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Why SoftBank Bets Big on AI
The world’s most powerful Venture Capitalist embraces Artificial Intelligence full-steam ahead. What is their rationale?
Masayoshi Son, the legendary Japanese investor, grew up in an illegally constructed tin-sheet home in a small Japanese railway city. Believing that the digital revolution would be the next great economic opportunity for the world, he made his luck by starting and selling startups before he graduated from college. Masa made a foolish-looking bet on a tiny Chinese e-commerce company despite brutal competition in 2000. 20 years later, the breakneck growth of Alibaba and the outcome for Masa is history. Now a public figure, Forbes estimates his wealth to exceed $20bn.
In 2017, Masa launched the Vision Fund, with an endowment of an unprecedented $100bn. As a comparison, the largest fundraised to date was $21.7bn by the world’s largest asset-holder Blackstone, and the largest VC fund was $5.6bn from the legendary Andreessen Horowitz company. The Vision Fund set out to own a share in every dollar spent digitally. Assuming that digital industries are winner-takes-all markets, then market leaders will provide staggering returns for their investors. The Vision Fund pampered tech startups with more money than their competitors to help them become the market leader. Its portfolio of…
