Masayoshi Son may be the oddest of the oddball billionaires

IN 2019, Elliott Management, an activist investment fund which had built up a 3 per cent stake in Softbank, demanded a meeting with the company’s founder and CEO, Masayoshi Son. Elliott complained that the company’s governance was such a mess that the stock was trading at least 50 per cent below net asset or “fair” value – the board was tame, the corporate structure was over-complicated, and “transparency” was not even a concept. Other business titans such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had bowed down before the god of good corporate governance. Why not Masa Son?

Son’s reply came as a surprise. “These are one-business guys. Bill Gates just started Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. I am involved in 100 businesses, and I control the entire (tech) ecosystem. These are not my peers. The right comparison for me is Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin (builder of the Great Wall of China). I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”

Emperor Son stands out as an oddball even in a world oversupplied with billionaire oddballs. He has made and lost more money than any man alive, topping the list of the world’s richest people in February 2000, then losing 97 per cent of his wealth in the dotcom crash. He has been the largest foreign investor in both capitalist America and communist China, the biggest startup funder in the world and the owner of 70 per cent of Japan’s Internet economy. He signs his e-mails “Big Boss”, and his private plane has the tail number N25TID, T standing for trillions and D for dollars.