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Masayoshi Son (, , born Masayoshi Yasumoto, ; August 11, 1957) is a Japanese entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. A Zainichi Korean, he is the founder, representative director, corporate officer, chairman and chief executive of SoftBank Group (SBG), a technology-focused investment holding company, as well as chairman of UK-based Arm Holdings and US-based Stargate LLC.
As an entrepreneur, he achieved notability in PC software distribution, computing-related book and magazine publishing, and telecommunications in Japan, starting in the 1980s and booming throughout the 1990s and 2000s. His early $20 million investment in Alibaba Group in 2000 grew substantially over the years, reaching a valuation of around $75 billion by 2014 following Alibaba's IPO and contributing significantly to SoftBank's financial success. SoftBank's 27 percent stake in Alibaba was worth $132 billion in 2018, including additional purchases of the stock since 2000. The morphing of his own telecom company SoftBank Corp. into an investment management firm called SoftBank Group Corp. made him noted worldwide as a stock investor. He is known for his bold investment strategies, sometimes resulting in major losses, particularly with the first and second SoftBank Vision Funds.
In 2013, Son was placed 45th on the Forbes magazine's list of the World's Most Powerful People. In 2017 he was named Entrepreneur of the Year at The Asian Awards. As of May 2025, Son ranks 65th on the Forbes list of The World's Billionaires and is No. 177 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He had for many years the distinction of being the person who had lost the most money in history (more than $59bn during the dot-com crash of 2000 alone, when his SoftBank shares plummeted), a feat surpassed by Elon Musk in the following decades. Son was included in Time 100 AI list in 2024.
Son idolized businessman Den Fujita, the founder of McDonald's Japan, and attempted to contact him multiple times to no avail. This culminated in Son purchasing a plane ticket to Tokyo and making an unsolicited appearance at the headquarters of McDonald's Japan, where he was able to speak to Fujita for 15 minutes. Fujita advised Son to begin studying English studies as well as computer science, and to move to the United States for education. Following this advice, Son dropped out of high school in Japan and, at the age of 16, moved to Oakland, California. He studied English at Holy Names College and graduated from high school in three weeks after attending Serramonte High School. He subsequently enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied economics, graduating in 1980.
He began his first business endeavours while still a student. With the help of some professors including Forrest Mozer, Son created an electronic translator that he sold to Sharp Corporation for $1.7 million. He made another $1.5 million by importing used video game machines from Japan, on credit and installing them in dormitories and restaurants. He also started a video game company called Unison World in Oakland. Later selling the company to an associate for $2 million, which was later acquired by Kyocera.
Following his return to Japan, he decided to adopt his Korean surname Son for professional purposes instead of his family's Japanese surname Yasumoto. He encountered pushback from some of his relatives who feared to be exposed as Korean. For this action and other similar ones, Son is considered to be a role model for ethnic Korean children in Japan.
In 2020, SoftBank Group agreed to sell U.K. chip designer Arm Limited to U.S. chip-maker Nvidia in a cash and stock deal initially worth $40 billion. The buy price, initially set at $40bn (cash and Nvidia shares) when first announced in September 2020, had risen closer to an estimated $66bn by 2022 given the intervening hike in Nvidia's stock – that would make this deal the biggest deal in the semiconductor market. Announcing the deal, SoftBank said the combination of Arm and Nvidia would create a computing company "that will lead the era" of artificial intelligence. However, the deal with Nvidia failed as announced in February 2022. After the collapse of the deal with Nvidia because of objections from United States and European Union antitrust regulators, SoftBank Group Corp.'s chip maker Arm filed in 2023 with regulators confidentially for a U.S. stock market listing seeking to raise between $8 billion and $10 billion. The estimated value of the UK chipmaker being listed by SoftBank at that date ranged from $30bn to $70bn.
Sprint and T-Mobile US merged in 2020 in an all-shares deal for $26 billion. By 2021, SoftBank Group Corp. had acquired 4.5% of Deutsche Telekom (parent company of T-Mobile) and sold its stake in T-Mobile US Inc. to the German telecommunications carrier.
In July 2018, coverage indicated that Son "would underwrite most of 100 GW" of a planned 275 GW of new renewable provision in India by 2027.
As of 2020, the first fund had invested in 88 companies including Coupang, DiDi, DoorDash, Fanatics, Grab, Oyo Rooms, Paytm Uber, and WeWork, but had experienced an awkward fall from grace as the COVID-19 pandemic and a Chinese regulatory crackdown accelerated the exposure of the Japanese investment management conglomerate's portfolio weaknesses. Son became noted as a stock investor after the meteoric rise of Alibaba Group. He had invested $20 million in Jack Ma's Alibaba back in 2000 when it was a young Chinese startup company although regrettably passing up early opportunities to invest in both Amazon and Tesla. In addition, he raised his global profile as stock investor since starting SoftBank Vision Fund in 2017, creating an unprecedented investment vehicle of almost $100 billion to back technology startups. But by 2021, he was still struggling to persuade investors of the value of his efforts, in part because of major losses with companies such as WeWork, OneWeb, Wirecard, OYO Rooms, Katerra or Greensill Capital, and SoftBank Group's own stock chronically traded far below the value of its assets reflecting a discount associated with tax liabilities, risk, past performance, losses, performance fees and high probability of occurrence of several haircuts given Son's poor track record while running the Vision Fund and high enthusiasm for investing vast sums in loss-making companies at eye-popping valuations. By October 2021, Masayoshi Son had accelerated the pace of his startup investments quintupling the number of companies in his Vision Fund 2 portfolio in less than 9 months, SoftBank was cutting more deals with fewer staff than ever and the average investment amount per company had fallen from $943 million in Vision Fund 1 to $192 million in Vision Fund 2. In 2022, SoftBank Vision Fund posted a record 3.5 trillion yen loss ($27.4 billion) for its financial year ended on 31 March 2022 as the valuation of its stock portfolio plummeted. SoftBank's bad timing-prone, impulsive investment decisions regarding previously overhyped and consequently overvalued startups like Klarna, had plunged in value while some other investment firms had even been able to cash in before the startups' comedown to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. In August 2022, Masayoshi Son said he was "embarrassed" and "ashamed" when asked to talk about the way he had run the SoftBank Vision Fund and Barron's characterized the fund as a "failed experiment" while The Wall Street Journal called SoftBank a "big loser" and Bloomberg News elaborated on "Masayoshi Son's broken business model".
By November 2022, according to the Financial Times, Masayoshi Son personally owed SoftBank $4.7bn because of growing losses on the Japanese conglomerate's technology bets, which have also rendered the value of his stake in the group's second Vision Fund worthless. By February 2023, this personal debt totaled $5.1 billion according to Bloomberg calculations based on company disclosures. This debt on side deals he set up at SoftBank Group Corp. to boost his compensation, as losses mounted at its core Vision Fund venture capital arm , sparked controversy due to corporate governance concerns, but Son insisted that there was no conflict of interest. As of March 2023, while the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was being investigated, over a third of Son's SoftBank shares had been reportedly posted as collateral for margin loans and the Financial Times was recalling signs of an emergent doomsday scenario for both SoftBank Group and Masayoshi Son.
When he went to the United States at 16 to attend high school and then the University of California, Berkeley, he decided to use his real Korean surname. In an interview with The New York Times, Son stated that "If I had stayed all the time in Japan, I probably would have become much more conservative, just as other Japanese."
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