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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

This is almost too perfect but SoftBank is, at the moment, trying to hire a valuations director:

https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=cf0378114e63aeb4&from=tp-s...

Sort of a "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" kind of thing . . .

In their defense, Masayoshi Son made much of his fortune by applying the greater fool theory (and lost much of it that way as well). There's a chance they really just took a calculated risk here, and with many of their other investments too. The risk being not so much the success of the company like normal VC investments, but explicitly a "maybe we can profitably push this through an IPO, let's see if the sheeple fall for it" kind of thing.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Eventually you will be the greatest fool.

Thats quite the defense.

Hypothetically, if he was really good at this he'd pick a highly leveraged market segment, attempt to crash it with a ridiculously implausible high-profile failure at the tail end of a bubble, and benefit by shorting everything that wasn't nailed to the floor.

Or maybe he's just a bit gullible. It's hard to be sure.

Alternatively, never be too quick to attribute to stupidity when there’s a strong incentive for malice to take advantage of that attribution to hide itself.

Alternatively, never attribute to malice or stupidity what can easily be attributed to greed and lack of incentive.

Greed and perverse incentives.

"It'll do a bunch of deals that'll crater the company within 3 years, but I'll cash out $700mil on the way and be long gone before everybody who stays is trying to climb out of the glowing hole in the ground..."

Yeah,

Hanlon's Razor needs a strong caveat that it should never be uncritically applied when strong financial motives are at play.

I think Hanlon's Razor became popular in earlier days of the Internet, when dumb technical decision might happen ... people are dumb. Today, with money riding on everything, the situation can be much muddier, with dumb technical decisions happening because people are greedy ... and dumb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

It's hard to get investment decisions right all the time. One day you buy 30% of AliBaba for $20m, another you invest in WeWork.

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