Yet somehow people still seemed to defend the strategy ("you underestimate biotech ROI" or "investing in moonshots was not the point of the fund").
Most criticism is invalid because it misses the underlying flaw of the Vision Fund: If you're going to waste $24+ billion on the Adam Neumann's of the world, you could not have performed any worse by taking on riskier projects.
It was obvious to everyone that WeWork was going to flop (even if Softbank got some money back from an IPO, the ensuing stock price crash would've tarnished their reputation and who knows how quickly they could've exited) and that Adam Neumann was a con. So the return there was going to be heavily negative.
I doubt $10+ billion into drug research would've yielded as negative of results, especially in this era.
The only valid critique of our approach I've heard is that it's a logistical pain to try and spread and manage $100 billion around $5 million at a time.