Masayoshi Son Concepts

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley

by Atsuo Inoue · 18 Nov 2021 · 295pp · 89,441 words

living in Japan. In 1986, he was one of the first Japanese journalists to interview Bill Gates and Ted Turner. The first time he interviewed Masayoshi Son was in 1987 and has since covered him closely for more than 30 years. While living in the USA, he interviewed many celebrities including Irving

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Harrison, and Jeffrey Archer. Over the course of his successful career, he has published numerous books including The Mentalities and Mindsets of Entrepreneur Masayoshi Son, Tokaton – Masayoshi Son Monogatari. Aiming High Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group, and Disrupting Silicon Valley Atsuo Inoue www.hodder.co.uk First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton An

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. Ziff would later comment to Hashimoto that he had only known three bona fide geniuses in his entire life: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Son Masayoshi. Son in turn would confide in Hashimoto during this trip that he wanted to buy Ziff’s company one day – which at the time Hashimoto took

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber · 3 Oct 2024 · 424pp · 123,730 words

has interviewed many world leaders and leading CEOs. He is a regular visitor to Japan. Lionel Barber * * * GAMBLING MAN The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son Contents List of Illustrations A Style Note on Names Cast of Characters Prologue PART ONE: BOY GENIUS 1. Roots 2. Pachinko 3. American Awakening 4

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Hanai/Bloomberg via Getty Images) A Style Note on Names Japanese names are given in the western order, so given name then surname, as in Masayoshi Son. For the purposes of this biography, I have used the shortened first name ‘Masa’ because it is more familiar than ‘Son’ or ‘Son-san’. Korean

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holding company and major investor, and SoftBank Corp, which is responsible for the operating companies in Japan, notably SoftBank Mobile. Cast of Characters Part One Masayoshi Son, CEO and founder of SoftBank, known as ‘Masa’ Mitsunori Son, father of Masa, king of pachinko in Kyushu Tamako, mother of Masa Son Jong-gyeong

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. A man who embodied their hopes and dreams; a self-styled visionary with the loftiest ambitions for himself, his company and Japan. His name was Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, the global media-technology conglomerate and the public face of the internet bubble. Almost a year earlier, when dot-com stocks began

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Decade. The dot-com boom promised a return to the good times, and that night word spread rapidly that the guest of honour was indeed Masayoshi Son. The presence of the man known to friends and rivals alike as ‘Masa’ was by no means a foregone conclusion. By nature secretive and prone

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and hubris, common sense and insane risk-taking for whom national borders, technological frontiers and ethical boundaries are there to be crossed. The tale of Masayoshi Son needs telling because it captures a 25-year span of hyper-globalization in which money, technologies and ideas flowed freely. SoftBank is perhaps the most

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, where a Japanese fleet of steel battleships annihilated the Russian navy in 1905, was a chippy teenager by the name of Son Jong-gyeong.1 Masayoshi Son’s grandfather arrived in 1917 in Kyushu,2 the western island in the Japanese archipelago which juts towards the Korean mainland as Cuba almost touches

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on to found Apple Computer. During one of his regular scouting visits to California, Sasaki bumped into an earnest young man who introduced himself as Masayoshi Son. Abandoning Japanese formality, Masa asked the older man: ‘What do you think is at the end of the universe? And where is the beginning of

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to his knack for charming the elders of big business. Sasaki was the first of many to fall under his spell. 4. Lost in Translation Masayoshi Son’s six years in California were marked by chance encounters with people who would shape his life for decades. He met his wife Masami as

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ground.8 Henry Heetderks, a tall, broad-shouldered Dutch-American aerospace engineer, remembers Mozer lecturing Masa about what it took to be a successful businessman. ‘Masayoshi Son was listening politely, nodding at the appropriate times and saying very little. I got the strong impression that he felt he had little to learn

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without charge. The Japanese press declared an end to the 10-day war between ‘the genius who creates’ Kazuhiko Nishi and ‘the prodigy who sells’ Masayoshi Son.17 Evidently, mainstream media in Japan were not yet ready to accept his father’s label of Masa as a genius. The compromise was much

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Rockefeller Plaza, headquarters of Lazard Frères bank in New York. Neither Steve Rattner nor Peter Ezersky, the two lead advisers to Ziff, had heard of Masayoshi Son. Neither would forget that first encounter. Masa presented each banker with a pair of exquisitely engraved chopsticks. Then came his life-story, delivered with his

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via a syndicated loan from Japanese banks. Adelson, sensing he could play his Japanese visitor, asked for more. In the end, he settled for $842m. ‘Masayoshi Son was so keen, he would have paid $1bn for the business,’ says Chudnofsky.9 Adelson used the Japanese cash to assemble the largest casino empire

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never bothered hiding he was good friends with Murdoch. He treated Masa with mild contempt, viewing him as a dangerous maverick. This dismissive view of Masayoshi Son was widely shared in the Japanese establishment. Even though SoftBank’s boss on paper was one of the richest men in Japan, he was so

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fact, ordinary workers operated one PC only, while managers or executives had two on their desks. If anyone inside SoftBank had three computers, it was Masayoshi Son. Masa was an incorrigible self-promoter. Most of the time it was harmless stuff. SoftBank was a young company in a young industry in a

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of infinite possibility. Few of the online enterprises competing for investors’ attention had any track record or sustainable business model. To dot-com evangelists like Masayoshi Son, the absence of conventional benchmarks was of no consequence. On the contrary, it was part of the allure. The true measure of a stock’s

