Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son was born on August 11, 1957, into a Korean immigrant family in Tosu, on the Japanese island of Kyushu, the second of four brothers. In a 1992 interview with the Harvard Business Review he said that, like many Koreans in Japan, his family had adopted the Japanese surname Yasumoto in order to assimilate; he recalled being pelted with stones by Japanese classmates in grade school.⁠[1][2][2][3][2]

As a teenager, after repeatedly calling in vain to request a meeting with Den Fujita, founder of McDonald’sMcDonald’sMcDonald’s is a publicly traded restaurant company headquartered in Chicago, known for hamburgers, fries, drive-thrus and its franchise network. Its origins lie in the restaurant opened by Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1940; Ray Kroc expanded franchising from 1955. It operates across more than 100 countries, with the great majority of restaurants run by independent operators.Open the full entry Japan, he flew to Tokyo and showed up at Fujita’s office, eventually getting a 15-minute conversation; he recalls Fujita advising him not to look at past industries but at the future industry: computers.⁠[2][2][2]

At 16 he went to the United States for high school, first taking English lessons at Holy Names College in Oakland; after entering Serramonte High School that September, he insisted that he already knew the textbook material and asked to take the college preparatory exam right away, finishing high school in two weeks, and he resumed using his Korean surname.⁠[3][2][2][2][3]

After two years at Holy Names College he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in economics. At 19, with the help of several Berkeley professors, he developed a pocket multilingual translator and sold the patent to Sharp, earning about $1 million; he also modified game machines brought from Japan and installed them in restaurants, dormitories and cafeterias, earning about another $1 million. He wrote down 250 inventions in his “Invention Idea Notes.”⁠[3][2][3][2][2]

While studying in the U.S., he saw a picture of a microchip in a science magazine that convinced him the age of personal computers was coming. He considered the U.S. a better environment for entrepreneurs but believed Japanese employees were more loyal, and that if he someday built a large global company its headquarters should be in Japan, so after graduating he returned home to start a business.⁠[4][2][3]

Back in Japan, he spent a year and a half researching 40 business ideas, from software development to hospital management, and evaluated each against 25 “success measures” of his own, including that he should “fall in love with the business for the next 50 years at least” and become “number one” in the field within 10 years; he ultimately chose wholesaling personal computer software.⁠[3][3][3][3]

In September 1981 he founded Nihon SoftBank (now SoftBank Group) and became its chairman and CEO. With no products at first, he rented one of the largest booths at a consumer electronics show in Tokyo and displayed the products of 12 software vendors free of charge, which led to a connection with Japan’s foremost PC retailer, Joshin Denki, and exclusive supply rights; in its first year monthly sales grew from $10,000 to $2.3 million.⁠[1][3][3][3]

After three new carriers entered Japan’s long-distance telephone market in 1986, he invented a “least-cost routing device” that automatically chose the cheapest carrier and route and dialed the number; SoftBank provided the devices free to customers and earned royalties on carriers’ increased billings, and the device became the basis of the company’s DATANET telephone data division.⁠[3][3][3]

SoftBank went public in 1994 at a valuation of $3 billion, with Son retaining a 70% stake. Over the next few years he led the acquisitions of Ziff Communications’ trade show division, the COMDEX computer show and Ziff-Davis Publishing, describing these deals as a way to “get a map and a compass” for a voyage into the center of information technology, and through Ziff-Davis discovered Yahoo!; in April 1996 SoftBank raised its Yahoo! stake to a controlling 37%.⁠[3][4][4][3]

By mid-1999 his $338 million investment in Yahoo! was worth more than $10 billion, and the $2 billion he had invested in about 100 internet companies was worth more than $17 billion; SoftBank’s market value reached $190 billion in February 1999, but by late November its share price had plunged more than 90%, wiping out $172 billion of market value in nine months.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

SoftBank invested in Alibaba in 2000, and Son became an Alibaba director in October 2005. He later said that meeting Jack Ma was one of the luckiest things in his life.⁠[4][1][2]

After SoftBank acquired Vodafone Japan in April 2006, he became its chairman, president and CEO; most of the roughly $15 billion purchase price was borrowed.⁠[1][5]

After the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, SoftBank Group announced on April 3 a donation of JPY 1 billion, while Son personally pledged JPY 10 billion and said that from fiscal 2011 until his retirement he would donate all of his remuneration as the group’s representative to support children orphaned by the disaster and other orphans.⁠[6][6][6]

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, he founded the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation with JPY 1 billion of his own money, holding its launch on September 12, 2011. He argued that Japan could meet 60% of its electricity needs with renewable energy within 20 years, called for a JPY 2 trillion nationwide “super grid” that could eventually be expanded into a grid linking Asian countries, and said Japan “must minimize our use of nuclear power over the next 20 years”; SoftBank also planned to invest JPY 10 to 20 billion in a new renewable energy business.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5]

When he announced the foundation in April that year, he said it would consult about 100 scientists around the world and advise the government on the use of natural energy sources such as solar, wind and geothermal power.⁠[7]

