At the very beginning of Gambling Man, his biography of Masayoshi “Masa” Son, the founder of Japanese investment firm SoftBank, Lionel Barber concedes that his subject is “probably the most powerful mogul of the twenty-first century who is not a household name”. The rest of the book proceeds to prove how absurd a paradox this is.
Son is, after all, a biographer’s dream. His career is an almost surreal string of personal highs and lows. Zelig-like, he has been present at — and indeed often responsible for — almost every big turning point in global tech over the past four decades. This is a man, Barber, a former editor of the FT, reminds us, who has been “the single largest foreign investor in capitalist America and communist China; the biggest start-up funder in the world, and the boss of one of the top ten most indebted firms, continually threatening a financial implosion”.
His first big coup came in 1995. An audacious punt on Jerry Yang’s Yahoo! saw him outmuscle the flower of America’s venture capitalists to secure the largest external shareholding in what became the bellwether stock of the dotcom bubble. By the time the market peaked in early 2000, SoftBank was being feted as the company that had single-handedly dragged Japan out of its lost decade, and Son was the richest man in the world.
The subsequent crash brought equally extreme ignominy. SoftBank’s market capitalisation fell 98 per cent. Son himself lost some $67bn. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper headlined a public repudiation of the one-time secular saint “Hunt for the Class A War Criminal”.
Most investors would have been finished. Masa was just getting started. He instantly discovered an ace up his sleeve in the shape of a modest $20mn ticket SoftBank had written 18 months earlier to secure a 30 per cent stake in a then unknown Chinese ecommerce start-up: Jack Ma’s Alibaba. The resulting leveraged bet on China’s explosive growth turned out to be one of the most spectacularly profitable investments of the next decade and helped bankroll SoftBank’s new expansion into broadband and telecoms on both sides of the Pacific.
Son’s second coming also came unstuck. In the teeth of the global credit crunch of 2008, SoftBank’s vast borrowings and its off-piste adventures in subprime derivatives came back to haunt it. Son himself was forced into a fire sale of his personal shareholding to meet margin calls. “I lost almost all my worldly assets,” he confesses to Barber.
Yet once again Son squeaked through the chicane: 2009 inaugurated a new era of ultra-low interest rates, and Son went back on the offensive. For the third decade in a row, he got a single big thing right — this time round, the new rules for sourcing mountains of capital in a multipolar world awash with money.
A new generation of leaders in the Middle East were eager to transmute their fossil-fuel fortunes into investments in global tech. “Masa” was on hand to oblige. Thus was born the $100bn Saudi and UAE-backed SoftBank Vision Fund — the largest tech investment vehicle the world had ever seen.
True to form, SoftBank became the poster child for this brave new era’s eventual appointment with reality. First came the debacle of a $14bn write-down of its investment in office-sharing start-up WeWork in what Barber calls, not unfairly, “one of the biggest swings and misses in the history of investing”. Then great post-pandemic inflation put an end to the age of free money. In May 2022, the Vision Fund booked a whopping $27bn loss as its start-up portfolio cratered. In November, Son announced that he was finally stepping down as the face of SoftBank.
Gambling Man, which is published in the US next year, is a pacy and highly professional telling of Son’s remarkable story, which skilfully draws out its broader historical themes. Of course, what readers of biographies also yearn for is the piercing personal insight. We mere mortals want to know what makes demigods like Masa tick.
Barber succeeds in securing interviews with his notoriously elusive subject. He settles on the origin story favoured by Masa himself. As an ethnic Korean born in provincial poverty and forced to pass as Japanese, he was driven by the need for acceptance in a famously regimented society. Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets, as the venture capitalists themselves like to say.
Yet so global, tumultuous and often frankly unbelievable is Son’s career that it is hard to resist the conviction there isn’t something more. At the very end of Barber’s book, he is unexpectedly invited into the tycoon’s private quarters. Wooden doors slide apart to reveal “a breathtaking scene . . . Masa’s make-believe world on the twenty-eighth floor of SoftBank’s headquarters”. It is as if we are finally about to learn what drives Son on, and whether he really is a genius or a madman.
It proves a tantalising finale. Son merely wants to show off his Japanese garden. There is no Rosebud moment. The Citizen Kane of Kyushu remains as enigmatic as ever.
Felix Martin is the author of ‘Money: The Unauthorised Biography’
Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son by Lionel Barber Allen Lane £30 416 pages
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