Mark Cuban has never been shy about airing his opinions on money, and lately his favorite subject is who gets to keep it.
The “Shark Tank” investor, whose fortune is estimated at $10.2 billion, has spent years pushing the idea that workers deserve not just a paycheck, but also a bigger piece of the companies that employ them.
Cuban has now sharpened that argument into something closer to a proposed policy. Rather than simply encouraging founders to be generous, he now wants the tax code itself to enforce it by rewarding companies that share ownership broadly and penalizing those that don’t.
Mark Cuban employee equity proposal and corporate tax code plan
Cuban laid out his thinking after a follower on X (the former Twitter) asked what he would do to close the wealth gap.
His answer was blunt. “Increase the taxes of any company that doesn’t offer equity to every employee on a pro rata basis to non-founder executives,” he wrote. “If they get rich from the market, so do they,” Fortune reported.
He expanded on the idea on the “What It Takes” podcast, describing to host Sarah McCammon a system where the standard 21% corporate tax rate becomes a reward rather than a default, according to Fortune.
Related: Mark Cuban predicts radical change for American workers
“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,’” he explained.
If a chief executive receives stock worth 10% of their cash pay, a janitor earning far less would receive stock worth the same 10% of their own salary, not the same dollar figure, but the same proportion, according to Inc.
Cuban points to his own track record as proof the idea can work. When Yahoo bought his streaming company Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in 1999, Cuban had already given stock to 330 employees, and roughly 300 of them became millionaires overnight.
He did something similar years earlier at his first company, the IT consulting firm MicroSolutions, handing out equity and cash bonuses to staff.
That history is central to why Cuban frames this as responsibility rather than charity. Most people who build serious wealth do it by selling a company or taking one public, he has said, and if founders accept the tax bill that comes with wealth creation, they should let employees share in the gains, too.
SpaceX IPO millionaires: what employee stock ownership does for workers
The math on this is not complicated. A 2021 Harvard Business School analysis found that if private companies nationwide got to roughly 30% employee ownership, household wealth would effectively double, as TheStreet reported.
Cuban’s argued that the only thing stopping it from happening is that nobody has made it worth the founders’ while to try.
The clearest recent proof of concept came from SpaceX. When the company went public earlier this year, more than 4,400 current and former employees became paper millionaires, and roughly 400 of them are sitting on stakes worth more than $100 million, according to Fortune.
The windfall was not limited to engineers and executives. Welders, machinists, and technicians who had been offered modest stock grants years earlier suddenly found their equity worth six and seven figures.
One widely told story involves Juan Hernandez, a welder who joined SpaceX in 2015 earning $28 an hour and was offered $10,000 in stock as part of his hiring package.
He told CBS News he did not think much of the offer at the time, since none of his previous jobs had included equity. His roughly 6,500 shares were valued at close to $900,000 near the IPO price.
Coverage of the IPO noted that the newly minted millionaires spanned far beyond the engineering ranks, touching cafeteria staff and contract workers alongside rocket designers.
It is exactly the kind of broad-based wealth creation Cuban says should be the norm, especially as pay gaps between executives and staff keep widening.
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Elon Musk KKR and Cost Plus Drugs on employee ownership in 2026
Cuban is not alone among prominent business figures making this case. Elon Musk has said he has always believed everyone at a company should hold stock so they can participate in its upside, according to Business Insider. It’s a philosophy he shared with Texas Governor Greg Abbott shortly before SpaceX’s record-breaking listing.
Private equity has also taken notice. KKR, through partner Pete Stavros, has pushed similar ownership models across its portfolio companies, an approach highlighted alongside the SpaceX story as evidence that helped turn broad-based equity from an individual founder’s philosophy into mainstream strategy used by major investment firms.
Cuban’s other major venture, the online pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs, follows a related instinct, even though it targets consumers rather than employees.
Co-founded with radiologist Alex Oshmyansky in 2022, the company sells drugs at their cost plus a 15% margin, using transparent pricing to challenge the traditional pharmaceutical industry, TheStreet reported.
CEO worker pay gap and what Mark Cuban equity plan means for investors
Not everyone is convinced that Cuban’s tax proposal would work as his own success stories suggest. Critics note that higher costs on companies, whether from taxes or tariffs, can be passed along to consumers rather than absorbed entirely by shareholders, squeezing budgets already stretched by inflation.
Cuban has pushed back, arguing that margin decisions are a choice founders make for competitive reasons, not an inevitable outcome of higher taxes. He has also pointed to the widening gap between executive and worker pay, noting that S&P 500 chief executives now earn roughly 285 times what their median employee does, up from 268 times a year earlier.
Congress is not passing Cuban’s tax proposal this year. That is not really the point. The companies worth watching are the ones already moving this way on their own.
Broad equity plans tend to show up in lower turnover and higher output before they show up in stock prices. If a company’s compensation disclosures show meaningful equity distribution below the executive level, that is worth knowing before the headline numbers do.
Related: Mark Cuban has strong words on taxes and wealthy Americans
