The most powerful tech mogul you’ve never heard of
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The PC gave us computing power at home, the internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift.

a new podcast for Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Etlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty.

On the first full day of Donald Trump's second term, the president stood in the Oval Office flanked by three men. One, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. The second, Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of the computer tech giant Oracle.

And a third man, the most powerful tech mogul you've probably never heard of. When this third man stepped to the podium to speak, Stafford set up a stool so he could reach the microphone. He's around 5'6".

Thank you. That's good. That's great. I feel tall now. Well, Mr. President, last month I came to celebrate your winning and promised that we would invest $100 billion. And you told me, oh, Masa, go for $200 billion. Now I came back with $500 billion.

Well, this is Masayoshi Son, often just called Masa. He is the CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese investment company, and he's a multi-billionaire. His net worth was some $33 billion in 2024, making him the 51st richest person in the world.

And the $500 billion, Moss says promising the U.S., are for a big new artificial intelligence project called Stargate. It's a partnership between SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI to build AI data centers across the country. We would immediately start deploying $100 billion with the goal of making $500 billion within the next four years, within your time. This will help

People's life solving many, many issues with the power of AI. AGI is coming very, very soon after that artificial super intelligence to solve the issues that mankind would never, ever have thought that we could solve.

So who exactly is Masayoshi Son? How did he come to have so much money, power, and connections to the White House? Why is he investing so much in the United States? And what might his investments mean for the future of AI in America and beyond?

Well, joining us to answer all these questions is Lionel Barber. He's former editor of the Financial Times and author of the book Gambling Man, the secret story of the world's greatest disruptor, Masayoshi Son. Lionel Barber, welcome back to On Point. On Point.

Great to be with you, Magna. Let's actually first start with Stargate, because for most Americans who have heard of Mashayusi-san, this was probably the moment. Can you remind us what Stargate is and why was it so important that President Trump decided to use his second day in office to make the announcement about it? This has been a project in the works for at least two years.

Masayoshi Son has talked about artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence for at least 20 years. So he was looking for the right partners and the right moment. He found that moment

in January with Donald Trump, and he found the key partners. One was Larry Ellison, the software giant in California. He's known him for well over 30 years. Larry Ellison, by the way, introduced him to Steve Jobs, the famed founder of Apple. And the other is Sam Altman, and I'm sure we'll talk much more about him, the founder of OpenAI, whose chat GPT product is sensational.

the best selling app of all time. Now, Masa has recognized that the opportunity is to invest in America, which is engaged in an arms race with China to develop artificial general intelligence. And the opportunities are, first of all, in Texas,

and laterally across the country. And what's needed are these giant data centers that can provide the computing power for models like ChatGPT, which consume lots and lots of energy as they're being trained, large language models,

They need that energy and these data centers can provide it. So he sees an opportunity. And perhaps the last point is that Masa, Masayoshi Son, has been a great investor in AI-related companies, just as he was being an investor in internet-related companies for many years. So he's bringing things together, data centers, energy, which he's also into, and AI-related companies.

Well, let's listen to a little bit more of what he has to say about AI. This is at a recent Future Investment Institute summit in Miami. And Masayoshi-san argued that people are underestimating how quickly AI will improve. If you think, oh, JAI still has, you know, some mistake in understanding, blah, blah, blah.

"Oh, I am smarter than you." You are looking from downward from yourself into JAI. But that little thing is becoming a billion X smarter. And it's exponential. Most people think linear. The reality coming exponential. And when you discover, wow, most of you too late.

Lionel Barber, honestly, as we continue to learn about AI in doing shows on this program, I think exponential isn't even the right thing. I think the progression is likely geometric. But how did Masayoshi Son become interested in AI in particular? Well, he's used a word, Meghna, which I hadn't actually heard about till I started writing this book, which is called singularity.

And that was popularized by a writer called Ray Kurzweil. And singularity is the moment when artificial intelligence, that is the robot, surpasses the capacity of the human brain in terms of intelligence and reasoning. It's a big moment. And he's talked about that for well over 20 years.

