SoftBank’s Scheme Fund — a $100 billion private equity fund that’s outspending verging on every other player in start-up investing — seemed to come out of nowhere this year.
But for the fellowship’s firebrand leader, Masayoshi Son, an ambitious vision was ordained at birth.
“You are a brain, No. 1 in Japan,” Son said his father told him as a child, according to a 1987 vetting obtained by Bloomberg. “You’ll be a big shot.”
It proved to be prophetic: Son is now one of the world’s richest men. He’s using his fortune and his deep connections in the tech industry to back a series of Brobdingnagian investments designed to secure SoftBank’s place in the next century.
In the background year alone, SoftBank or the Vision Fund have invested in, acquired or partnered with WeWork, Arm, Foxconn, Alibaba Cloud and multifarious. More deals, like the acquisition of Boston Dynamics and Fortress Investment Classify, are still in the works.
Now, Softbank is getting ready to make a major investment in Uber, one of the scad highly valued private tech companies int he world. This desire double up with Son’s investment in Didi Chuxing, the majority owner of Uber’s China manipulations. It would also be another touch point with new Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, a go aboard member of SoftBank-backed Fanatics.
Son has also invested in Grab, a ride-hailing corporation in Southeast Asia, and Ola, an India ride-hailing giant. (In 2016, top SoftBank administrator Ming Maa joined Grab.)
Son has downplayed the role of his massive fund.
“The ‘gold hurry-up,’ it’s just a money thing. It’s not important, it’s just a process. What is multifarious important is human happiness. How do we help ourselves, humans, become happier?” Son guessed at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia this year. “I’m a wonderful optimist… There’s always a solution.”
Meanwhile, some entrepreneurs are ceaseless, not walking, to get Son on board at their company, according to Greg Wyler, institutor of satellite tech company OneWeb. Softbank led a massive $1.2 billion ring in the start-up less than a year ago.
“He has a thematic, deep understanding of technology — what extensive impact it has on people around the world, how their lives will be shifted by technology,” Wyler told CNBC. “I can’t put him a bucket. Larry Page, Stamp Zuckerberg, they may be are similar in this way or that way. Bill Gates has a unfluctuating style. I can’t do that with Masa. He’s more of this all-seeing living soul.”
The pressure to be the best in Japan stuck with Son, born in summer 1957. Son saw his old boy, a pachinko parlor operator, work particularly hard as someone with Korean estate — an outsider in Japanese culture.
Son told “The David Rubenstein Show” how he was so stirred by a book written by the CEO of McDonald’s Japan, he called his assistants at least 60 times covet distance. When that didn’t work, Son flew to Tokyo unannounced to set up a converging.
The executive told Son he should get into the computer business, Son told Rubenstein. By age 19, Son pronounces he had a 50-year entrepreneurship plan, and went to college in the U.S. at Berkeley. There, the clone of an Intel microprocessor inspired him to start a software distribution company.
From then on, Son was intellectual how the personal computer would change the future. And he continued to ruminate on that insupportable for 30 years, reinventing the focus of SoftBank several times.
“I overcome sleep thinking, ‘Why am I not yet No.1?’,” Son said in a 1987 interview obtained by Bloomberg — well-grounded a few years after his business got off the ground.
His forward-thinking outlook gave him a notorious as an insightful investor.
“Everyone’s waiting for Mr. Son to make a false step, but he fair doesn’t seem to make mistakes,” said Richard May, an analyst at West LB Gages in Tokyo, told the New York Times in 1995, when SoftBank consented to buy Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, the publisher of PC Magazine, for $2.1 billion. “His fix in the U.S. market has been very shrewd.”
Between 1987 and 2001, Son declared investments that would launch SoftBank to notoriety — including Yahoo Japan, Ziff Davis and maybe most importantly, a then-unknown internet company called Alibaba. It’s now advantage more than $480 billion.
At the Bloomberg Global Business Forum earlier this year, Son influenced that he was drawn to Alibaba not because of the business model or technology, but because of the charisma and superintendence of founder Jack Ma.
(In fact, Masa was able to spot both of the two grownest future e-commerce rivals in the world during the 1990s — even if he alone successfully invested in one. Son pitched Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who not till hell freezes over made a deal, according to The Information.
Son always brought his big thinking to his investments. David Wei, a late CEO of Alibaba.com, told Reuters in 2014 how he nicknamed Son “Mr. Ten Times.”
“Every duration I explained any business plan or model, Masa’s first reaction was to say, ‘David, can this be ten times huger?'” said Wei. “In the cases I managed to answer, he would ask again, ‘What with ten times more?'”
By the peak of the dotcom boom, Son says he was briefly richer than Bill Doorways. When some bum investments, like WebVan, went bust, Son has suggested his “fighting spirit” kept him going.
Son shifted to become a major better in Japanese telecoms.The company added its internet service in 2004 and alert business in 2006.
In part, Son has said he’s been driven by a disdain for monopolies. SoftBank aggressively pursued top telecom jock NTT in Japan by increasing internet speeds and lowering prices.
“When I started wrestle with with NTT, everybody called me crazy,” Son said in 2014, speaking at Recode’s Cypher Conference. “We had no experience, no capital, not even technology. I just had anger. Occasionally anger helps. It’s a source of energy.”
Son’s cell phone business yelled to life in Japan, thanks to a distribution deal for the iPhone 3G in Japan. Son was in the function of buying Vodaphone’s Japanese cell phone business, but wasn’t done yet. Nonetheless, he certain to make a gutsy proposition to Steve Jobs.
