Masayoshi Son: High-tech gambler

It's 1973 and a 16-year-old boy is in McDonald's. He's very animated and has some pretty specific demands. He doesn't want a Big Mac and Fries and it's not... a McDonald's, the boy has stormed into the head offices of the McDonald's Corporation in Japan. He's in reception and he's insisting on being allowed to see the boss of the entire company.

He's been trying to speak to him for weeks. He's phoned and phoned. And now he's even flown across Japan from the southwesterly island he lives on to the capital, Tokyo, just to get an audience with this famous businessman. The receptionist is doing her best to send him away, but eventually the boy will get exactly what he wants, and it won't be for the last time.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Every episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money. Then we judge them. Are they good, bad or just enough a billionaire? My name is Zing Zing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster. My name is Simon Jack and I'm the BBC's business editor. So that kid we were just talking about in McDonald's was Masayoshi Son, who goes by the name Masa.

He's now worth 29 billion US dollars, but he was once, very briefly, the richest person in the world. Not anymore, though, but he still remains the founder, the CEO and the largest shareholder of a company called SoftBank. This is a Japanese... best known for investing in tech companies, many of which you will have heard of. The 67-year-old has invested all controlled assets worth over a trillion dollars and has become famous for making some of the biggest and most profitable investments.

Now, he's quite notorious for making very quick decisions on huge investments. And his nicknames, I love this, include the unicorn hunter for his investments, the old man. for his habit of befriending older businessmen as mentors and the Bill Gates of Japan for his impact on the Japanese software industry. He's not shy. He's compared himself to Napoleon.

Genghis Khan for his empire building and to Jesus. As Masa says, he too is misunderstood. And Masayashi-san has popped up in many of the billionaire stories you've told on this podcast, as we'll see. So it's about time we... So let's take him from zero to a first million.

Masayashi-son was born in a shack his family shared with pigs on squatted land in August 1957. So he came from quite humble origins. Now, this was in a small city on Kyoshu, the southernmost island of Japan. And Masa was a... third generation Zainichi, which means residing in Japan. It's applied to ethnic Koreans like Masa, whose family had moved to Japan before the Second World War, when Japan had annexed Korea and made it part of their empire in 1910.

World War II, the Japanese government actually no longer recognised them as Japanese citizens. They said they were foreigners residing in Japan temporarily. So resident but not citizens. Exactly. So kind of... institutionalized discrimination, if you want to put it that way. And like other Zainichi, Masa was born with two names, a Korean name, Song Jung Yoo, and a Japanese name, Masayoshi Yasumoto.

When he was growing up, though, he and his family would only ever use their Japanese surname, Yasumoto. And his early childhood was pretty tough, as you can imagine. So he was the second of four boys with his family living on this squatted land next to a railway station. His dad, Mitsunori, worked 18-hour days raising pigs.

Masa, however, remembers this as being a good childhood despite its obvious hardship. He does, however, recall one seminal incident from his youth when a group of Japanese children taunted him for living in the Korean ghetto. They threw stones, one hit his head and drew blood.

biographer, Lionel Barber, that gradually you start to realise that you're not a Japanese kid. You start to understand the nationality, the race, the discrimination and Lionel Barber's book, Gambling Man, has been a pretty useful source for this podcast. In spite of this discrimination and thanks to the minimal business costs of raising pigs who were eating restaurant scraps on squatted land.

Masa's father's hard work actually pulled the family out of poverty. So by the time he was seven, the family had moved to a bigger city. And there his dad got out of the pig business, a dirty one, no doubt, and into another one.

Pachinko. Another dirty one? Well, I mean, dirty in a different way. Have you ever played Pachinko? All I know about Pachinko is that what you end up doing is collecting quite a lot of small ball bearings. Yes. For which reason, I've never been quite sure. Okay, so if you're wondering right now, now what pachinko is it is sort of a mix between pinball and slot machines and i remember when i went to japan you would just walk down the high street and you will see pachinko parlors

lining the streets, you know, and they are bright, they're fluorescent, you can hear the pinging of the ping pong balls. It's quite a sight. It is a really popular hobby in Japan. Gambling actually is illegal there mostly. So when you win pachinko, you get these prizes.

that you almost always sell on for cash at these neighbouring stores to kind of circumvent these regulations around gambling. What's even cashing your bull bearings for sort of real money? Exactly. So sort of like a games arcade with the coupons. And very interesting because... Japanese business culture is not a gambling one at all.

