Mark Cuban gave 77 acres in Texas national attention Thursday when news broke that the business magnate bought the tiny town of Mustang for an undisclosed amount.
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Mustang is located south of Dallas in Navarro County. Cuban has no immediate plans for the town, which he bought from a friend as a favor, he told The Dallas Morning News.
The U.S. Census Bureau listed Mustang’s population as 21 in 2010. According to Fox Business, the town includes a trailer park, a volunteer fire department building and an abandoned strip club, which was at one point the scene of a murder.
“I don’t know what if anything I will do with it,” Cuban said in an email to the Dallas Morning News.
Cuban is the latest in an exclusive group of billionaires to purchase large swaths of real estate in small towns nationwide. Owner of the LA Dodgers Mark Walter has spent the last several years buying up property in Crested Butte, Colorado. He now owns at least six commercial properties, according to The Daily Beast. Earlier this fall, Fortune reported that billionaire Marc Lore is looking for inexpensive land to establish a utopian town called Telosa.
Not every billionaire has ventured into town ownership, though a recent article by GoBankingRates listed major U.S. cities with combined debts that represent just one one-hundredth of some of the world's wealthiest people's net worths. Cuban’s net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is $5.88B.
Mustang was on the market in 2017 for $4M, Dallas real estate broker Mike Turner told the Dallas Morning News. Turner said he was able to negotiate the cost down to $2M, but the deal never closed.
