Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son with Lionel Barber
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They will judge Masa to have been an extraordinarily consequential investor and historic figure in world investing and tech investing because he has made not just spectacular bets, but he's made so many people rich. I mean, with other people's money. Yeah, that's true. All these founders, he's given them money. He's been an enormous disruptor and he's built global businesses.

He's built a huge business in Japan on the mobile operator. So for all these reasons, I know he sometimes feels dissatisfied with his legacy and he's now trying to build his greatest legacy in the march to artificial general intelligence.

And maybe the legacy will be finally judged as to does this bet come off? What will his role be in the AI revolution? I would say to him, you've done pretty well so far.

Welcome to Analyze Asia, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business technology and media in Asia. I'm Bernard Leong and Masayoshi Sun, CEO of SoftBank Group, remains to be one of the movers and shakers of global tech. What's the one common line that makes him larger than life? With me today, Lionel Barber, author of Gambling Man, the secret story of the world's greatest disruptor, Masayoshi Sun, and former editor of the Financial Times, which I'm a lifelong subscriber as well.

to help us to demystify the Japanese tycoon who is now making headways even in the area I'm working on, AI. Lionel, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Bernard. And of course, it's a tradition on the podcast to start with origin stories. How did you start your career and eventually became the editor of the Financial Times? I began my career as an Englishman in Scotland. So that wasn't easy. On the paper called The Scotsman in Edinburgh, where I was a reporter,

And I then worked briefly in Glasgow, and then I went to London two and a half years later. So you have an illustrious career in journalism and also chronicled some of the biggest major business stories of our times. Before we dive in, how do you describe the journey of covering these stories in your own words?

Well, I was on The Scotsman and I had needed to find a speciality and something I was passionate about. And I remember Mrs Thatcher's intellectual guru, Sir Keith Joseph, giving a speech in Glasgow about how interesting business was and why weren't journalists more interested in business and risk-taking and entrepreneurs. So I decided to follow his advice and I became a business journalist.

And that's what I was on the Sunday Times. And then the Financial Times hired me in 1985. And that was my passion. I mean, I did write about politics. I've interviewed a lot of world leaders during my time. Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Li Keqing, Wen Jiabao, not Li Kuan Yew, unfortunately, but I met him.

But all through this time, I was trying to write about business and the economy and understand how the modern world worked.

And also some of the really great investigative journalism that's done by the Financial Times as well. Yes, I led the Wirecard story, which you and some of the board did some great work on. And that was probably one of the biggest investigations that I oversaw as editor during my 14 years at the Financial Times. I was very proud of that story. But we did other work too.

And I've always thought that investigative journalism, i.e. deep reporting, is a very important part of being a great journalist. Yes, and it still is today. So looking back, what were the biggest lessons you learned from your career journey that you can share with a younger audience out there? Stay curious.

Don't be cynical. You've got to be able to have an open mind when you're a reporter and journalist. Reporting is not about having opinions. It's about finding facts and then show a bit of humility and humor. Because if you're sitting opposite a very powerful person, male or female, you need to listen and listen.

Show some humility. Don't think that you're the most important person in the room. And my final advice is when you're interviewing somebody, don't fill the silence. Actually wait for the other person to keep speaking. The biggest mistake of all for journalists is to fill the silence during an interview. Thank you for the advice. I'll bear that in mind when I interview my next guest. Okay, that comes to the main story of the day.

you want to talk about your new book gambling man because i have been looking forward to a book like that because the only other biography about the person you cover masayoshi san the current ceo of softbank has been a fanboy book so to start off of course uh i've really enjoyed the gambling man i think it took me within two days to finish the whole book really paid page to page

So having covered global business leaders for years, what stood out to you about Masayoshi-san that made him worth dedicating a book to? Well, he's just been there at the heart of the action.

in all the big tech investing stories for more than four decades. I describe him as this sort of Forrest Gump type character. He's there and he's either trying to buy the company or a piece of the company.