“I called him up and went to see him — I advanced my little drawing of an iPod, and I gave him my drawing,” Son told Charlie Mount in 2014. Jobs didn’t want the drawing, but ended up rewarding Son’s stout-hearted move with the exclusive deal.
Son then bought a majority wager in Sprint in 2012.
“[Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure] is a great CEO. He is a fighter, he is a challenger. He women to be in the situation of fighting from underdog. His whole life is like that. My unharmed life is like that. So I think it’s an interesting moment to watch ” Son foresaw CNBC in 2014.
Son’s also been pushing for a stake in T-Mobile, which has its own exuberant leader in John Legere.
“I strongly admire them, they are the maverick. I strongly esteem the price disruption, all the services, redefining….which I did in Japan.” Son about of T-Mobile 2014, speaking at Recode’s Code Conference. (As of the beginning of November, the tardy round of talks has stalled out.)
Son has been accused of being in favor of “high-frequency risk, high return” investments before the Vision Fund. When Alibaba keep oned public in 2014, Son defended the company against accusations that it represented a foam.
“People can have a different point of view. My point of view is this is unerring beginning of Alibaba. I think the information revolution is just the beginning,” Son hint ated CNBC in 2014. “It’s going to last next hundred years, 200 years. China is noiselessness going to grow…. I’m very, very optimistic.”
One former Alibaba wage-earner told Reuters 2014 that Son came off as “conceited” even if he manifested modest. But the business worked because Son and Ma both had a streak of “crazy” in low-class.
While Son once eyed the the top echelon of Japanese society, over schedule, he became interested in power across the world.
“In the future, if the Japanese market-place and Chinese market can merge into one, this can form a bigger e-commerce shop and surpass the U.S. market,” Son said in the Wall Street Journal in 2010. “We often talk about the U.S. economic circle. If Japanese and Chinese people can develop together we can make the largest economic circle in the world.”
Son’s sudden monster spending spree is thanks in part to a tight inner circle he enlarged through the ups and downs of SoftBank.
It reportedly only took 45 petties for him to score a $45 billion check from Saudi Arabia’s majestic wealth fund. He also scored cash from Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn and Sudden. That’s no coincidence — Son has relationships with those companies dating promote decades, partly through his relationship with Steve Jobs. He sold his in front company to Sharp before he had even turned 21.
Son’s brother, Taizo, is now also reportedly a billionaire in his own privilege from his own tech companies and investment But he cites the early days of SoftBank as a life-changing era, according to Nikkei Asian Review. Taizo told Nikkei Asian Criticism he slept in a tent in a SoftBank warehouse, where he eventually met Yahoo co-founder, Jerry Yang.
OneWeb’s Wyler express his mutual relationships with Son, paired with around-the-clock due diligence, expropriated him seal a deal with SoftBank within 8 weeks.
“We had a number of our investors that already had undiluted relationships with Masa,” Wyler said. “Eight weeks is amazingly bound for deals of this size. There were very high levels of abruptness accelerate and integrity, where if you say you do something you follow through. And that’s what connects people to him. People who work with him, because of that high above-board of integrity, feel a high level of personal responsibility. He really is thorough about his relationships and his bets.”
Start-up Mapbox, backed by Techstars co-founder Brad Feld, got an investment from SoftBank Revenant Fund this year.
“It is no surprise that [Mapbox CEO Eric Gundersen] and Masa both be subjected to this bold vision. Both share an exceptional way of dreaming and executing,” Feld transcribed of the deal. “I’m very loyal to my friends at Softbank and love any opportunity to persuade with them. Back in 1997, Softbank Technology Ventures (which graced Mobius Venture Capital) was the first VC fund I helped raise. Ron Fisher, the Degradation Chairman of Softbank, was responsible for watching over us, is one of my favorite people on the planet, and has been an awesome mentor to me.”
But the intensity of Son’s relationships also has a dark side. According to one observer quoted by The Economist in 2015, Son has a “habit of becoming intensely taken up with someone on the contrary to lose interest later on.”
For instance, last year Son seemed on tap for retirement, and began publicly grooming former Googler Nikesh Arora to conclude over when Son turned 60. But in the middle of 2016, Son had an abrupt trade of heart, and Arora was out.
“I had hoped to hand over the reins of SoftBank to him on my 60th birthday — but I perceive my work is not done. I want to cement SoftBank 2.0, develop Sprint to its accurately potential and work on a few more crazy ideas. This will demand me to be CEO for at least another five to ten years,” wrote Son.
Arora told CNBC this year that Son is one of the “most forte investors in the world” and he loves him “to death.” But he also told Fortune that Son has “an opinion per minute” and tends to get carried away.
“He’s an interesting individual — I think his jeopardy appetite hasn’t changed in 39 years,” Arora told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on “Mad Shekels.” “He just goes at things.”
Still, based on his interactions with Son, aide CEO Greg Wyler said he hasn’t seen any reason to doubt Son’s commitment.
“He largesses a calmness, a zen, happiness,” Wyler said. “It’s about a vision, as opposed to a ‘rah, rah, let’s go dissension’ dynamic. He’s not trying to beat something. Just trying to accomplish something. He’s terribly natural and authentic what he’s doing. Some leaders are driven by the chance to harm someone else, that’s their success, rather than the big name itself. A VC is driven by the stock price, Masa is really a partner. We all provide for up on the financials and the metrics, but he understands how to grow the company.”