IN: Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Norton Cuban, was an automobile upholsterer, while Cuban has described his mother, Shirley, as someone with "a different job or different career goal every other week." He grew up in the suburb of Mount Lebanon, in a Jewish working-class family. His paternal grandfather changed the family name from "Chabenisky" to "Cuban" after his family emigrated from Russia through Ellis Island.

On November 17, 2008, it was reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil suit against Cuban relating to alleged insider trading in the shares of Mamma.com, now known as Copernic. A stock dilution occurred shortly after a trade in June 2004, giving hints of inside knowledge at the time of the trade, and Cuban allegedly was saved from a loss of $750,000. The SEC claimed that Cuban ordered the sale of his holdings in Mamma.com after he had been confidentially approached by the company to participate in a transaction likely to dilute shares of current shareholders. Cuban disputed the charges, saying he had not agreed to keep the information secret. On his blog, Cuban contended the facts were false and that the investigation was "a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion". DealBook, a section of The New York Times, reported through an anonymous source that Cuban believed the investigation was motivated by an SEC employee having taken offense to his interest in possibly distributing the film Loose Change. In July 2009, the U.S. District Court dismissed the charges against Cuban, and the SEC appealed. In September 2010, an appeals court said that the district court had erred and that further proceedings would be necessary to address the merits of the suit. A federal jury in Texas found in favor of Cuban on October 16, 2013. The nine-member jury issued the verdict after deliberating 3 hours and 35 minutes. In March 2014, Cuban was on air at CNBC criticizing high-frequency trading (HFT). Those against HFT, such as Cuban, believe the technology is equivalent to automated insider trading.
QUESTION: What was the SEC insider trading allegations about?
IN: The Rothschild family is a wealthy family descending from Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), a court factor to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire, who established his banking business in the 1760s. Unlike most previous court factors, Rothschild managed to bequeath his wealth and established an international banking family through his five sons, who established themselves in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples. The family was elevated to noble rank in the Holy Roman Empire and the United Kingdom. During the 19th century, the Rothschild family possessed the largest private fortune in the world, as well as the largest private fortune in modern world history.

In the words of the Daily Telegraph: "This multinational banking family is a byword for wealth, power - and discretion... The Rothschild name has become synonymous with money and power to a degree that perhaps no other family has ever matched." Writing of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, Harry Mount writes: "That is what makes these two dynasties so exceptional - not just their dizzying wealth, but the fact that they have held on to it for so long: and not just the loot, but also their family companies." The story of the Rothschild family has been featured in a number of films. The 1934 Hollywood film titled The House of Rothschild, starring George Arliss and Loretta Young, recounted the life of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Nathan Mayer Rothschild (both played by Arliss). Excerpts from this film were incorporated into the Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) without the permission of the copyright holder. Another Nazi film, Die Rothschilds (also called Aktien auf Waterloo), was directed by Erich Waschneck in 1940. A Broadway musical entitled The Rothschilds, covering the history of the family up to 1818, was nominated for a Tony Award in 1971. Nathaniel Mayer ("Natty") Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild appears as a minor character in the historical-mystery novel Stone's Fall, by Iain Pears. Mayer Rothschild is featured in Diana Gabaldon's novel Voyager as a coin seller summoned to Le Havre by Jamie Fraser to appraise coins, prior to the establishment of the Rothschild dynasty, when Mayer is in his early 20s. The Rothschild name is mentioned by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World, among many names of historically affluent persons, scientific innovators and others. The character, named Morgana Rothschild, played a relatively minor role in the story. The name Rothschild used as a synonym for extreme wealth inspired the song "If I Were a Rich Man", which is based on a song from the Tevye the Dairyman stories, written in the Yiddish as Ven ikh bin Rotshild, meaning "If I were a Rothschild". In France, the word "Rothschild" was throughout the 19th and 20th centuries a synonym for seemingly endless wealth, neo-Gothic styles, and epicurean glamour. The family also has lent its name to "le gout Rothschild," a suffocatingly glamorous style of interior decoration whose elements include neo-Renaissance palaces, extravagant use of velvet and gilding, vast collections of armour and sculpture, a sense of Victorian horror vacui, and the highest masterworks of art. Le gout Rothschild has much influenced designers such as Robert Denning, Yves Saint Laurent, Vincent Fourcade and others. "Yes, my dear fellow, it all amounts to this: in order to do something first you must be something. We think Dante great, and he had a civilization of centuries behind him; the House of Rothschild is rich and it has required much more than one generation to attain such wealth. Such things all lie much deeper than one thinks."
QUESTION:
What cultural references are there to the family?