SoftBank CEO says Khashoggi killing may have impact on Saudi-backed Vision Fund | Hacker News Reader

SoftBank CEO says Khashoggi killing may have impact on Saudi-backed Vision Fund

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111 pointsbrownbat51 comments

This is going to be interesting. Until recently, SoftBank was thought of as being a Japanese operation. Now they seem to be a front for Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

They seem to be the world's largest source of dumb money. They keep Uber afloat. $375M for a pizza making robot company. WeWork. Cruise. $300 million in Wag, a dog-walking company. They do have big stakes in ARM and NVidia, which actually make useful stuff profitably. But the investments in the last two years have been strange.

The goal may not be profitability, but influence. The Cruise investment gives them some pull at GM. The WeWork investment gives them some pull in the US real estate market. The Uber investment lets them influence the future of transportation. Those all make strategic sense for an oil power. Someone there likes robots; they bought most of the robot companies Google dumped, plus a few others.

[1] https://www.recode.net/2018/2/5/16974032/this-is-where-chart...

> The goal may not be profitability, but influence.

Or money laundering?

> Son said he had not heard of any companies saying they would not want to accept investments from the Vision Fund due to its relationship with Saudi Arabia's PIF

Anybody expected otherwise? Many Softbank investments would be in companies that eagerly sells their users to the highest bidders, hardly paragons of virtue...

If someone is gay working for a Softbank-backed venture then they are quite literally helping to enrich and ensure the longevity of a regime that executes people like them. I am genuinely surprised that this isn't considered a huge issue in Silly Valley.

Surely they don't want to end up like the journalist. Would there be enough employee support to publicly protest?

Weak. SoftBank has always seemed suspiciously large and cavalier. I expect there's a venture analog to the expression "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." Let's hope they stick the WeWork landing ...

> "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."

First time ever hearing this. What an interesting expression

I've heard it with climbers and soldiers as well, seems like it works across many fields.

It's a simple way to express the difference between probabilities for an ensemble of game players and probabilities for a particular player over time.

If the player is ruined, the game stops for them.

--edit: added "for them"

Optimal strategy is probably a curve: start compliant, follow the rules, be conservative, then take bigger and bigger risks until you can go “all in” on a series of risky bets, and if you aren’t obliterated dial back your risks to favor longevity.

If you are obliterated, well, you served the population.

This is probably more psychologically palettable for men than women. Although some women can do it for sure. Just... well at the population level it doesn’t make nearly as much sense evolutionarily for folks with wombs to take these kinds of risks as folks producing sperm.

Optimal strategy for the population, perhaps, but as an individual avoiding 'all-in' is very nice, if not always possible.

In the context of SoftBank, though, I'd expect all-ins and near all-ins to be avoidable...

Death only hurts once, but success feels good forever. So, in that sense it’s worth it to take the bet.

Optimality is just maximizing your upside and minimizing the window of exposure to oblivion. I don’t think there’s any “avoid oblivion at all costs” strategy that comes close to “court oblivion once” in terms of the total expected utility.

Spies too.

Yeager...:-D

Sorry for my super naive question, but since 45 billions of saudi money is in the fund and that fund is said to be 100 billions, does it mean that saudi owns 45% of it and, consequently, more or less 45% of the stuff it funded (be it by shares, intellectual prperty or whatever mean) ???

The Saudis are limited partners in the fund, so they don't really have any control over the investments. Investment decisions are left up to the general partner, Softbank. Once the fund reaches maturity and the profits are distributed, the Saudis would get paid (they would get close to 45% of the fund earnings) in cash or shares in the portfolio companies.

> Investment decisions are left up to the general partner, Softbank.

Not necessarily, it depends on the LP agreement. It wouldn't be unusual to have an LP agreement where investments that are more than a certain percentage of the fund require sign off from the key LPs.

Not sure why you are downvoted, you are 100% correct.

> Not sure why you are downvoted, you are 100% correct.

Haha that's like half of my HN comments. I'm guessing that the first thing that comes up in Google from Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, or Quora says something different.

But when a fund is doing as well as SoftBank is, it would be very odd for an LP to veto an investment.

> it would be very odd for an LP to veto an investment.

