Key Facts
- Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of SoftBank, has become one of Donald Trump's closest allies in the technology and investment world.
- Son was born in 1957 in Japan to Korean parents and grew up in poverty before moving to the United States at 16 to study at Berkeley.
- He built SoftBank into a global investment empire, with early bets on Yahoo! Japan, Alibaba, and Vodafone Japan.
- SoftBank's Vision Fund, launched in 2017, received more than $45 billion from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, helping Son deploy over $100 billion.
- Son has invested in U.S. firms such as Uber, Slack, WeWork, OpenAI, and Nvidia, and in Chinese firms such as Didi, ByteDance, and Alibaba.
- In December 2016, Son pledged $50 billion and 50,000 U.S. jobs after meeting Trump; in December 2024, he announced more than $100 billion in new U.S. projects, with Trump suggesting $200 billion.
- Son is chairman of Stargate, a Trump-backed AI infrastructure project with at least $500 billion in planned investment over four years, involving SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI.
- His proximity to Trump worries investors and diplomats, who fear that high-level discussions bypass normal government channels and create geopolitical risks.
Introduction: A Billionaire in the White House Orbit
Donald Trump's list of friends includes a heavyweight of artificial intelligence. Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of SoftBank, has spent months strengthening a relationship with the U.S. president. The alliance could shape American economic and geopolitical priorities, unsettling other countries, with China at the top of the list.
As the new duo attracts attention, several questions stand out. Who is Masayoshi Son? How did this Japanese billionaire become one of the most influential figures in global AI? And how has he learned to speak Trump's language with such ease?
From Rural Japan to a Global Tech Empire
Born in 1957 into poverty in Japan to Korean parents, Son was raised around poultry and pig farming. He once recalled collecting neighbors' garbage to feed the animals. He described it as so viscous that it made him nauseous, adding that the family worked hard and so did he. At 16, against his parents' wishes, he left Japan for the United States to study at Berkeley.
There he developed an English-Japanese translator and sold it for $1 million. He later founded SoftBank, initially a distributor of software for personal computers. In parallel, he made bold bets on Yahoo! Japan and, most famously, Alibaba, where he acquired about 30 percent of the Chinese giant. In 2006, SoftBank bought Vodafone Japan.
SoftBank then became known as a global super-investor, especially after creating the Vision Fund in 2017. The giant fund was designed to back promising technology startups. It was a major gamble, but it did not appear from nowhere. To invest at that scale, Son needed capital.
The Saudi Connection and the Vision Fund
He found it in Saudi Arabia. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman injected more than $45 billion into a SoftBank fund. The spectacular alliance drew other investors, including from Abu Dhabi. While Son had only about $28 billion in SoftBank's own funds, the combined contributions gave him more than $100 billion to invest, according to reports.
Ranked among the world's richest
Source:La Libre.be News