Masayoshi Son: The Man Who Lost $70 Billion and Came Back $70 Billion

The three days he was richer than Bill Gates

In February 2000, Masayoshi Son's net worth hit roughly $78 billion. SoftBank's share price had risen so quickly during the dot-com boom that for about three days he was reported to be the richest person in the world, briefly ahead of Bill Gates. Son would later talk about that stretch almost with embarrassment. He understood what was happening around him; the stock was moving faster than any underlying business could justify.

Then the bubble burst.

Over the next six months SoftBank lost roughly 93% of its market value. Son personally lost close to $70 billion. His net worth bottomed near $1.1 billion — a drop of about $76.9 billion from peak. At the time it was widely described as the largest personal paper loss in history. Most founders would have been wiped out of public life for good. Son stayed in his chair, kept the core positions he believed in, and began the slow work of rebuilding.

What happened in the middle of that collapse is the story that defines him.

A six-minute meeting in Beijing

In October 2000, with SoftBank's stock still in freefall, Son flew to meet a Chinese English teacher named Jack Ma. Ma was running a small B2B marketplace called Alibaba. It had no revenue. It had no clear business plan. It had, by most measures, no reason to warrant a cheque from a man who had just lost most of his fortune.

Son has told the story many times. The meeting lasted around six minutes. He offered Ma $40 million. Ma pushed back and eventually accepted $20 million for roughly a 34% stake. When asked later why he moved so fast, Son's answer was almost comically unquantitative: it was the look in Ma's eyes. He called it "animal smell" — a founder with the right instincts and the right energy. No spreadsheet produced that decision.

It turned out to be one of the most lucrative venture investments ever made.

By Alibaba's 2014 IPO, SoftBank's stake was worth more than $50 billion. At its peak it exceeded $130 billion. The entire Vision Fund — the $100 billion vehicle that reshaped late-stage venture capital — was effectively funded by that single conviction cheque written in the middle of Son's worst year.

From Tosu to Berkeley

Son was born on August 11, 1957, in Tosu, a small city in Saga Prefecture. His family were Zainichi Koreans — ethnic Koreans with permanent residency in Japan — a group that has historically faced significant social discrimination. His father raised pigs and chickens, built the family home on railway land without permission, and later ran a small, informal sake business. Son grew up using a Japanese family name while being quietly aware of his Korean heritage.

He was ambitious to the point of being pushy. At fourteen he talked his way into a meeting with Den Fujita, the Japanese president of McDonald's, and asked him what to study. Fujita told him to go to America and learn computers. At sixteen, Son left for California. He finished high school there and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1980 with a degree in economics.

While still a student, he and a small team built a prototype multilingual electronic translator — a handheld device that could translate between Japanese, English and German. He licensed the design to Sharp Electronics for roughly $1 million. That cheque, in 1980 dollars, was his seed capital. He returned to Japan in 1981 and founded SoftBank in Fukuoka as a software distributor, with a handful of employees and an infamous first-day speech delivered standing on a wooden crate about becoming the world's biggest.

The conviction style

Son's investment philosophy is unusual in a world that prizes diligence and models. He writes extremely large cheques quickly, off theses he can describe in a sentence. He concentrates. He holds through drawdowns that would force most funds to blow up.

Alibaba is the clean example, but the same pattern runs through most of what he has done. He bought ARM Holdings in 2016 for about $32 billion when ARM looked like a stable but mature chip designer; by the time of its 2023 Nasdaq relisting, it had become central to the AI compute stack. He took a majority stake in Sprint in 2013 and spent years restructuring it before merging it with T-Mobile US. He put money into Yahoo Japan in 1996 and turned it into the country's dominant internet portal.

The downside of this style is also well documented. The Vision Fund's bet on WeWork lost tens of billions. Oyo, Katerra and a long list of other names did not survive. In 2022, Son said he was "ashamed" of some of his decisions during the fund's peak writing-cheques phase. His conviction has produced both of the extremes.

The 300-year plan

Son talks about SoftBank in time horizons that sound unserious until you spend time with them. He has publicly framed the group around a 300-year corporate vision, with specific milestones laid out in a 2010 presentation about where the business should sit in 2040 and beyond. In that deck he described a target of investing in 5,000 companies to give his unborn successors a base to build on.

Most of this is clearly aspirational. The 300-year framing is a planning tool, not a forecast. But it changes how the organisation treats pain. A quarterly loss, a blown-up portfolio company, even a $70 billion drawdown, look different when the stated horizon is three centuries. Son has often said the Vision Fund is less about any single bet and more about assembling what he calls a "cluster of number-one strategy" — concentrated stakes in the market leaders of each wave of technology.

Whether that framing survives him is an open question. In 2024 and 2025, Son leaned heavily into AI, including the Stargate infrastructure project with OpenAI and Oracle. The pattern — massive, concentrated, long-dated bets on the next platform shift — is the same one he has run since 1981.

What the story actually teaches

It is tempting to read Son's career as a case for pure conviction and ignore the risk. That reading is wrong. The lesson is more specific.

First, people are the signal. Son's best decisions have been bets on operators — Ma, Simon Segars at ARM, a handful of others — made quickly and held for decades. He has publicly admitted that his worst decisions were also people decisions, where he overrode caution because he liked the founder.

Second, survival compounds. Son's willingness to absorb the dot-com crash without blowing up is what made the Alibaba return meaningful. If he had been forced to sell in 2001, none of what followed would exist. The ability to stay solvent through a 93% drawdown is a competitive advantage very few investors have.

Third, time horizons are a strategy, not a cliché. Running SoftBank on a 300-year framing is partly theatre, but it also enables decisions a quarterly-reporting company would never make — holding ARM, holding Alibaba, backing capital-intensive platforms before they look like winners.

Masayoshi Son is not a universal template. His style is concentrated, personal, and often painful to watch. But the arc from a Zainichi Korean family in Saga, through a $1 million translator deal at Berkeley, through the largest personal paper loss in history, to a six-minute meeting that produced tens of billions in returns — that arc is a reminder that long careers in technology are built on a very small number of extraordinarily high-conviction decisions, made and held through the worst years.