A new Financial Times profile of Mayayoshi Son opens with SoftBank CEO seeming to hit backside, gazing his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I’ve performed nothing I may be happy with.”
The scene is introduced because the prelude to a hoped-for a comeback, with Son largely disappearing from the general public eye after SoftBank’s Imaginative and prescient Fund took huge losses from investments like WeWork. Lionel Barber, who’s written a brand new biography of Son referred to as “Playing Man,” mentioned that whereas Son seemed to be “doing penance,” he was truly “plotting a comeback.”
Now SoftBank is betting big on AI, discovering success by taking chip design company Arm public — although even with AI, Son admits “perhaps we had been a little bit too early.”
Past the main points of Son’s funding technique and monitor document, there are some enjoyable private particulars, like his obvious fascination with Napoleon. When an activist investor introduced up Invoice Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 assembly with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business guys.”
“The suitable comparability for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son mentioned. “I’m not a CEO. I’m constructing an empire.”