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of popular unrest. Manufacturing innovation continued, Japanese companies hugely increased their offshoring, and the long awaited modernization of central Tokyo took off. Throughout this period, Masayoshi Son was steadily growing into his role as an agent of change. Masa was offering something very different. SoftBank didn’t make anything. It was an

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: ‘Alibaba is just a baby, and a baby does not need this amount of cash.’2 It took guts – or epic foolishness – to turn down Masayoshi Son. By 1999, he was a minor celebrity in China, admired by an emerging class of private-sector entrepreneurs aware of his early investment in Yahoo

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go before the bank’s investment committee – or else it was a sackable offence. His immediate boss Anshu Jain was appalled: ‘Who is this guy Masayoshi Son anyway?fn2,9 Like Misra, Jain attended Delhi Public School, an institution beloved of elite Indians, but that was about all the two had in

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CEO of the Japanese development company running the mega-project. The fact that Jeffrey A. Sine was a Wall Street banker whose prized client was Masayoshi Son was not noted. A few months earlier, Sine had co-founded the Raine Group, a boutique New York investment bank. After a career at Morgan

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-war Japan. Over the next few days and weeks, the threat of deadly radiation hung in the air. Sitting in his office at SoftBank headquarters, Masayoshi Son watched the unfolding horror on a live feed on NHK national television. For a while he remained transfixed by the sight of whole towns being

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, re-establishing communication lines was a lifeline for the earthquake’s victims and a critical measure of national recovery. Faced with the irresistible force of Masayoshi Son determined to step down as CEO, one of his aides turned to the immovable object of Tadashi Yanai, the Uniqlo boss. Yanai was familiar with

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declared: ‘I am absolutely against Keidanren’s proposal.’ No one was listening.14 Looking back, the Fukushima disaster brought out the best and worst of Masayoshi Son’s character. It showed his capacity for compassion. As an ethnic Korean in Japan, he never felt accepted by the establishment; he remained the outsider

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in favour of Nikesh Arora. ‘Retirement, isn’t that a joke?’15 23. Smash and Grab In 2015, the world’s top technology investors, including Masayoshi Son, were gushing about digital genetic coding, self-driving cars, next-generation robotics and something called ‘the internet of things’. This was the fancy term to

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photographs together. The Saudis were falling under Masa’s spell. On 3 September, under lights and flashing cameras, deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Masayoshi Son posed for photographs at the Geihinkan State Palace. The bulky, bearded prince, in formal dress, gesticulated with his left hand towards the assembled journalists. Masa

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cameras, but grew flustered when one of the American reporters confused him with Terry Gou, the Foxconn boss. ‘No, no, no,’ said Masa. ‘I am Masayoshi Son, and SoftBank is not a bank.’ Soon after, al-Bassam’s iPhone lit up with texts from Riyadh. ‘What is Masa doing?’ said the man

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lean Welsh émigré who became a venture capital billionaire finally exploded. ‘There is at least one difference between [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong Un and Masayoshi Son,’ he wrote in an email to Sequoia colleagues. ‘The former has ICBMs that he lobs in the air while the latter doesn’t hesitate to

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Hensan Iinkai, Tosu Shishi, Vol. 4: Kindai-Gendai Hen, Tosu Shi, 2009, p. 474 2 Sano, Anpon, pp. 28–39 3 Atsuo Inoue, Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley, Hodder & Stoughton, 2021, p. 2 4 Mitsunori Son, interview with author, 1 April 2023 5 Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 108

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6 Sano, Anpon, p. 115 7 Ibid., p. 159 8 Ibid., pp. 340–47 9 Ibid., pp. 350–51 10 Ibid., p. 28 11 Masayoshi Son (Masa), interview with author, 10 February 2023 12 Ibid. 13 Hiroshi Kodama, interview with author, 24 October 2022 14 Nikkei, 8 November 2017 15 Mitsunori

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. The Great Escape 1 Duncan Mavin, The Pyramid of Lies, Pan Macmillan, 2023, pp. 158–64 2 Ibid. 3 The account of the meetings between Masayoshi Son and Elliott Management are based on several sources who spoke on condition of not being identified 4 Warren Buffett on CNBC ‘Squawk Box’, interview, 26

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the record 6 Senior former SoftBank executive speaking off the record 7 Kana Inagaki and Leo Lewis, ‘SoftBank: inside two weeks of turmoil that squeezed Masayoshi Son’, Financial Times, 5 April 2020 8 Ibid. 9 Masa, interview with author, 18 October 2023 10 The following is based on multiple sources speaking off

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the record 11 Robert Smith and Kana Inagaki, ‘Jesus Christ was also misunderstood, Masayoshi Son tells investors’, Financial Times, 18 May 2020 28. The Whale is Still Hungry 1 A person present at the Tokyo dinner who asked not to

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founder living in Tokyo since China’s tech crackdown’, Financial Times, 29 November 2022 6 Former senior SoftBank executive, speaking on condition of anonymity. 7 ‘Masayoshi Son owes SoftBank $4.7bn after tech rout’, Financial Times, 17 November 2022 Epilogue 1 Masa, interview with author, 18 October 2023 2 Ibid. 3 ‘SoftBank

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my Tokyo-based researcher Simon Angseop Lee, who accompanied me on every step of a three-year journey to complete the first western biography of Masayoshi Son. Simon dug deep into original Japanese source material, including public archives, Japanese-language biographies and books on SoftBank. He was a diligent researcher and an

