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At dawn, in the office of the SoftBank CEO. The staff of Masayoshi Son’s Invention Hotline relax. Fortunately, the phone has been silent overnight and the morning handover is just around the corner; however, experience shows that now is when the boss comes up with the brightest ideas.
marvelous! “Self-aware AI eggbeater? Genius, sir. We’re patenting it now.”
marvelous! “AI duck pond with GPT-generated automatic rattles? Mr. Tonight is really hot.”
marvelous! “Mara particle accelerator? I think it has something to do with artificial intelligence, sir? That’s a great hat-trick, and it’s not even Tuesday yet.”
Those exchanges may have been imagined, but according to what the person said last week, the arrangement was anything but. Masayoshi Son, 65, who is by some accounts the world’s foremost technology investor, has indeed begun to describe himself as an “architect of the future of humanity”. He threw himself into inventing games.
His company, SoftBank, does maintain a 24/7 hotline so shifts of employees and patent attorneys can deal with the founder’s ideas as they pop from his brain. The ideas (many apparently AI-related, based on Masayoshi Son’s late-night chat with ChatGPT and involving a titular collaboration with SoftBank-owned UK chipmaker Arm) are indeed flowing: 630 inventions announced in the past eight months, and one new invention. Edison’s goal is to reach 1,000 by the end of the year. Some of these inventions may have the potential to change the world, but Masayoshi Son happily admitted last week that most are actually completely useless.
While it’s all been a fascinating spectacle, it feels like a turning point — and not necessarily a good one — for SoftBank. Sudden turnaround victories have been the way Son and company have gone about it. But those transitions have a better chance of succeeding when Son is more clearly driven by money than by social structures. Same goes for Japan, and while it might hate to admit it, the original version is probably better.
According to reports, the background of the investor’s strategic shift is more complicated than the market guesses. Son hadn’t been seen in public for seven months until last week. The last time a loss-making, wound-licking founder declared SoftBank was in “defensive” mode; the company has been raising a whopping $36 billion in liquid assets since then. Now, in his grand reappearance, Masayoshi Son is telling shareholders the company is ready to fight back.
It’s certainly exciting. SoftBank looks like it smells of some big deals, and that always means a feast. But investors’ enthusiasm was tempered by what felt like a relief from a psychiatrist’s couch.
Before starting to talk about his invention, Son described days of uncontrollable tears and deep reflection on whether he was truly living the life he wanted. Will he spend the rest of his life in a state of obligation or in a state of freedom? Will he end his career as a businessman or as a cause more important to humanity?
There are distinctly personal attempts to recapture a happier past. It was the sale of one of his early inventions (a translation device, to Sharp) that financed the founding of SoftBank, and according to an authorized 2010 biography, the more carefree Masayoshi took part of every day in his early 20s To create SoftBank. invention. This ends when the administrative burden becomes too heavy.
In valuing SoftBank, the market will have to decide for itself how much of an investment the founder’s tears and crises in his later years sound like. But obviously, shorting Masayoshi Son has an opportunity cost. SoftBank could surge from two years of losses with a mega-deal or a mega-invention derived from Masayoshi Son. There is a fair share of people in Japan who would have a lot of sympathy for a born inventor who decides to go back to his roots. Rightly or wrongly, Japan sees itself as a home for such ideas.
The greater danger, however, is that the country as a whole would lose more than it gains by condoning Masayoshi Son’s retreat to a garden hut (even though the $68 billion garden hut is attached to the world’s foremost chip design firm). SoftBank — and more specifically Masayoshi Son — is a rarity in Japan. Not only is it globally important in the world of technology and tech investing, but the company has historically been eager to make big bets with confidence. Son remains a must-meet for any hopeful tech company, and the Vision Fund is still going strong.
Those qualities have waned over the past two years, and if Son’s inventions do occupy his attention, they may be gone now. Japan needs more companies like SoftBank, not more inventors.
leo.lewis@ft.com