SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has been planning his comeback

A new Financial Times profile of Mayayoshi Son opens with SoftBank CEO seeming to hit bottom, staring at his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I have done nothing I can be proud of.”

The scene is presented as the prelude to a hoped-for a comeback, with Son largely disappearing from the public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund took huge losses from investments like WeWork. Lionel Barber, who’s written a new biography of Son called “Gambling Man,” said that while Son appeared to be “doing penance,” he was actually “plotting a comeback.”

Now SoftBank is betting big on AI, finding success by taking chip design company Arm public — though even with AI, Son admits “maybe we were a little too early.”

Beyond the details of Son’s investment strategy and track record, there are some fun personal details, like his apparent fascination with Napoleon. When an activist investor brought up Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 meeting with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business guys.”

“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”