And he's made some of the most spectacular bets on Yahoo early, on Alibaba, and latterly on Arm, the British semiconductor design company. They've come up, but he's also lost lots of money. He lost about 97% of his paper wealth when the dot-com bubble burst. So that made him a very interesting character to me because, you know, bottom line,

follow the money. If there's lots of money, there's bound to be good stories and a lot of good characters to write about. And what is the one thing you know about Masayoshi-san after researching and writing this book that very few do? He is enormously resilient. I think people overlook this. They look at the big mouth, the big promises,

The talk of creating trillion-dollar companies lasting 300 years, all this. And what they miss is the essence of the character. And crucially, and I'm sure we'll talk a bit about this, the fact that he's an outsider in his own society, in a very stratified society in Japan. He's Korean-Japanese, and that gives him tremendous motivation to succeed.

Somebody said to me, the thing about you need to understand about Masayoshi-san is he has the biggest chip on his shoulder of anybody you'll ever meet. I think that's a bit harsh, but there is something...

which we can discuss about his character that I find very interesting. So it comes to the core of the title, right? The title Gambling Man suggests that risk-taking part as the defining trait of Master San. Can you elaborate on the core themes of the book then? Obviously, somebody who loses and gains tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth and takes this giant risk-taking, I think is something of a gambler. Now, he would say,

But he's worked it all out. I don't believe that all the time. I think he acts on instinct. So that sense of explaining the giant risk-taking appetite, how do you do that? Why does he do it? That's a very important thing, the theme of the outsider. And also the theme of riding the technological wave of the last four decades from the microchip

to the internet, to the mobile internet, and now artificial intelligence. I mean, he's ridden that wave consistently for more than four decades. And guess what? He still survived. He's not given up. He's not moved on like Jeff Bezos at Amazon or Bill Gates. He's still there at the head of SoftBank. You also find that he's like an eternal optimist. He's always thinking about the next wave and the next, next wave on there as well.

Yeah, that's a very good way of putting it, Bernard, that he's an eternal optimist. I think he's never down. Well, he can be down, but he's not a pessimist about what he thinks is the right thing to do or the right direction of technology or markets.

He looks long term. I think that he's always bouncing back because he thinks there's another opportunity to make money, to succeed with an interesting idea. He is, by the way, very curious still, which is a strength. But yeah, the power of optimism. But there's also something which I think you asked a great question, which is what does some people have done? Do they not know?

I think there's something slightly unfulfilled about him. There's something a bit sad. He's never satisfied. I describe him once as like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, and then it always comes down, but he's back again. So there's something, yeah, that's optimism, but there's also something slightly tragic, actually.

Yeah, that's true. There's never an end point to something for him. Yes, exactly. And that's about that. And he talked to me about that in the last interview that I did with him in Tokyo. Because he's based in Japan and most Asian leaders tend to be secretive and don't really talk much about their stories. What are the biggest challenges in documenting his story for you?

Bernard, he is very secretive. He's one of the most secretive people I've ever met. He really doesn't like to talk about, you know, where he lives, what he's doing, his schedule, his plans. Everything is secretive because he wants to surprise people. But also, he's a very private man. I mean, I decided not to go deep into his family, not because there are dark secrets. I don't think there are, but just because.

It's very difficult because he doesn't want to talk about that. I mean, he did face in the late 90s some kidnapping threats because he got close and worked closely with Rupert Murdoch when they were buying a setting up a satellite TV joint venture. And so you've got to respect a bit that. But also there's a cultural problem. I mean, I don't speak Japanese. I visited Japan.

when I was editor of the Financial Times, because we were bought by Nikkei, I visited Japan 14 times in four years to cement the relationship. But I don't speak Japanese. I did five trips to Japan in 14 months to see Masaroshi-san. By the way, twice he said he was too busy, which was, you talked about the challenges. That's a challenge. And the other challenge is just trying to penetrate Japan

what is a very well-constructed narrative where he tells the same stories again and again and again that everybody else has retell. So I wanted to talk, penetrate that. And so one way of doing that was to talk to other people who've worked with him, particularly in the West.

But that's another story. But there were significant challenges. It cost, by the way, a lot of money to travel around the world all the time to Japan. And it's the Silicon Valley, you know, more than half a dozen times. So that's a challenge, too. Yeah.

