Since Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes won his first Super Bowl in 2020 and signed a record-breaking 10-year NFL contract worth nearly $500 million in July, he has been making investment deals.
And while Mahomes has a financial team to help him make business decisions, the 25-year-old says he most admires billionaire Mark Cuban’s business style.
“I watch Mark Cuban a lot, just because I’ve met him a couple of times and obviously he has a TV show with ‘Shark Tank’ and stuff like that,” Mahomes tells CNBC Make It. Mahomes says he likes that Cuban is “passionate” as the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and that he is a “tremendous businessman” in the other industries, too.
“He’s someone that I watch and learn from as much as possible,” Mahomes says. “And hopefully I get to continue to talk to as I continue to learn more and more about business.”
In July, Mahomes became a sports owner himself (the youngest part owner in sports history) when he took a minority stake in the MLB’s Kansas City Royals. Mahomes has also invested in performance technology companies Hyperice and Whoop.
Like Cuban, Mahomes has also jumped into the NFT game. (NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique digital assets stored on blockchain that can be used to track ownership of things like digital sports memorabilia or artwork.)
In March, Mahomes reportedly made $3.7 million selling his debut NFT digital sports collectibles collection on MakersPlace.
“It’s is still something that’s new to the general public for sure, including me. But it’s something that I still have a lot of interest in,” Mahomes says. “I think that will continue to get bigger.”
Mahomes (like Cuban) is also “dabbling” in cryptocurrency.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a huge investor,” Mahomes says. “Some of my friends brought it to me at the end of this last year.”
“Obviously [bitcoin] shot up a ton over the last few months,” Mahomes says. “But as someone who’s kind of a new to investing, I’ve learned a lot in a little amount of time.”
“I love how you look one day and it’s up and you look the next day and it’s down there.”
Mahomes says the biggest thing he’s learned about choosing business deals is that he has to truly believe in a product or service to invest.
The more that I love and have a passion for the companies that I’m behind, the more it seems to work out or we figure out a way to make it work out,” he says.
Mahomes also likes to invest in things that he personally uses. One of his first endorsement deals was with Kansas City-based private jet company Airshare, which he and his family use to fly to and from Chiefs home games (Mahomes lives in Tyler, Texas).
In addition to Cuban, Mahomes says he admires the careers of LeBron James, Michael Jordan and Alex Rodriguez.
“[They] really made themselves bigger off the field than they were on it. It just shows that you have the platform to learn from these people and you can become the businessman that you want to become,” he says.
“And that’s something I’m trying to do every single day.”
Mahomes, who welcomed his first child, daughter Sterling Skye Mahomes, with fiancée Brittany Matthews in February, says he seeks out mentors who have more knowledge than him to make himself better each day in business and in life.
“I want to be the best family man, football player, businessman that I can be,” Mahomes says, “and hopefully make a great impact in this world.”
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Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”