The Billionaire Behind Insider Trading Charges

Nov. 18, 2008— -- Mark Cuban likes the spotlight.

The tech mogul and reality TV star has danced with the stars and upended the movie business.

Now, he's getting another kind of attention, this time from the feds.

The billionaire entrepreneur, self-described "business adrenaline junkie" and outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks was accused Monday of insider trading for allegedly using confidential information to avoid more than $750,000 in stock losses.

The Securities and Exchange Commission claims in a civil complaint that Cuban sold all his shares in Mamma.com, an online search company, hours after learning of a planned public stock offering that would undercut the company's share price. Cuban has denied the charges.

"It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market," Scott Friestad, the SEC's deputy enforcement director, said in a statement.

Cuban, 50, a self-made billionaire who made most of his money in the tech business, has cast himself as an outspoken maverick who is not afraid to challenge conventional business wisdom or flout rules of decorum.

He has been fined more than $1 million by the National Basketball Association -- as owner of the Dallas Mavericks, which he bought from Ross Perot in 2000 for $280 million -- for criticizing NBA officials, and other infractions.

He has been known to watch games from the same seat he sat in before he bought the team, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, and to run onto the court at times to yell at referees and other basketball officials. He fired Mavericks head coach Avery Johnson, one of the most successful coaches in the team's history, earlier this year.

"He seems to enjoy taunting figures of authority, such as the commissioner of the NBA and every referee in the league. He knows what he likes to do to have fun," said Lester Munson, who writes about legal issues in sports for ESPN.com and other outlets.

"I think we in sports always viewed him as a kind of ideal owner in that he was a maverick. He cared about his players, he wanted to win and he cared about his fans," Munson said. "Nobody ever looked hard at his money or what he was doing with it."