Yeah but you usually want to give them the option to soft veto stuff (even if it's not required) by letting them say things like, "I'm skeptical that this is a good idea, but go for it if you think it makes sense." Otherwise at the end of the fund, even if you've posted good returns you don't have any way to show your LPs that you're managing their money differently than how they would have managed it themselves.

Managing money is one of those jobs that everyone thinks they can do a good job at themselves (like how everyone wants to be head of product), so no one is willing to pay a premium for it unless you create opportunities to memorialize how you're doing it differently than what they would have done themselves.

^ This

Good graphic on this page that explains it nicely: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-limited...

Given that the fund is so highly concentrated by one LP, there is a (chilling) hypothetical situation that they (KSA wealth fund) could overstep the traditional bounds of a LP and taking more controlling interests of portfolio companies. This is a new territory where little precedence has been set because (1) we're dealing with international money (2) the size of the fund (3) the funding concentration.

Only if the fund itself already has a controlling interest in the portfolio companies. Otherwise you can just tell them to take a hike.

Which is precisely the speculation of the Vision Fund: http://fortune.com/2018/10/10/softbank-visionfund-wework-maj... (and why I mentioned it)

Interesting. 51% of 51% would allow you to control a company where another party holds 49%, even if you invested much less.

OK, technically. Maybe. In reality Softbank worries about their reputation as managers of other people's money.

PLUS, Softbank wants to raise more funds in a year or two. So Saudis do have a lot of say, IMO.

I imagine it would depend on the structure of the shares - they could be "first money out" - so how much everyone gets depends on overall amounts during exits; similarly, it's why early employees may not gain anything more than their salary, not getting anything in exchange for the equity they were given during an exit event.

I have a feeling that soon this will be forgotten. His family will get $50 million from SA and an "apology"...and within a few months to years, the world will focus on the next horrible thing. Maybe the Saudi money will be slightly laundered with bigger funds so "we didn't get Saudi money, the fund we got the money from has a lot of investors" and the world will keep going. Money and geopolitics talk.

He, a commoner, already caused a lot of problems to a soon-to-be King. If he was in SA, he would have been charged with espionage or whatever and left to rot in jail or beheaded, with virtually no complaints.

What a soft, weak, non-stance of a stance.

I agree:

> We don’t yet know the clear understanding of the case

this is clearly bullshit, we know what happened and regardless of authority chains it was still a normal function of the backwards Kingdom come fully to light.

But at the same time controlling $45 billion dollars of someone's money will make you choose your words carefully.

What a pathetic excuse of an address

> "At the same time, we have also accepted the responsibility to the people of Saudi Arabia, an obligation we take quite seriously to help them manage their financial resources and diversify their economy," said Son.

“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” - Benjamin Franklin

Hah, indeed.

Since when is that money realistically the money of the Saudi Arabian people anyway, it's the money of their butchering royal family.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair

By "people of Saudi Arabia", he's meaning the rich elites and the princes. I lived in that country for a couple of years. The wealth gap there is truly staggering.

lol - yes. That entire article was a very long-winded way of saying "they've got a lot of money so we really don't care about what they do"

What about the fact that the killing was botched? Isn't that telling of dysfunction within the Saudi Administration?

There are professional people in this world that can handle such situations. The Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the all have people who can clean up a mess well enough to keep things away from the media. But such people are professionals. This saudi team looks more like a bunch of frat boys: well-educated but where they are because of connections. The operations smacks of "assassination for dummies." These people had not done this before. They didn't have a playbook. They were inventing everything.

My point: The Saudi regime doesn't use professionals, doesn't know how to employ experts. Instead they employ friends and family. That deficiency surely bleeds into other areas too.

The Russians are worse to me... their botch up hit job actually killed a british citizen. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if that happened on u.s. soil?

The Israelis, presumably the best at this game, killed a waiter in front of his pregnant wife in Norway in a case of mistaken identity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair), got caught, and the consequences weren't that bad even with Norway being a NATO member...

Mossad aren't exactly known for being subtle. Just look at the way they took out the guy they mistook Ahmed Bouchikhi for. Sure, they got their man... along with his four bodyguards and four bystanders. Not to mention the sixteen people injured when their bomb attack on Ali Hassan Salameh went off.

Consequences appear to have been less than five year prison sentences for several accomplices. The murderers were able to escape and could not be extradited to stand trial. Israel paid out <$500k to the families but did not admit responsibility.

