Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son is the boldest and most controversial figure in the Japanese technology and investment landscape. A single investment decision can generate trillions of yen in profit or produce losses on the same scale. This extreme range of outcomes is the essence of Son, and any evaluation of him must account for both spectacular successes and colossal failures.

Born in 1957 in Tosu, Saga Prefecture, to a Korean-Japanese family (zainichi Korean — ethnic Koreans with permanent residency in Japan), he later became a naturalized Japanese citizen. At sixteen he moved alone to the United States and studied economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Even as a student he showed entrepreneurial instincts, selling an automatic-translation-machine patent to Sharp to raise capital. In 1981 he established Japan SoftBank, initially as a distributor of personal-computer software. A famous founding anecdote has Son standing on an apple crate before his two part-time employees, declaring, 'One day this company will have revenue of one trillion, two trillion yen.'

During the 1990s Son expanded into computer-related publishing and trade shows, and in 1996 co-founded Yahoo Japan, riding the wave of commercial internet adoption. But the investment that inscribed his name in history was the roughly $20 million he put into Alibaba Group in 2000. Decided after a brief meeting with founder Jack Ma, the investment had grown to approximately $75 billion by Alibaba's 2014 IPO — one of the most successful single investments ever recorded.

On the other side of the ledger, the dot-com bubble collapse in 2000 drove SoftBank's share price down roughly 99%, and Son's personal fortune reportedly shrank by more than $70 billion — at the time the largest asset loss by an individual in history. Yet he recovered from this devastating blow and continued aggressive expansion, entering the mobile-phone business through the acquisition of Vodafone Japan and later acquiring Sprint in the United States.

The SoftBank Vision Fund, established in 2017 with an unprecedented $100 billion, invested in technology companies worldwide, including Uber, WeWork, and DiDi. The spectacular failure of WeWork's IPO attempt and subsequent valuation collapse represented major setbacks. Vision Fund I ultimately reported positive returns, but Vision Fund II recorded substantial losses.

Son's investment philosophy rests on a deep conviction that technology will transform society. He espouses the vision of 'bringing happiness to people through the information revolution' and aims to build a corporate group that endures for 300 years. His investment style — emphasizing broad technology trends and the quality of founding teams over detailed financial analysis — resembles venture capital more than traditional investing. From a risk-management perspective, his approach diverges sharply from convention: heavy use of concentrated bets and leverage means a single decision can determine the fate of the whole enterprise. This method amplifies returns when right, but magnifies losses when wrong.

As of 2024 Son has sharpened his focus on artificial intelligence, pursuing majority ownership of Arm Holdings and proposing large-scale AI-infrastructure investments in the United States. His investment career remains a work in progress, and its ultimate verdict depends on the trajectory of the technology revolution he champions. The sheer scale of both his successes and failures defines his identity as an investor. In 2024 Time magazine named him to its list of the 100 most influential people in AI, underscoring a presence that extends well beyond investing.