Masayoshi Son
Masayoshi Son (孫 正義, Son Masayoshi, born August 11, 1957) is a Japanese billionaire entrepreneur, technology investor, and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., one of the world's largest technology-focused investment holding companies, as well as chairman of UK-based Arm Holdings and US-based Stargate LLC. With a net worth of $34.1 billion as of 2025, Son is one of Japan's wealthiest individuals and among the most influential technology investors globally.
Born to ethnic Korean parents in Japan, Son overcame significant discrimination and poverty to become one of the world's most prominent business leaders. His early $20 million investment in Alibaba Group in 2000—when the company was virtually unknown—grew to approximately $75 billion by 2014, representing one of the most successful venture capital investments in history. Son is known for his bold vision, aggressive investment strategy, and unwavering optimism about technology's potential to transform society.
Through the SoftBank Vision Fund, which raised $100 billion in capital, Son has invested in hundreds of technology companies worldwide, including Uber, WeWork, DoorDash, Nvidia, Slack, and many others. However, his investment style has also attracted significant controversy, particularly following the spectacular collapse of WeWork and massive losses in the Vision Fund's portfolio.
Early Life and Education
Masayoshi Son was born on August 11, 1957, in Tosu, Saga Prefecture, on the island of Kyushu, Japan. He is a third-generation Zainichi Korean—a descendant of Koreans who remained in Japan following the end of Japanese colonial rule over Korea in 1945. His Korean name is Son Jeong-ui (손정의). Son's family lived in poverty in an immigrant community, and he experienced significant discrimination as a Korean living in Japan during his childhood.
Son's father raised pigs and operated an illegal sake brewing operation to support the family. The family later opened a pachinko parlor and video game arcade business. Despite the family's modest means, Son demonstrated exceptional academic ability from an early age.
At age 16, Son moved to the United States to pursue his education, driven by a desire to escape discrimination and seek greater opportunities. He completed high school in just three weeks by studying intensively and passing the required examinations at Serramonte High School in California—a testament to his extraordinary intellect and determination.
Son enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied economics and computer science. While at Berkeley, he became fascinated with emerging computer technology and began developing inventions. He created an electronic translator device using a microchip, which he sold to Sharp Corporation for approximately $1.7 million—his first major business success.
Meeting His Wife
While attending UC Berkeley, Masayoshi Son met Masami Ohno, a fellow Japanese student. The two fell in love and married in 1979, while Son was still a student. Masami has been described as Son's steadfast partner throughout his entrepreneurial journey, supporting him through both spectacular successes and devastating failures. The couple has maintained a relatively private personal life despite Son's public prominence, and they have two daughters together.
Masami Ohno is the daughter of a wealthy Japanese businessman, and her family initially had reservations about her marrying Son due to his Korean heritage and uncertain financial prospects. However, she remained committed to their relationship, and her family eventually came to support the marriage.
Business Career
Founding SoftBank (1981)
After graduating from Berkeley in 1980, Son returned to Japan with grand ambitions. In 1981, at age 24, he founded SoftBank Corp. with two part-time employees in a small office in Tokyo. The company's initial business was distributing software for emerging personal computers.
Son set extraordinarily ambitious goals from the outset. He famously stood on an apple crate and told his two employees that the company would one day achieve revenues of "trillions of yen," a statement that seemed absurd at the time but would eventually prove prescient.
SoftBank initially served as a distributor and publisher of computer software, including personal productivity and game software. The company became one of Japan's leading software distributors throughout the 1980s, partnering with major American software companies to bring their products to the Japanese market.
Expansion and Diversification (1990s)
Throughout the 1990s, Son aggressively expanded SoftBank's operations, transforming it from a software distributor into a major conglomerate with interests across technology, media, and telecommunications.
In 1994, SoftBank acquired Ziff-Davis Publishing, a major American computer magazine publisher, for $2.1 billion—an extraordinarily bold move that shocked observers given SoftBank's relatively modest size at the time.
Son also began making strategic investments in emerging internet companies. In 1995, he invested $100 million in Yahoo! when the search engine was still in its infancy, eventually building a 35% stake. This investment would grow to be worth billions of dollars. Son also founded Yahoo! Japan in a joint venture with Yahoo!, which became Japan's dominant internet portal.
