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Masayoshi Son (Japanese: 孫 正義, romanized: Son Masayoshi, Korean: 손정의, romanized: Son Jeong-ui; born 11 August 1957) is a Japanese billionaire technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. A third-generation Zainichi Korean, he naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1990.[2] He is the founder, representative director, corporate officer, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG),[3] a strategic technology-focused investment holding company, as well as chairman of UK-based Arm Holdings.[4]
As an entrepreneur, he achieved notability in PC software distribution, computing-related book and magazine publishing, and telecommunications in Japan, starting in the 1980s and booming throughout the 1990s and 2000s.[5][6] Poor investment decisions of Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group led to a panoply of losing[7] investments across the history of the company.[8][9][10][11] Since Son founded SoftBank in 1981, he has made many investments, but the vast majority of those deals failed, and his reputation as an investor rests almost solely on his $20 million initial investment in Alibaba Group in 2000, a stake that had grown to a paper valuation of about $50 billion[12] just before the Alibaba IPO[13] in 2014.[14] SoftBank's 27 percent stake in Alibaba was worth $132 billion[15] in 2018, including additional purchases of the stock since 2000.[16][17] The morphing of his own telecom company SoftBank Corp. into an investment management firm called SoftBank Group Corp. made him noted worldwide as a stock investor. However, after a number of high-profile setbacks, Son's investing strategy in the first and second SoftBank Vision Funds established in 2017 and 2019, has been described as one reliant on the greater fool theory.[18] A controversial figure,[19][20][21] Son has been called a gambler,[22] mocked by some specialized media[23] and dubbed the worst investor ever,[24][25] being known for eccentricity[26] and criticized because of his hubris.[27][28]