01/24/2025

Eight Lessons from the Career of Softbank’s Masayoshi Son

What his successes — and failures — have to teach other leaders

Few characters are more enigmatic or misunderstood than Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and CEO of SoftBank, the Japanese media technology conglomerate. In Japan and in western media, he is cast as a dreamer, financial engineer, and speculator — an object of suspicion who has risked financial ruin more than once in a five-decade career.

His life story is a Forrest Gump-like journey through all the key moments in recent business history: from the launch of the personal computer to the birth of the internet, the dotcom boom and bust, the rise of China, the global financial crisis, and the advent of artificial intelligence. As the British writer Simon Nixon observed in a review of Gambling Man, my biography of Son, “He seems to have known everyone and owned everything, or at least tried to buy it.”

I was interested in researching and writing about Son to better understand how his formative years shaped his career and what leaders in both the East and West can learn from both his successes and missteps as a corporate manager and investor. 

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.