TO New Financial Times profile Mayayoshi Son’s video begins with the SoftBank CEO seemingly hitting rock bottom, staring at his “ugly” face on Zoom and saying to himself, “I haven’t done anything I can be proud of.”
In fact, Son largely disappeared from public view after SoftBank’s Vision Fund suffered huge losses on investments such as WeWork. But FT writer Lionel Barber, whose new biography of Son is called “Gambling Man,” writes that while Son appeared to be “doing penance,” he was actually “planning a comeback.”
Now SoftBank is betting big on AI and is having success by taking chip design company Arm public.
There are also some amusing personal details in the profile, such as Son’s apparent fascination with Napoleon. When an activist investor mentioned Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a meeting with Son in 2020, he apparently dismissed them as “one-business guys.”
“For me, the right comparison is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I’m not a CEO. I’m building an empire.”