Mark Cuban sold a dot-com company for $5.7 billion, but that doesn’t mean he throws money around. Cuban, who bought the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks in 2000 after selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo! in 1999, now has the chance to buy other prime Texas sports properties. But he appears to be in no rush. In mid-September Tom Hicks, the founder of buyout firm Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, said he wanted to sell his personal investments in the Stars, Dallas’s NHL team, and in the city’s $407 million American Airlines Center, a state-of-the-art arena that opened last year. Hicks, who owns half of the AAC, said he wanted to cash out and focus more on his family and his Texas Rangers baseball team. Cuban already owns the other half of the arena, where the Mavericks and the Stars are the major tenants. But he remains a prudent investor. “One team is enough for me,” Cuban tells II in an e-mail. The arena is not, he says, making money, and it won’t until the concerts-and-events business picks up. Ben Lett, a J.P. Morgan vice president who is helping to sell Hicks’s properties, insists that the AAC had positive free cash flow of $2.4 million in the year through June, and he says that figure should rise to $16 million this year. “If the deal was right, I would consider purchasing the remainder of the AAC,” writes Cuban. “It’s just a question of price. Nothing else.”