It is salaryman, you work for the same company for 50 years, and then you go and retire. This guy is one of the ultimate gamblers we've ever seen on this podcast. Yeah, it's interesting how that kind of family business maybe feeds into his later career. But there's a bit of the kind of ostracization, a bit of the prejudice going on here because Pachinko very much associated with Koreans who often had trouble breaking into other industries.

And it wasn't a hugely appealing business to be in. And also, it could be quite dangerous. Some people know the word Yakuza. Japanese mafia, who often used pachinko parlours for money laundering, turf wars were common. Gambling places are brilliant.

Brilliant for money laundering because no one knows how much you brought in, how much you leave with. But Massa's dad had made a success of it. It seems certain that Massa got some of his business acumen from his dad. Mitsunori's burgeoning empire was eventually generating a monthly revenue.

of half a million US dollars, although he was also supporting 20 members of an extended family. But that extended family, there was no doubt that there was a singular golden child, and that was the second son. Massa. So Massa's dad always thought of him as being an absolute genius. He was told he was the best, he was number one, he was brilliant. And that understandably gave him the belief that he was actually number one. Now his dad didn't want Massa to follow him into the...

Pachenko world where he'd found the life tough He wanted his son to be a politician, dreamed of him one day being president of Korea. But Masa himself was not that keen on politics or, as it turns out, on pachinko. He did, though, want to make lots of money and he became obsessed with meeting...

a famous and eccentric Japanese businessman called Den Fujita to get advice on how to become rich. Now, Fujita had gotten rich by introducing McDonald's to Japan. So the teenage master kept calling Fujita's office and asking for a meeting. And perhaps unsurprisingly, they said no to this teenager. But...

Masa kept calling. In fact, he called so much that he realized that buying a flight to Tokyo was cheaper than all the long distance phone calls. So that is exactly what he did. He flew to Tokyo, the capital. He headed to Fujita's office and told the reception. perfectionist. Tell Mr. Fujita, you don't have to look at me. You don't have to talk to me. You can keep on working, whatever you're doing. I just want to see his face for three minutes.

So Vegeta agreed to meet him and Masa asked what business he should go into. And Vegeta's answer was computers. He said, don't look at the past, look at the future industries, the computer industry. That's what you should focus on. This is a crazy story, right? I mean, it has the flavour of an apocryphal story. Doesn't it just?

What I think is very interesting about this entire series is that massive confidence is rewarded. Now, we don't know how many massively confident people tried the same thing and didn't succeed. So we've got no kind of alternate. hypothesis. You've got no control group. Because, you know, a lot of the common denominator of our billionaires is incredible persistence. Yeah, incredible persistence and some might say overconfidence. Well, Fujita also told Massa that he should learn

English. So he immediately signed up for a summer language course at a private university in Oakland, California. And it's at this point that Masa stops using his Japanese name, Yasumoto, and uses Son. He's just 16. He's really confident, clear.

about who he is and his future because after he finished the summer course, he decided to continue his education in America rather than returning to Japan. His parents protested about him staying in America, but he told them that graduating from an American university...

would elevate his status on returning to Japan. And then he enrolled in a Californian high school, but asked the head teacher or principal there if he could take the high school graduate exams after two weeks rather than two years. But Supreme Ability, because the school agreed, gave him a bit of extra time to use a Japanese-English dictionary and he passed. So after two weeks of school...

He's an American high school graduate, and he stays in California. And he goes back to that private university for a couple of years. And when he's 18, he transfers to the University of Berkeley, also in California. It's one of the top universities, a hotbed of early tech development. he studied economics and computer science. And while he's studying, Masa was determined to think of his next...

big business ideas. So he would devote five minutes of each day to thinking of possible inventions and write them in a notebook. So he gathered around 250 of these. But Masa wasn't really an inventor. These were just things he thought would make good inventions.

And he soon got what he thought was a good idea, a talking word translator, something to translate spoken language. Now, I have to say... Everyone thinks that's a good idea, right? I mean, Star Trek thought this was a good idea. Of course it's a good idea. But he had no idea how to make it. So he looked through Berkeley's directory of professors to find someone who could help him by designing a prototype. And he found a guy, Professor Forrest.

Forrest Moser, he'd helped design the prototype. And Masa also got physicist Chuck Carlson, who worked at the University's Space Sciences Laboratory, to lead the team building it. Moser said that Masa didn't know any electronics, but it was clear from the very beginning.

