When people first heard he wanted to raise a one-hundred-billion-dollar fund, they didn’t laugh politely. They stared. Some asked if he was joking. Others quietly concluded he had finally gone mad. No one had ever attempted anything like it. Not even close.

Masayoshi Son didn’t flinch.

To him, the number didn’t feel outrageous. It felt necessary.

Because Masayoshi Son had never lived small—not in his dreams, not in his plans, and certainly not in his bets.

He came from nothing that society respected. His grandparents had slipped into Japan from Korea on a fishing boat, hiding like stowaways, arriving with no money, no language, no welcome. Their descendants carried that stain for generations. As a child, Masa learned quickly that being different made you a target. Classmates threw rocks at him. Teachers looked past him. His family scraped by on odd jobs—raising pigs, selling illegal liquor—whatever kept hunger away for one more day.

The humiliation did not break him. It sharpened him.

By middle school, Masa had already decided what his life would be. He would become Japan’s most successful businessman. Not rich—unavoidable. The kind of man the world had to reckon with.

He found his first idol in Den Fujita, the man who brought McDonald’s to Japan. Masa called his office endlessly, only to be dismissed by a receptionist who didn’t know his name and didn’t care. Finally, Masa calculated the cost of rejection. Plane tickets were cheaper than phone calls. He flew to Tokyo, walked into the office, and announced himself.

Fifteen minutes. That was all Fujita offered.

It was enough.

“Computers,” Fujita told him. “That’s the future.”
“And America,” he added. “You have to go there.”

At sixteen, Masa boarded a plane to California with little more than conviction. High school bored him—too slow, too small—so he convinced administrators to let him take college entrance exams early. He barely passed. It didn’t matter. He was in.

At university, Masa studied economics and computer science, but his real education happened alone, in five-minute bursts. He wanted a job that paid ten thousand dollars a month for five minutes of work a day. When his friends laughed, he reframed the problem. If time was scarce, invention was the highest leverage.

Every day, he set an alarm. Five minutes. No distractions. Just ideas.

Some were ridiculous. Some were obvious. A few were brilliant.

He filled notebooks—250 invention concepts in a year. The best was a pocket translator, a device that could convert languages instantly. He found a professor to help build it. Then he skipped classes, paying another student to sit in his place while he pitched companies relentlessly.

Sharp bought the patent for $1.7 million.

Masa was nineteen.

Around the same time, he imported Space Invaders arcade machines from Japan and placed them in American bars. By moving fast—faster than invoices, faster than payments—he often made back the money before he even owed it. Momentum mattered more than caution. Cash flow was a weapon.

This was the first twist of his life: Masa realized that speed itself could bend reality. If you moved fast enough, rules struggled to catch up.

He returned to Japan as promised to his mother and founded SoftBank. The name sounded modest. The ambition was not. He told his first two employees the company would be worth a billion dollars. They quit soon after, convinced they were working for a fantasist.

For a while, it seemed they were right.

Magazines failed. Software distribution limped along. Critics warned him to stop before he lost everything. Masa ignored them. He always did.

Then the personal computer wave arrived, exactly as he’d predicted. SoftBank rode it hard. By the mid-1990s, it employed hundreds and generated a billion dollars in revenue. Just as victory arrived, disaster followed.

Masa collapsed.

Chronic hepatitis left him bedridden, uncertain if he would survive. His daughter was barely a year old. His wife was pregnant. Worse, banks would pull funding if they learned the truth. So he lied. He slipped out of the hospital to attend meetings, pretending strength while his body failed him.

He survived—but the fear rewired him.

If life could end without warning, then hesitation was the real enemy. From that moment on, Masa didn’t just think big. He accelerated.

SoftBank went public. Cash poured in. But Masa wasn’t interested in sitting on money. He began investing—boldly, instinctively, obsessively. Yahoo. E*TRADE. Hundreds of startups. Failures didn’t bother him. One massive win could erase them all.

Then came Alibaba.

Jack Ma had no revenue. No plan. Just conviction. Masa looked into his eyes and saw something undeniable. Twenty million dollars changed hands. That stake would later be worth more than seventy billion.

For three days in 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest man in the world.

Then the internet bubble burst.

Seventy billion dollars evaporated. The largest personal loss in history. The world expected retreat. Apologies. Silence.

Instead, Masa doubled down.

This was the second twist—the moment many realized he wasn’t playing the same game as anyone else. Loss didn’t humble him. It liberated him.

He bullied his way into Japan’s broadband market, launching services at half the price of competitors, bleeding money with no clear timeline for profit. He handed out free modems in Tokyo streets, believing scale would eventually justify the chaos. Growth first. Logic later.

When mobile phones replaced PCs, he sensed the shift instantly. He called Steve Jobs and asked for exclusive iPhone rights in Japan—before the phone was even announced.

“You’re crazy,” Jobs laughed.

So Masa bought a telecom company.

Debt didn’t scare him. Missing the future did.

SoftBank sold the iPhone in Japan, flooding the market with cheap contracts. Once again, momentum won. And still, it wasn’t enough. Masa talked about robots with emotions, telepathy, even communicating with dogs. His vision stretched centuries ahead. He called it his 300-year plan.

But he had a problem.

He had missed Amazon.

Capital had been tied up elsewhere, and the regret haunted him. He would never let money limit him again. And so he conceived his boldest creation yet: the Vision Fund.

One hundred billion dollars.

People said it was impossible. Then Saudi Arabia entered the picture, desperate to turn oil wealth into future relevance. Masa flew to meet the crown prince with a presentation meant to ask for thirty billion. On the plane, he changed the number to one hundred.

Aim high.

Forty-five minutes later, he secured forty-five billion dollars. One billion per minute.

The Vision Fund was born.

This was the final twist—the moment Masa stopped reacting to the future and decided to force it. Artificial intelligence, he believed, was the next singularity. He poured money into companies at a scale never seen before, inflating valuations, crushing competitors, bending markets by sheer financial gravity.

But shadows followed.

WeWork. Wag. Ride-sharing wars. Capital became a weapon, not a tool. Founders complained that his money encouraged recklessness. Markets trembled when SoftBank moved. Some said his attention was a curse. Others said he was playing god with other people’s lives.

Was he a visionary accelerating progress?
Or a gambler destabilizing everything he touched?

Perhaps both.

Masayoshi Son smiles easily. He speaks simply. He sounds harmless. And yet, with a signature or a phone call, he can move industries, distort prices, and reshape the future.

He once planned to step away after sixty.

But gamblers don’t leave the casino.

They just keep raising the stakes—convinced that the next bet will finally prove they were right all along.