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.
