Masayoshi Son becomes Japan’s richest with US$55 billion fortune
Uniqlo billionaire Tadashi Yanai has been at the top of the country’s ranking for most of the past decade, and continuously since April 2022
[HONG KONG] Masayoshi Son’s big wager on artificial intelligence (AI) has paid off – propelling the SoftBank Group founder past Uniqlo billionaire Tadashi Yanai to become Japan’s richest person.
Son’s net worth jumped 248 per cent this year to US$55.1 billion on Wednesday (Oct 29), about US$23 million larger than Yanai’s, the chairman and biggest shareholder of Uniqlo’s parent company Fast Retailing.
Yanai has been at the top of the country’s ranking for most of the past decade, and continuously since April 2022, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The recent spike in Son’s fortune mirrors the performance of Tokyo-listed SoftBank, where the Japanese billionaire is the biggest shareholder with a stake of about one third.
The 68-year-old controls a global portfolio of tech investments from chipmakers to startup ventures, and has embarked on a spending spree this year to try and position the firm as a linchpin in the global AI boom.
SoftBank shares climbed on Wednesday after it was listed among companies interested in launching projects in the US during President Donald Trump’s visit to Tokyo earlier this week. Son has become one of Trump’s key foreign backers in global business, making an early pledge this year for US$100 billion in US investments.
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His most ambitious deals now include a planned US$30 billion investment in OpenAI and a US$500 billion initiative to build AI data centres and other infrastructure across the US in partnership with the ChatGPT operator, Oracle and Abu Dhabi fund MGX.
He is also seeking to team up with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for a trillion-dollar industrial complex in Arizona for AI and robots.
The gains linked to OpenAI, Arm Holdings and other AI bets have helped buoy SoftBank, with its shares becoming a proxy for the AI infrastructure spending boom.
Son’s new darlings include a surprise US$2 billion investment in Intel, the acquisition of ABB’s robotics arm for US$5.4 billion and fresh exposure to Nvidia and TSMC.
Son, an ethnic Korean born in Japan in 1957, began his entrepreneurial career while studying in the US by developing an electronic dictionary that he famously sold to Sharp for around US$1 million.
After returning to Japan, he founded SoftBank in 1981 as a distributor of computer software. Over the past four decades, the business has evolved into a conglomerate spanning telecommunications, digital payment and technology investment.
“Everything is breaking the right way for SoftBank at the moment,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kirk Boodry. “Everything AI-related is going up. The OpenAI connection is certainly a driver, as that company’s deals with Broadcom and AMD have boosted the overall rally.”
While the fortune of the tech entrepreneur has skyrocketed over recent months, that of the retail tycoon has barely moved this year. The last time Son surpassed Yanai was in 2014.
To be sure, some investors caution that AI valuations have run too high, warning that OpenAI and Nvidia are fuelling a complex web of business transactions that’s artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.
Rollercoaster fortune
At the height of the dotcom bubble, Son’s net worth was surging by US$10 billion a week. For three days, he was the richest person in the world, Son once said. But before the billionaire had a chance to tell anyone, SoftBank’s stock crashed.
“Somehow, I survived,” Son said in a 2017 interview on The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations. “At that time, I said, ‘Now is the time to go next stage, which is the Internet will become mobile internet.’”
Over the following two decades, an early bet on Alibaba Group Holding and years-long exclusive rights to Apple iPhone sales in Japan secured him a meteoric comeback, before Beijing’s crackdown on Chinese tech companies led to a hit to his fortune. BLOOMBERG
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