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Simon in April 2022 through Professor Niall Ferguson, then teaching at Stanford University. At the time I was despairing of ever completing a book on Masayoshi Son. Over a sandwich lunch on campus, Niall recommended I hire a Japanese researcher – preferably a PhD student. Simon fell short on that count, but otherwise

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and provided valuable steers on tricky subjects. Without his cooperation, this project would have been much harder to complete. I would also like to thank Masayoshi Son for agreeing to sit down for four interviews in Tokyo and for allowing me to speak to his father Mitsunori at the family home in

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: Japan: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009 Christopher Harding: The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives, Allen Lane, 2020 Atsuo Inoue: Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank and the Disrupting of Silicon Valley, Hodder & Stoughton, 2022 Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs, Simon & Schuster, 2011 Kim Yeong-dal, Sōshikaimei no Hōseido to Rekishi

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power

by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck · 14 Sep 2020 · 339pp · 103,546 words

CEO of Amazon.com David Pecker, CEO of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer Ari Emanuel, Hollywood agent and cofounder of Endeavor talent agency Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese tech investor SoftBank Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s Vision Fund Nizar al-Bassam, Saudi deal maker and a former international banker

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cards with a stream of visitors. Trump Treasury chief Steve Mnuchin dined with his wife at Hong, the Ritz-Carlton’s high-end Chinese restaurant. Masayoshi Son, founder of Japan’s SoftBank, occupied one of the suites used days later to detain a prince. The startling juxtaposition between Davos in the Desert

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against the housing market. He left soon after, making brief stops at UBS and Fortress Investment Group before landing at SoftBank. Rajeev had reconnected with Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s technology-obsessed founder, at a wedding in Italy a few months earlier and subsequently accepted a job trying to help Masayoshi develop complex

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DRIVE THEM OUT OF THIS EARTH.” There were multiple standing ovations. Bannon looked on with pride. This was the real, new beginning. No more apologies. Masayoshi Son and Rajeev Misra also flew in during the Trump visit to sign the paperwork on the $100 billion Vision Fund. When they finally got in

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normally skeptical New York Times, which sponsored the conference. Sorkin, its best-known financial writer, came to Riyadh with the hope of interviewing Softbank’s Masayoshi Son. He ended up getting roped into hosting onstage interviews with Son and others. He didn’t realize the “Sophia” on his list of interviewees was

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being the most popular kid in school. One of the world’s largest money managers, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, was there, along with SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, former British prime minister Tony Blair, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and Hollywood kingmaker Ari Emanuel. Foreign media called the event “Davos in the Desert,” a

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have a deep interest in Saudi Arabia as a long-term partner showed a sometimes shocking ignorance of its values. “Saudi has the Great Mecca,” Masayoshi Son declared at the conference. “We will create two more Meccas.” Mohammed was forced to intervene: “Please do not misunderstand his statement. Mecca became an example

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already off the ground with $40 billion from Saudi Arabia. Rajeev Misra, head of the Vision Fund, strutted around the Ritz-Carlton, holding meetings in Masayoshi Son’s huge suite and vaping nonstop. Some international investors pledged to invest money in the kingdom, though they were mainly affiliated with countries or companies

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in Turkey but it would go a long way to start and change people’s view.” Other business leaders had similarly ambivalent approaches. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, who was managing about $45 billion in Saudi investment, pulled out of the conference but went to Saudi Arabia anyway. Other executives who wanted to

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on earth could slosh billions around so easily. The chance to catch some, even a few million, was too juicy to not take. One afternoon, Masayoshi Son and Mohammed took a trip in a small boat to a pristine reef and went snorkeling for more than an hour. Pleasantries aside, Masayoshi had

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) Mohammed bin Salman connected well with Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President Trump. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images) SoftBank’s Rajeev Misra and Masayoshi Son with the Public Investment Fund’s Yasir al-Rumayyan. (Bandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Council/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion

by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell · 19 Jul 2021 · 460pp · 130,820 words

former and current WeWork executives, staff, and board members; SoftBank staff; bankers, advisers, investors, landlords, rivals, friends and family members of the Neumanns; SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son; and numerous others. The vast majority of these people spoke on the condition that we would not reveal their identities as sources, with many citing

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—they all had bet on Neumann. Wall Street was even more enamored: the CEOs of both JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs lavished him with attention. And Masayoshi Son, chairman of the Tokyo-based SoftBank Group and the most prolific tech investor in the entire world, had taken a particular shine to him, anointing

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audience, nodding along, was a self-possessed Japanese businessman who was starting to write some of the largest checks India’s entrepreneurs had ever seen. Masayoshi Son was the founder and CEO of the Tokyo-based tech conglomerate SoftBank Group. Clad in a black blazer and white shirt, the fifty-eight-year

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with tequila, circulating through as the set went on. Stumbles in the rearview mirror, the party raged on. CHAPTER 16 One Billion Dollars per Minute Masayoshi Son was getting anxious. He’d been building SoftBank for three decades, and by the summer of 2016 his personal fortune was estimated at around $17

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one who could fund the race and anoint the winners. He was going to be a kingmaker. CHAPTER 17 Neumann & Son On December 6, 2016, Masayoshi Son was on his way to Trump Tower, having flown to New York to meet the president-elect. Much of the world was still in shock

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on a predawn flight for Tokyo to complete the first chunk of SoftBank’s monster investment, but he hadn’t thought to bring a gift. Masayoshi Son was putting $4.4 billion—the number they’d finalized—into his company, and he didn’t have so much as a bottle of scotch

