Cuban is also a reader of Rand's work, but favors her 1943 novel "The Fountainhead."

He's read the book, "three complete times, and untold number of little snippets and segments," he tells C-Span in a 2006 interview. "I'll pick it up when I need motivation, but then if I read too far I get too much motivation, and I get too jittery so I have to put it down."

To him, the dedication of the characters to overcome challenges is encouraging.

"Anybody who started a business and built a business knows there's going to be lots of times when you feel beaten down, and you need some motivation, and that's when I turn to that book among others," Cuban continues.

"The Fountainhead" similarly explores topics of "rational selfishness," an ideology that later became known as objectivism. Cuban says he didn't read into the political message of Rand's work but found motivation in her characters.

"I didn't buy into her political philosophy, like 'all government is bad,' and pure libertarianism," Cuban explains on a 2017 episode of "The Jamie Weinstein Show" podcast.

"When you have a protagonist like Howard Roark, that just fired me up," Cuban says about the book, "He was true to himself. And to me, that was the message that I took home."

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Why Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary read Ayn Rand