Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son (born 1957) founded SoftBank in 1981 as a software distributor and turned it into a serial-betting conglomerate: an early $20 million stake in Alibaba that became one of history’s greatest venture returns, the $100 billion Vision Fund, and ownership of chip designer Arm. His career has swung between visionary and cautionary — he lost more money than almost anyone alive in the dot-com crash and in WeWork — but he has never stopped swinging.

“Born to realize ASI”

At SoftBank’s June 2024 shareholder meeting in Tokyo, Son declared that everything he had done before was a warm-up: artificial superintelligence — AI he predicts will be 10,000 times smarter than humans within a decade — is the purpose of his life and of SoftBank itself. He has framed the company’s mission as nothing less than “the evolution of humanity.”

He has backed the rhetoric with the largest checks of the AI era. In January 2025 he stood beside President Trump and Sam Altman to announce Stargate, a $500 billion US AI-datacenter venture with SoftBank as its lead financier and Son as chairman, alongside a roughly $30 billion investment in OpenAI, the acquisition of chip startup Ampere, and reported plans for a trillion-dollar AI manufacturing hub in Arizona. Critics recall that Son’s conviction has produced spectacular wrecks as well as triumphs, and that SoftBank is borrowing heavily against its assets to fund the spree. Son’s answer is characteristic: the only real risk, he argues, is missing the biggest technology shift in human history.