The Alibaba Investment (2000)
In 2000, during a six-minute meeting with Jack Ma, Son made what would become one of the greatest venture capital investments in history. Son invested $20 million in Alibaba Group, a then-unknown Chinese e-commerce startup operating from a small apartment in Hangzhou.
Son recognized Ma's vision and entrepreneurial talent immediately. Despite speaking limited Chinese and having minimal detailed analysis of Alibaba's business model, Son trusted his instincts about Ma's leadership and the potential of China's internet economy.
By the time of Alibaba's initial public offering in 2014, SoftBank's stake had grown to approximately 32% of the company, valued at around $75 billion—representing a nearly 4,000-fold return on the original investment. This single investment transformed SoftBank's financial position and cemented Son's reputation as one of the world's most visionary investors.
Telecommunications Expansion
In 2006, SoftBank acquired Vodafone's Japanese operations for $15.4 billion, transforming SoftBank into Japan's third-largest mobile carrier. This acquisition marked SoftBank's entry into the telecommunications business and positioned the company to capitalize on the emerging smartphone revolution.
Son became an early partner with Apple, securing exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in Japan when it launched in 2008. This partnership proved extremely lucrative, as the iPhone's popularity drove massive subscriber growth for SoftBank's mobile business.
In 2013, SoftBank acquired a 70% stake in Sprint Corporation, the third-largest U.S. mobile carrier, for $21.6 billion—Son's largest acquisition to that date and a bold attempt to enter the American telecommunications market. The Sprint investment would prove challenging, as the company struggled with network quality issues, competitive pressures, and declining subscriber numbers.
SoftBank Vision Fund (2017)
In 2017, Son launched the SoftBank Vision Fund, a massive $100 billion technology investment fund—the largest venture capital fund ever created. The fund's capital came from SoftBank ($28 billion), Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund ($45 billion), Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company ($15 billion), and other investors including Apple and Qualcomm.
Son articulated a grand vision for the Vision Fund: to accelerate the "information revolution" by investing in companies developing artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and other transformative technologies. He predicted that the fund would invest in 1,000 companies over the next decade and generate extraordinary returns.
The Vision Fund invested in numerous high-profile technology companies, including:
- Uber Technologies ($8 billion)
- WeWork ($10.7 billion across multiple rounds)
- DoorDash ($680 million)
- Slack Technologies ($250 million)
- Nvidia (early-stage investment)
- ByteDance (TikTok parent company)
- Didi Chuxing (Chinese ride-hailing)
- Grab (Southeast Asian ride-hailing)
- OYO Rooms (Indian hospitality)
- OneWeb (satellite internet)
- Compass (real estate)
Son's investment philosophy emphasized speed, scale, and market dominance. He frequently invested massive sums in companies to help them achieve rapid growth and crush competitors, often overriding traditional due diligence concerns.
ARM Holdings Acquisition (2016)
In 2016, SoftBank acquired ARM Holdings, the British semiconductor and software design company, for $32 billion in cash—the largest-ever acquisition of a European technology company. ARM's chip designs power the vast majority of smartphones globally, including all iPhones and most Android devices.
Son viewed ARM as a critical strategic asset for SoftBank's future, positioned to benefit from the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and autonomous vehicles. However, the acquisition was highly controversial, with critics arguing that SoftBank overpaid and that the deal loaded the company with excessive debt.
In 2020, SoftBank announced plans to sell ARM to Nvidia for $40 billion, which would have generated a substantial profit. However, the deal collapsed in 2022 due to regulatory opposition from competition authorities in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and China. Instead, SoftBank took ARM public in September 2023 in the largest initial public offering of the year, raising $4.87 billion and valuing ARM at approximately $54 billion.
Major Controversies and Failures
The WeWork Disaster
The most spectacular and damaging failure of Son's career came with his investment in WeWork, the co-working office space company founded by Adam Neumann. Between 2017 and 2019, SoftBank and the Vision Fund invested approximately $10.7 billion in WeWork, valuing the company at an extraordinary $47 billion by early 2019—making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.
Son personally championed the WeWork investment, overriding objections from his lieutenants and investment team. He was captivated by Neumann's charismatic vision of WeWork as a technology company that was "elevating the world's consciousness" rather than simply renting office space. Son encouraged Neumann's grandiose ambitions, urging him to grow faster and more aggressively.
