Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once provided Mark Cuban with a painful ego check at a bar in Las Vegas, the Dallas Mavericks owner said during a podcast interview.
Cuban, 63, revealed that some female friends once ditched him in favor of a newly uber-rich Gates. He said the encounter occurred “way back in the day” at COMDEX — once considered one of the largest computer trade shows in the world.
“I had started my company — I was like 26, 27 and I just thought I was a badass,” Cuban said during an appearance on the “Full Send” podcast. “I’m hanging with these girls and this was right when Microsoft had gone public. One day, no one knows who Bill Gates is, the next day, he’s the king of tech.”
Cuban said he was “maybe worth a million dollars” at the time. Microsoft went public in 1986.
“I’m buying these girls drinks and doing shots and everything and they’re like, ‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom’ — I think for real,” a laughing Cuban said. “And then they don’t come back and I’m like, what the f—? And then my buddy says, ‘Yo, you know who Bill Gates is?’ Bill Gates took my girls!”
Cuban added that the story was “100% true.”
Gates, 66, is one of the world’s richest individuals, with an estimated personal fortune of $103.2 billion, according to Forbes. Meanwhile, Cuban is worth an estimated $4.7 billion.
Gates was married to his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, from 1994 until their divorce in 2021.
In March, French Gates said her ex-husband’s past meetings with deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were a factor in their eventual divorce. Gates himself has described those meetings as a “huge mistake.”
“It was many things. But I did not like that he’d had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein,” French Gates told CBS News. “I made that clear to him.”
Despite the divorce, Gates and his ex-wife continue to run their eponymous charity foundation. Gates recently told Forbes they’ll “be able to run the foundation together forever.”
Gates indicated that he plans to give away enough of his fortune to eventually fall off the list of the world’s richest people.
Representatives for Gates did not immediately return a request for comment.