He got lucky in a big way twice. The reason he was able to lose more money than anyone in history, is because the first time he got lucky like that was with Yahoo when a relatively small investment became worth tens of billions of dollars. He failed to sell though and Yahoo of course didn't have a sustainable position (unlike Alibaba). The epic boom in his Yahoo position is what initially made him famous during the dotcom bubble. It started the mythology of Masayoshi as a finder of those types of investments.
Masayoshi Son seems like someone who started believing like Midas, that anything he touches would turn to gold.
I heard the guy speak, and he seemed full of himself.
And he's taken Saudi money, I would not want to be in his shoes to say the least.
> Masayoshi Son seems like someone who started believing like Midas, that anything he touches would turn to gold.
It is so incredibly common in the investment world to mistake extreme luck for skill and cling to flawed methodologies as if they were gospel because they worked once by chance.
Your typical investment "strategies" are hardly better than someone bringing his lucky shoes to a gambling den.
He is still way better off than your average hs commentor. It will be easy to pivot into anything.. flower shop.. ebay jeans store the sky is the limit.
No. Yahoo US was once worth ~$125 billion ($200b today) and Masayoshi's SoftBank owned 28% of it during the peak bubble days of 1999-2000. [1] Yahoo was a very big deal at the time, it was briefly an Internet juggernaut. That's a key reason why he was so rich during the dotcom bubble. That single position propelled his image and made him famous.
To put into perspective how relatively massive SoftBank's Yahoo position was considered to be at the time in the tech world (and more broadly): if you go back to early 1995, it's a sum comparable to what Microsoft was worth ($30-$35b), and more than Intel was worth. The notion that a tech company could be more valuable than the old industrial giants like GM was still a rather confounding premise.