And of course, it comes up to this product, this work. And I probably been looking forward to a book like this to read. So one thing that I do draw from the biography is that Master Yu Shisan's Korean heritage and his father's Pachinko business have actually played quite a big role in shaping his worldview. How does his upbringing influence also his approach to business? Well, his father...

grew up. He was born in 1936. So he went through the war, which was terrible, obviously, for Koreans in Japan. They were non-citizens. Remember the family, the grandfather came in 1917 and worked in a coal mine and the grandmother 10 years later. So they were economic migrants. And

They, father born in 36, after the war, it's a catastrophe, the war for Japan, obviously the nuclear atomic bombs. They go back to Korea and they're rejected by their own families and cousins. And so they go back to Japan and they're living in a slum. I mean, it's a shantytown.

And Masa is born in 1957. His father was originally a bootlegger selling moonshine, and then a pig breeder, and then a loan shark, and then pachinko. He buys pachinko parlours. So he's in the underground economy. I mean, dealing with the underworld a bit, it's very a bit dark, shady. He makes money, but Masa, crucially,

The influence of his parents is one, he is a hustler, but two, he decides, I don't want to go that way. I want to work in the open in a new business. And the way he deals with this is he tells his parents, I'm leaving for America. I'm going to go to high school. I'm going to go to college in America. Now, that's a huge break. He's the second son in the family. And, you know, it's a liberation to learn English and

because it gives him a new tool. But it also makes him very special when he goes back to Japan, because he says, first of all, I'm going to be Korean Japanese, I'm going to live under my own name. Yes, not like my parents, not have a Japanese alias, Yasumoto, I'm going to be called Song. And then I'm going to have a new business, which is software distribution. So all this makes him very different from his parents and his father. But he certainly knows how to hustle.

You very clearly laid out the aspects of that family background that somehow has been overlooked in terms of understanding his entrepreneurial mindset. And he does have a very unique entrepreneurial story. What do you think from the coverage of the biography, what do you think were the defining moments that shaped him as a business leader? Well, the first was he couldn't get credit. He couldn't get bank loans as business.

an entrepreneur with starting his own company. Can you believe that? And a new business. I mean, can you think of the greater odds and obstacles? So he needed people to help and he got some help from older people who gave him some advice and also stood for him right at the beginning. So that's the first, I think, very serious moment where

He can get the money. He's living a bit on the edge, but he's also chosen a new product line, which is distribution of software in 1981. So I think that's important. Another defining moment was that he decides to invest in America. He's buying businesses or stakes in businesses in telemarketing, then a trade fair, very important in Las Vegas.

because suddenly he's meeting all these famous people and he's running the show at the trade fair. You know, people like Larry Ellison of Oracle, Steve Jobs of Apple, that's how they meet. So he's a great networker. I think that was very important. I mean, there are, look, there are numerous places, but I'd say in the early days, the other one is obviously he makes loads of money. He's richest man in the world for three days.

Think about that in February 2000. And then it all goes down the chute. He loses 97% of his wealth in the dot-com bubble, but he pivots to saying, I'm going to create a broadband business. So I think those are some of the pivotal moments and obviously buying Vodafone Japan, the mobile operator, and creating his own mobile phone business. Yeah. So that's where I find this very interesting about Masa.

How did he manage to build from this small software distributor where there was origins of when SoftBank started? I think he also got tech conferences and getting distributorship. Then subsequently pivot into a kind of a global tech conglomerate with a telco that challenges the likes of KDDI and NTD Docomo. Ownership of ARM. Okay, because I'm from Cambridge University, ARM is almost like the Intel to...

Yeah, it is. With all the sponsorship, I know the founders myself as well. And then also that reputation of a great investor. You know, these are great questions. First of all, he understands where technology is going. So starting with software distribution is fine. I mean, he becomes the number one distributor, but that's obviously not enough for scale.

He's always been interested in investing. So you have to distinguish these two roles, which, by the way, is often overlooked. He can play the role of both investor and operator when he focuses. But he's looking to build an empire. I mean, he talks about empire like almost like Imperial Japan. You know, he wants to be a global player. So it's never enough just to be number one in Japan. He wants to be.

He wants to build an empire. So that first sort of manifests itself with having stakes in more than 400 companies. Can you believe that? Yes. During the dot-com bubble. But then when he goes into broadband and takes on the most powerful operator, once the most valuable company in the world, NTT Dockermore. Yes.