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, from which they wanted to request $100 billion for the fund. It was a comically large number. Saudi Arabia had indeed committed $45 billion to Masayoshi Son for the Vision Fund, but it’s not as if the country had unlimited stores of scores of billions lying around. The entire size of

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billions had the potential to reshape fledgling industries, to determine winners and losers with a check. And it was all controlled by a single person. Masayoshi Son wanted to have a personal hand in selecting every recipient. As he saw it, his instincts and his gut—the vibe he got from a

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about far more than running an office space subleasing company. Fueling their ever-rising and perhaps ever-more-erratic ambitions was the forthcoming deal with Masayoshi Son. The deep-pocketed investor’s recent commitment was going to mean a whole new volume in the story of WeWork, a full partnership with the

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the scheme of a company worth $20 billion, a jet didn’t seem worth a fight. Regardless, Neumann had a powerful supporter of the purchase. Masayoshi Son said he was fine with the idea, Neumann told board members. Some WeWork staff, though, fretted that if the public ever found out, it would

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a rather strange marriage: two aging startups, both bleeding money, with one investing the venture capital dollars it raised from SoftBank into the other. (When Masayoshi Son later found out about the talks, he was furious with Neumann and forced him to shut the discussions down. SoftBank was a backer of Lyft

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education had become WeWork’s, and together the couple planned to reshape schooling for children everywhere. As staff raced to complete the forthcoming deal with Masayoshi Son, WeWork was on track to change the world, just as Neumann had been promising for years. In the fall of 2018, he spoke to the

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Theater—a prudent company would have recognized the need for wholesale change. WeWork’s inability to turn a profit was suddenly dangerous. Without the money Masayoshi Son had pledged for the larger Fortitude deal, the company was going to need billions to keep materializing from somewhere. WeWork was still spending as though

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went public for roughly $40 billion less. JPMorgan had been tempting WeWork with extremely bullish projections for years, and Neumann had used them to urge Masayoshi Son to push up the valuation when he invested. Neumann and Artie Minson would talk about the banks’ prior projections for WeWork’s valuation almost as

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would sell analytics software to clients tracking employee use of space, the effort never got off the ground. The way Neumann had pitched WeWork to Masayoshi Son in 2018—with the triangle that called for WeWork to take over every part of the property world, from ownership to services—hadn’t advanced

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need most were a few committed believers willing to write huge checks. Just then, a familiar face reached out to Neumann. Masayoshi Son wanted a meeting. CHAPTER 34 A Setting Son Masayoshi Son was getting worried. Reading reactions to the IPO prospectus from his office in Tokyo, he was beginning to see that WeWork

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communiqué the staff got was a late-night email inviting them to watch an all-company webcast the next morning at 11:00. * * * — In London, Masayoshi Son’s deputies Rajeev Misra and Munish Varma attended a small dinner with a group of investors, including Ibrahim Ajami, the head of Mubadala’s venture

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the public markets, he added, WeWork was still learning the rules of the game. * * * — The next day, Wednesday, on the other side of the country, Masayoshi Son was hosting a three-day summit for the Vision Fund’s portfolio companies and its investors at the posh Langham Huntington in Pasadena, a five

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it—isn’t a business at all. * * * — For SoftBank, it was a bitter pill to swallow. It had infused a fleet of companies with billions. Masayoshi Son’s stated strategy at the Vision Fund was that companies should accelerate their growth and not dwell on losses. Son began to pivot. As WeWork

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didn’t mean it was the best course of action. Many of WeWork’s remaining top executives had little but scorn for the conglomerate, blaming Masayoshi Son for accelerating WeWork’s insanity under Neumann in the prior two years. They worried SoftBank would use WeWork’s troubled position as a way to

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on paper were being lost across Silicon Valley—a trend driven in large part by the WeWork disaster. It was a lesson being absorbed by Masayoshi Son as well. Investors weren’t taking him up on his second Vision Fund. The $108 billion in commitments he thought he once had proved illusory

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clean up the mess they had made. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby On November 6, six weeks after Adam Neumann stepped aside as CEO, Masayoshi Son stood on a stage in Tokyo, sounding humbled. “My own investment judgment was really bad,” Son said. “I regret it.” He was staring into a

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surf pools. If Saudi Arabia’s economy hadn’t fallen under the control of a new startup-loving prince desperate to diversify its oil wealth, Masayoshi Son might never have written Neumann a check. If bankers hadn’t been so focused on the prestige and fees from leading a big IPO, perhaps

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WeWork was dealing with investigations from regulators—SoftBank simply refused to pay up. COVID-19 was sweeping the globe. WeWork’s finances were looking dire. Masayoshi Son didn’t want to spend another $3 billion on WeWork, even if he’d agreed to do it. As he’d told Marcelo Claure in

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party, Neumann threw a tequila bottle through his office window. After the first pane shattered, a colleague threw another. Bloomberg via Getty Images SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son (left), who long pined to be considered in the same league as technology titans like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, raised $45 billion from Saudi

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.com/watch?v=X8T4Xnjuy0Q (Neumann introduced at 52:40). “We’re in nineteen cities”: Ibid. “the beginning of the big bang”: Surabhi Agarwal, “Softbank’s Masayoshi Son Unfazed by Talk of a Funding Crunch or Bloated Valuations,” Economic Times, Jan. 18, 2016. world’s richest man in 2000: “Conversation with

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Masayoshi Son,” The Charlie Rose Show, March 10, 2014. His father had cirrhosis: Atsuo Inoue, Aiming High: A Biography of Masayoshi Son (YouTeacher, 2013), chap. 31. He barely had a drink: Interview with Hong Lu, April 2020. called

