AI and Trump 2.0 bring Softbank CEO Masayoshi’s son back to the spotlight
The first day of the second Trump administration offered the newly elected president the opportunity to share the spotlight with some of his most important allies. Some of the leaders in the spotlight were what you’d expect: Kabinette candidates, Congress leaders, Megadonor Elon Musk, and at least one was a surprise.
The opportunity for her son’s star turn at the Roosevelt Room at the White House on January 21 was announced that his son’s Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank Group would be making most of the funding. Stargatean ambitious partnership with Openai and Oracle, aimed at turbo-recharge American leadership in artificial intelligence. Standing on a box seen above the lecturer, adjacent to Oracle’s chairman Larry Ellison and Openai CEO Sam Altman, his son has promised Stargate will invest $500 billion to build a nationwide network of data centers, power plants and research centers. Trump praised “My Friend Masa,” who bankrolled “the biggest AI infrastructure in history.”
“This is the beginning of America’s golden age,” my son told Trump. “Unless you were winning (I wouldn’t have decided to invest.”
It’s also a golden age for gambling with AI, and it seems my son is determined to be the best roller on the table. SoftBank leads Openai with a $40 billion funding round, valued at $260 billion, which could be a record single round for a private company. If confirmed, the investment will position SoftBank as Openai’s largest shareholder. Meanwhile, SoftBank and Openai are boot A joint venture to develop and sell AI in Japan.
(Softbank said on March 31, after the story was first released. It agreed to lead The funding round of up to $40 billion at Openai Global, a subsidiary of the ChatGPT maker’s for-profit organization, is $300 billion, which could be a record single round for private companies. SoftBank plans to invest up to $30 billion in its subsidiary, with co-inves syndicates planning to provide the remaining $10 billion. )
In some circles, the surge is even more pronounced, as the son knows his failure best. Certainly, it was 2022 that my son last got a huge hit with global headlines. His vision fund recorded a loss of $27 billion and wobbled on the brink of collapse. among them Most magnificent obstacles: Office sharing startup WeWork. The fund was forced to write down $14 billion.
But the comeback is the son of vintage. Over the years, he has created and lost wealth more than investors in capitalist history. From his early days as a crude software distributor, his son demonstrated The talent of grand gesturesunshakable faith in a charismatic young founder with big ideas and his ability to bounce back from failed bets. Comparing him isn’t that fetched DarumaTraditional Japanese dolls are symbols of patience. Daruma The doll has a heavy, weighted base. Like the American weells, they wobble, but don’t fall.
The pattern of wobble and counter-strickenness recurred throughout my son’s career. And each boom and bust cycle seems to keep his financial foundations stronger. Softbank’s first major success was betting on Yahoo, the dotcom boom darling. The wealthiest man in the world. Yahoo then committed a series of strategic errors, and the boom burst, and Softbank’s market capitalization plunged from over $180 billion to $2.5 billion, a 98% drop.
son I returned midway through him Thanks to a $20 million investment made just a month before Dotcom’s crash, SoftBank gave Alibaba a 34% stake, an obscure Chinese e-commerce startup of the time. The son famously claims that after a six-minute meeting with founder Jack Ma, he decided to invest based on his pure instincts. “It was the appearance of his eyes, the smell of an animal,” he recalled years later.
At the peak of 2020, Softbank’s Alibaba stock was worth over $200 billion, allowing Softbank to borrow money for investments in hundreds of other ventures. In Japan, the company has pioneered the expansion of high-speed internet and broadband just in time to serve one of the world’s most tech-savvy younger generations. In 2006, SoftBank acquired Vodafone Japan and later rebranded it as SoftBank Mobile. This is a game-changing move in which my son effectively controls one of Japan’s top telecom providers. Its success paved the way for SoftBank to buy a majority stake in Sprint. The third largest US mobile carrier.
My son’s luck seemed to run out since 2017 when he launched the world’s largest high-tech investment fund, the $100 billion vision fund, with major support from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The fund’s myriad wipeout losses ultimately forced my son to take down many of SoftBank’s assets, including the majority of Alibaba’s investments.
But if his son was uneasy about these spins, he rarely showed it. He lives in a luxurious mansion around Tokyo’s expensive Azabujuban, and in 2019 he took away a personal loan from SoftBank, paying $117 million, most paid to US residential property, even if SoftBank’s fate was burdened by the weight of Weck’s failed IPO.
When that fits him, the son who displays samurai swords and armor from his personal collection in his office at Softbank’s Tokyo headquarters can be as scary as a feudal warlord. Anthony Tan, co-founder of Southeast Asian Super AppGlove, remembers being summoned to Tokyo in 2014 for a meeting with his son. An hour later, my son chased after me. “You take my money, good for me, good for you,” Tan recalls what his son said. “You don’t take my money, it’s not very good for you.” (Tan took the money.)
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi provided a brief explanation as to why Tech CEO made countless 11-hour flights from San Francisco to Tokyo multiple times to meet his son.
My son’s cannon may be non-flammable on the Vision Fund. But what allowed him to reload is another singular investment success: British chip designer Arm Holdings, made private by SoftBank in 2016. SoftbankClickOm At NASDAQ, its market capitalization has skyrocketed nearly $120 billion, allowing SoftBank to pledge to take on debts with a portion of its 90% stake as collateral.
SoftBank needs that new ammunition. For Stargate, SoftBank has pledged to provide $19 billion of its first $52 billion funding to the venture in exchange for 40% of its stake. In mid-March, it cost $6.5 billion. Buy ampere computinga US chip designer focused on AI Compute. Softbank’s overall AI spending commitment is well above the $31 billion cash found on the balance sheet at the end of last year. information SoftBank reports it is in consultation with bankers to borrow $16 billion in its $16 billion investment, in addition to the $18.5 billion that it has recently been arranged to borrow.
The bigger question that delves into Stargate’s bet is whether it is worth a return. On January 27th, just six days after the White House ceremony, global investors saw Deepseek. Little-known startups Based in Hangzhou, China, we have developed an AI model that performs better than Openai’s main models, but requires much less memory and much less electricity. Deepseek said he developed the model for less than $6 million. That says only a small portion of billions of big tech companies are spending it on modeling.
$19 billion
SoftBank’s first funding commitment to Stargate AI Infrastructure Project
“Deepseek shock“We have challenged general assumptions about the correlation between performance and cost of AI models. However, many in the technological community sees it as a distraction from the big truth that increasing demand for AI creates greedy needs of power and hardware, even if the AI models themselves become more efficient.
Obviously, the big estimate of how expensive it will be to build that infrastructure doesn’t scare my son. “After Deepseek Syndrome, some people say, ‘Oh, you’re spending too much,'” he said he shrugged at his February appearance at the SoftBank Conference in Tokyo. “You know, you can save more by spending less.” But I think you’re looking at it the wrong way… how much global GDP could be replaced by a billion times smarter? ”
My son estimates that within 10 years, AI-driven solutions will replace at least 5% of the world’s GDP, potentially replacing 10%.
At the same event, my son recalled a past meeting with Altman. In 2017, Altman came to Tokyo looking for funding, but his son sent him empty-handed. Two years later, my son offered to invest $1 billion in a venture as Openai developed one of the world’s most sophisticated AI models. This time, Altman refused.
On stage, my son had memories of Valier from his encounter in 2019. “You said you were going to go to AGI (artificial general information), and from there I was a follower.
“Some people think you’re crazy too,” replied Altman. “It all goes well.”
This article will be displayed in April/May 2025 issue of luck With the headline “The Life of the Nine of Masayoshi’s Son.”
Tech’s finest table gambler
This story was originally introduced Fortune.com