After SoftBank completed its roughly $21.6 billion investment in U.S. carrier Sprint in July 2013, he became Sprint’s chairman.⁠[8][8]

In September 2016 SoftBank completed its acquisition of ARM Holdings for about £24 billion, and Son became ARM’s chairman and executive director. On October 14 of that year SoftBank announced the SoftBank Vision Fund, which he said would become the biggest investor in the technology sector over the next decade; the fund held its first close in May 2017 with more than $93 billion of committed capital.⁠[9][1][10][11]

On December 6, 2016, after meeting President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York, he announced that he would invest $50 billion in the United States and “commit” to creating 50,000 jobs, with the money coming from the $100 billion fund he had set up with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and others and earmarked for U.S. startups; he said he had come to “celebrate” Trump’s new job. Trump promptly took credit for the pledge on Twitter, attributing it to his election win; at the time the financial details and timeframe of the commitment were unclear.⁠[12][12][13][12][12]

After WeWorkWeWorkWeWork is a flexible workspace company founded in New York in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. It provides private offices, coworking space, meeting rooms and enterprise workplace services. After withdrawing its IPO plan in 2019, it went public through a BowX merger in 2021, entered Chapter 11 in 2023 and emerged from restructuring in June 2024, continuing as a private company.Open the full entry’s IPO faltered, SoftBank announced a large capital infusion on October 23, 2019. Son said it was not unusual for the world’s leading disruptors to face growth challenges, and that since the vision remained unchanged, SoftBank had decided to “double down.”⁠[14][14]

In 2020 SoftBank set up SB Northstar to trade listed stocks with the company’s excess cash, with Son personally holding a 33% interest and the company the rest. After tech stocks crashed in early 2022, SoftBank recognized a JPY 670 billion loss on SB Northstar for the fiscal year ended March 2022, of which Son personally was on the hook for JPY 315 billion.⁠[15][15]

On June 25, 2020, he told SoftBank’s shareholder meeting that he had left Alibaba’s board as of that day, saying he was “graduating” from his most successful investment by far; at the same time Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma left SoftBank’s board, which Son said did not signify any disagreement between the two.⁠[16][16]

In November 2020 he became representative director, corporate officer, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group; since April 2021 he has also been a board director and founder of SoftBank Corp.⁠[1][1]

In May 2022, after the Vision Fund posted a record annual loss, he told a press conference that by personality he likes to play offense, but amid the “pandemonium” of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine it was time to play defense: “When it rains, you open an umbrella.” On August 8 of that year, when SoftBank reported a $23 billion quarterly loss, he said he had become “somewhat delirious” when the company was making big profits and, looking back, was “quite embarrassed and remorseful.”⁠[15][15][17][17]

In August 2023 he became chairman and director of Arm Holdings; Arm listed on Nasdaq on September 14 of that year.⁠[1][18]

On December 16, 2024, he and the newly re-elected Trump announced a $100 billion investment plan for AI and related infrastructure, aiming to create 100,000 jobs over four years. Commentators noted that the actual impact of the 2016 pledge was hard to determine.⁠[19][19][19]

In January 2025 SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGXMGXMGX is an Abu Dhabi artificial intelligence and advanced technology investment company, announced in March 2024 by Abu Dhabi’s Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council with Mubadala and G42 as foundational partners and chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. It has invested in companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Databricks, and Binance, and co-founded the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) with BlackRock, Microsoft, and others.Open the full entry announced the Stargate Project, which planned to invest $500 billion over four years in AI infrastructure in the United States, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and Son serving as chairman.⁠[20][20]

Under his leadership, SoftBank sold all 32.1 million of its Nvidia shares in October 2025 for $5.83 billion to fund its promised OpenAI investment; in February 2026 it agreed to invest a further $30 billion in OpenAI, bringing its cumulative investment to $64.6 billion and its stake to about 13% by October 2026.⁠[21][21][22][22]

In his message to shareholders he set the goal of making SoftBank the No. 1 platform provider for artificial superintelligence (ASI), and said he disagreed that AI is a bubble, arguing that the current evolution of AI resembles the early days of the internet.⁠[23][23]

On October 9, 2026, the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter, said he was seeking to raise up to $100 billion from Gulf investors for a new wave of AI investments and had held discussions in recent weeks with senior figures, including in the United Arab Emirates; ReutersReutersReuters is an international news agency founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter and is now the news business of Thomson Reuters. It provides text, photo, video, and graphics coverage to media and institutional clients and distributes it through channels such as Reuters Connect.Open the full entry, relaying the report, could not immediately verify it, and SoftBank did not respond to a request for comment.⁠[24][24][24]

As of October 2026 he is representative director, corporate officer, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group, as well as a director of SoftBank Corp. and chairman of Arm Holdings; as of June 1, 2026, he held 1.866 billion shares of SoftBank Group.⁠[25][1][1]

SoftBank Group: Official website: https://group.softbank/en/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

X: Public account: https://x.com/masason (opens in a new window)⁠[26]