He was an entrepreneurial genius. And key to that entrepreneurial genius, he's got a professor and a guy who's running the space lab involved when he's very, very young. Yeah, I mean, he's an undergraduate, right? He's convincing these top professors from his uni to... basically work for him. He has clearly got the gift of the gab and by the age of 20 he's engaged to a Japanese-American woman called Masame Ono.

two years older than him but he's dedicated to his work perhaps a bit more than his relationship in fact on the morning of his wedding in 1978 he went to the lab to see a test of the latest translator prototype Professor Carlson did a demonstration that excited him. He typed in an English phrase and clicked the translate button and boom, a German translation appeared on the screen. Breakthrough, they'd done it. But in the meantime, he missed his own wedding.

Oh, you'd be in a doghouse for that one. And Masa, understandably, had to apologise to his tearful wife. They ended up rearranging the wedding for a week later. And then a week later, guess what? Masa was late again because he was at the lab. This time, however, the courthouse judge just agreed to marry the couple even though they were late for their own slot.

I don't know, but if I was Mas' fiancé, I would have said second time's not the charm, darling. I think it's off. We've had some pretty patient partners on this podcast, haven't we? James Dyson's wife, Deidre, springs to mind. Another level, though, this. His obsession with work, however, paid off pretty fast for the couple. In 1979, he sold his patent for this translator thing to the big electronics company, Sharp. Massa often says he sold it for $1 million. Sharp actually paid $423,000.

Either way, Masa kept a fair chunk of whatever it was for himself. That's because Masa actually told Moser, that professor, that Moser wasn't due any money at all as he had paid wages to all the engineers who had worked on the prototype. And while Moser has admitted... that they did only have a gentleman's agreement. He was a little bit bitter about it. He said...

I was his first business partner and on his first business deal, he lied and cheated me. So not exactly a resounding endorsement. Yeah, hold that thought for when we come to Judge Masayoshi Son. But he was very quick to move on, though. He started another business that imported arcade machines, things like space invaders, from Japan. Now, he paid over the odds to get his games flown to the US rather than shipped over, which means they arrived in days...

rather than weeks, and gave him an edge on his competitors. I can get these space invaders here faster than anyone else. But, you know, within six months, Masa was pretty successful. Him and his partner had imported 350 machines. They'd made a profit of around 200...

thousand dollars and again Massa often claims he actually made a million and he may be talking about turnover rather than profits but you know it's a profit of 200,000. Yeah he's a big talker but he's not quite at our first milestone a million. Yet, especially at this time, he did split the money from that business with his partner. So Masa went back and he finished his degree, but he'd promised his mother he'd return to Japan. So just before graduating in 1980, he flew home with his wife.

He'd already made quite a lot of money, but he wanted to do something big that would excite him. So he had a list of his 40 best ideas. all in different fields. So, you know, not exactly a specialist, our guy. He created this matrix of 25 measurements. He drew up a table. He scored each idea in each category. And the idea that came out top overall led him to start a company called Softbank. Softbank, an incredibly famous institution now.

This is the company that will make Masa a billionaire. In 1981, he starts SoftBank to fill a very simple gap in the marketplace. He could see that the personal computer, the PC, was going to be big news. But in Japan, there was no kind of... shop catalogue where consumers could get the latest software available so he started softbank to provide japanese pc consumers with software

And Masa had just returned from America, right? So he was enthused by the startup culture he discovered while he was in California. Japan had basically nothing like this. You know, this idea that you could quickly build a hugely valuable company from literally nothing.

And he wanted to be the one person who changed that. But he had some problems convincing anyone else that that would work, even his own employees. When he started SoftBank, he hired two men whom he decided to inspire about the company's future.

tangerine box apparently in the middle of their office and told them that profits will have to be 10 billion yen in five years 50 billion yen in 10 years and eventually i want to be able to count profit in trillions of yen now these two employees both quit two weeks later So the inspirational speech didn't work. Yeah. And understandably, Masayoshi-san started looking elsewhere. So he moved to Tokyo. He got Japan's Management Research Institute to invest $43,000 of startup capital in SoftBank.

Some people were kind of impressed by him. And a few weeks later, he booked a booth at a big annual consumer electronics trade show in Osaka. He called all the software suppliers and he offered them space in his booth for free. They said yes, but they were a bit confused. over how Massa would make any money himself from this. And Massa himself didn't seem to have much of a plan, to be honest. In fact, he spent 80% of that money that he got and only sold $3,000 worth of software products. Now...

At the time, Masa was saying that people were actually laughing at him. But he did get a call from a top Japanese electronics chain who were about to open a computer megastore. Masa almost refused this meeting, but then he did meet them and he asked for an exclusive deal to provide software for the store. He told them, I have no evidence, but I strongly believe in myself. And he got the deal. I think it's pretty unusual just to sort of say.