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to Japan: Interview with Lu, April 2020. sold the patent for the translator: Alan M. Webber, “Japanese-Style Entrepreneurship: An Interview with Softbank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son,” Harvard Business Review, Jan.–Feb. 1992. Mozer only found out that Son: Interview with Mozer, March 2020. His father was sick: Interview with Lu, April

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Out on Bold Experiment,” San Jose Mercury News, July 10, 2001. in 1995, Son pushed Yahoo’s founders: Daisuke Wakabayashi and Anton Troianovski, “Japan’s Masayoshi Son Picks a Fight with U.S. Phone Giants,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 23, 2012. SoftBank led a $20 million investment: Henny Sender and Connie Ling

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: Jathon Sapsford, “Vodafone Sells Japanese Unit to Softbank for $15 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2006. By negotiating directly with Steve Jobs: Takashi Sugimoto, “Masayoshi Son Talks About How Steve Jobs Inspired SoftBank’s ARM Deal,” Nikkei Asia, Sept. 24, 2016. $21.6 billion deal in late 2012: Wakabayashi and Troianovski

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, “Japan’s Masayoshi Son Picks a Fight with U.S. Phone Giants.” spending $117 million for a nine-acre estate: Katherine Clarke, “The Estate That Wants to Be Silicon

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Who Gained the Most Money in 2016,” Forbes, Dec. 30, 2016. “Life’s too short to think small”: Sarah McBride, Selina Wang, and Peter Elstrom, “Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100 Billion Blitz on Sand Hill Road,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 27, 2018. The Qataris were noncommittal: Arash Massoudi, Kana Inagaki, and Leo

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Inagaki, and Simeon Kerr, “The $100Bn Marriage: How SoftBank’s Son Courted a Saudi Prince,” Financial Times, Oct. 19, 2016. kingdom a $1 trillion gift: Masayoshi Son, interview on The David Rubenstein Show, Bloomberg Television, Oct. 1, 2017. “$45 billion in forty-five minutes”: Ibid. apologized for arriving late: Jason Kothari, Irrationally

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Taking Majority Stake in WeWork,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9, 2018. “We are unicorn hunters”: Mitsuru Obe and Akane Okutsu, “ ‘We Are Unicorn Hunters,’ Says Masayoshi Son,” Nikkei Asia, June 20, 2018. Money went to startups like Plenty: Phred Dvorak and Mayumi Negishi, “How SoftBank, World’s Biggest Tech Investor, Throws Around

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”: Eliot Brown, “How Adam Neumann’s Over-the-Top Style Built WeWork. ‘This Is Not the Way Everybody Behaves,’ ” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 18, 2019. Masayoshi Son was hosting a three-day summit: Farrell and Brown, “Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle.” “Adam Neumann was flying high”: Brown

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words

, that Yahoo was almost bound to be funded. The funder who appeared was ideally suited to the moment. He was a short, slight entrepreneur named Masayoshi Son, and he had earned a reputation as the Bill Gates of Japan by hitting it big with a software distributor called SoftBank. Unlike Gates, who

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, implying a multiple of about twenty-five times capital.[67] The back-to-basics vision of venture capital was evidently thriving, whatever the message from Masayoshi Son’s example. The contest between these two models would persist into the future. The Benchmark partners practiced venture capital the way that traditionalists loved, intelligently

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be part of it,” he said later.[8] Bechtolsheim’s impromptu investment signaled the coming of a new kind of technology finance, as significant as Masayoshi Son’s $100 million check two years earlier. Before the mid-1990s, semiretired technology executives had sometimes turned their hands to investing: Mike Markkula had backed

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the pot to eke out a return of 1.3x.[64] The equivalent Kleiner Perkins fund performed even worse, never making it into the black. Masayoshi Son, who had briefly become the richest person in the world, lost more than 90 percent of his fortune. Having loaded up with capital during the

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the Wirehog presentation stood up and voiced the shared conviction of the rising generation: “Young people are just smarter.”[74] Coming on the heels of Masayoshi Son’s growth checks, the spread of Bechtolsheim-type angels, and Peter Thiel’s hands-off investing, Y Combinator represented yet another challenge to traditional venture

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, Rieschel had an international outlook, and he knew what booms smelled like. He had worked in Japan during the go-go 1980s. He had run Masayoshi Son’s Silicon Valley venture fund in the frenetic 1990s. He had shifted his focus back to high-growth Asia when the Valley’s boom had

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to perform magic!” she told herself bitterly.[18] In January 2000, Lin spoke to Mark Schwartz, Goldman’s Asia Pacific chairman. Schwartz was close to Masayoshi Son and on the board of SoftBank. Lin explained her dilemma: she had a portfolio of China startups, but New York didn’t like them. “I

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Russian. Dumb money . . . this is insane.”[8] Andreessen knew otherwise. Milner was neither crazy nor dumb, nor was he even impetuous in the way that Masayoshi Son was. To the contrary, what distinguished Milner was his data-driven approach. He had meticulously compiled the key metrics on the world’s social-media

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a profit of more than $1.5 billion, and Facebook continued to head skyward.[10] For Silicon Valley, it was a watershed. Thirteen years earlier, Masayoshi Son had shocked the traditional venture shops by foisting $100 million on Yahoo. In contrast, Milner had initially bought more than $300 million worth of Facebook

