Do they have any good investments?
They were heavy into WeWork and WireCard. They have about $10 billion into Uber. Lots of small oddballs like investing in Wag at $300MM valuation. Lost a bunch buying bitcoin at the peak. Now this.
They had 6 full exits generating $5B of gains, plus another dozen companies went public and the mark to market on the whole is a $3B gain. I don’t see that they’ve ever invested in Bitcoin. The remaining portfolio is down about $5B on $60B invested - I have a lot of questions about how they are marking those securities, but surely it’s similar to the VC model of “Mark to the last third party investment, even if we led the investment, unless something really bad happened”. That’s where the WAG and WeWork losses would be. So all in they still think they are in the black by $3B on $80B invested. Even if they are mis marking the private book by 20%, the fund would generate a 0.9x return or disappointing but not a complete disaster.
Apparently it was a personal investment:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/23/masayoshi-son-invested-in-bi...
>the fund would generate a 0.9x return or disappointing but not a complete disaster.
Definitely disappointing, with a nearly exclusive biotech/tech portfolio during once of the biggest tech bull runs ever.
True, but Alibaba, as far as I know, is an unaudited company. A good investment for Softbank, but are the sales figures real? Would Softbank even exist without the Alibaba returns?
Absolute madness.
i have to assume bytedance has/will work out favorably for them.. maybe im wrong there