Now, in terms of context, Masa Yoshison has always been fascinated by technology. He claims to have had a sort of a great moment when he first saw the microchip, an Intel processor back in the 70s and experienced a similar sensation to Bill Gates, who also saw it in a magazine. So he's gone from the microchip

to the internet and now to artificial intelligence. This great arc of technology progress, and he's riding this new wave. Interesting. That's where it comes from. Well, we'll talk obviously a little bit later in the show in much, much more detail about his...

his journey, if I can put it sort of roughly that way, as becoming one of the world's richest men. But as an aside, Lionel, regarding Kurzweil and the singularity, for several years now on my iPhone, whenever I send emails from my iPhone, my signature line that I put in there is sent from a device that proves the singularity is near. So, yeah.

You got a big fan in me of this kind of crazy futuristic thinking from Ray Kurzweil. But on the other hand, there's also obviously a big financial imperative here or financial boon that Masayoshi-san sees in AI, not just that it's technologically developing in leaps and bounds virtually every week. So here he is again at the Future Investment Institute Summit in Miami, and people

People have criticized him for perhaps overspending with that half a trillion dollar pledge to the Stargate project in the U.S. And Sun says they're all wrong. I think you're looking at the wrong way. How much percent of GDP will be replaced by a billion X smarter thing?

I would say at least 5% within 10 years, and that 5% is $9 trillion. Well, if that's the amount of return, you shouldn't be scared of spending a few trillion dollars. If return is $9 to $18 trillion per year, why should you save? For what? I don't get it.

His billionaire's optimism there, Lionel, is quite apparent, but...

A little later, I'm going to talk to you about what's been the fate of his previous promises regarding investment in the United States. But he immediately actually got – he and Sam Altman were almost immediately criticized by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, right after the SoftBank OpenAI announcement came out. Musk sent out this very terse statement.

post on X slash Twitter saying they don't have the money for a $500 billion investment. Can you tell me about that?

Well, he's a great talker, isn't he, Masayoshi Son? He's also a great futurist. So it's all about the future and the potential growth rather than the actual returns in the short term. But there is a bit of personal, as we say in London, between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. He's got beef. Beef is what we say here in the U.S. Okay. Well, that's good. Two nations united by a common language.

But Musk was a partner in the OpenIA company in its early days. And Musk is now doing his own thing in terms of AI. And he also has a beef with Sam Altman saying he said it was for non-for-profit and actually now he's going for big time profit. So how is he going to sort out that in terms of governance? I mean, I think there's a big gap

personal rivalry between the two. Now, what Massa has done is he's chosen Sam Altman. He's not gone with Elon Musk as a partner. And the other point is that Massa is not looking at getting a return inside four years. He's quite right that the potential

for artificial intelligence to play a bigger part in the economy is certainly there. But when the profits come is another matter. Well, Lionel Barber, hang on for just a moment. When we come back, we want to dig back deep into Masayoshi's son's history and how he became to be such a powerful global tech mogul. This is On Point.

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You're back with On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty and Lionel Barber joins us today. He is author of the book Gambling Man, the secret story of the world's greatest disruptor, Masayoshi Son. And of course, Masayoshi Son is the head of SoftBank and he and Sam Altman and Larry Ellison are

of ChatGPT or OpenAI and Oracle, respectively, have pledged to invest half a trillion dollars in a U.S. project known as Stargate that would set up AI systems

AI centers around the country. Now, Lionel, I just want to put a little coda on this personal, as you said, or beef, as I said, between Sam Altman and Elon Musk and thereby Masayoshi Son. Let's hear them speaking about it in their own words. This is just last month.

Sun and Sam Altman were in Tokyo where they were talking about AI for businesses. And Masa joked that Elon Musk, as we talked about, had been saying they don't have the money for the Stargate AI infrastructure project. So you're about to hear his voice plus Sam Altman's. Our mutual friend Elon Musk said, you know, he says, Masa, do you have enough money? I will tell you. We will make it happen.