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he knew what he was doing. At home in its traditional market, Sequoia experimented with new kinds of investments. Ever since the Yahoo experience with Masayoshi Son, Moritz and Leone had eyed the growth-equity business, determined to avoid being outmuscled by kingmakers with larger checkbooks. In 1999 they duly raised a

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newcomers, most of whom came from a respected Boston shop called Summit Partners, had a style that differed markedly from that of Yuri Milner or Masayoshi Son. They had been trained to invest in obscure companies that had never taken venture capital—that had “bootstrapped.” Most of these bootstrappers were located outside

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to hold him to high standards. Indeed, far from kowtowing to Benchmark, Neumann was about to link arms with the ultimate enabler. The enabler was Masayoshi Son, now busy with his second charge into a U.S. technology bull market. In 2016, in a burst of inspired salesmanship, Son had talked $60

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to fortify itself against the SoftBank bullying tactics that Moritz had experienced at Yahoo. “There is at least one difference between Kim Jong-Un and Masayoshi Son,” Moritz wrote to his top colleagues, referring to North Korea’s missile-wielding dictator. “The former has ICBMs that he lobs in the air while

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unison if Kalanick was allowed back. Gurley had to stop him. In July 2017, Benchmark began to prepare a second stratagem. A few months earlier, Masayoshi Son had backed Benchmark’s other troubled unicorn, WeWork. Now the partners figured that Son might provide his special brand of assistance to Uber. He was

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harrowing experience. They had ejected Kalanick and salvaged the firm, but only by shredding the normal VC rule book. The Chicago ultimatum, the use of Masayoshi Son as a battering ram, the lawsuit: all these maneuvers had been improvised, because in the pre-unicorn era none of them would have been needed

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too sweeping: it glossed over the different types of technology investors. WeWork’s capital had come overwhelmingly from nonstandard players: banks, mutual funds, and then Masayoshi Son, acting as a conduit for Arab Gulf money.[84] The one recognizable VC in the WeWork story, Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark, had provided only about

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the question was whether larger lessons would be learned and whether the tech world would turn a corner. In the wake of the WeWork humiliation, Masayoshi Son, the single greatest corrupter of unicorn governance, confessed the error of his ways. “My investment judgment was poor,” he offered.[87] By way of atonement

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Kleiner Perkins would have invested in Facebook rather than Friendster, and perhaps Goldman Sachs’s bosses would have held on to their Alibaba stake, depriving Masayoshi Son of the springboard for his second coming. In any version of history, the power law would ensure that a few winners become outsized stars. But

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less thoughtful investors, “blitzscaling” has come to mean little more than “get rich quick,” a phrase to be filed alongside other notorious war cries, from Masayoshi Son’s injunction to be “crazier, faster, bigger” to Mark Zuckerberg’s call to “move fast and break things.” Even the recipients of blitzscaling war chests

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slowly. It would never have happened,” O’Reilly himself comments. Theoretically, a really huge amount of venture dollars might represent an overcorrection: when buccaneers like Masayoshi Son are setting the pace, the anti-blitzscaling critique may have merit. But buccaneer blitzscaling is not the fault of venture capital as it is usually

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, fig. 2.02. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 Son spoke about his early life in a speech at the SoftBank thirtieth anniversary shareholder meeting. See Masayoshi Son, “SoftBank’s Next 30-Year Vision,” SoftBank Group, June 25, 2010, group.softbank/en/philosophy/vision/next30. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16 Amy Virshup, “Yahoo

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; Rieschel, interview by the author, March 18, 2019. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24 Rieschel, author interview. See also Daisuke Wakabayashi and Anton Troianovsky, “Japan’s Masayoshi Son Picks a Fight with U.S. Phone Giants,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 23, 2012. The Journal’s otherwise excellent article conflates Son’s Series B

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2016 and 2017, confirming his sense that unicorns had been overvalued. Subsequently, in 2018 and 2019, late-stage valuations rose more dramatically than ever, reflecting Masayoshi Son’s huge and reckless influence. The ratios given here are calculated from data provided to the author by the investment adviser Cambridge Associates. BACK TO

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, transforming the online experience. 1995 Michael Moritz of Sequoia backs Yahoo, emerging as the leader of his firm and later of the venture industry. 1996 Masayoshi Son of SoftBank invests $100 million in Yahoo, heralding the rise of “growth investing” and earning the enmity of Moritz. 1996 John Doerr backs Amazon, signaling

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it with stock options that enable its take-off. 2000 New capital commitments to U.S. VC funds hit a peak of $104 billion. 2000 Masayoshi Son follows Goldman Sachs into Alibaba, ultimately making up for his vast losses in the U.S. tech bust. 2003 Tiger Global becomes the first hedge

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cleantech investments. 2012 Ellen Pao sues Kleiner Perkins for discrimination. 2013 As big tech firms increasingly remain private, Aileen Lee coins the term “unicorn.” 2017 Masayoshi Son launches his $99 billion Vision Fund. 2017 With Moritz comparing Son to North Korea’s dictator, Sequoia responds with an $8 billion growth fund. 2017

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Filo’s office was often littered with Rollerblades, CD cases, crumpled soda cans, old copies of the Micro Times, and a blue-plaid polyester blanket. Masayoshi Son persuaded Yahoo’s founders to accept an unprecedented $100 million investment, telling them that if they turned him down, he would put capital behind their

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal

by Duncan Mavin · 20 Jul 2022 · 345pp · 100,989 words

high finance that if one big financial firm does a deal, others will probably assume that their rivals did their work properly and follow suit. Masayoshi Son, the CEO of giant Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, had launched the $100 billion Vision Fund in 2017. He staked about $28 billion of SoftBank’s own

