It Started on a Crate: The SoftBank Story
In an office in Japan in 1981, Masayoshi Son mounted a crate and spoke to his only two employees.
He'd just founded SoftBank, and he told his staff that this would be the greatest company in the world. He was 24.
The employees soon quit. But Son is still at the helm of the Japanese IT investment company.
Son was newly back from the US, where he'd made his first million dollars by importing Japanese arcade games.
SoftBank began as a distributor of computer software. It then moved into publishing computer magazines before investing heavily in the internet, putting $100 million into Yahoo and establishing Yahoo Japan.
But at the dawn of the 21st century, the so-called "dot-com bubble" burst. The stock prices of many publicly traded web companies tanked, wiping out trillions of dollars in value for investors.
Son was one of the big losers. Over 90% of his wealth evaporated — some $70 billion. But luckily for him, he still had more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.
His next move helped him get some of that wealth back, and set SoftBank onto a profitable path. He invested $20 million in Alibaba, which was then a young Chinese e-commerce company.
By the time SoftBank sold most of its Alibaba stock in May 2024, the company was worth about $200 billion.
Son acquired Japan Telecom and Vodafone Japan in the 2000s when SoftBank turned to telecoms, and he has since plowed money into artificial intelligence.
Those who know him say Son has always had a sense of where to put his money before others did.
By market capitalization — the total value of a company's outstanding shares of stock — SoftBank is now Japan's seventh largest company, just behind Hitachi.
However, it's only about a third the value of Toyota.
Son is getting closer to his goal — but he has some way to go if he wants to fulfill the promise he made on top of that crate in 1981.
