Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son: The Biggest Bets Ever Placed

In February 2019, SoftBank sold its entire 4.9 percent stake in Nvidia. By June 2024 those shares would have been worth over $150 billion. Masayoshi Son's public comment on the mistake was that the fish that got away was big. It is the most expensive sentence in modern venture capital, and it is also the perfect summary of a career built on positions so large that being wrong once costs more than most investors ever make.

An Outsider by Birth

Son was born in August 1957 in Saga prefecture, on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu — SoftBank's official biography gives 11 August, Britannica 31 August. His family were ethnic Koreans living in Japan, a minority that in the 1950s and 1960s faced systematic discrimination in employment, marriage and citizenship. He later acquired Japanese nationality.

He left for the United States as a teenager and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 with a degree in economics. While a student he developed a sound-translation device that converted Japanese into English and German, and sold the technology to Sharp Corporation. That money became seed capital.

In September 1981 he founded Nihon SoftBank, the direct ancestor of SoftBank Group Corp.

Distribution, Then Bets

The original business was mundane: distributing software and publishing technology magazines into Japan's emerging personal computer market. It was a good position — a chokepoint between foreign software and Japanese buyers — and it generated the cash for what came next.

Through the 1990s Son expanded aggressively by merger and acquisition, and financed it in a way Japanese companies generally did not: through corporate bonds rather than bank loans. He has described his approach as diplomatic warfare, arguing it benefited both SoftBank and the companies it absorbed. The financing choice matters more than it sounds. Bond markets let him move at a speed and scale the relationship-based Japanese banking system would never have permitted.

Then came Yahoo Japan, and then the investment that defined him: an early stake in Alibaba. The dot-com crash nearly killed the company — SoftBank lost roughly ¥75 billion, about $748 million — but the Alibaba position survived and eventually returned one of the largest multiples in the history of venture investing.

Telecoms and Chips

In April 2006 Son took control of Vodafone K.K., Japan's struggling third mobile carrier, and became its chairman, president and CEO. The renamed business became SoftBank's telecoms arm and a serious cash engine. In 2013 he bought a controlling stake in Sprint, the third-largest US wireless carrier.

In September 2016 he acquired ARM Holdings, the British company whose processor designs sit inside nearly every smartphone on earth, and became its chairman. He remains chairman and a director of Arm Holdings, a position he took again in August 2023. Since June 2017 he has been chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp.

The Vision Fund

In May 2017 Son launched the SoftBank Vision Fund with $100 billion — the largest technology investment fund ever assembled. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund put in $45 billion, SoftBank itself $28 billion, Abu Dhabi's Mubadala $15 billion, with Apple among the other investors. By June 2023 assets under management stood at $134 billion.

The portfolio was enormous and indiscriminate by design: Uber, DoorDash, Coupang, ByteDance, Arm, Flipkart, Grab, and dozens more. The strategy was to write cheques so large that a startup could simply buy its market.

It did not go smoothly. WeWork became the emblem of the fund's due diligence problem, its failed IPO destroying investor confidence. Vision Fund 2, launched in 2019 with a $108 billion target, raised less than half of that as outside investors declined to follow; SoftBank funded most of its eventual $30 billion itself. The results have swung violently — a record $36.99 billion profit in 2021, a $27.4 billion loss in 2022, a $23.1 billion quarterly loss that August, and a record $32 billion annual loss reported in May 2023. Son said publicly that he felt embarrassed and ashamed.

Why Masayoshi Is Called a Genius

The distinguishing quality is conviction at scale combined with an unusually long time horizon — the willingness to identify one structural shift, size a position far beyond what risk management permits, and hold it through ruin. Almost nobody does this. The Alibaba investment, made when Chinese e-commerce barely existed, is the proof case, and the ARM purchase shows the same pattern: buying the design layer under every mobile device before the AI build-out made it obvious. His financing innovation — bonds rather than banks, in a country where that was not done — is a genuine structural insight, not just nerve.

The counter-case is severe, and it is a counter-case about judgement rather than intellect. This is capital allocation, and the record is bimodal rather than consistently excellent: one generational winner in Alibaba, one catastrophic misread in WeWork, and a Nvidia exit that cost more than most of his wins earned. Losses of $27.4 billion and $32 billion in consecutive periods are not volatility around a good thesis; they reflect a fund that deployed capital faster than it could evaluate it. Vision Fund 2's failure to raise outside money is the market's own verdict, delivered in the only currency that counts. Son's defenders call him a visionary; the honest reading is that he makes very large bets on real trends and is right often enough, and lucky enough in one case, to survive being spectacularly wrong in others.

Legacy

Son is one of the few individuals to have shaped the funding environment of an entire industry. The Vision Fund's mega-cheques changed what private companies could raise and how long they could stay private, inflating valuations across the startup world and then deflating them — an effect visible in the terms of deals he never touched.

He has since committed SoftBank's future to artificial intelligence, connecting it to semiconductor design, mobile devices and data centres, with ARM as the physical anchor. It is the same move he has made his whole career: pick one thesis, bet more on it than anyone thinks reasonable, and wait.

Achievements

• Educated at University of California, Berkeley and Holy Names University
• Worked as entrepreneur and engineer