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a team of credit traders who profited from the crash in the US sub-prime mortgage market. He had developed a strong personal bond with Masayoshi Son since 2006, when he raised $16 billion in debt SoftBank needed for a large acquisition – the deal had helped make the SoftBank CEO a multibillionaire

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critical. There were some of the same Vision Fund staff they’d met with before. But critically, Lex and Cameron also met with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son himself. Son is one of the most powerful, and unconventional, investors in the world. He encourages the Vision Fund to invest huge sums of money

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with running a few billion dollars of supply chain finance programmes. Lex wanted to finance every single receivable in the world. This was exactly what Masayoshi Son wanted to hear. Greensill was dealing with $31 billion worth of transactions already, but it could be handling $385 billion in just a few years

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as a financial adviser to the Vision Fund, helping to raise funds for some of its portfolio companies, including through an initial public offering (IPO). Masayoshi Son had also borrowed from Credit Suisse for decades, pledging his shares in SoftBank as collateral for billions of dollars of loans. Credit Suisse’s Michel

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cultivated a relationship with Sky television’s Ian King and with Sky News business reporter Mark Kleinman. More importantly, he cultivated a personal connection to Masayoshi Son. SoftBank insiders felt Lex was spending more time with Masa than just about anyone else. The Australian followed his new mentor to Washington DC, Jakarta

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Greensill access to numerous new relationships, from across the Vision Fund and externally, for us to evaluate.’ It seemed like a vague reference to something Masayoshi Son had said about the ‘Cluster of No. 1’ strategy. SoftBank’s website explains that SoftBank-backed companies ‘are encouraged to form synergies to evolve and

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know this till later, but Lex was as panicked as the markets. Weeks before my story about the potential conflicts of interest, he had called Masayoshi Son in Tokyo from his chauffeur-driven car on a rainy day in London. Lex pleaded for his mentor’s help. He blamed the impact of

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’t need the bad publicity this kind of investigation attracted. Lex, once the golden boy, was suddenly on the naughty step. His daily calls with Masayoshi Son, his mentor and biggest promoter, ended abruptly. He also lost the support of his other big cheerleader at SoftBank. Colin Fan, the former Deutsche Bank

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which Greensill had loaned money to. He was also the main Vision Fund executive responsible for Zume, an automated food delivery business that had pitched Masayoshi Son on the idea of using robots to make pizzas. By early 2020, all these businesses were floundering. Fan stopped attending board meetings at Greensill; although

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, David Solo, the banking and trading maestro, Jeremy Heywood, the most powerful civil servant in the UK, David Cameron, the former UK prime minister, and Masayoshi Son, possibly the most influential investor in the world. There were many other lesser lights who also got behind Lex along the way, fuelling his rapid

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investors. SoftBank Vision Fund – The $100 billion Vision Fund, founded in 2017, was set up by SoftBank, a Japanese technology firm led by charismatic businessman Masayoshi Son. The fund, which is also backed by investors from the Middle East and Silicon Valley, is the biggest technology-focused investment fund in the world

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, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Tower Trade ref1 Tradeshift Networks ref1, ref2 and Jeremy Heywood ref1 and John Gorman ref1 legal work ref1 marriage ref1 and Masayoshi Son ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 mentors ref1 mission statement, ‘helping out the little guy’ ref1 and Mohammed Bin Salman ref1 at Morgan Stanley ref1, ref2

The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World

by James Ashton · 11 May 2023 · 401pp · 113,586 words

by a single party. There were four of them: Simon Segars, who in 2013 had become Arm’s third chief executive; his chairman, Stuart Chambers; Masayoshi Son, the billionaire Japanese investor whose portfolio of investments included Chinese ecommerce website Alibaba and the US mobile-phone carrier Sprint; and Alok Sama, chief financial

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arranged meeting there was really only one thing on the menu: the future ownership of Arm, the UK’s most successful technology company. Animal Instincts Masayoshi Son had built a reputation for taking quick decisions. When he first met Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese ecommerce website Alibaba, it took a

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, May’s only rival, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out of the race, and she was driven back to London, preparing to take charge of the country. Masayoshi Son was unperturbed by the tough talk or the latest political weather. Guided by his 300-year vision of the future, he flew into London the

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at the centre of SoftBank’s inaugural Sōzō Summit – which took its name from a Japanese phrase that meant ‘to imagine’ and ‘to create’ – was Masayoshi Son, still the go-to man to bankroll any big production. ‘What can you tell the founders of your portfolio companies who are doing marvellous things

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next door, opened in 2000 by Stephen Byers, the trade and industry secretary, and where staff assembled to celebrate the SoftBank deal with a beaming Masayoshi Son in July 2016, was still in use but the executives were long gone. On the balcony, Simon Segars’ old office was now a ‘retreat room

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Clark, Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built, Ecco, 2016. 2 https://www.reuters.com/article/alibaba-ipo-board-idINL4N0QK3Q120140827 3 Atsuo Inoue, Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley, Hodder & Stoughton, 2021. 4 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/simon-segars-interview-looking-forward-future-and-internet

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.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-internet-of-things-the-value-of-digitizing-the-physical-world 8 https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Masayoshi-Son-talks-about-how-Steve-Jobs-inspired-SoftBank-s-Arm-deal 9 Inoue, Aiming High, p. 270. 10 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160621005758/en

