Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank in 1981 in Tokyo as a software distribution company and has since transformed it into one of the world's most important technology investment firms. Born in Japan in 1957 to a Korean-Japanese family, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he sold a patent for a pocket translator to Sharp for $1 million — his first major business success. He returned to Japan and built SoftBank into a telecommunications and internet conglomerate. Son's reputation as an investor was cemented by two legendary bets. In 1996, he invested $100 million in Yahoo during its early days, ultimately generating enormous returns. In 2000, he invested $20 million in a little-known Chinese e-commerce company called Alibaba. When Alibaba went public in 2014 at a $231 billion valuation, SoftBank's stake was worth over $100 billion — one of the greatest venture capital returns in history. In 2017, Son launched the Vision Fund — a $100 billion venture capital mega-fund backed primarily by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala — which disrupted the entire VC ecosystem by writing checks of $100 million to $10 billion into companies like Uber, WeWork, DoorDash, and Coupang. The Vision Fund's record was mixed: spectacular successes (Coupang, DoorDash) were offset by spectacular failures (WeWork, Katerra), and Vision Fund 2 invested heavily at peak valuations in 2021. Son's current strategic obsession is artificial intelligence, which he calls the most important technology in human history. SoftBank owns 90% of ARM Holdings — the chip architecture company whose designs power virtually every smartphone and are increasingly central to AI computation. Son took ARM private in 2016 for $32 billion and relisted it in 2023 at a valuation exceeding $60 billion, which has since grown further as AI demand surged. His vision is for SoftBank to become the world's most important AI investment company, with ARM as the cornerstone and a portfolio of AI-centric investments across robotics, autonomous vehicles, healthcare, and enterprise software. At 67, Son shows no signs of slowing down, projecting that he plans to work until he is 99.