I don't know, but I think I'm great. It is in many ways more akin to the startup culture in California than it is in Japan. And getting this deal with a top company led to more exclusive deals with software vendors. But he now needed some cash both to fulfil the orders and because he wanted to buy out the Management Research Institute stake in SoftBank. They wanted $130,000 for their $43,000 investment. So he borrowed $200,000.

000 from his family which begs the question why didn't he borrow from them in the first place but he also wanted a bank loan of 450 000 as well Now, in Japan, the size of this loan was unheard of at the time, especially if you're looking at everything, you know, a three-month-old company run by someone so young and inexperienced. It wasn't really the done thing.

Masa asked a Japanese mentor he'd met in California who happened to be the head of research at Sharp Electronics to vouch for him. So this guy was obviously another one charmed by Masa because he not only vouched for him, but he offered up his own. Now, I find this...

Truly wild. I don't know, maybe this is where he gets that old man killer nickname from. I think it's nuts. Either Mass has got some serious dirt on this guy or he is such an amazingly charismatic fundraiser that you think this guy is going... places and to be honest the story so far leads you to believe that everyone thinks that from his parents to just about everyone else anyway he got he got that loan

He then launched two computer magazines to help sell his software. Sales started pretty slowly, but when he redesigned the magazine, SoftBank started to take off. And this was really because of the boom of PCs worldwide. 1982 was the year that...

Time magazine swapped their man of the year for machine of the year and put a computer on its front cover. Wow. So Massa was really perfectly placed to ride that wave. Yeah, right place, right time. Exactly. So by that year, SoftBank had 75 employees. They had a turnover. of 2 billion yen or around 8 million dollars. So while Masa often claims that he was a millionaire by the age of 19...

1982, when he's 25, is the point we can confidently say that Masayoshi Son is definitely a millionaire. But just as he's becoming really successful, something else comes along. Sickness threatens to take.

All of that away. So in May 1982, just as SoftBank is taking off, Masayoshi-san is told he has just two to five years to live. He's diagnosed with a serious illness, hepatitis B. And by now, him and his wife have one daughter and she's pregnant with their second child. So the family genuinely feared for their future.

He had to be hospitalised to receive treatment and by 1983 he was so sick he had to give up his chief executive role at SoftBank, leaving an older businessman in charge. Now he did continue to attend meetings but only because he was afraid the banks would...

foreclose on their loans if they knew just how ill he was. But he also worked to find a way of making himself better. He researched hepatitis treatments and found a doctor trialing an experimental treatment. And he discovered it was having a 70 to 80% success. rate he got himself on the program in early 1984.

And after just four months of being on this treatment, his illness started to turn around. We can't say for sure it was a treatment that saved him, but in two years, he made a full recovery. While Mas' life was saved, he found that his business was now in a weakened state.

was starting to make losses. So Masa once again started brainstorming new ideas. And it was at this point that Japan had just deregulated the telecoms, the telecommunications market by the mid-1980s. Similar thing was happening. elsewhere in the uk for example and it meant there were now lots of different telephone companies vying for consumers businesses so masa came up with an idea for a computer device capable of finding the best rate for users if you like this is a sort of proto

version of price comparison websites that we see to this day. Yeah, but Masa was one of the first ones to think about it. So he filed a patent and he went out and got an engineer he knew to help build it. This engineer was actually a fellow liver patient he'd met at hospital. who sadly died of his disease just a year later. And the product that he created called the NCC Box was a huge success. And the royalties from that...

actually helped to clear SoftBank's debts. Meanwhile, Massa carries on. In the late 1980s, he was back as chief executive of SoftBank.

thinking of selling shares in the company. But if he was going to do that, he wanted SoftBank to be something much bigger than just a software seller. He wanted to expand into other areas of computing. So he decides to create this growth by investing some of SoftBank's profits. to other tech ventures. And Masa has spotted a US company called Novell. They've developed...

which is a computer operating system that was becoming hugely popular. Novell doesn't exist anymore, but at one point they were the second largest maker of software for PCs in the world. They were Microsoft's biggest competitors, big player in... computing so master flew to utah to meet the chief exec ray norder and he was in his 70s

and wasn't particularly impressed by this young, enthusiastic Japanese guy who wanted to invest in his company. Yeah, probably one of the few people who wasn't entranced by Masa. But, you know, money talks and... Ray was impressed by how quickly Masa raised funds. So in 1990, SoftBank signed a joint venture to adapt and distribute Novell's netware in Japan. And this was a game changer. It really changed the course of SoftBank's future. The company went...

from being just a sort of software distributor, a reseller, if you like, to becoming a partner and networking business. And a SoftBank executive said, once we had this new technology... Customers treated us differently. The Novell deal suddenly changed the way we were seen by foreign and Japanese companies. You're not just a trader.

