Bill Duke

Thank you #LenaWaithe for this great conversation... youtu.be/F89mN-ga2mE?si… @THR @Variety @accesshollywood @latimesent @nytimes @washingtonpost

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Mark Cuban reveals why he paid his employees $35 million after selling the Mavericks “I’m not there without them and I did it my first 2 companies with Microsolutions all 80 employees got paid” “With broadcast .com out of 330 employees 300 became millionaires” “They were there for me the whole time and for those who were there 20 years or more it was life changing money”

Mark Cuban sold his company to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999. Overnight, he was a billionaire. There was just one problem: Yahoo paid him in its own stock, he was banned from selling it for six months, and that stock was sitting on a bubble that was about to pop. So he was a billionaire who couldn't actually reach his money. He owned 14.6 million shares of Yahoo, worth around $1.4 billion, and he couldn't turn a single one into cash. Even after the six months ran out, selling them was its own trap. Nobody buys 14.6 million shares at once. The second he started dumping that much stock, the price would slide before he finished, dragging his fortune down with it. Here is what he did instead. He bought insurance on his own stock. You can buy a contract that locks in a guaranteed price someone has to pay you for your shares later. Cuban locked his in at $85 each. From then on, no matter how far Yahoo fell, he could still sell at $85 and walk away with more than a billion dollars. The problem is that this kind of protection costs money, and insuring $1.4 billion is expensive. He covered the cost in a strange way. He sold off his claim to Yahoo's biggest gains. He signed a second contract that said if the stock ever climbed past $205, someone else could buy his shares at that price and keep anything above it. He was betting it would never get there, and the money from that bet paid for his insurance almost exactly. The whole setup cost him nothing. For a while, he looked like a fool. Yahoo kept climbing, blew past $205, and ran all the way to about $237. He had locked himself out of a fortune in gains, right at the top. Then the bubble burst. Yahoo went into freefall and crashed to roughly $13. Almost everyone holding it got wiped out. Cuban's $85 floor held the entire way down, and he walked off with his money still in his pocket. The company that set all of this in motion never made it. Yahoo killed Broadcast .com in 2002, three years after paying $5.7 billion for it. Yahoo itself was sold off in 2017 for about $4.5 billion, less than it once paid for Cuban's company alone. Selling made him a billionaire on paper. The insurance trade is the only reason he kept it.

Remembering the great Duke Ellington, who passed away 52 years ago today.

In 2004, Bob Dylan spoke with 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley about the role New York City played in his life. In this expanded clip from the interview outtakes, the singer-songwriter discusses his journey from Minnesota to New York. Today, the musician turns 85.

Happy 40th Birthday to the brilliant RYAN COOGLER, a storyteller redefining modern cinema.

One of the earliest and most iconic revolving-set sequences ever put on film. Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding (1951) still feels like movie magic.

Everybody knows Kenny Rogers recorded ‘Lady’… but hearing Teddy Pendergrass perform it live feels like an entirely different song. Lionel Richie wrote a masterpiece. Kenny Rogers made it legendary. Teddy Pendergrass made it seductive.

Happy Birthday to Nat Adderley Jr! 🎊 A true musical genius and longtime collaborator of Luther Vandross, his collaborations helped define Luther’s signature sound for decades 🎹

Mark Cuban: "I paid $285,000,000 for the Dallas Mavericks. I went to opening night of the 1999–2000 season, first game of the year and it wasn’t sold out. The energy wasn’t in the building. I looked around thinking, I can do a better job than this."

🚨 FORMER TESLA PRESIDENT ADMITS ELON USED THE DOMINO’S PIZZA APP TO REINVENT HOW PEOPLE BUY CARS — AND THE STORY IS BLOWING PEOPLE’S MINDS Former Tesla president Jon McNeill is going viral after revealing the bizarre moment Elon Musk pulled up the Domino’s pizza app during a meeting… because Tesla customers needed 64 CLICKS just to buy a car online. Elon’s reaction? “How many taps does it take to get a pizza?” Answer: • 10 taps Buying a Tesla at the time? • 64 clicks • endless loan documents • nonstop forms • massive friction Elon became obsessed with stripping the process down after realizing most of the paperwork wasn’t even legally required. So Tesla started going bank-to-bank asking: Why does buying a car need to feel harder than ordering dinner? Most banks reportedly refused to cooperate. Then one Midwest bank CEO finally agreed to test a radically simplified system… and Tesla allegedly eliminated around 40 clicks from the process almost overnight. Now people online are saying this perfectly explains why Tesla disrupted the entire auto industry while traditional dealerships kept drowning customers in paperwork, waiting rooms, and sales tactics. Did Tesla accidentally expose how outdated the entire car dealership model really was? 📹: kencoleman

AI gives people more leverage to do their best work. Our CEO Jensen Huang shares how AI assistants can help teams move faster, think bigger and take on challenges that were once out of reach.

James Caan talking about working with Marlon Brando.

@vernonfrancois great video of @Lupita_Nyongo ...dancing...

Duke Ellington preferred calling his work “American music” rather than jazz. He saw it as too limiting a label for what he was creating.

@Matt__thegeek Love it Thank YOU so Much!!!

Here's a drawing for @RealBillDuke hope you like it

@GabrielAttal at what email is it best to communicate with you on? Kindly DM info...nous aimerions discuter de votre. campagne.pour president...

Jensen Huang on the Sega failure that saved NVIDIA.

Miles Davis on Prince

JAMES EARL JONES talking about his speaking role as Darth Vader and the struggles he's faced with his iconic voice.