Mark Cuban sold his company to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999. Overnight, he was a billionaire. There was just one problem: Yahoo paid him in its own stock, he was banned from selling it for six months, and that stock was sitting on a bubble that was about to pop.
So he was a billionaire who couldn't actually reach his money. He owned 14.6 million shares of Yahoo, worth around $1.4 billion, and he couldn't turn a single one into cash. Even after the six months ran out, selling them was its own trap. Nobody buys 14.6 million shares at once. The second he started dumping that much stock, the price would slide before he finished, dragging his fortune down with it.
Here is what he did instead. He bought insurance on his own stock.
You can buy a contract that locks in a guaranteed price someone has to pay you for your shares later. Cuban locked his in at $85 each. From then on, no matter how far Yahoo fell, he could still sell at $85 and walk away with more than a billion dollars. The problem is that this kind of protection costs money, and insuring $1.4 billion is expensive.
He covered the cost in a strange way. He sold off his claim to Yahoo's biggest gains. He signed a second contract that said if the stock ever climbed past $205, someone else could buy his shares at that price and keep anything above it. He was betting it would never get there, and the money from that bet paid for his insurance almost exactly. The whole setup cost him nothing.
For a while, he looked like a fool. Yahoo kept climbing, blew past $205, and ran all the way to about $237. He had locked himself out of a fortune in gains, right at the top. Then the bubble burst. Yahoo went into freefall and crashed to roughly $13. Almost everyone holding it got wiped out. Cuban's $85 floor held the entire way down, and he walked off with his money still in his pocket.
The company that set all of this in motion never made it. Yahoo killed Broadcast .com in 2002, three years after paying $5.7 billion for it. Yahoo itself was sold off in 2017 for about $4.5 billion, less than it once paid for Cuban's company alone. Selling made him a billionaire on paper. The insurance trade is the only reason he kept it.
China has revealed a spherical police robot designed to autonomously pursue and immobilize criminals by shooting nets and rolling at speeds of up to 35 km/h.
140,000 people for the #KabakaBirthdayRun2026 yesterday, up from 120,000 in 2025!!! These are the kind of dizzying numbers you only get when you aren’t paying for them. They come from the heart. At this rate, on his 75th birthday Kabaka Ronald Mutebi will have over 200,000 showing up for his charity run and there will be no place in and around Kampala to fit them. I wonder what the secret sauce here is.
HAPPENING NOW: @MoWT_Uganda is officially launching the General Specifications for Road and Bridge Works 2026 at Speke Resort Munyonyo, setting new benchmarks for quality, standardization and efficiency in Uganda’s infrastructure sector.
Political persecution is so brutal and laden with impunity that it sometimes includes senseless violence against and murder of political opponents by monstrous power actors.
In the Muwanga KIVUMBI case, this twisting of tales, facts and reality is embarrassingly naked. The victims are shot, those who survive are detained and their supporters are intimidated.
The culprits—the killers—evade justice because they are working for those in power.
I think I just figured something out about why things feel different right now. And then I'm logging off X for the night.
This is the very first time, in the modern history of our country, that we can communicate openly about military campaigns, without having our accounts suspended.
Think about it, Elon Musk took over Twitter while Biden was still in office. And Biden was just a drooling mindless cucumber. So he didn't know what he was doing, nobody knew what he was doing. He just opened the country to let murderers, terrorists and the most evil people in the world come in.
We are actually watching Trump take out drug cartel boats, remove brutal dictators, liberate Iran, do what he knows is right, and we can talk about it openly like we actually have true Free Speech.
And not only can we freely talk about it, without censorship, the people that are deeply involved can talk about it freely. Look at all the Venezuelans celebrating, praising Trump. Look at all the Iranians saluting pictures of Trump in Iran. Look at Iranians celebrating in America right now.
A few short years ago, we would have never seen any of the REAL information, and each others REAL opinions. Jack would have shut you down.
God Bless President Trump and God Bless Elon Musk.
The Golden Age has arrived, and I'm here for it.
The quiet moments are often the most important. Last night just before Cabinet members walked onto the House floor for the President’s State of the Union, we joined together in prayer, giving all thanks and praise to God, and praying for the clarity and strength to listen to Him, serve Him, and do His will.
Akena’s remarks come after Gen Muhoozi, since the disputed January 15 elections held under an internet shutdown, has made a series of inflammatory statements on X targeting the opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) and its leader, @HEBobiwine https://t.co/aj3kBmwOlq
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