Masayoshi Son was born in Tosu, Japan, in 1957 to a Korean-Japanese family, trained at the University of California, Berkeley and founded SoftBank in 1981 as a software distributor. Over four decades he built the company into one of the world's most active technology investors, with anchor positions in Yahoo Japan, the early Alibaba investment that became one of the most successful venture bets in history, the acquisition of Arm and the launch of the Vision Funds.
His conviction in artificial intelligence as the defining technology of the next decades has driven SoftBank's recent commitments at unprecedented scale, including its central role in the financing of leading AI infrastructure platforms.
Son is one of the most studied and most controversial investors of his generation, with a long record of both spectacular wins and spectacular losses.