What is SoftBank?
A really difficult question to answer these days.
A telecoms group.
It's a semiconductor group.
It's now more of an investment group.
A huge and very aggressive hedge fund.
It is the corporate expression of one man.
A journey for people to ride alongside the mind of Masayoshi
Son.
It's like a jigsaw puzzle.
Right at the centre of it you've got Masayoshi Son.
The 63-year-old founder of SoftBank.
He's like no other chief executive in Japan.
He is not afraid of taking risks.
He's a risk-addicted billionaire.
He's not afraid to make extremely aggressive bets.
If we were in a casino, he'd be the guy doubling down
every time he wins with his money.
If he's on the blackjack table, just double down, double down,
double down.
He never takes the chips off the table
and he just let it ride as far as he can go.
He's exploring ways to become rich, exploring ways
to change the world.
He identified technology as the way to do that.
In the next 10 years I would continue
to invest more and more.
He's driven by power, the desire to make
SoftBank one of the world's biggest companies.
He's not really into inventing things.
So it's not like SoftBank creates products.
He's more investing in vision.
If you go in the room and ask for $100m
and he says, well, I was going to give you $500m,
so why do you only need $100m?
If you don't have a good answer for the $500m,
you're not getting the money.
He gets frustrated with us journalists.
He gets frustrated with investors
who don't value his company as highly as he
thinks it should be valued.
He's small, like, physically small, and he's calm.
What lies beneath is this vigorous shark.
Masayoshi Son is born and raised in Japan.
He left Japan to study in the US.
He came back to Japan using the money from a patent
that he sold of an electronic translator.
He set up SoftBank in 1981 as a software distributor.
His breakthrough deal came in 2000
when he invested $20m in Alibaba,
just a year after the Chinese company was created.
To turn $20m into $100bn and more, that doesn't happen.
You know, even the best venture capitalists
in the world who put a sliver of money in Airbnb
or a sliver of money in Google, they never
have hit anything like that.
He's a kind of film script version
of what happens if we all went back in time
and invested in Facebook on the day
that it was invented and so on.
When the market turns on SoftBank
the thing that keeps the market confident that it's still worth
something is that he's still clutching onto that Alibaba
stake.
Even through the pandemic we've seen Alibaba only get stronger
and its share price go higher.
We all want to be that investor.
He actually was that investor.
What if it was a fluke?
Did he just get lucky on Chinese e-commerce?
Then you come back to the puzzle.
Is he the world's most astute tech investor
or is he the luckiest guy on the planet?
He listened to Jack Ma's speech for five minutes
and he saw the twinkle in his eyes
and decided to invest in the company.
I could smell him, right?
We are same animal.
He believes in the future.
He probably has the biggest guts in the world
on doing investment.
Yeah.
Right.
Very few people in the world have that courage.
Too much.
God, sometimes I lose a lot of money.
I know.
He had so much conviction in Jack Ma
and what the potential of Alibaba
was that all these times that it was in the money,
he never took a penny off the table.
He just wanted to ride it.
And he's been proven right.
It's one thing to find Alibaba, which is already impressive.
But it's another to have the conviction to stick with it.
The problem is that last autumn Jack Ma
made a pretty ill-advised speech in Shanghai
and it seemed to take a swipe at regulators.
The next thing we know the share price of Alibaba's
taking a really, really big hit.
Big problem there is that SoftBank
is a 25 per cent holder of Alibaba stock.
And where goes Alibaba, goes SoftBank.
It's kind of hard to describe SoftBank in one word.
It has so many pieces.
It's investment portfolio is diverse.
It has, obviously, its stake in the domestic mobile business.
The now separately listed mobile business
that has been absolutely core.
And a lot of investors have invested
in SoftBank because of the stability
that this telecoms business offers.
The 2006 Vodafone Japan deal, that's
a key moment because it creates a ballast
to keep the company stable.
Almost as important as buying Vodafone's Japan business
was the decision to be the launch carrier for the Apple
iPhone.
You have this outsider offering an American phone
to Japanese consumers.
And the whole question of whether Japanese consumers
would dump the Japanese product in favour of an American
product.
Like everything he does, it was a gamble
and it obviously paid off enormously.
The underlying theme, of course, is SoftBank's investment
into the future of technology.
The current state of the puzzle, it's
in flux because one of the key pieces
is in the process of being sold, which is Arm.
If you asked me four or five years ago what SoftBank is,
I would say SoftBank is a company with Arm at the core
and Masa running around the world telling everyone
that this company and its chip design
will be the basis upon which the internet of things
will be built off of, all these connected devices.