But he understands he needs scale for the empire. And that's why he goes in for the leveraged bit of Vodafone Japan. But then that's not enough. He wants to then replicate the model in America. So he buys Sprint. He talks about, you know, a company worth a trillion dollars.

I think then there's the pivot to, I need to be investing. I see that the giant tech bubble, or maybe not a bubble, but these companies like Google, like Facebook, like Amazon, they're huge companies. I want a piece of that. So that's when he starts investing and he creates the Vision Fund to invest or turbocharge tech companies built around the internet and mobile.

Yeah. It would have been bad of me not to forget about Yahoo Japan as well. I think that's also one of the pretty good... Very important. Well, Bernard, that's very important because of what we're seeing now with open AI. I mean, the key thing is when he buys the stake in Yahoo, he gets 40%. There's this great...

a conversation with co-founder Jerry Yang, who I interviewed. And Yang basically says, I don't need your money and I don't need $100 million. And Masa looks at him and says, everybody needs $100 million. And there's a bit of the mafia about that. But the crucial thing is, he says, I'm investing in you, I'm giving you the money, but I want the name Yahoo and I want to have my own Japan e-commerce business.

So you give me Yahoo Japan. And Jerry Yang says, well, we can't fund or give you all the people for that. And he says, I'll do it myself. I just need the name. And that's what he does. He brings American technology and know-how to his domestic market. He's the great middleman in that respect. So this is the part where I find pretty interesting. And because you have actually met and interviewed Masa,

Master Yi Shi San has seamlessly switched between being a business operator and an investor. In your conversations with him and your research about him, do you find one of these roles are more natural for him or maybe for him it's just both sides of the same coin that he's able to switch between them? He can play both roles. He's flexible. But

What people who've worked with him a long time and know him say is the question is, it's all about when he focuses or not. And his mind works very quickly. I mean, he falls in and out of love with people.

He has enthusiasms. I mean, one day he will spend six weeks designing in great detail the new city of Nusantara with all the tech around it. And he's like an architect.

He has that artistic streak, by the way. I mean, he can go into tremendous detail and he can be an operator like with Sprint. But on the other hand, he likes to go to the tables. He likes to be investing in companies. So there's a tension between the two roles. And I mean, sometimes that tension persists.

proves to be quite strong. But I definitely think it's wrong just to call him a gambler or just an investor. I think he really does go deep into technology and he can operate. By the way, we haven't talked about this, but

How good is he at managing people? I mean, that's maybe a question mark. So if you're talking about an all around, you know, CEO leader, I mean, he does tend to fall in and out of love with people. And he like he plays, lets people sort of feud and fight within the company, which is sometimes not great.

And that's where the audacious bets comes in, right? You think of Alibaba, you think of WeWork. What does his investment philosophy actually reveals about his mindset? Think big.

I mean, he just falls in love with people who think that they can take over the world. People like Adam Neumann, this Jesus Christ-like figure from Israel, WeWork. And, you know, they almost egg each other on. They're encouraging each other to talk bigger. The other thing, Bernard, is, I mean, he'll never talk to you about profit and loss. He's not interested in that. He's just interested in growth, in revenue.

Total accessible market. He wants to see, you know, if he'd go on a plane and he'd come and see people would come to Tokyo and eat. I've talked to somebody who was hoping to get 50 million dollars. Amasa said, no, not 50 million. You need 500 million. The guy didn't know what to do with the money.

But Masa is saying, you need the money, think big, go for scale. And that's the part that some people can think that scale and go beyond that. We're talking about some of the successes like Jack Ma of Alibaba, maybe Sam Altman of OpenAI and et cetera. And there are some very good stories as well. But then there's also the spectacular bets that have gone south to like the WeWorks, Cantera, and whichever the case is. Bernard, let me just say one word on Alibaba. The fact is that

Jack Ma did not say to Masa in that first meeting in Beijing in 1999, he didn't say, I'm going to take over the world. Masa understood the potential of a Chinese eBay with Alibaba. And then Masa also really helped. I mean, I interviewed Joe Tsai, the co-founder. He really helped develop the B2B business.

with Alibaba. And so you should take great credit in that. And this is where you actually review some things that people think that he's just only investing, but the bets that come out actually his involvement is far more greater than what is actually shows in the open. This is the part of the story that I really enjoy books like yours when you dive very deep into that person,

and really figure out what are the things that are real and what are the things that actually the normal people's perception is not correct. I mean, I hear a lot of US podcasts, they are always looking to him as like some fool or clown or joker, but I don't think they understand that.