However, WeWork's planned September 2019 initial public offering exposed severe problems:
- Massive and growing financial losses (nearly $2 billion in 2018)
- Questionable corporate governance and conflicts of interest
- Neumann's erratic leadership and self-dealing transactions
- A business model that was fundamentally a real estate operation with massive long-term lease obligations, not a high-margin technology company
Investors recoiled, and WeWork was forced to cancel its IPO. The company's valuation collapsed from $47 billion to less than $8 billion in a matter of weeks. SoftBank orchestrated a rescue package that removed Neumann as CEO (while providing him with a controversial $1.7 billion exit package) and invested billions more to keep WeWork afloat.
In November 2023, WeWork filed for bankruptcy protection, marking the final collapse of what had once been valued as one of the world's most valuable startups. The WeWork saga cost SoftBank approximately $11.5 billion in direct losses, with an additional $2.2 billion in debt exposure.
Son later admitted: "We made a failure on investing in WeWork and I've been admitting that several times I was foolish." However, critics noted that the WeWork debacle revealed fundamental flaws in Son's investment approach—excessive optimism, inadequate due diligence, enormous bet sizes, and excessive deference to charismatic founders.
Vision Fund Massive Losses
Beyond WeWork, the entire Vision Fund portfolio suffered devastating losses beginning in 2021-2022. The fund reported a record $32 billion loss in fiscal year 2022, followed by an additional $22 billion loss in 2023. These losses reflected:
- Declining valuations across the technology sector as interest rates rose
- Poor performance by numerous portfolio companies
- Several high-profile failures and bankruptcies beyond WeWork
Major Vision Fund investments that suffered significant value declines included:
- Uber: Value declined substantially from peak
- DoorDash: Shares fell significantly from pandemic highs
- Didi Chuxing: Chinese ride-hailing company faced regulatory crackdown
- Coupang: South Korean e-commerce company's shares plummeted
- Grab: Southeast Asian super-app struggled post-IPO
- OneWeb: Satellite company filed for bankruptcy before rescue
By November 2022, Masayoshi Son personally owed SoftBank $4.7 billion because of margin loans he had taken out using his SoftBank shares as collateral—exposing him to potential margin calls as SoftBank's share price declined.
Sprint Investment Struggles
Son's 2013 acquisition of Sprint Corporation, intended to give SoftBank a major presence in the U.S. telecommunications market, proved deeply challenging. Sprint consistently lost subscribers, struggled with network quality problems, and burned through billions of dollars in capital expenditures attempting to upgrade its infrastructure.
After years of losses and unsuccessful attempts to merge Sprint with T-Mobile (blocked by regulators during the Obama administration), SoftBank finally succeeded in merging Sprint with T-Mobile in 2020. However, SoftBank received a minority stake in the combined company and effectively ceded control, marking a disappointing conclusion to the Sprint investment.
Credibility Crisis
The WeWork collapse and Vision Fund losses severely damaged Son's professional reputation. Analysts and investors openly questioned his investment judgment and risk management:
- Bloomberg reported: "Son has a credibility problem and SoftBank has a credibility problem."
- The Financial Times described Vision Fund as having "a broken business model."
- Critics noted that Son's "unyielding optimism and lack of challengers led SoftBank to overvalue WeWork."
SoftBank's share price declined significantly, trading at a substantial discount to the value of its publicly listed assets—a discount that reflected investors' skepticism about Son's capital allocation decisions.
AI Strategy and Recent Developments
Despite the Vision Fund setbacks, Son has positioned himself and SoftBank at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution. Beginning in 2023, Son became increasingly vocal about AI's transformative potential, predicting that "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) would arrive within a decade and fundamentally reshape human civilization.
In 2023-2024, SoftBank benefited enormously from the spectacular rise of ARM Holdings, whose chip designs are used extensively in AI applications and data centers. ARM's successful September 2023 IPO and subsequent share price appreciation added tens of billions of dollars to SoftBank's market value.
Son has indicated plans to raise capital for Vision Fund 3, focused specifically on artificial intelligence investments. He has also made personal investments in AI companies and has spoken extensively about positioning SoftBank to be the world's leading AI investor.
In 2024, Son was named chairman of Stargate LLC, a new venture focused on AI infrastructure.