You're a principal. You've got something. Yeah. So in fact, up until this point, the company had been called SoftBank Japan. But in 1990, it officially changed its name to just SoftBank to reflect this new global outlook. And SoftBank's revenues were getting well. They grew to 350 million in 1991.

That's roughly 50% coming from American software distribution deals and partnerships. Even Novell's bitter rivals Microsoft started to want to do business with SoftBank. Massa famously met with Bill Gates in Japan in 1992 and convinced him... that SoftBank should distribute Japanese versions of Microsoft Word and Excel. Other big US tech firms like IBM soon did deals with SoftBank as well. So SoftBank was riding high with the sales of software on the then cutting edge new...

called CD-ROMs, which you may be too young to remember, but essentially they were just CD discs, computer discs. 1994 was the point where Massa was ready to start selling shares in this incredibly successful company. Now, he does something a bit different. different than some of our other billionaires. We've talked often about the IPO, the initial public offering, which is where you basically...

sell shares to the general public. What they did was they sold shares on what's called the OTC market. That's over the counter. These are sales of shares that aren't facilitated by a stock exchange. Literally, you go into a shop and say, Can you sell me this? And the prices don't have to be publicly disclosed. So they're basically trade...

directly between two parties rather than on a visible exchange. And is that part of the reason why this might have been attractive to Masa, the fact that it's not as visible as going public? I'm struggling to understand why he would do this because there's something... about the IPO, which gives you publicity and legitimacy.

In the eyes of the investing public. You think about Martha Stewart going public with her company in that big PR blitz. Yeah, you ring the bell. It's a market stall on the World Exchange. An OTC thing. It says over the counter. people feel it's like a little bit under the counter, if you know what I mean, because it's not quite got the same razzmatazz. I don't know. I find it kind of odd. Well, Masa ended up keeping a 70% stake in SoftBank, so he still retained complete control of the companies.

So the valuation of the shares he'd sold meant the stake he retained was worth $2.4 billion. So we can safely say at this point in 1994 that Masayoshi Son is comfortably a billionaire.

Having become a billionaire, he sets out on a spending spree and he makes some very big bets funded by bank loans in part. SoftBank pays $800 million for the Condex Group, which runs computer trade shows. He loves these trade shows, as we remember. He even made friends with a man called...

Steve Jobs at one in the 1985 show. He'll reappear in this story. He also spends $1.2 billion for an 80% stake in the leading memory boardmaker Kingston and a whopping $3 billion for the Ziff Davis Group, who run... computer magazines and yet more trade shows. These high prices were raising eyebrows, but Massa explained to the New York Times in 1995 that his plan was to make himself a key player in the infrastructure of the personal computer business.

not only in Japan, but in America. And by now, Masa has a U.S. arm, SoftBank Holdings, to invest in American companies. And he said, a year ago, we had five employees in America. Now we have 700. By the end of the year, we'll have 1,000. 200. The New York Times calls him the Bill Gates of Japan, a phrase he is

Or too happy to repeat. Why wouldn't you be? And to fund some of these investments, he changes slightly his approach to financing. In the old days, he'd go for a bank, for a loan. But he starts issuing corporate bonds. Those are bonds you sell to. Anyone will buy them. not a bank. And this led to a cheaper form of financing for him. Yeah. And understandably, the banks aren't really happy about this, right? So they see this as a real threat. They lobby the government.

But because Masa is able to do this thanks to a new law in Japan, the Ministry of Finance actually ends up siding with SoftBank. And suddenly SoftBank's fee structure could be reduced by up to 90% because they're cutting out the middleman. Masa was able to start clearing... those depths much more quickly. So he's basically in the vanguard of a movement which really changed the economic fortunes of Japan at that time. It was a big shift.

But it put Masa in a prime position to invest in American companies because he could access public debt rather than private bank debt. He had cheap borrowing from the domestic bond market. And at that time in the 90s, the yen was still strong. the dollar i remember being in palm springs california when every single hotel you went by say

Owned by Japan, owned by Japan, golf course, owned by Japan. I mean, it was huge at that time. A really massive seismic change in Japan's fortunes, right? Yeah. It meant Masa could now invest in US companies far more easily than even his US peers could.

