SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son was planning a comeback

A new Financial Times profile of Mayayoshi Son opens with the SoftBank CEO seemingly slumped over, staring at his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “He hasn’t done anything to be proud of.”

Indeed, Son largely disappeared from the public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund lost heavily on investments like WeWork. But FT writer Lionel Barber, whose new biography of Son is called “The Gambling Man,” writes that while Son appears to be “feigning remorse,” he was actually “planning to come back.”

Now SoftBank is betting big on AI, and is finding success by taking chip design company Arm public.

There are also interesting personal details in the profile, such as Son’s apparent fascination with Napoleon. When the activist investor brought Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg to a 2020 meeting with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business guys.”

“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I am not the CEO. I built a kingdom.”