Masayoshi Son is not one for moderation. The career of the SoftBank founder is filled with surprising wagers, each seemingly more shocking than the previous one.
His most recent action involves liquidating his entire $5.8 billion Nvidia holding to focus entirely on AI. While this surprised the business world on Tuesday, perhaps it shouldn’t have. At this point, it’s almost more surprising when Son, age 68, doesn’t put all his chips on the table.
Consider that during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, Son’s net worth rose to approximately $78 billion by February 2000, briefly making him the wealthiest person globally. Then came the devastating dot-com collapse months later. He personally lost $70 billion – which, at the time, was the largest individual financial loss in history — as SoftBank’s market capitalization fell 98%, from $180 billion to only $2.5 billion.
Amid that awfulness, Son made what would become his most famous bet: a $20 million investment in Alibaba in 2000, decided (the story goes) after a mere six-minute meeting with Jack Ma. By 2020, that stake would eventually be worth $150 billion, transforming him into one of the venture industry’s most celebrated personalities and funding his recovery.
That Alibaba success has often obscured the times when Son has overstayed his welcome. When Son needed funds to launch his initial Vision Fund in 2017, he didn’t hesitate to seek $45 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – well before accepting Saudi money became commonplace in Silicon Valley.
After journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in October 2018, Son denounced the killing as “horrific and deeply regrettable” but insisted SoftBank couldn’t “turn our backs on the Saudi people,” maintaining the firm’s dedication to managing the kingdom’s capital. The Vision Fund actually increased its dealmaking shortly afterward.
That didn’t end up so well.
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A significant wager on Uber resulted in paper losses for years. Then came WeWork. Son disregarded his lieutenants’ reservations, “fell in love” with founder Adam Neumann, and assigned the co-working company an astounding valuation of $47 billion in early 2019 after making several prior investments in the company. However, WeWork’s IPO plans failed after it released a notoriously problematic S-1 filing. The company never fully bounced back – even after ousting Neumann and implementing a series of cost-cutting measures – ultimately costing SoftBank $11.5 billion in equity losses and an additional $2.2 billion in debt. (Son later reportedly referred to it as “a stain on my life.”)
Son has been engineering another comeback for several years, and Tuesday will surely be remembered as a key moment in his turnaround story. Indeed, it will likely be remembered as the day SoftBank sold all 32.1 million of its Nvidia shares – not to diversify its wagers but to further invest elsewhere, including a planned $30 billion commitment to OpenAI and to participate (it reportedly hopes) in a $1 trillion AI manufacturing hub in Arizona.
If selling that position still causes Son some distress, that’s understandable. At approximately $181.58 per share, SoftBank exited just 14% below Nvidia’s all-time high of $212.19, which appears strong. That’s remarkably near peak valuation for such a large position. Nevertheless, the move marks SoftBank’s second complete exit from NVIDIA, and the first was extremely costly. (In 2019, SoftBank sold a $4 billion stake in the company for $3.6 billion, shares that would now be worth more than $150 billion.)
The action also unsettled the market. As of this writing, Nvidia shares are down almost 3% following the disclosure, even as analysts stress that the sale “should not be seen as a cautious or negative stance on Nvidia,” but instead reflects SoftBank needing capital for its AI ambitions.
Wall Street can’t help but wonder: does Son currently perceive something that others don’t? Based on his track record, perhaps — and that uncertainty is all investors have to rely on.
