Masayoshi Son

Current Company

SoftBank Group — Founder, Chairman & CEO

The World's Biggest Technology Bet-Maker

Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank in 1981 in Tokyo, starting with a small software distribution business. Born in Japan to ethnic Korean parents, Masayoshi Son moved to California as a teenager, studied economics at UC Berkeley, and returned to Japan with the conviction that the information revolution would reshape every industry. His early investment in Yahoo Japan proved the model — identifying paradigm shifts early and deploying capital at a scale that competitors couldn't match.

Masayoshi Son's defining move was his $20 million investment in Alibaba in 2000, which at its peak was worth over $100 billion — one of the most successful venture bets in history. That conviction-driven approach became the foundation for the $100 billion Vision Fund, launched in 2017 with backing from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which invested in companies including Uber, DoorDash, WeWork, ByteDance, and dozens of other technology platforms.

Vision Fund and the Art of Scale

The SoftBank Vision Fund reshaped the global venture and growth equity landscape by writing checks so large — often $500 million to $1 billion or more — that they compressed timelines and forced competitors to raise or fold. Masayoshi Son's philosophy was simple: find the market leader, give them more capital than they could spend, and let them dominate. The strategy produced spectacular successes and spectacular failures in equal measure, with WeWork and Wirecard becoming cautionary tales.

Through it all, Masayoshi Son has remained SoftBank's Chairman and CEO, navigating the company through periods of record profits and record losses with the same long-term conviction. His recent focus on artificial intelligence — including SoftBank's major investment in Arm Holdings and AI infrastructure — signals that Masayoshi Son sees AI as the next platform shift on the scale of the internet itself, and he intends to be the capital behind it.