Mark Cuban knows what it feels like when rank-and-file staff suddenly become millionaires. He made it happen. When he sold Broadcast.com years ago, roughly 300 employees walked away with life-changing sums. The experience left a mark. Now the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks wants every chief executive to follow suit.
“I would like to see it so that every single CEO/founder/entrepreneur does what I did, which was to give equity to every single employee,” Cuban told Sarah McCammon on the “What It Takes” podcast. “Every company I’ve ever sold, I’ve given money to every single employee. Every time.” The message lands at a moment when wealth gaps yawn wider than ever and employee ownership sits at something of a crossroads. Yahoo Finance captured the full interview on July 27, 2026.
Cuban’s formula is straightforward. Tie equity grants to cash compensation. If a CEO earning $1 million in salary receives $100,000 in stock, then a janitor making $50,000 should get $5,000 worth. Same percentage. No exceptions. The approach, he argues, aligns incentives from the corner office to the shop floor. Workers who own a slice think and act like owners. They watch costs. They suggest improvements. They stay longer.
Elon Musk offers a parallel case. Cuban points to SpaceX. When the rocket company went public, it minted roughly 4,000 millionaires among its staff. Tesla employees saw their net worth climb in lockstep with the share price. “So if you work at Tesla, if you work at SpaceX, when those stocks go up, your net worth goes up,” Cuban said. The pattern repeats across high-growth tech. Ownership spreads upside that once flowed only to founders and venture capitalists.
Yet the numbers reveal how far corporate America remains from Cuban’s vision. Morgan Stanley’s 2026 State of Workplace Financial Benefits study found just 37 percent of employees work at companies that offer equity compensation. Contrast that with sentiment inside those same workplaces. Seventy-five percent of workers and 85 percent of human-resources leaders view equity as an effective motivator. The gap between belief and practice is glaring.
Broader data on structured employee-ownership plans tells a more encouraging story. According to the National Center for Employee Ownership, 6,609 employee stock ownership plans operated at 6,411 companies as of updated 2026 figures based on 2023 data. Those plans cover 15.1 million participants, more than 10.9 million of them active workers, and hold over $2.1 trillion in assets. In 2023 alone, ESOPs paid out more than $166 billion to participants and received contributions exceeding $114 billion. Three hundred nine new plans launched that year, adding 56,663 active participants. The pace of creation has held steady. An average of 269 new ESOPs formed annually since 2019. NCEO compiled the statistics from Department of Labor filings.
Performance metrics back the ownership model. A Rutgers University study from 2000 showed ESOP companies grow 2.3 percent to 2.4 percent faster after adoption than they would have otherwise. Pair ownership with genuine workplace participation programs and the gains multiply. An earlier NCEO analysis from 1986 found 8 percent to 11 percent faster annual growth under those combined conditions. Later academic reviews have confirmed the direction and scale of those results. Productivity typically jumps 5 percent in the first year of an ESOP. Output runs 2.4 percent higher than at peer firms over time.
Employees capture real financial upside. A 1997 Washington State study discovered ESOP participants earned 5 percent to 12 percent higher wages and held nearly three times the retirement assets of workers at comparable non-ESOP companies. Average annual contributions reached $4,443 per participant by 2010 data, with account balances averaging $55,836. More than half of ESOP firms also offer an additional retirement plan. The contrast with standard 401(k) match structures is stark.
Recent market signals suggest momentum is building. Investment in dedicated employee-ownership funds jumped 73 percent in 2025, climbing from $500 million across 27 funds in 2024 to $865 million across 29 funds. The Stout ESOP Index, which tracks private employee-owned companies, delivered a 17.3 percent average annual return from 2021 through 2024. That beat the S&P 500’s 11.9 percent and crushed the Russell 2000’s 3.1 percent. “Employee-owned companies tend to perform better, resist downturns better and be more productive,” Julie Menter of Transform Finance told Harvard Business School’s Institute for Business in Global Society. The article appeared March 18, 2026. Harvard Business School reported the surge.
Policy makers have taken notice. Several states advanced legislation in 2025 to ease transitions to employee ownership. Colorado’s HB25-1021, a bipartisan measure, would expand tax credits and introduce capital-gains exclusions for sellers to ESOPs, worker cooperatives, or employee-ownership trusts. Similar bills surfaced in Indiana. Project Equity documented the trend in a February 2025 overview that also highlighted the so-called Silver Tsunami of retiring business owners and growing interest from private-equity sponsors. Project Equity outlined 11 distinct forces shaping the sector.
Critics raise practical hurdles. Dilution concerns worry existing shareholders. Startups with thin cash flows fear the accounting complexity. Mandatory programs could distort capital allocation or spark unintended tax consequences. Cuban counters that voluntary adoption, sweetened by targeted tax incentives, sidesteps most of those issues. He frames the move as enlightened self-interest. “Nobody wants to see civil unrest,” he said. “Nobody wants to see people who can’t live their lives, you know, and pay for food or pay for housing or pay for transportation or afford their gas. That is not what this country should be all about.”
The data on wealth concentration lends weight to his concern. While roughly 150 million Americans own stocks in some form, the top 1 percent capture the vast majority of market gains. Broad-based equity programs chip away at that imbalance without confiscatory taxes or heavy regulation. They turn workers into residual claimants on the value they help create.
Of course, equity alone does not solve every problem. Frontline employees still need competitive cash wages to cover immediate living costs. A secretary living paycheck to paycheck may find restricted stock units less useful than a raise. Cuban’s proportional model preserves existing pay differentials while extending ownership. It is not pure egalitarianism. It is capitalism with wider participation.
Public companies already experiment with variants. Restricted stock units, employee stock purchase plans, and broad-based option grants appear in tech, finance, and manufacturing. Private firms lean on ESOPs for succession planning. Two-thirds of ESOP transactions finance the exit of a departing owner. The structure preserves local jobs and institutional knowledge that might otherwise vanish in a sale to a distant competitor.
Yet adoption still lags. Only a fraction of the roughly 6 million private U.S. businesses use any formal ownership-sharing mechanism. The gap between Cuban’s challenge and current practice remains large. Closing it will require more than rhetoric. Boards must weigh dilution against retention gains. Lawmakers could streamline regulatory burdens that currently discourage smaller firms. Executives might study the long-term outperformance of employee-owned cohorts before dismissing the idea as idealistic.
Cuban has walked the talk. His track record at Broadcast.com, MicroSolutions, and other ventures demonstrates that sharing ownership need not come at the founder’s expense. Quite the opposite. Motivated teams often deliver the results that lift all boats. The question now is whether enough CEOs will accept the challenge. The numbers suggest the upside is real. The social stakes, Cuban warns, are higher still.
And the data keeps piling up. New ESOP formations continue. Fund inflows accelerate. Academic evidence grows more robust with each meta-analysis. If the trend holds, the next decade could see employee ownership move from niche strategy to mainstream expectation. Cuban would likely call that progress. Many workers would call it overdue.
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