Son Masayoshi

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Son Masayoshi’s leadership of SoftBank has emphasized large-scale investment and long-term strategic ambition.

© Akio Kon—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Son Masayoshi is a Japanese entrepreneur who is chair and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., a multinational investment holding company with major interests in telecommunications, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Son Masayoshi was born on August 31, 1957, in Saga prefecture, Kyushu, Japan. He was born into a family of ethnic Koreans living in Japan and later acquired Japanese citizenship.

In the early 1970s, Son repeatedly sought a meeting with Fujita Den, the president of McDonald’s Company (Japan), Ltd., to ask for advice about his future. When the two finally met, Fujita urged Son to pursue opportunities in computer technology and to study in the United States.

Son later enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. While a student, he and a group of others developed a sound-translation device capable of converting Japanese into English and German. Son sold the technology to Sharp Corporation and used the proceeds to establish the predecessor of SoftBank after returning to Japan in 1981.

Son’s business initially focused on the distribution of computer software and related publications, operating at a time when Japan’s personal-computing market was still emerging. Under Son’s leadership, the company expanded rapidly, and by the early 1990s it had become a major force in Japan’s computer-software distribution and technology-related publishing businesses.

Nearly 20 years after their first meeting, Son met again with Fujita Den. By that time, Son was president of SoftBank Corp., and Fujita was deeply moved when Son thanked him for the guidance he had received years earlier.

During the 1990s Son pursued an aggressive expansion strategy centered on mergers and acquisitions, a departure from the more conservative growth models favored by many Japanese companies at the time. He financed the purchases largely through the issuance of corporate bonds rather than bank loans, allowing SoftBank to expand rapidly while limiting dependence on traditional lenders.

Son characterized his approach as a form of “diplomatic warfare,” arguing that both SoftBank and the companies it acquired could benefit without engaging in all-or-nothing confrontations. Through this strategy, SoftBank acquired a range of businesses related to technology and media, including Phoenix Publishing Systems, publishing and convention operations formerly owned by Ziff-Davis, Inc., and the rights to host COMDEX, then the computer industry’s largest trade show. It also acquired a majority stake in Kingston Technology Company, Inc., an American memory-card manufacturer.

Since first offering SoftBank shares on the over-the-counter market in July 1994 to raise capital, Son was reported to have invested several billion dollars in acquisitions. In 1996, SoftBank joined News Corporation of Australia, led by media executive Rupert Murdoch, in the purchase of a minority stake (21%) in Asahi National Broadcasting Co., Ltd., a major Japanese commercial television station. The investment, described by some Japanese media outlets as an unexpected incursion of foreign capital, was sold the following year.

Son’s rapid expansion and unconventional approach to corporate growth brought him comparisons to figures such as Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft Corporation (MSFT); Morita Akio, the longtime head of Sony Corporation (SONY); and Honda Soichiro, founder of Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (HMC), the automobile- and motorcycle-manufacturing company that bears his name.

In the late 1990s, SoftBank began investing heavily in Internet-related businesses, both in Japan and internationally. Among its most significant ventures was Yahoo Japan Corporation, which became a major force in Japan’s emerging online economy. The collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000 resulted in heavy losses for SoftBank, which lost an estimated ¥75 billion ($748 million) as technology stocks declined sharply.

Despite these setbacks, Son continued to pursue large-scale technology initiatives. In 2001, SoftBank established a broadband Internet service in partnership with Yahoo Japan, expanding the company’s role in telecommunications. In 2006, Son engineered SoftBank’s acquisition of Vodafone KK, the Japanese arm of the British mobile-phone company Vodafone Group. The purchase marked SoftBank’s entry into mobile telecommunications and significantly expanded its presence in Japan’s consumer communications market.

By the early 2010s, Son had begun transforming SoftBank from a primarily domestic telecommunications company into a global investment and operating group. Central to this shift was an increased focus on overseas technology companies and large-scale international acquisitions.

Among SoftBank’s most consequential early investments was a stake in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group, which later became one of the most valuable assets in SoftBank’s portfolio. Son also sought to expand SoftBank’s telecommunications footprint beyond Japan. In 2013, SoftBank acquired a controlling stake in Sprint Corporation, the third-largest wireless carrier in the United States at the time.

These moves reflected Son’s ambition to position SoftBank as a global technology group rather than a national telecommunications operator.

In 2017, SoftBank established the SoftBank Vision Fund, a venture capital fund focused on global technology companies. It makes long-term investments in sectors such as telecommunications, transportation, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence.

Under Son’s direction, the Vision Fund took substantial stakes in a wide range of companies, including ride-hailing, logistics, and financial-technology firms. Some of these investments grew rapidly, while others encountered operational or financial difficulties, contributing to periods of significant volatility in SoftBank’s financial results.

The scale and pace of the Vision Fund’s investments distinguished it from traditional venture capital firms and made Son one of the most influential—and closely scrutinized—figures in global technology finance.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, Son increasingly emphasized artificial intelligence as central to his long-term view of technological and economic development. He argued that advances in data processing, machine learning, and computing power would transform a wide range of industries, shaping both business and society.

This emphasis was reflected in SoftBank’s investment strategy, including the Vision Fund’s focus on companies developing or applying AI technologies. It was also evident in SoftBank Group’s ownership of Arm Ltd., a semiconductor design company whose chip architectures are widely used in mobile devices and increasingly in data centers and AI applications.

Through public speeches and corporate strategy, Son positioned AI as a unifying theme linking SoftBank’s telecommunications operations, investment activities, and longer-term technological ambitions.

Son’s career has been marked by a rare combination of entrepreneurial activity, large-scale investment, and long-term strategic ambition. From his early expansion of SoftBank through M&A to his later role in global technology finance, he has occupied a distinctive position among Japanese business leaders.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Son’s influence has derived less from the creation of a single dominant product than from his role as an organizer of capital and technology in numerous industries and regions.

By the early 21st century, he had become one of the most prominent and closely watched figures in the global technology sector, largely through his leadership of telecommunications businesses and large-scale investments in technology companies.