And this is where the legend of Master Yoshison, for my money, begins, because that's when he starts making huge bets on startup companies, usually internet companies. He spotted that as the next big thing. And in some cases, these huge investments become... Spectacular. Yep. First up.

is Yahoo. So in 1996, Masa wants to buy the whole company. He is, however, a little bit late. So this is a startup that's already making waves. It's got some big investors, but Masa being Masa, he still wants in. And of course... This being Masayoshi's son, he already knows one of the founders, a guy called Jerry Yang. So they're at a party sharing cold pizza, and Masa offers a cool $105 million for a 33% stake in Yahoo.

Yang actually takes the money and he said most of us thought he was crazy and that putting $100 million in a startup in March 1996 was very aggressive. And, you know, it was. It's a lot of money. Yeah, but he went even further than that. He put another $250 million, taking his total bet to $355 million. As the price rose, SoftBank soon got back $450 million just by selling off some of those Yahoo shares.

they still had a 28% stake and that alone was worth $8.4 billion. Now, Jerry Yang says that he doesn't think it was just luck on Masa's part. He actually believes that Masa looks ahead in 15 to 20... year chunks. Masa, because of investments like Yahoo, he gets a reputation as this kind of visionary. He becomes this hugely influential figure in Silicon Valley and he keeps making these big bets and starts a trend. So he's not a manager.

medley. Well, remember, he didn't actually know how to do any of the electronics. He just was an entrepreneurial genius, said one of his early collaborators. Exactly. So he has a habit of just getting out of people's way. And the same man said, Masa is a master of the internet universe. He has a clear vision of how technology is going to connect everyone globally in the next 50 years. And he doesn't let daily, weekly or monthly fluctuations get in the way. He holds his nerve.

So that man, by the way, saw Massa's $400 million investment in his company grow to $2.4 billion. Massa sometimes does get it right. He had a bunch of smaller bets too. In 1999, Forbes magazine was reporting that SoftBank had invested $1.7 billion in more than 100 different internet companies. This, of course, was the peak of the internet boom. there was a massive sense of FOMO, fear of missing out. So you wanted to basically have a few bucks on every horse that was in the race.

He was riding high. For three days in February 2000, he became the world's richest man, knocking Bill Gates off the top spot with his personal net worth estimated at $70 billion. But if you're looking at the timeline now and you're... thinking 1999, 2000, you'll probably know what is happening next because after the dot-com boom comes the dot-com crash. So in 2000, markets around the world began a severe correction. The Nasdaq...

fell by more than 75% between March 2000 and October 2002. It wiped out over $5 trillion in market value and SoftBank's share price plummeted. Masa actually ends up losing 96% of his wealth. according to Lionel Barber's biography. Ouch, 96% of your whole wealth. So that's pretty much the whole $70 billion gone. It's the largest personal loss in history at that time.

He's still a billionaire, but this loss is enormous. And he decides then to refocus from software into digital telecommunications. But he takes some pretty desperate measures. Yeah, so there's this story, right, told by Massa to the Wall Street Journal and confirmed. by the man in question of Masa storming into the Tokyo office of an official in Japan's telecommunications ministry. He's holding a cheap cigarette lighter and shouting,

This is the end. If you don't help me, I'm going to pour gasoline all over myself right here and set myself on fire with this $1 lighter. And amazingly, he actually got the help he wanted, which was to successfully launch a broadband service. I mean, pretty high stakes. Again, he gets what he wants. And we've seen this time and time again with our billionaires, against the odds.

on his uppers, lost 96% of his wealth. He then comes back and pulls a stunt like that and manages to get them to agree. But it was actually a deal he'd already done that, in fact, brought Massa... back from the brink. Because back in 1999, as SoftBank was peaking, they'd arranged a speed dating event for Chinese entrepreneurs. And that was where Masa had met one of our other billionaires, a guy called Jack Ma. So Jack Ma's full story.

is an hour episode. But in brief, Ma pitched his company called Alibaba, which he described as an electronic yellow pages matching buyers and sellers. So Masa offered him $40 million. Ma at first turned him down. He said he didn't need that much.

But after a few months' pursuit, Ma eventually accepted $20 million for 30% of the company. And that... investment single-handedly saved Masayoshi Son after that dot-com crash Alibaba became profitable at the end of 2002 when it went public five years later in 2007 Masa's stake was worth a cool 10 billion dollars and at its peak master's 20 million dollar investment

would be worth £72 billion. That's got to be one of the greatest investments of all time. That is the comeback of a century. I mean, it must have made him think he was absolutely invincible. Yeah, and a lot of these people do have that kind of unshaken...

self-belief that they are right. And the rest of the world will realise that they're right at some point. I mean, maybe this is where the comparison to Jesus comes in, right? I mean, it's quite the resurrection. So Massa's the richest person in the world at one point. Then he loses almost everything. I mean, still remains a billionaire.