He didn't have the money to pay for Arm
and so he needed to find people who would put money in
to back the transaction.
What he does discover is that there's
a bunch of capital in the Middle East
that just wants to invest with him.
And that's how we get the Vision Fund.
The Vision Fund launched in 2017 as the world's largest
technology fund.
The largest investors in the fund
were the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi.
Saudi Arabia was also a big investor.
It was really a marriage of minds between Mohammed bin
Salman and Masayoshi Son.
On the one hand, a young authoritarian
leader who's in a hurry to transform a society
and wean it off oil.
Tech-obsessed, but is very concerned about looking
like dumb money on the global stage.
So in comes Masa and says, look, I'm the world's best technology
investor and I have Arm and I can
see the future of connected devices
and you're trying to build these megacities in Saudi Arabia.
Let's do this together.
Fast forward to today, Arm's operations under SoftBank
basically stunk.
The high-tech stuff, the stuff that was the future,
is basically a cash guzzling, cash burning disaster.
If he's nothing else, he is a consummate salesman.
He got asked once, so how did you
convince Mohammed bin Salman to give you $45bn in an hour?
And he says, no, $45bn in 45 minutes.
One billion every minute.
You've got so much money in a fund.
You're not just buying a little part of that industry.
You're buying the future of that industry.
He got $100bn with which he can say, OK, OK.
Maybe the market was one day going to come to the conclusion
that this company was going to be the dominant player.
But I'm going to leapfrog all of that and just make this company
the dominant player by pouring so much money into it.
What if he says, OK, if you don't take my money,
I'm going to go give quadruple that amount to your rival.
It's not all lovey dovey.
People don't see that brutal side of Masa.
He used capital as a weapon with the Vision Fund.
It poured money into various start-ups
from Uber, DiDi, Oyo, Slack.
Sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley
and brought the valuations of technology companies
to new heights.
They wanted to basically be more effective at investing
than Sequoia or Benchmark, the brand
name venture capital funds.
But it's really a bunch of ex-Deutsche Bank traders
who are running the show.
And so what do they know about venture investing?
So the first few years of the Vision Fund
are marked by, like, enormous mistakes.
These companies weren't making money.
And when it came time for them to do IPOs,
investors weren't convinced.
We had this crisis at WeWork that really raised questions
in the Vision Fund's strategy.
A office work-sharing company sold into this incredible hype
machine.
And the person feeding that hype of Adam Neumann, the founder,
was Masa Son.
I don't think he's necessarily the greatest
judge of character.
He falls very hard in love with other entrepreneurs.
I think if any of us in a room with Adam Neumann we'd probably
be like, I'd probably tone down the crazy
'cause this is starting to look nuts.
Masa says, no, be more crazy.
And after the pandemic struck it also
showed the vulnerability of the Vision Fund
with some of the major bets like Uber and DiDi being hit.
Then that led to SoftBank suffering its biggest
ever annual loss.
But if you think about a venture portfolio,
if they're in 88 companies, maybe slightly more,
their point is, some of them will be duds, some of them
will be OK, and some of them may be Alibaba level potential.
Maybe not the full Alibaba.
And as long as they get enough of those
it doesn't really matter what the other stuff does.
Now you've got people so deeply involved in some area
of development, particularly the Vision Fund, again,
that they've become their own piece but are never more
powerful than him at the centre.
He recruited this Google man called Nikesh Arora.
Indian, very successful.
Nikesh wanted Masa to pay down his debt, take less risks.
These two had a spectacular falling out.
At the same time, another Indian who Masa had recruited,
Raeev Misra from Deutsche Bank, his rise
really begins and takes off as Nikesh's plummets.
He brings in a guy called Sago.
He is Goldman Sachs in Japan.
Super cautious.
And so you've got Deutsche and Goldman Sachs characters
now merged.
You've got a lot of complexity around everyone second guessing
what everyone else is up to.
Another character was Marcelo Claure
who was recruited into SoftBank and then put
in charge of Sprint and is now playing a major role
across the portfolio.
The Wild West is how the Vision Fund's
been described internally.
He likes a little bit of chaos and he
likes a little bit of tension.
It's a pirate ship and it's full of pirates
and they're all aggressive traders.
And what you have is, basically, Masa as the ringleader
of this pirate ship.
They're not co-ordinated, they don't get along,
everyone is briefing against each other.
That tension is all held in place when he's there.
But then I think we do come back to this question of how long
Masayoshi Son is going to be in charge of this.
And whether SoftBank survives him not being at the centre
of that puzzle.
Right before the Arm deal, Nikesh leaves.