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.cam.ac.uk/a-call-to-arms/ 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1S7Zk3eHdo 19 https://www.techinasia.com/masayoshi-son-softbank-40-year-dream-arm-acquisition 20 https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Masayoshi-Son-talks-about-how-Steve-Jobs-inspired-SoftBank-s-Arm-deal 21 https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies

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/Masayoshi-Son-talks-about-how-Steve-Jobs-inspired-SoftBank-s-Arm-deal 22 Personal view; British fund managers are too risk averse to back visionaries such as

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(2020). Grove, A.S., Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career (1996). Inoue, A., Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley (2021). Isaacson, W., Steve Jobs (2011). Lean, T., Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer (2016). Malone

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork

by Reeves Wiedeman · 19 Oct 2020 · 303pp · 100,516 words

more or less doubled every year for a decade, and Neumann had raised more than $11 billion of investment capital. The vast majority came from Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, a Japanese technology conglomerate, and one of the few executives in the world whose ambition exceeded Neumann’s. Son had first

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a growing sense of unease as cracks began to appear in WeWork’s ever-optimistic narrative. SoftBank’s investment was gargantuan by any measure, but Masayoshi Son, Neumann’s chief advocate and business mentor, had backed out of an even larger deal at the end of 2018, as the blistering economy of

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and claiming to harness the nascent power of the internet to disrupt one industry after another. In 2000, a few well-placed tech bets allowed Masayoshi Son, from SoftBank, to rise from relative obscurity and briefly become the world’s richest man. Even as the internet bubble began to burst, Hayden and

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–based investors suggested WeWork as the kind of company on which SoftBank might want to place one of the large bets for which its founder, Masayoshi Son, had become famous. But the WeWork pitch died with Nikesh Arora, SoftBank’s then-president, who didn’t see how it fit the firm’s

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door.” Chapter Eleven Mr. Ten Times ON JUNE 25, 2010, just a few months after Adam and Miguel opened the first WeWork at 154 Grand, Masayoshi Son walked onstage and smiled at the audience packing a five-thousand-seat auditorium in Tokyo. Son was the founder of Softbank, the Japanese technology conglomerate

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begun to look around for updated versions of himself—young entrepreneurs with a sparkle in their eyes and a willingness to act a little crazy. “Masayoshi Son 2.0,” as he put it with a smile. * * * IN JANUARY OF 2016, shortly after WeLive opened, Adam and several WeWork executives flew to India

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crazy enough.” In Adam, Masa had found not only a vessel for his cash but also a visionary eager to be molded in his image—Masayoshi Son 2.0. When WeWork’s executives returned to Tokyo for another meeting later on, they noticed Adam’s collage was still hanging up at SoftBank

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’t been all it was cracked up to be. Chapter Nineteen Fortitude IN AUGUST 2018, just a few weeks before WeWork’s final Summer Camp, Masayoshi Son told SoftBank’s shareholders that the dozens of companies he was investing in through the Vision Fund would “join us as our family.” Among his

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

by Grace Blakeley · 11 Mar 2024 · 371pp · 137,268 words

cities. By 2016, WeWork was worth $10 billion and featured on Fortune’s list of “unicorns”—private companies worth more than $1 billion.4 Enter Masayoshi Son, infamous founder of the Japanese financial institution SoftBank, known for investing with his gut and making big wins as well as some massive losses. Son

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corruption and mismanagement that took place under Neumann would have forced the company into insolvency, allowing a better-run competitor to buy up its assets. Masayoshi Son bought WeWork time, and this is what allowed it to restructure itself into a viable (and much smaller) corporation. Though doubts still remain as to

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relationships. Big businesses and big banks—and the individuals who run them—tend to have very close relationships given their interdependence. And sometimes, as with Masayoshi Son and Adam Neumann, these close relationships allow poorly run firms to survive far longer than they should. The planning power of modern finance is not

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to close the four funds lending to Greensill, which collectively contained about $10 billion of Greensill’s debt, leaving investors unable to access their money. Masayoshi Son, the owner of the investment firm SoftBank, whom we first encountered in chapter 5, rode to Credit Suisse’s rescue, injecting $1.5 billion into

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of bubbles and other forms of financial instability—as well as rising inequality. A few executives, like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba (through which Masayoshi Son made his fortune), became symbolic of the excesses of the Chinese boom. This was no small issue for the legitimacy of the government of an

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. 6. Ibid. 7. Alan M. Webber, “Japanese-Style Entrepreneurship: An Interview with Softbank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 1992, https://hbr.org/1992/01/japanese-style-entrepreneurship-an-interview-with-softbanks-ceo-masayoshi-son. 8. “Who Has Lost the Most Money in Human History?,” The Spectator, November 19, 2022, https

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 28 Jan 2020 · 501pp · 114,888 words

Madrid’s IE Business School, forty-two SWF deals valued at around $16.2 billion flowed in this direction. And this pales beside Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son’s mega-fund, the “Vision Fund.” Driven by his belief in the “Singularity”—Ray Kurzweil’s idea that developments in AI will lead to unprecedented

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‘Singularity’ Will Occur Within 30 Years,” Business Insider, February 27, 2017. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/softbank-ceo-masayoshi-son-thinks-singularity-will-occur-within-30-years-2017-2. The Vision Fund got started: “Masayoshi Son Prepares to Unleash His Second $100bn Tech Fund,” Economist, March 23, 2019. See: https://www.economist.com/business

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/2019/03/23/masayoshi-son-prepares-to-unleash-his-second-100bn-tech-fund. Force #3: Demonetization Ilumina’s latest generation sequencer: Sarah Buhr, “Illumina Wants to Sequence Your Whole Genome