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Comment by venning | Hacker News Reader

"Son" is mentioned twice in the article with no reference to who that is. Masayoshi Son is the man standing on the left in the photo. According to Wikipedia [1] he is founder and CEO of SoftBank.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son

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I knew about SoftBank but not its founder. He seems like the Japanese version of Buffett... I also somehow assumed that SoftBank was an older company.

Buffet buys companies with pricing power while Son does massive bets with debt. His major skill seems ability to convince banks to borrow him billions for increasingly larger leveraged buyouts.

Didn’t SoftBank just throw a ton of money at Uber?

He was the richest man on earth pre-dotcom bubble for 3 days.

http://www.financialexpress.com/industry/how-softbanks-masay...

The Wikipedia page has this interesting piece of trivia about him:

[H]e is the richest man in Japan, despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).

By a large margin over Masayoshi Son, the richest in Japan title now goes to Tadashi Yanai of Fast Retailing:

https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/tadashi-yana...

After that is Takemitsu Takizaki, of Keyence:

https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/takemitsu-ta...

"Masayoshi Son’s $100 Billion Bet to Conquer the Future"

Bloomberg did a piece on him last year on the Decrypted podcast.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-05-30/masayoshi-so...

Interesting indeed. I wouldn’t say he’s like Buffet though. I think he’s more like Richard Branson.

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