Rich company

Mark Cuban among 4 Dallas-Fort Worth tycoons inducted into Texas Business Hall of Fame

Mark Cuban's been making things happen his whole life.

Photo courtesy of Dallas Mavericks

Mark Cuban can add another trophy to his case. He and three other Dallas-Fort Worth business tycoons — John Goff, Morton Meyerson, and Randall Stephenson — were inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame recently, honored during a dinner at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas.

Also inducted were Austin billionaire John Paul DeJoria, who built his fortune through hair care products and high-end tequila, and Houston investment manager Gerald Smith.

A little more about the new hall of famers:

Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban, of course, is owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, as well as chairman and CEO of AXS TV and one of the investors on ABC’s Shark Tank.

"Since the age of 12, Mark has been a natural businessman. Selling garbage bags door to door, the seed was planted early on for what would eventually become long-term success," his hall of fame bio says.

His latest initiative is Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, a new venture designed to disrupt big pharma and keep the cost of prescription drugs down.

Dallas private investor Morton Meyerson — recognized most notably as the namesake of the Meyerson Symphony Center — is former chairman and CEO of Plano-based EDS and former chief technology officer at GM. He is currently chair of 2M Companies, a family office he established in 1983, and of The Morton H. Meyerson Family Foundation.

Fort Worth private investor John Goff was co-founder, vice chairman, and CEO of Crescent Real Estate, which Morgan Stanley bought in 2007 for $6.5 billion. Two years later, he bought back the company in partnership with Barclays Capital. Today, Goff is chairman of Crescent Real Estate as well as Houston-based Contango Oil & Gas. He owns The Ritz-Carlton hotel in Dallas and Fort Worth-based spa company Canyon Ranch.

Dallas executive Randall Stephenson is former chairman and CEO of Dallas-based tech, media, and telecom giant AT&T.

"As Chairman and CEO, Randall led AT&T’s transformation aligned with two major trends: First, that consumers will continue to spend more time viewing premium content where they want, when they want and how they want. And second, that businesses and consumers alike will continue to demand more connectivity, bandwidth, mobility and software-based entertainment," his hall of fame bio says.

Houston investment manager Gerald Smith is chairman and CEO of Smith Graham & Co., an investment management firm. He’s also a board member of New York Life Insurance and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and chairman of the Texas Southern University Foundation.

Austin hair care guru John Paul DeJoria and hairstylist Paul Mitchell, in 1980, transformed a partially borrowed $700 into Beverly Hills, California-based John Paul Mitchell Systems, which today sells the largest privately owned line of salon hair care products. In 1989, DeJoria co-founded Patrón, the first ultra-premium tequila. Patrón, now the world’s No. 1 ultra-premium tequila, was sold to Bacardi in 2018 for $5.1 billion.

“John Paul DeJoria’s rags-to-riches biography exemplifies the American dream. Once homeless, he has struggled against the odds to achieve success, launching multiple global enterprises while always supporting his motto, ‘Success unshared is failure,’” his bio says.

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Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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