Skimmed through this hoping it was some sort of joke, and there was a genuine "gotcha" moment before diving into the stuff professional analysts spend lots of time examining.
Turns out, the joke was on me. I got pictures of fucking geese.
Softbank aren't really doing this any more though. They are making very large bets on relatively few companies. Their vision fund 1 was something like 100 billion spread between about 100 companies, so 1 billion each. This is rather different than the usual VC. It's hard to get data, but most data suggest smaller rounds have better success [1].
Is a small number of people with huge amounts of money investing in things nobody wants better than lots of people with small amounts of money investing in things they want?
This feels like the same PE theory / sell job: "Untapped value that can only be unlocked with PMaaS - Professional Management as a Service", only scaled up "because AI". They're trying to change the narative so that SB has a huge intrinsic value, while it's common knowledge that venture funding is a hit-driving business. I don't blame them but it's total bullshit. Funds do this when they're out of ideas and throw a lot of very expensive spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
One of Masayoshi Son's recent slideshows has been doing the rounds on the FediVerse this week. If you've seen people making odd comments about 'Goose was not valued.' or 'Goose value 71.' or 'eggs do not lay eggs' over the past few days then Son's 2026 presentation to shareholders is what they are going on about.
This is the context that a lot of us didn't have. Son has been doing this since 2010, the goose laying golden eggs going back to at least 2014, and the 2020 earnings report having a run of 23 slides of geese and eggs. Other weird things over the years have included dog telepathy and a representation of COVID-19 as flying unicorns jumping out of a ditch. As the Bloomberg people pointed out, this significantly came to the attention of the world outwith Japan, which largely boggled at some of the slideshows sans context, in 2019 and 2020. Part of the world is discovering this afresh in 2026.
Some of the criticism over the years has focussed not on the more oddball aspects of these slideshows, but on the stereotypical way in which the graphs with projections just suddenly make lines shoot upwards.
Softbank is a codesmell. If u have worked for a Softbank startup, you'd know. I don't use any Softbank backed services. The employees are in extreme stress. Nothing good can come out of that environment than money printing for the big dogs.
I once has the displeasure of using a SoftBank SIM in Japan which relentlessly spammed my phone with unblockable ads. The continuing survival of this company is proof that billionares that got lucky once cannot possibly fail.
They were right that economics is a dismal science, but to me these days it's not only about the ugly Moloch-like consequences, but also because these utter wierdos are in charge of it, and the medium of economic domination is a PowerPoint of nonsensical AI slop.
I assume that the PowerPoints can be absolute slop because they do not matter at all, the power is elsewhere.
It all comes to names here. The world puts waaay too much faith in successful people being successful again, and too much of the success is attributed to their inherent talent. It’s a classic fallacy of authority.
Ironically, because everyone thinks that everyone thinks that they will succeed, investing on them does yield good returns, because others are likely to invest after. And they do indeed continue to succeed!
It’s as arbitrary as tulips. Bubbles of names. That’s why it’s weirdos, because it’s quite random who is chosen, and I suppose weirdos have a more pronounced brand.
Of course it’s not completely arbitrary, there’s real merit in cracking the initial chicken-and-egg, depending on where you start in life. And there are plenty of ways of squandering the opportunities that come after. But still.
I mean, he was pretty vindicated on Uber. Which kind of hurts me to say, I was a long time Uber bear. But it did indeed emerge from the pandemic stronger.
Quick Google suggests Uber is up 66% on its IPO price, but the S&P index is up 85% over the same time period. I think Softbank also sold out around 2022, so the return (vs IPO price) would have been even lower. Didn't check for stock splits etc but I don't think Uber was a home-run for Softbank at all.
WTF do you mean by this? Even constitutions can be amended, and if an odious law cannot be changed through politics then that only means it will be changed by other means.
I think in most countries the drivers get paid by the taxi license holders and usually can make more money and/or more have more flexible working conditions driving for Uber.
Masayoshi Son for me has always been the best living example of survival bias. Got very lucky once, been taking terrible decisions ever since.
Zuckerberg is another great example.
And then spent 80 billion on the Metaverse, while actively making the world a worse place.
Masayoshi son has lost absolutely stupid amount of money on things like WeWork, which he deemed as revolutionary as "AGI", which he is still pushing as inevitable.
These are immensely stupid people, with a lot of capital and non-existen ability to self-reflect or care, both enormous advantages when you play a game that favors carelessness.
It's like somebody winning the lottery once, constantly investing all of their money into more lottery tickets, and going "holy shit, look at how smart I am at picking lottery numbers; I've already won something four times!"
Given that the lottery has a typical expected value of -$1.00 per ticket you really should revise your opinion of how lucky/smart these people who repeatedly make tens of billions by pouring all their money into tickets are.
Interesting that you would use as an example two people who ingeniously built complex systems, through lots of hard and clever work, to turn the odds in their favour. "Incredible mind for mathematics" indeed. Doesn't sound like luck was the secret sauce.
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