"Most people don't do that. In putting these 16 people in the house, that's what I tried to test for. That's what the challenges were about, being an entrepreneur, being what I think is successful. What I'm looking for is someone who's willing to go outside their comfort zone. Look, if they didn't have dreams, they wouldn't want to be on the show."
Cuban, who sold garbage bags door-to-door at 12, co-founded a computer-consulting firm in 1983, which he later sold for millions. Then he and pal Todd Wagner (also an executive producer on the show, with creator David Young and Clay Newbill) began
Broadcast.com, supplying audio and video over the Internet. The company's initial public offering in 1998 broke stock-market records. A year later, Yahoo! bought the company for $5.7 billion.
Now, with more money than several small nations, Cuban could have retired to an island and watched sunsets through his toes for the rest of his life. Instead, he bought the NBA's Dallas Mavericks. As a hands-on owner, Cuban established an ongoing interaction with fans through his own Web log, http://www.blogmaverick.com.
Cuban also could have busied himself with player trades and irate fans for eternity, but instead he's launched two high-definition television networks, HDNet and HDNet movies.
Now Cuban's tackling reality television (and donating his fee for the show to charity), and proudly proclaiming that "The Benefactor" is "the first and only reality show shot in high-def. It's a totally different visual experience, and reality shows will benefit the most from it."
So the challenge facing the 16 contestants -- who range from an elementary-school teacher to a women's pro football player to a floral designer -- is how to impress Mark Cuban. But Cuban wasn't about to give them any help in figuring that one out.
"The way it works is," Newbill says, "when the contestants show up, the dilemma for them is, 'I'm here to try to impress Mark Cuban, who is, himself, a very impressive individual. How do I impress somebody who has reached the spot in life where he is?'
"Mark would present to them a test based on something that would reveal the values and the characteristics that he feels are important in the eventual winner."
"They're very open-ended challenges," Cuban says. "Everybody has to come up with their own ideas. Everybody has to come up with their own solutions to the challenges, which is far more difficult, because they can't copy from each other. They don't know what each other is going to do."
Of course, the reality-show world being what it is now, contestants seldom arrive all unknowing and wide-eyed, and "The Benefactor" is no different. Also, Cuban is a very public and communicative guy, not a reclusive tycoon living on top of a mountain somewhere.
"They knew me inside and out," Cuban says, "but once we got past the first five minutes, and we made our first cut, they realized what was at stake. It's a million dollars, and they had a 1 in 15 chance, and they didn't know what I wanted.
"They didn't know what I was looking for. But I told them they had to be themselves. The last way to win was to suck up. 'If you kiss up,' I told them, 'you're going to be gone.' This person, I'm giving them a million dollars. I want to say, six months, a year, 10 years from now, 'I picked the right person.' "
And sometimes, "The Benefactor" benefited from some lessons of his own.
"I found I wasn't nearly as good at first impressions as I thought I was," Cuban says. "If I go in a business office, no problem, every day, I've got millions of dollars on it. Put me in a sports environment -- I'm not there, but I'm getting better. But these are just normal people.
"That's one of the lessons: You don't get a second chance to make a first impression. We made that cut in the first five minutes, I'm like, 'Oh my God, I've got to do this. I don't want to do this. It's too early.'
"Right at the beginning, [people are asking], 'Who do you think is going to win? What do you think of these people? How do you gauge them?' Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was really an education."
As for Cuban's future, he laughs when reminded that the current U.S. president was once one of the owners of a Texas sports franchise -- in the case of George W. Bush, it was baseball's Texas Rangers.
"You're the second person to refer to President Bush," he says. "Politics are not in my future. I've had multiple people who've come to me, and you know the ones that ask, 'Did you ever inhale?' I just can't stop there."
Asked about his long-term goals, Cuban says, "Just my family. Live life, wake up with a smile, go to bed with a smile, give my daughter and my wife a kiss good night, then I'll go off and play basketball."