Personal Life
Family
Masayoshi Son has been married to Masami Ohno since 1979. They have two daughters, both of whom have maintained low public profiles. Son is known to be intensely private about his family life, rarely discussing his wife or daughters in interviews or public appearances.
Residences and Lifestyle
Despite his immense wealth, Son maintains a relatively modest public profile compared to many billionaires. He lives with his family in a three-story, $50 million mansion in Tokyo's exclusive Denenchofu neighborhood. The mansion features a cutting-edge temperature-controlled golf course, reflecting Son's passion for the sport.
In 2012, Son purchased a nine-acre estate in Woodside, California for $117.5 million—at the time one of the most expensive residential real estate purchases in California history. The property provides him a residence during his frequent business trips to Silicon Valley.
Philanthropy
Son has engaged in various philanthropic activities, though he is less publicly active in philanthropy than many billionaire contemporaries:
- Donated ¥10 billion ($120 million) to earthquake and tsunami relief following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
- Pledged to donate his SoftBank salary to disaster victims
- Supported various educational initiatives in Japan and globally
- Funded research into renewable energy and clean technology
Business Ownership
Through SoftBank, Son owns the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, a professional baseball team in Japan's Pacific League. The team has won multiple Japanese Series championships and Pacific League titles, becoming one of Japan's most successful franchises.
Naturalization and Identity
Son naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1990, adopting a Japanese surname although retaining his Korean given name. He has spoken occasionally about experiencing discrimination as a Korean in Japan during his youth, and he has expressed pride in overcoming these barriers to achieve extraordinary success.
Investment Philosophy
Son's investment approach is characterized by several distinctive elements:
- Enormous bet sizes: Willing to invest billions in single companies
- Speed over analysis: Famous for making investment decisions extremely quickly, sometimes in minutes
- Conviction-based investing: Relies heavily on intuition and personal conviction rather than extensive due diligence
- Market dominance strategy: Invests to help portfolio companies achieve market leadership through aggressive growth
- Long-term vision: Articulates 300-year vision for SoftBank and frequently references decades-long time horizons
- Technology optimism: Unwavering belief in technology's ability to transform society and generate returns
Son has described his investment style as following his "gut feeling" and has said he can determine whether to invest in a company within minutes of meeting the founder.
Awards and Recognition
- Named one of the "World's Most Powerful People" by Forbes multiple times
- Listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People
- Received the First Class Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese government
- Honorary doctorate from Universidad del Turabo, Puerto Rico
- Asia Business Leader of the Year
Net Worth
Masayoshi Son's net worth has fluctuated significantly based on SoftBank's share price and the value of his investments:
- 2025: $34.1 billion (Forbes)
- Peak (2000): Briefly ranked as world's richest person during dot-com bubble with estimated $78 billion fortune
- 2024: Approximately $17-28 billion depending on source and date
The vast majority of Son's wealth is tied to his approximately 34% stake in SoftBank Group, making his net worth highly volatile and dependent on the company's performance.
Leadership Style
Colleagues and business partners describe Son as:
- Extraordinarily charismatic and persuasive
- Intensely optimistic, sometimes to a fault
- Visionary thinker focused on long-term technology trends
- Willing to take enormous risks that others avoid
- Demanding and intense in business dealings
- Capable of pivoting quickly when circumstances change
However, critics note that Son's leadership style can also involve:
- Insufficient checks on his decision-making authority
- Tendency to override prudent risk management
- Excessive optimism that ignores warning signs
- Cult of personality that discourages dissent
Legacy and Impact
Masayoshi Son's impact on global technology and business is profound and multifaceted:
- Pioneered large-scale technology investing from Asia
- Early investments in Yahoo!, Alibaba, and other companies helped shape the internet's development
- SoftBank Vision Fund changed venture capital by deploying unprecedented amounts of capital
- ARM Holdings acquisition positioned SoftBank at the center of mobile and AI chip ecosystem
- Demonstrated both extraordinary successes and catastrophic failures in technology investing
Whether Son will ultimately be remembered primarily for visionary successes like Alibaba or spectacular failures like WeWork remains an open question. However, his influence on technology investing and entrepreneurship in the 21st century is undeniable.
At 67 years old, Son shows no signs of slowing down, having articulated plans to lead SoftBank for at least another decade while positioning the company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution.