The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 2009. That is 17 years without a single increase, the longest freeze in the history of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
A full-time worker earning that rate takes home $15,080 a year, less than a third of the average American salary of around $60,000. In Georgia and Wyoming, the state floor sits at $5.15, though employers covered by federal law still have to pay the federal rate.
Mark Cuban went on X on June 6 and said the number needs to be a lot higher. The billionaire investor and Shark Tank star did not mince words about what he thinks of employers who pay workers as little as the law allows.
Mark Cuban calls $20 minimum wage smart and current rate embarrassing
“I’ve said before I think raising the federal minimum wage to $20 is smart,” Cuban wrote on X.
No state is anywhere close to that. Washington D.C. leads the country at $17.95 an hour. Washington state follows at $17.13. Eighteen states and D.C. have minimum wages of $15 or more. Twenty states are still at the federal floor of $7.25.
Related: Mark Cuban doubles down on the stock market and Elon Musk
Cuban also called out the companies that could afford to pay more and choose not to.
“When I heard people who worked for a company I invested in (but didn’t run) needed government assistance, I made sure they all got raises,” he wrote. “It was embarrassing to me that we didn’t pay enough.”
His case goes beyond embarrassment. Cuban has said that when workers cannot cover basic costs, they turn to government programs, and taxpayers pick up the tab that employers decided not to pay. In his view, low wages are not a private business decision. They are a cost that gets redistributed onto everyone else.
Why Mark Cuban says paying workers well is good for business
Cuban emailed his reasoning directly to Fortune, which reported it. Better pay, he said, produces measurable results in performance, employee commitment, and quality of work.
“The less your employees stress about paying their bills, the less stress they bring to the office, to your vendors, prospects and customers,” he said.
Cuban has put this into practice across his own businesses. When he sold MicroSolutions, an 80-person computer consulting firm, to CompuServe in 1990 for $6 million, he distributed 20% of the sale proceeds to all his workers.
More Economy:
- JPMorgan doubles down on economy, inflation outlook
- Central bankers grow nervous about AI funding
- BofA sees new trends forming in the K-shaped economy
When he and his partner sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion, roughly 300 of the company’s 330 employees became millionaires. In January 2024, he paid out over $35 million in bonuses to Dallas Mavericks staff after selling his majority stake in the team.
“I’ve made, or helped make, at least a thousand millionaires,” he said on X. “And I’ll keep working to increase that number.”
He calls the philosophy “trickle up.” Getting real assets and higher wages into the hands of workers who live paycheck to paycheck, he argues, generates economic activity that eventually benefits business owners too.
Mark Cuban on CEO pay and why workers are getting left behind
Cuban’s comments came in response to a 2025 Oxfam report showing that CEOs at the world’s largest corporations received an 11% pay increase last year while the average worker got 0.5%. Billionaire wealth grew by $33 trillion over the past decade. Cuban’s explanation was blunt: “the stock market has gone straight up.”
He is not against founders building wealth. His problem is with what happens to the workers who helped build it.
He has pushed for a structural fix: any stock or options awarded to C-suite executives should be granted on a pro rata basis tied to every employee’s cash salary, putting rank-and-file workers in line for proportional upside when share prices rise.
“You know who is funding the increase, particularly lately? Retail investors. 401ks. The better question is, why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?” Cuban wrote on X.
Wally/Getty Images
What a $20 federal minimum wage would mean for workers and small businesses
Over 40 million Americans currently rely on food stamps to make ends meet, according to Fortune. The Bank of America Institute found that one in four U.S. households lives paycheck to paycheck. The federal minimum has not kept pace with housing costs or inflation since its last increase 17 years ago.
A jump to $20 would be the single largest increase in the federal minimum wage’s history. Restaurants, retail stores, and hospitality businesses, which already operate on thin margins and high turnover, would feel it most. Small employers without the pricing power to pass costs along would face the steepest adjustment.
Congress has not raised the federal minimum since 2009. Proposals for $15 and $17 have both failed to pass. Getting to $20 would require a political alignment that has not materialized through four administrations.
Cuban knows this. His argument is not that $20 will pass next year. It is that profitable companies using $7.25 as their wage floor, while their workers qualify for government assistance, have made a deliberate choice, and someone else is paying for it.
What Cuban’s minimum wage push means for investors and labor costs
State-level minimum wage increases are already reshaping labor costs for large employers. California is at $16.90. Connecticut hit $16.94. New York is at $16. Washington D.C. sits at $17.95.
Companies with operations across multiple states are managing a patchwork of wage floors that looks nothing like the single federal standard that existed when $7.25 was set in 2009.
A federal $20 floor would flatten that patchwork and hit businesses in low-wage states hardest. Texas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina are among the 20 states still at $7.25, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Companies sheltered behind those rates would face the sharpest cost increase of any scenario where Congress finally acts.
Cuban’s larger point to entrepreneurs is straightforward. If a business is profitable and its workers still need public assistance to get through the month, the legal minimum is not a justification. It is a choice. And in his view, it is the wrong one.
Related: Mark Cuban exposes hidden AI opportunity for workers
