The High School Dropout Who Made $2B & Bought an NBA Team

This is Ryan Smith, a guy who went from a 1.9 GPA high school dropout to a $2,000,000,000 net worth. But this isn't your normal dropout story. At some point, you have a conversation with yourself like, okay. I gotta make this happen. Yeah. I gotta find a gear that I've never used before. When he dropped out, he had no plan, no money, and nowhere to live. There's a great story about the early days of Qualtrics and focus. We were religious about it, and it was actually an incredible forcing function for me. At some point, you get offered $500,000,000 to sell the company, and you turned it down. Every other person I would talk to about this offer was like, take it and run. Right. You're building it from your family's basement all the way to the end zone, basically. Sell for $8,000,000,000. You end up going public. I didn't do anything else when I was doing Qualtrics. I didn't invest. I didn't sit on boards. No side hustles? No side hustles. Nothing except for hoops. What's it like to now own an NBA team? That's insane. My philosophy was don't blink. Just go. I wanna start with this. Like, you know, you've done what kids like me dream of. It's like I build a successful company with my family no less, become this super successful guy, billionaire, NBA team owner. You live this really interesting life. What's cool is that if we rewind the clock, you were, a guy who dropped out of high school and had a 1.9 GPA in high school. So going from a 1.9 GPA to, like, I don't know, a $2,000,000,000 net worth, that's a pretty big jump. We hear these stories where it's like, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates. They they were at Harvard, and then they dropped out with this big grand idea, and it came to fruition. That's not your story at all. So let's do the origin. Can you take us back, you know, you're 14, 15, 16, 17 years old. What was going on in your life at that time? Yeah. I mean, it's no secret. Like, my parents split up when I was, like, 14, and the world was rocked. And, you know, I was I was very much like, okay. Screw everything. No one can tell me what to do, and, you know, I think my parents were trying their hardest to keep us. I mean, we had five kids. They were keeping us all kinda afloat. And I think to be honest with you, you know, I never really developed the skills for for school, and and I didn't think I was really good. I knew I was a good athlete. I knew I was good at golf and could play poker. And, like, I I knew there was something there, but I didn't work hard. I didn't finish anything. And it was really hard, like, this concept of finishing, and it just never …