A brand new Financial Times profile of Mayayoshi Son opens with SoftBank’s CEO seeming to hit backside, gazing his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I have done nothing I can be proud of.”
Indeed, Son largely disappeared from the general public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund took big losses from investments like WeWork. But FT author Lionel Barber, whose new biography of Son known as “Gambling Man,” writes that whereas Son gave the impression to be “doing penance,” he was really “plotting a comeback.”
Now SoftBank is betting huge on AI, and discovering success by taking chip design firm Arm public.
There are additionally some enjoyable private particulars within the profile, like Son’s obvious fascination with Napoleon. When an activist investor introduced up Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 assembly with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business guys.”
“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son mentioned. “I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”
