Aiming High

Inoue, a Japanese author with long access to Masayoshi Son, wrote a biography covering Son's life from his childhood in a Korean immigrant family in Japan through the building of SoftBank.

The narrative covers the early years: growing up in a Zainichi Korean family facing discrimination, leaving for California as a teenager, studying at Berkeley, inventing an electronic translator he sold to Sharp, and returning to Japan to start a software distribution business. It then covers SoftBank's development: the software distribution and publishing businesses, the 1996 Yahoo investment that returned an extraordinary multiple, the 2000 investment in Alibaba which became one of the most profitable venture investments ever made, the broadband business Yahoo BB built by giving away modems on street corners against NTT's incumbency, the acquisitions of Vodafone Japan and later Sprint, the ARM acquisition, and the Vision Fund.

The recurring characteristic is scale of risk. Son repeatedly committed sums that would have destroyed the company if the bet failed, and Inoue documents the broadband period in particular, when SoftBank was losing enormous amounts monthly while building subscribers. The book also covers the 2000 collapse, in which Son's paper wealth fell by an amount reported as among the largest personal losses on record.

The book is authorised and admiring. It presents Son's own framing of his decisions, does not seriously examine the Vision Fund's performance, the WeWork investment, the governance questions about SoftBank's structure, or the pattern of losses in the later period. Readers wanting a critical assessment should look elsewhere. It is useful for the early history and for understanding how Son describes his own reasoning about risk.