When the Russians "botch" a job they do so with a reason. If you want to quietly disappear someone you don't do it with chemical weapons or radioactive material. You use such things when you want people to know about it, when the goal is remind everyone exactly who they are dealing with. Dig into things and you will find lots of Russian agitators disappearing under suspicious circumstances. They know how to do things properly when they want to. They don't dress up in the dead man's clothes and do a little dance for the cameras.

Whether any killings have happened on US soil is an open question. But, without mentioning the T word, I think not much would happen. Both chemical and a nuclear weapon were deployed in Britain ... and Russian operatives still move in and out of the UK freely. Russian money still invests in London real estate. I don't see why anything different would happen in the US.

What do you mean by nuclear? If you think polonium, it's lethality is not linked to it's radioactivity, it's purely chemical.

It kills as a chemical, but is detectable as a radioactive substance. Using it means you have access to a nuclear reactor and extensive infrastructure. It is a weapon that could only have come from a state actor, one with an extensive nuclear program and a willingness to weaponize material from that program. That is a very short list. Had they wanted to remain anonymous they could have used any of a dozen different methods that could not be so easily traced. They weren't trying for a knife in the dark.

Polonium can be made in a cyclotron, and AFAIK they are quite common in hospitals. I'm afraid this is very much in reach of a non state actor...

Atoms of polonium can indeed be manufactured in a cyclotron, but unless your cyclotron is the size of a building it would take years to gather enough to conduct such a poisoning. Usable quantities are only ever made inside nuclear reactors.

Nothing but a communique that the US government is shocked?

Governments don't care about "their" citizens. Look at what they do, not what they say.

Just to play devil's advocate here. What is it that people want? Countries and companies to stop doing business with murderous regimes and governments? Then who is there to do business with?

Should anybody do business with the US, EU, China, Russia, etc?

It's crazy how millions are suffering in Yemen due to saudi/US/EU backed war and yet the entire media apparatus is going crazy over one person. Makes me wonder what's really going on here.

What's "really going on" is the media taking notice of one of its own being butchered by the Saudis.

As you correctly observed, there is no political will in the US/UK/SA bloc to draw attention to Saudi-borne atrocities. This percolates down to major news platforms, contingent upon an implicit truce between Saudi Arabia and the media class. This was frustrated (although likely not severed) by the Khashoggi affair.

To address your larger concern - I am sympathetic to the argument that the most 'advanced' nation-states are no less complicit in 'barbaric' acts, war crimes, systemic violence, etc etc than those which more often receive scrutiny.

Even in this light, the Saudi example is exceptional: it's an explicitly anti-democratic hereditary autocracy with a medieval justice system having no concept of codification (other than deference to the Quran and Hadith) or legal precedent (rulings are inconsistent and case-by-case). Essentially any investment capital or financial dealings with the SA, the state, is directly debited to or from the Saudi royal family.

This is different from China and even Russia, for which one could make also the case that the state is insufficiently democratic, has arcane/draconian laws, etc etc, and that the money is likely to be siphoned off to oligarchs or state accessories. In fact, to your point, business with these countries _is_ often criticized - some would say to not a great enough degree. But drawing an equivalence on the basis of questionable state actions alone is, well, equivocating in this case.

You're being brigaded/downvoted, but to answer your question - the real reason there's manufactured outrage over this killing in the US is that Khashoggi worked for an influential US media company (WaPo).

Otherwise, this is just a case of the Saudi administration 'taking care of' one of their own who turned against them.

For the last few years, the Saudi regime has been kidnapping and imprisoning others who have done the same, only with limited external reporting and even less outrage.

BBC Newsnight had a fascinating report in this about a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2KYQWPUbG4 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40926963 [transcript]

It’s a good question.

I think at issue is which killings are acceptable under “normalcy”. Obviously soldier/spy deaths are OK, sex workers are OK to kill since they’re by definition sinners, work-related deaths are OK for low wage workers as long as the injury is not acute, accidental military slayings are OK outside of developed nations because of the “we tried” doctrine, black kids are OK because black folks have “opted in” by choosing to commit more crime than whites, First Nations people are ok because they opted out of U.S. sovereignty...*

I think some people feel journalist killings are fundamentally a violation of normalcy.

* not saying I agree with any of that, but this is the mainstream consensus

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