What is Marcel really good at? Again, Bernard, you've put your finger on the button there. That's exactly right. It's easy to see him in terms of a caricature, like he's this Yoda figure, just because he's not very tall and he does joke.

But that doesn't mean to say he's actually a very serious person. And by the way, he used the Joker role to obscure his serious intent. I mean, he's also read Sun Tzu's Art of War. He's very good at deception. That's the way he plays things. So people underestimate him.

Yeah. So given that SoftBank makes record, I think because of the Vision Fund and there are two parts of it, right? There was a very good part coverage from your book about how the Vision Fund is actually assembled. And I think people just read the headlines as in how he came to doing the fund. Would you want to talk a little bit about that as well?

Well, he clearly imagined that he would completely change the model of investment funds. By the way, I'll explain why I don't think this is a BC fund. I mean, everybody, he definitely disrupted the venture capital market, but the way the fund worked was not like a venture capital fund.

Basically, he decided to throw a wall of money at everybody, at founders, but also the venture capital industry. So while normally people would go for, say, a $5 billion fund, that would be high. He said, not even $20 billion. He suddenly says he's on an airplane to the Gulf. He's going to Qatar and then on to Saudi Arabia. He basically says, no, I want $100 billion. $100 billion.

Now, this is completely different from everybody. And he gets $60 billion, $45 billion from Saudi Arabia, 15 from the Emiratis. So he's got a gigantic war chest. Now, there are two issues here, at least. One is,

He guarantees as part of the negotiations to give the Saudis and the Emiratis, the LPs, a 7% coupon. So he's already down. He's having to give 7% annually, right? Irrespective of the returns. The second thing is,

He's not investing in startups. He's investing in companies that have been around for, say, five, six years. We work Uber and he's he's sort of force feeding the companies. He says turbo charging. I like force feeding. And, you know, he's all he thinks that's the fastest way to growth. And then when he gets into difficulty with WeWork, instead of saying, well, OK, it didn't work.

Because in venture, you know, some work, some don't. It's about moonshots. He decides to stick with it. It sort of bails him out, goes in even deeper. So he's breaking all these normal rules. But overall...

He's trying to make a huge amount of money off a huge amount of money. And as people say, most people can only make a huge amount of money off a low amount of money. That's the way it works in what's called the power law. Yeah, I think he got the arm view correct. I think the door there is also correct as well. Correct. I mean, on arm, by the way, he bought arm, right?

This wonderful company that, as you say, based in Cambridge, and I did interview the founder, Herman Houser, thought Masa was ridiculous talking about the Internet of Things and ARM. But he paid $32 billion and he got the company in 15 days. Can you believe it? In 2015. But that was a year before the Vision Fund.

So he put Arm in the Vision Fund later, or a large portion of it. But actually, that transaction took place before. So given the relentless drive and also the willingness to take risks, do you think that Masa has actually changed the way how modern tech investing actually works? Because I do recall VCs making this point to me once, there's another exit strategy, sell to software.

Yeah, I think he, look, he obviously has changed the way investors work. People felt that they had to respond in this venture capital arms race. So he comes up with a hundred billion tiger global. They suddenly were amassing large amounts of money. Look at the Anderson Horowitz now on around the AI fund. Look at Sequoia.

in Silicon Valley, they all had to bulk up to match Maas' firepower. Now, he disrupted their party, so he's really despised by a lot of people in the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley that he's admired in some quarters as very creative. But basically, they didn't like the competition, but they also didn't like the way in which he arguably played

unrealistically forced up valuations by putting so much money in and, you know, increased the risk of a crash. And you had something of a crash just before the COVID pandemic. And Masa obviously then lost a lot of money. And, you know, the Vision Fund now

is okay. I mean, you would have done slightly better, I think, with just investing in ordinary equities and that Vision Fund 2 was not good at all. So his record in that sense is quite somewhat indifferent, although you've mentioned a couple of hits. I mean, it is a bit like a pop album, isn't it? He's got a couple of great songs, but the whole album not so good.

