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’

Jeannine Mancini

Sat, September 5, 2026 at 6:17 PM GMT+3 5 min read

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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.

If companies don't want to play along, he said, "your taxes go back up."

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That's a significant shift from the way most people experience their jobs. Employee equity exists, particularly at startups and some publicly traded companies, but it isn't a standard benefit for every worker. A company's stock can soar while an employee's compensation remains largely tied to a paycheck.

Until Cuban's idea — or something resembling it — becomes more common, workers can still build ownership on their own.

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Cuban's proposal is ultimately about giving workers a stake in the wealth they help create.

For everyone waiting for a company to hand them a piece of the pie, building assets independently means they don't have to wait for the CEO to pass the plate.

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This article 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' originally appeared on Benzinga.com