Looking at Softbank's investments, I am having trouble coming up with a better explanation for their behavior.
The Saudis have this huge problem of trying to turn all the oil wealth into something, anything more permanent to diversify their economy before the oil runs dry or climate regulations cutoff the money flow. Earlier work more independently seems to not to have come to much so. Soft Bank and maybe even to some degree the ARAMCO IPO are possible ways to try to tie into global capability to try to up their conversion success.
Norway has a trillion dollar sovereign investment fund and they seem to be profitable and uncontroversial?
You're comparing apples to oranges. One is a sovereign wealth fund managed by citizens, for citizens. The other is a wealth fund managed by royalty, for royalty, with the main goal being to keep said royalty in power.
Firstly, the royal family could care less about the welfare of the average Saudi citizen. Secondly, the royal family has full control over the fund (with zero accountability).
Given these two facts, there is much less harm if they play hard and fast with the fund. Besides, most of the royal family already has their welfare guaranteed for life in the form of personal investments and the monthly salary.
This is ludicrous. Every regime cares about public opinion no matter how despotic.
Norway was pretty unique in that early on they decided to route most of the cashflow into their fund. They're an (the only?) exception to what has been called the resource curse. Oil riches usually don't work out as well as in Norway.
It seems hard to imagine that those strategies wouldnt have done alot to diversify and future proof their wealth without gambling on something like wework.
Maybe these transactions would be blocked under some type of foreign influence laws but maybe they could have also snuck under the radar by laundering credibility and origins through the vision fund.
And why should Saudi Arabia to that? It’s a terrible idea. 100% exposure to US equities is a bad bad idea. Ideally as an investor, you wsnt to build a portfolio of uncorrelated assets.
The economic system is driven by greed, there are countless other companies that have essentially been vaporware with no serious amount of foreign investing like WeWork had. Stock symbol GTAT was one that went bankrupt on contract to make sapphire screens for Apple. They weren't a scam but way over promised on what they could do, fooled Apple's due diligence to spend half a billion dollars on a plant in Arizona to make these sapphire screens. Both American companies, GTAT headquartered in New Hampshire and mostly large US institutional investors as their main shareholders.
WATT is another one that I know of and have been following, claims the ability to wireless charge phones not on a mat but in a given area or in a room. However they is no feasible way they can simply overcome physics on that: radio waves follow an inverse square law for power density and they won't get the type of power delivered for that and other reasons. Using a mat if you want wireless charging is about as good as its going to get for the trade offs that come with that. Anything else just doesn't seem economical or able to provide enough of an advantage for people to buy it.. getting that advantage is going to be really hard especially with the technology the company is developing, cause inverse square law. Also wattage for charging a phone is increasing, and we're now seeing power adapters using GaN and delivering 40+Watts in a small form factor... the gap will continue to widen and they won't be able to overcome physics. Yet the stock was as high as 15 or so dollars a share in the last year. Now down to around 2... in this market that is no easy thing to do. Heck even Apple couldn't get it right to make a mat that could charge 3 different devices at once and had to cancel it because, once again, physics.
Enron is the classic example for vaporware and downright fraud. If any entity was hit the strongest by that it would be the state of California having lost billions in economic activity due to the rolling blackouts that company imposed on the state for years to make money.
Researchers at Disney are probably looking at it because they want some walk-in interactive experience (like their VR stuff) where batteries would either be an ongoing maintenance hassle, or because they have dozens/hundreds of individual objects that would be impractical to recharge by hand. Hmm, like a big room filled with hundreds of mouse sized wheeled robots, or a thousand quadcopters...
It took billionaires' money and used it to subsidize taxi rides, shared work spaces, and dog walking.
At the least, maybe Masayoshi is a reluctant Robin Hood?
I don't think throwing more money at the problem will speed it up too much, they need to build up the institutional knowledge with smaller projects like this before jumping on a jumbo jet.
I'll also suggest that, with lots of investment funding, not only could they buy more equipment and land and build facilities, they could also poach valuable employees from other aircraft makers to build up that institutional knowledge more quickly. Surely there's some disgruntled Boeing engineers who value quality and safety over executive bonuses who might like to work for a while in Nagoya?
> "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."
KSA only makes money if it works out, and it's not.
KSA loses, SoftBank still won.
It assumes users of this forum are redditors, but the way they say it shows how they view reddit as the center of discussion