Billionaire Mark Cuban says it’s ‘embarrassing’ to not pay employees well—and a $20 minimum wage should be standard

In some U.S. states, workers bring home just $5.15 for each hour of hard work bussing tables, stocking store shelves, and flipping burgers. And as more companies boast record profits and trillion-dollar market caps, tens of millions of Americans living below the poverty line are questioning if they’ll ever get in on the success. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban says raising hourly rates is one step forward that’s long overdue. 

“I’ve said before I think raising the federal minimum wage to $20 is smart,” Cuban said in an X post published last month. 

There isn’t a single state in the U.S. that has set a standard hourly wage at that high. 

The federal minimum currently rests at $7.25 an hour. That adds up to just $15,080 a year, based on a standard 40-hour workweek—less than a third of the average American’s salary of around $60,000 yearly. And as the cost-of-living crisis chews up measly wages, over 40 million Americans have to turn to food stamps to make ends meet. 

The Shark Tank investing star said it’s mortifying to not pay workers a livable wage; he’s focused on bringing talent into newfound wealth. 

“When I heard people who worked for a company I invested in (but didn’t run) needed government assistance, I made sure they all got raises,” Cuban continued in his X post. “It was embarrassing to me that we didn’t pay enough. I’ve made, or helped make, at least a thousand millionaires. And I’ll keep working to increase that number.”

Cuban’s push for higher wages and employee wealth-building is part of his broader response to the topics of billionaire founder wealth, income taxes, and “eat the rich” rhetoric. The entrepreneur worth $6 billion argued that founders take on significant risk to launch businesses and, as they build wealth, those companies in turn generate jobs for other workers. He’s against the anti-rich sentiment, but draws a distinction that more needs to be done to improve the financial lives of everyday workers. 

“I am a believer in trickle up,” Cuban said. “Where we do all we can get to get appreciable assets and higher wages into the hands of people who have to live paycheck to paycheck.”

Small businesses just starting to get their feet wet may not have the resources to offer million-dollar compensation, but once they hit their stride, Cuban says they should pay a living wage. And there are real business imperatives behind the practice. The entrepreneur tells Fortune that economic performance, quality of life, and commitment to the organization all improves by paying workers better. He believes any stock or options given to the C-suite should be pro rata awards based on cash salary of all employees.

“Of course as a startup, survival comes first,” Cuban wrote to Fortune in an email exchange. “But as you grow out of that phase of your lifecycle, you will start to learn that the more every stakeholder beyond you thrive, the better your company performs and the more financial success and just as importantly, your quality of life improves.”

“The less your employees stress about paying their bills, the less stress they bring to the office, to your vendors, prospects and customers.”

The entrepreneur has long shared his business wins with employees. Cuban says he has brought more than a thousand of his workers into the seven-figure club. Every time he’s sold a business, he’s dished out big bonuses for anyone who had worked there for over a year, Cuban revealed in a 2024 X post. 

At MicroSolutions—an 80-person computer consulting company Cuban founded in 1983, and later sold to CompuServe in 1990 for $6 million—he paid out 20% of the profit to all his workers. Cuban also stuck by his philosophy at Broastcast.com, an internet streaming company he cofounded in 1995, and later sold to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion; around 300 of the company’s 330 employees become millionaires, he said. 

While his 2003 company HDNet wasn’t as big, Cuban recalled paying out 20% of the profits to his employees. And those who staff Cuban’s ventures beyond his tech companies are getting in on the winnings, too. Cuban, a minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, shelled out over $35 million in bonuses to the NBA team’s employees back in 2024. 

Cuban has long been outspoken on giving rank-and-file workers a slice of business success. 

In response to a 2025 Oxfam report detailing that billionaire wealth increased $33 trillion over the past decade, Cuban took to social media to pinpoint the culprit. The billionaire says the reason behind the windfall is that “the stock market has gone straight up.” However, staffers aren’t seeing the gains hit their bank accounts; the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest companies got an 11% pay bump last year, while the average worker only got only a sliver, at a 0.5% increase, according to an Oxfam study. 

“You know who is funding the increase, particularly lately? Retail investors. 401ks,” Cuban wrote in an X post last year. “The better question is, why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?”

Some companies have already put that philosophy into practice. After Klarna’s stock market trading debut last year, the company’s market cap soared to a whopping $17 billion thanks to surging shares, catapulting more than 40 current and former Klarna staffers into the millionaire club thanks to stock perks. 

Akin to Cuban, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also claimed last year that he’s created more billionaires on his team than any other leader in the world. And when Canva launched an employee share sale in 2025, the company’s chief operating officer, Cliff Obrecht, said that current and former staffers who are eligible would be able to sell up to $3 million worth of shares at a price of $1,646.14 each.