Mark Cuban says one of the best ways to tackle income inequality is by giving workers a stake in the companies they help build.
Speaking in an episode of the “What It Takes” podcast from Unmoderated News released on Thursday, the billionaire entrepreneur said that every employee, from the CEO to the janitor, should receive company stock. He also proposed using the tax code to encourage businesses to do it.
“I would like to see it so that every single CEO/founder/entrepreneur does what I did, which was to give equity to every single employee,” Cuban said.
Cuban, the founder of Cost Plus Drugs and former majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has been making the same argument for years.
He has repeatedly called for companies to share more of their success with employees and has said he has paid bonuses after every company sale, helping about 300 Broadcast.com employees become millionaires when Yahoo bought the company in 1999.
The proposal comes amid a widening income gap between executives and workers. Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation found that the CEOs of the world’s largest companies enjoyed an 11% real-terms pay rise in 2025, while average worker pay increased just 0.5%.
In the US, S&P 500 CEO pay climbed 25.6% from 2024 to 2025, compared with a 1.3% real-terms rise in average hourly earnings for private-sector workers.
On Thursday’s episode of the “What It Takes” podcast, he said sharing equity is the most effective way to reduce wealth inequality because employees benefit directly when the companies they work for succeed.
“The way you’re going to reduce income inequality for anybody who works with somebody is making sure they get shares of stock and then they benefit,” he said.
When host Sarah McCammon noted that Cuban’s own equity-sharing was voluntary, he argued the government could nudge CEOs in the same direction through the tax code, rewarding companies that broadly distribute equity with lower corporate tax rates.
“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,'” he said.
He illustrated the idea with an example: if a CEO receives stock worth 10% of their cash compensation, employees should receive stock worth the same proportion of theirs.
“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, you know, the same percentage in stock, and that will change the game,” Cuban said.
Companies that don’t adopt the approach, he added, could face higher taxes instead.
“And if you don’t do that, then your taxes go back up,” he said.
Cuban’s calls for employees to be given stock echo comments made by Elon Musk in the wake of SpaceX’s IPO. In a radio appearance earlier in July, Musk said he’s always wanted his employees to benefit from the success of his companies.
“I’ve always had the philosophy that everyone at the company should receive stock in the company, so that they can participate in the upside of the company,” he told Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
SpaceX’s big rival, Blue Origin, is also introducing a new, more generous equity scheme to address internal dissent over its options program. As Business Insider’s Tom Carter reported on Thursday, however, there’s a catch: employees will forfeit all their stock options if they join a competitor within 18 months of leaving Blue Origin.