Yeah, but the story still remains to be told, right? I mean, there's still open AI and we still do not know how far this is going to go as well.

Yeah, well, this is the big new story. And I was very pleased because I've just come back from America. I've been there for two, just over two weeks. And would you believe it? But the day of the publication of my book, Gambling Man, Masa announces that he's not putting just $100 billion into Open AI. He says $500 billion.

$500 billion. And he's teamed up with Sam Altman's OpenAI and Larry Ellison of Oracle. I mean, you couldn't make this up in the Stargate venture. So I have two more questions. My first one is, what's the one question you wish more people would ask you about Master Yoshihide and the book? I think I ask him, what was the hardest question

Okay, well, I'm going to ask you now, what was the hardest question? The hardest question was when I asked him about...

where he lived in Tokyo because it's a giant secret. So that was a delicate matter. But I said to him, look, I've interviewed 16 people have been in your house. It's an amazing house. And, you know, somebody called it Wayne Manor, which is the Batman's home because it's so secretive and underground. So I think that's probably the hardest question.

And that comes to my final question, Dan. How do you think business history will judge Masayoshi Son? And what would you think his legacy would be? I think they will judge Masa to have been an extraordinarily consequential investor and historic figure in world investing and tech investing because he has made not just spectacular bets, but he's made so many people rich.

I mean, with other people's money. Yeah, that's true. All these founders, he's given them money. He's been an enormous disruptor and he's built global businesses. He's built a huge business in Japan on the mobile operator. So for all these reasons, I know he sometimes feels dissatisfied with his legacy and he's now trying to build his greatest legacy in the march to artificial general intelligence.

And maybe the legacy will be finally judged as to does this bet come off? What will his role be in the AI revolution? I would say to him, you've done pretty well so far. Let's don't mess it up at the end.

Yeah. And I just have to point out one interesting fact from your book that I really enjoyed was the part where he was announcing his so-called retirement. And then his lieutenants went to Tadashi Yanai, who is actually also the founder of Uniqlo, who is supposed to be Japan's richest man. And then he said, what retirement? Yeah. I mean, there were some magic moments with people who know him.

I really enjoyed talking with Mr. Yanai. He's a great figure, as you say. And he is seen still as a big outsider in Japan. He's mistrusted by the elite in Japan. So he's had to overcome a lot of prejudice, a lot of prejudice. And he's managed to do that. So chapeau. So...

Lionel, many thanks for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this conversation because I was really looking forward to, first, I read the book and I was like, yes, this is going to be the conversation I'm going to have. In closing, I have two quick ones. Any recommendations which have inspired you recently? Recommendations on? On books, movies or something out of the blue. Yes, of course, Bernard.

I wish I could have written as good a biography, as great a biography of the one I have just read, which is a book called Titan, which is the biography of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Turner. I think it's a brilliant, brilliant business biography, which tells you about one of the great robber barons of the late 19th century. And by the way, Masa, he,

sort of looks at the Robert Barons and sees what they did, wants to be, you know, in that pantheon. But that's a great book. Yes. And my 13-year-old daughter has read that book. Right. And actually, I practiced a little bit of the master father parenting on my son. Oh, wow. Bernard. Bernard, she's going to be amazing then.

Yeah. And how do my audience find you? And the book, of course. Yeah. Well, do find me on Twitter or Blue Sky at Lionel Barber. And you can also see me in the Financial Times books that I read. And the book is Gambling Man, you kind of mentioned by one signal, or Penguin Random House in the UK. And you can see that on Amazon. And anybody who likes the book,

please write a recommendation. Yes, I will definitely add a recommendation to the book on Amazon because I bought it in the Apple Books immediately to try to read it as quickly as I can. So you can definitely find this podcast anywhere, whether Spotify, YouTube, and definitely subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter and the

And Lionel, I definitely think you'll be writing better and greater books. And let me know when and we can come on the show and have a chat again. Well, I've really enjoyed this, Bernard. You've asked some great questions and I really appreciate how you've dug deep into the book and understood what I was trying to do. For a writer and an author, you know, we're very sensitive souls. So we love it when somebody actually appreciates what you're trying to do. Yeah. Thank you so much for your time.

Great. I loved it. Thank you, Bernard.