I have been following Masayoshi Son for 30 years now, since he bought the old Comdex show from Sheldon Adelson. Two things remain consistent.
First, he wants to be a monopolist. Second, he’s not very good at it.
The Comdex deal should have been the first clue. It made Adelson’s fortune as he plowed his winnings into the land the show sat on, the Sands Convention Center and associated hotel. That became the Bellagio, after which he began building in Macao. His widow is now worth over $30 billion. (It’s good to be on the other side of a Son deal.)
After the computer retailing world where he began his career collapsed with the dot bomb, Son had another brainwave. He would control the next big thing, mobile telephony. He gained a competitive advantage in Japan, by cutting prices against an existing duopoly. Then he decided he would have a global footprint.
Where did he get the money? He was the money behind Alibaba, Jack Ma turning his $20 million into $8.5 billion. This let him buy Sprint, then the nation’s third largest cellular carrier. By the time he sold Sprint, it was the fourth largest carrier. Point is Son pays no attention to operations.
It was while he controlled Sprint that Son began talking the Saudi sheikhs into backing his $100 billion “Vision Fund,” with which he hoped to dominate the Web 3.0 era of the last decade. The result was WeWork and a bunch of its brethren, like Uber, DoorDash, and OpenDoor. It was a hit or miss affair, often a hit AND miss affair, as OpenDoor showed.
But when he won, he won big. Witness ARM Holdings.
Son’s Latest Fling is AI and You
Deals like Vision and ARM made Son’s fortune. It’s now estimated at $33.2 billion, twice what it was less than two years ago. The Rolodex includes investments from Apple, Qualcomm, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Foxconn. Many of his investments are holdovers from the last decade, versions of DoorDash like Korea’s Coupang and India’s Swiggy.
When he’s riding high, Son dreams bigger. In the age of AI, he’s once more swinging for the fences, with no thought about the consequences. It’s Son who made OpenAI’s Sam Altman powerful with the still-unbuilt Stargate project, which claims an investment of $500 billion. Now he’s trying to talk TSMC and the Trump Administration into a $1 trillion robot manufacturing hub in Arizona.
Never mind that they don’t have enough water already, given the load of TSM’s existing fab build-out, and everything else going on there. Whether it’s completely built, whether it makes money, isn’t the point. The point is that Son aims at building monopolies that may or may not wind up being owned by Softbank. He’s the face of Big Tech, for better or worse.
If Son is engaged in capitalism, as Son claims, it’s state capitalism, in which entire nations are just limited partners. There’s nothing more limited than a limited partner. My point is, if the Trumpies get on board with this, you’re one of those limited partners.
