Masayoshi Son is the investor who has made more money and lost more money than any other in the past three decades. He has generated more than $200 billion by making early bets on Yahoo! and Alibaba, China’s Amazon. In 2000 he became the richest man on the planet. He has also blown as much as $200 billion, in the dot-com crash and by making catastrophic one-off investments, notably in WeWork, the shared office start-up.
Remarkably for a man who has dominated the business pages for the past 15 years and controlled $1 trillion of assets, this is his first comprehensive biography. Lionel Barber has crunched the numbers. He has battled Lost in Translation jet lag, traveling from London to Tokyo to Silicon Valley and back dozens of times to talk to those who have worked with “Masa”, as everyone calls Masayoshi. He even persuaded the notoriously media-shy 67-year-old founder of SoftBank to sit down for four interviews in Tokyo.
Barber sets out Son’s extraordinary backstory. Most people assume he is Japanese. In fact he is Korean. His grandfather emigrated to Japan in 1917 and married a young Korean immigrant. The Son family grew up in an old cowshed on a dirt track with no name. They were poor pig farmers before Masayoshi’s father expanded into loan sharking, gambling and running pachinko parlors, Japanese gaming arcades. The young Masayoshi saw his father’s customers — and ultimately his father too — win and lose fortunes, but it did not deter him from becoming a business high-roller.
Masayoshi has generated more than $200 billion by making early bets on Yahoo! and Alibaba, China’s Amazon.
Throughout his early life Son struggled with his Korean heritage. Foreigners can face suspicion in Japan, especially foreign business leaders, as the former Olympus boss Michael Woodford and the former Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn know to their cost. Even though Son eventually took Japanese nationality, his sense that he was always the outsider never left him and explains much of his success. Being treated as a nobody made him desperate “to be somebody”, Barber writes.
He has certainly achieved that. Barber reveals how Son founded the Tokyo-based SoftBank, which is not a bank but a software distribution business, and transformed it into the world’s biggest technology investment company. Son has an unshakable belief that he can see the future more clearly than any other investor. “He thinks that if something could happen, it should happen. And if it should happen, it will happen,” one colleague of his explains. Son is often right, spectacularly so. The value of his $20 million investment in Alibaba when it was a start-up soared to a staggering $144 billion at its peak.
His focus is as intense as that of Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder on whose iPhone Son made a wildly profitable $17 billion bet. He was once so determined to develop a consumer electronics product that he lost track of time in a prototype development meeting and missed his own wedding. Fortunately his bride-to-be, left standing at the altar, forgave him and they married the next week.
He is as ruthless as any Wall Street titan. When the Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang balked at Son’s offer to invest $100 million in return for a one-third stake when it was a start-up, Son said that if Yang did not do the deal he would invest in Yahoo!’s main competitor “and I will kill you”. Son’s public dressing downs of senior executives are so ferocious they are nicknamed “Masa-cres”.
He was once so determined to develop a consumer electronics product that he lost track of time in a prototype development meeting and missed his own wedding.
His stamina is superhuman. When he was 24 he contracted hepatitis B and was given two years to live, but survived. He thinks nothing of flying 6,000 miles for a lunch meeting — booking all the tables in the restaurant to ensure privacy, of course.
His Achilles’ heel, though, Barber reveals, is his tendency to believe not only in all his dreams, but in those of others whom he sees as kindred spirits. “No matter that they might be charlatans or spendthrifts, the key was that they dared to dream and aimed high.” One such entrepreneur was the WeWork founder, Adam Neumann.
Barber reports how Son encouraged Neumann to be even more “crazy” in his already wildly overblown ambitions to shake up the office real estate market. He indulged Neumann’s “worst instincts. It was like feeding a monkey alcohol.” WeWork imploded under a tidal wave of debt that cost Neumann his job and SoftBank $14 billion.
Son, Barber argues, is also self-aggrandizing to the point of pottiness. He claims that he is a higher achiever than Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg because they are “one-business guys” whereas, thanks to his investments in hundreds of different tech outfits, Son “controls the entire tech ecosystem”. He says: “They are not my peers. The right comparison for me is Napoleon or Genghis Khan. I am building an empire.”
This book is more for the serious-minded business reader than the layman. That goes with the territory. Barber is a former editor of the Financial Times. He details in chronological order all the deals, big and small, that Son did to enrich himself and to “address head-on Japan’s failure to develop a US-style start-up culture”. But Barber’s eye for color is more than enough to keep the everyday reader engaged.
“The right comparison for me is Napoleon or Genghis Khan.”
We are given a privileged boardroom-table view of the gilded age of tech-utopianism and borderless finance. Son thinks his time is so valuable he divides it into five-minute chunks in his diary. He invites partners to fly to Tokyo for a single five-minute slot and will sometimes make a multibillion-dollar investment decision in less than half an hour. He raised $45 billion of investment for his $100 billion Vision Fund from the Saudi government in just 45 minutes.
My favorite section is the description of the office on the 28th floor of a Tokyo skyscraper where Son sat for his interviews with Barber. His private dining room is decorated with Japanese art and there are “vast open spaces with rock pools and trees symbolizing spring, summer and autumn”. Lined up ready to drink with his favorite sushi, delivered directly from a Tokyo fish market, are $5,400 bottles of Romanée-Conti. The cost of his average business dinner? $48,000. It is in this building that Son sets out to Barber his plan for what will turn out to be the latest of his “biggest swings in the history of investing”: AI.
Inveterate Bond villain in a Tokyo tower who got lucky, or conjurer of capital who has changed the world for the better? The verdict is not in yet, but after reading this book I was tempted to go with the latter.
John Arlidge covers business at The Times of London. He is also a fellow of the Orwell Prize for Journalism
