I mean... Masayoshi Son must be one of the worst investors in history, at least in terms of absolute losses. That guy loses more money than anyone.
Lost 70B during the dot com crash. Writing down billions in 2019 on Uber and WeWork. I know a few folks that worked at other companies he/Vision Fund invested in. One received $200M and they had no idea what to do with it. They spent it on headcount, which isn't the smartest when you don't know what direction to go. That investment will never see a positive return.
Anyways, other than Alibaba, does Masa have any other big wins?
This is just nuts. Wasting tens of billions of dollars. More and more the vision fund looks Saudi’s vehicle to throw money away. There must be some underlying reason why they are ok with wasting this much money. I bet the billions wasted on WeWork, would have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty
Possibly, but there is another angle here. WeWork isn’t really a tech or realestate company, but a financial instrument to be propped up and then dumped into the lap of late investors or the market, so that early investors can run away with a nice profit. The IPO attempt failed. Now they need time for people to forget, so the financial instrument can be repackaged and sold to some gullible private investors a bit later. SoftBank will get new shares significantly cheaper than the older ones, and as long as they can keep the patient on life support long enough for someone else to believe in it, the whole game will pay off nicely. Probably a few years though, waiting for the next wave.
Lost 70B during the dot com crash. Writing down billions in 2019 on Uber and WeWork. I know a few folks that worked at other companies he/Vision Fund invested in. One received $200M and they had no idea what to do with it. They spent it on headcount, which isn't the smartest when you don't know what direction to go. That investment will never see a positive return.
Anyways, other than Alibaba, does Masa have any other big wins?