But he never stops making these big bets. So one of the things he did was to convince his old friend Steve Jobs to let him distribute the iPhone in Japan. And that, of course, was huge. Vassa claims he tried to show Jobs a scam. Thank you. because Masa had...

Asked first. But you know, distributing the iPhone is huge, right? The world's most successful consumer electronics product of all time. And I think Masa knew this because he spent a lot of money on making sure it was a success. He spent 17 billion... on Vodafone Japan to enable him to provide a phone network for the iPhone.

And the iPhone established SoftBank Mobile as the number one operator in Japan. It actually paved the way for them to acquire a controlling stake in a US mobile operator called Sprint in 2013. Sprint is, of course, massive. Huge. That then... merged with T-Mobile to become one of the three leading mobile companies in the US. SoftBank still holds a 24% stake in it. So when you think about it, he's a huge guy in US telecoms as well. Absolutely massive in US telecoms.

So this was an investment fund for the future that Massa wanted to be worth around $100 billion. Now, that is a lot of money. The average venture capital fund in Silicon Valley raises a maximum of... billion each round. So, you know, this is very ambitious, but, you know, very typical for Massa. So Massa needed some very rich investors indeed. So he went to one of the richest, Saudi Arabia's leader, controversial figure, Mohammed bin Salman.

but has billions, some would say trillions of petrodollars to invest. Bin Salman's aides weren't convinced that Massa was very reliable. The Saudi Minister of Commerce telling him, you went from hero to zero to hero. How do we know you won't go back to zero again? Massa replied, how many people come back after losing 96%? percent of their wealth.

After an hour or two, the two men were taking photographs together. A meeting was set up with Bin Salman. So once again, he managed to talk his way through this. Now, that meeting is now one of Mas' favourite stories. He's told it first to Bloomberg. He's repeated it since. Met with MBS for just 45 minutes and left with a $45 billion investment in his vision fund. One of the most lucrative meetings.

of all time maybe 45 minutes 45 minutes for 45 billion I can barely do a gym workout in 45 minutes exactly the vision fund was also backed by Apple by the way investors in Abu Dhabi had a slice and it reached that billion target of the fund in 2016. And it is still to this day, the largest fund of its kind in history. And it also goes against the typical venture capitalist playbook. They usually put small amounts into startups at the beginning.

And then as you grow, you get more money. But instead, Master just puts big money into startups much later on. But here's the real thing. It hasn't been that much of a success. It put massive investments into companies that didn't necessarily need it. Some of them focused then on growth at any cost rather than developing their ideas.

And, you know, some failures along the way. Yeah, some big failures of due diligence. So some companies were selling themselves to soft bank as tech companies when they really weren't. So the most famous example of this is WeWork. Adam Neumann.

Another story that we've told on the podcast, Newman famously saw this idea of WeWork being a tech company. Really, it was an office space company. He was a commercial landlord. It all blew up in Adam Newman's face. But there were also other companies that weren't goers. Oh, does that still exist? I need that. Well, maybe you should approach the Vision Fund and say you're ready to put in a...

Will you take my call? Well, there's also another app, maybe you're interested in this, Zoom, a company that uses robots to make pizzas. I mean, robots will make a car, for sure. But I think I can tackle a pizza. Decisions like this cost the Vision Fund a lot of money. He came across with an investment in Wirecard. This is a payments giant. It collapsed in 2020. It was Germany's biggest post-war fraud scandal. There was another company called Greensill. This was a...

supply chain finance business that collapsed in 2020 amid a massive lobbying scandal. So as he approaches his 70s... I don't know. Where do we think he is? There is talk that Masa is investing in AI. He's still looking to the future. Crucially, he's also still worth a lot of money. He's worth 29 billion. If at the end of the day, I make a few bets and I end up with 29 billion dollars.

I will consider that a good betting pedigree. Well, Simon, I think on that note, it is time to judge Masayoshi-san.

So now we judge our billionaires by things like wealth, villainy, philanthropy, their power, their legacy, and we score them in these categories 0 to 10. 10 and we start with wealth and there are two ways of looking at this one is absolute wealth and the other one is sort of you know how far they've come from where they started. So he's $29 billion, puts him around 60th richest person, was once the very richest for a few days. He's also had some of the biggest losses ever.

