Mark Cuban Says Raise Taxes on Any Company That Won’t Give Every Employee Equity — ‘If They Get Rich From the Market, So Do They’
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Getting rich from a company is apparently supposed to come with a guest list. In billionaire entrepreneur and Cost Plus Drugs co-founder Mark Cuban‘s version, employees shouldn’t be stuck outside while the CEO cashes the check.
Cuban was recently asked on X what he would do to reduce wealth inequality.
“Increase the taxes of any company that doesn’t offer equity to every employee on a pro rata basis to non-founder executives,” Cuban wrote. “If they get rich from the market, so do they.”
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The idea is pretty simple. If a company’s leaders get richer when the business grows, Cuban wants employees to have a piece of that upside, too.
“It’s exactly what I have done for employees in companies I have started,” Cuban wrote. “Most wealthy people get that way from selling their companies or taking them public.”
And Cuban has some receipts for that argument.
“In every business I’ve sold I’ve paid out bonuses to every employee that was there more than a year,” he wrote on X in 2024. He added that 300 out of 330 employees became millionaires after Broadcast.com was sold to Yahoo in 1999. He also said he paid about 20% of the sale proceeds to roughly 80 employees after selling MicroSolutions to CompuServe.
That history helps explain why his latest proposal isn’t simply about raising taxes. Cuban is arguing that companies could use tax policy as a carrot to make employee ownership more common.
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Cuban Wants the Tax Code to Push Companies Toward Employee Ownership
On the “What It Takes” podcast in July, Cuban laid out the idea more specifically. He said he wanted every CEO, founder and entrepreneur to follow the approach he had used with his own employees.
“You can give them incentives to say, ‘Look, if you want that 21% tax rate, then you need to give every single employee the same percentage in stock warrants, options, whatever it may be, of their cash compensation that you give to the CEO,'” Cuban said.
He offered a hypothetical to make the math easier to understand.
“So if the CEO gets $100,000 worth of stock because they make $1 million in cash, and the janitor makes $50,000, then they deserve the same percentage in stock, and that will change the game,” Cuban said.