And this was the person that was the anointed successor.
Masa is now 63-years-old.
It doesn't seem like he has a successor.
Because so much of this company is associated with his vision
that also creates a big risk for SoftBank.
The whole structure would collapse
if something happened to Masa.
Someone could make a play at it for the run for the top.
So it's not the end of the world, but it's pretty close.
If you have a company that is run with such obvious deference
to one person's views, you've got governance issues,
you've got questions about whether the board is
a real board, whether it can stop him doing something
that's manifestly insane.
2020 has been a crazy year for SoftBank.
Masa became very exposed, whose entire wealth
is effectively in SoftBank shares.
When the stock of SoftBank starts
going down the banks with whom he's borrowed get very nervous.
So Masa, in the middle of March, went
into some crisis meetings with his key executives
and Elliott, the hedge fund which
has an activist stake in SoftBank
and has been calling for it to do share buybacks.
The assumption was that Elliott would end up
in a nasty clash with Son, but ultimately they
wouldn't get anywhere.
Lo and behold, the buybacks begin.
Maybe the investors are getting somewhere.
Maybe governance is changing with his companies.
It triggered this massive asset disposal,
which was initially designed to carry out share buybacks
and also to reduce debt and to restore investor confidence.
The Arm gets agreed to be sold to Nvidia in a $40bn deal.
You have the Japanese telecoms unit.
They announce a plan to bring down
their control to raise money.
They have Sprint, which they've merged with T-Mobile.
Another part of the jigsaw puzzle.
And he's one of the great men of industry.
He's very politically savvy.
He can strike up a relationship with most of the world leaders,
whether it's Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.
And from the moment Trump was elected president
Masa was courting him.
He needed the Sprint deal to get through.
Masa goes to Trump Tower and says to him,
I'm going to create 50,000 new jobs in America.
I'm going to invest $50bn.
US regulators finally allowed Sprint and T-Mobile to merge.
He had cracked the code of Trump.
Now it's flush with money, so it has $80bn in cash.
One thing you should never expect Masa to do
is to have cash in the bank account and not spend it.
And that's how you get to the other piece of the jigsaw
puzzle, that Nasdaq whale story.
Towards the end of August 2020, we
started to notice some quite strange stuff going on
in US stock markets, and particularly in tech stocks.
The Nasdaq index, the Composite and the Nasdaq 100,
were both up about 12 per cent, 13 per cent over the month.
Tesla was up 70-odd per cent and Amazon and Google
and all these stocks had had an absolutely blistering run.
The options market is a place where investors can effectively
bet on future stock price movements
or try and hedge themselves against them.
The talk was of a whale, a huge account
- people couldn't figure out who it was - that was just
gobbling up these options.
Our sort of ringing around on this led us to SoftBank.
Our instincts were saying, someone's got this wrong.
But to our surprise, it turned out to be right.
Masayoshi Son says it's actually in line with this vision
because it's investing in the future of AI
and he believes that, you know, the big US
giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google,
they're all kind of the front runners in the AI race.
But, obviously, investors don't always agree with that idea.
So the next day, shares in SoftBank
itself fell pretty heavily, took about $9bn
off the market cap of SoftBank that day.
The strategy was being directed specifically by Masa Son.
This came from the top and that tells you a lot
about Masa Son as a character.
He's not afraid to take the market completely by surprise.
He's not afraid to make extremely aggressive bets
in markets that he doesn't normally play in.
I mean, veterans in the equities options market
were telling us they've never seen anything
like the scale of the bets that were going on here.
It started to look at a certain point
like SoftBank was morphing into a huge and very aggressive
hedge fund.
This is not something that sat easily with the market.
He doesn't really respect the stock market.
He doesn't really respect stock market investors.
But he needs it because he's so aggressive that he
needs the sources of capital.
To be risk addicted and to buy at the rate he buys really
means that he borrows more than almost anyone we know.
And what you have is a company that
constantly changes because he's constantly experimenting.
It's impossible to second guess.
You never know where SoftBank are going to crop up next.
You never know what market they might
start dabbling in, in huge size and with very
aggressive strategies.
A few weeks down the road, or even a few days down the road,
SoftBank could have another massive transformative deal
and we'll be talking about a new definition for SoftBank.
It kind of depends on, you know, where that vision
that Masayoshi Son has next.
He's a gambler and he takes big risks.
And he's undoubtedly successful.
I really don't see a scenario where Masa hoards cash.
Ultimately, we come back to the casino and the question is,
are you going take your chips off the table and walk away,
or are you going to push it all out and go all in?
Everything in his career suggests
that he's always all in.