But for my money, this guy who grew up... With pigs. Right, literally growing up on land that his family squatted. It is quite the amazing journey, isn't it? For my money, he's a nine. I think he's a nine for sure. I mean, he has been the richest man in the world for a time. Okay, so wealth. nine each villainy um

He wasn't the best business partner to one of his first business partners? No, he didn't pay that early collaborator at Berkeley. He's also had a kind of gambling, high-stakes approach to some of his investments. Some people criticised him for over-inflating prices.

I do find what the new statesman said about him interesting. They basically said, by pushing more cautious investors out of the market, he's reshaped the tech investment landscape, convincing both his backers and entrepreneurs that companies like Uber and We...

work can scale in the same way as businesses which manage software and data but only if they take enough of his money. So really he's kind of changed the game. Massa himself said he's actually a bit embarrassed by some of his past approaches. He said When we were turning out big profits, I became somewhat delirious. And looking back at myself now, I'm quite embarrassed and remorseful.

Interesting. Yeah, you don't get a lot of our billionaires expressing remorse for anything. Remorse is a new one. I don't think we've ever used the word remorse on this programme ever before, have we? No, we need a word cloud of all the words we use most. We've had confidence, arrogance. Remorse has not really come up that often. Yeah, I rate him highly for saying that.

Villainy, it's hard, isn't it? Don't think he's ever been seen as a kind of villain. I'm going to give him a two on villainy. I can't find too much to complain about him. If your first ever business dealing ends up with you stiffing your partner, I feel like maybe.

You just rank a little bit higher. So I'm going to give him a three out of 10. OK, two for me, three for you. Philanthropy. Now, what do we know about that? So he has a charitable foundation that, in its words, supports youth with high aspirations and exceptional talents. But it's actually not very... clear how much money he gives to individuals or organisations. So really not a lot of information out there. Very skinny, the information on his philanthropy. You've got a feeling that if

There was more of it. We'd hear more about it because he's not exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to most things. No, he is a talker. So I think I would score him quite low on this. I'm going to give him a one out of 10 for philanthropy. I think a one out of 10 is...

works for me i mean he's got a foundation we just need more information about it okay and then power and legacy so this is you know what have they done to influence the world have they changed it what we remember them for what do you make of that one now this is really interesting because massa actually has

connections with Trump. So he stood alongside Trump and pledged to invest 50 billion in American companies and create 50,000 jobs in 2016. So this goes quite a way back. In 2024, he pledged to invest 100 billion in the US over four years. So he's clearly a mover and shaker on the political landscape. He might have done that anyway.

True, regardless of who was in the White House. Given his massive investment in US companies. But aside from politics, he has had a real influence on how technology and business interact. Perhaps the biggest legacy is just how many other billionaires...

stories that we've covered he appears in as an investor his story is like a greatest hits of good bad billionaire he's so integral to the billionaire culture we talk about he's in all the selfies he's like the invisible hand guiding the fortunes of all these other billion dollars companies he's not Bill Gates he's not Bezos but he's kind of in the crowd yeah he's in the room when it happens he's in the room he's in the room so I'm going to give him a seven

of the power and legacy. I think it is interesting. He has really leapfrogged from his country of origin, his heritage, to becoming someone massive on the investment stage. On the global stage, yeah. Okay, I'm going to upgrade my seven to an eight. I think I'm going to agree with you. Eight out. of 10 okay we agree and then we've got to decide good bad or just another billionaire i think for my money he's just another billionaire yeah he makes billionaire moves

He makes risky investments that sometimes don't pay off. He changes the investment landscape. Some people say for the better because you need big money to be ambitious. Some people say for the worse because you should be cautious when it comes to spending loads of cash. It kind of works out evenly. I'm with you. I think he's just another billionaire. Sometimes that overwinning confidence, that incredible belief.

can lead you to great riches. But I bet there's someone just like that who didn't make great riches. So I'm just going to call him just another billionaire because he didn't invent anything, right? No, he didn't. He just is very good at spending money. So Masayoshi-san, you are officially just another billionaire. So who do we have next episode? We have the king of the court himself, a man who at six foot nine is a literal giant of the sport.

Yeah, broken just about every record and was the heir apparent for a whole generation who are looking for someone to succeed and fill the shoes, the very, very lucrative shoes of Michael Jordan, the heir to heir Jordan. That's on the next episode of Good Bad Billionaire. For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the commissioning editor is John Monnell. And if you enjoyed it, do tell a friend.