Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank and spent the next few decades making the largest, least hedged bets in technology. Computing, connectivity, now artificial intelligence — always with conviction, rarely with a fallback.
One of them was Alibaba, an early cheque that turned into among the most profitable venture investments ever made. That single win funded the ambition that followed, and the ambition was the Vision Fund, which pushed sums into private startups that nobody had attempted before.
He does not invest in companies so much as in his own conviction about the future — for better and worse.
What followed was violent in both directions. Some holdings soared. Others failed publicly and expensively, and the losses forced a genuine reckoning about what happens when that much capital lands on companies too young to absorb it.
He has not changed. The appetite for scale is intact and so is the conviction that an AI-driven transformation is arriving. Few investors have shaped the startup economy this much, shaken it this hard, or split opinion so completely.