We are not the bank, but we are soft bank. What you heard there was Sam Altman very pointedly jumping in and saying, your mutual friend, a.k.a. not mine. Lionel Barber, tell us about son's earliest years. He grew up in Japan. He was the son of Korean immigrants to Japan. Tell us about his boyhood. It's really important to understand that

Masa is an outsider. He's Korean-Japanese. And in Japan, that means you're a second-class citizen. His grandparents came over at the turn of the century. And at that time, Korea was a part of Imperial Japan. They were a colony. After the war, the family actually went back to Korea. Because they were seen as Japanese,

They were rejected. So they then went back to Japan in 1947 and they lived in a slum. And Masa was born on the edge of a slum in a large family. His father, who left school at 14, was initially a bootlegger and then a loan shark and then went into pachinko gambling, which is this semi underworld thing.

underground economy where it accounts for a huge amount of money in the Japanese economy, but there's essentially slot machine gambling. And Masa, therefore, was no longer living in poverty. Actually, his parents were quite wealthy, but he decided to go a different course. He wanted to speak English, learn about the future. And so he went to California

went to high school in California,

And then college, and he spent three years at Berkeley, UC Berkeley. Lionel, we're going to get to that in a second, but can I just ask you a quick follow-up about his family's sort of venture into gambling and pachinko, as you said. I mean, I was just thinking the title of your book is Gambling Man. Is there a connection, even though he went a different direction in terms of the businesses that he pursued, is there a connection there in terms of

you know, his obviously high, high tolerance for outlandish risks that most people probably wouldn't take. Well, you nailed it, Magna. He learned the art of the hustle, but he also learned, and I discovered this because I actually interviewed his father. His father described buying a large pachinko parlor

called the Golden Lion. And this was the biggest pachinko slot machine parlor in town. And because he needed to have very high turnover with lots of people, he fixed the machines. He fixed the pins so everybody would win. But of course, that meant running up very big losses. So his father gambled that, well,

As long as I get the volume through, then people will come back, even if I run up large losses. So he fixed the pins after a month. Then he went back again to let people win again. This is how Masa has pursued his career. He's delighted in running up big loss-leading companies in order to get the bigger prize, the bigger market share later. Ah.

Oh, interesting. So there's multiple conclusions we can draw from that early experience. And I'm going to obviously defer to you because the other one that comes to mind is, oh, market fixing. I wouldn't dream of saying that. Well, I would. But I take your point about the lost leader. But then there's also this idea that...

The big, big risk for the potentially big payoff, you also have to have the sort of, let's say, emotional fortitude to withstand things when they don't pay off. Did he have like early failures in his career? Well, one reason is, and he described to me how the Korean immigrants in the ghetto were

Every night during the week, the Japanese railway employees, they would actually dismantle the shacks and knock them over. And next day, the Koreans would build them back up again. And that's how he looked at life. I'll come back even if I've lost anything. And there's a phrase or a saying, which is, if you started with nothing,

losing everything, you just go back to where you were. You're having nothing. In a funny way, that describes Maas' mentality. He has a giant, giant appetite for risk. I would say that, yes, his risk tolerance is amazing.

on steroids practically. But it also, but, you know, to your point about understanding his family's Korean history and how that was seen in Japan, I think more broadly what Masayoshi-san seems to have an outsized ability for is something that actually, if I might say, we see in a lot of immigrants, right, who have the risk tolerance to leave their own countries to go to somewhere else and

sometimes with nothing, to try and make a new life. I think it's a similar mindset, but perhaps orders of magnitude more intense. Now, you had said that he came to the United States for high school, went to the University of California, Berkeley.

Now, we have a clip of tape here of Masayoshi Sun speaking with lawyer and businessman David Rubenstein back in 2017. And Sun here is describing to Rubenstein how when he was a college student, he was thinking about how he could make some money on the side by only working, as he tells it, for five minutes a day.

So I asked my friends, isn't it a good job that I can earn $10,000 in five minutes a day? My friend said, you're crazy. It's impossible. Nothing like that. Do you want to sell drugs? So I said, no, no, I don't want to do that. So I said, OK, what is the best, most efficient use of my time? It's invention. And I have to file a patent. If I get the patent...

Five minutes if I focus I can make some idea so I set alarm clock five minutes and tick tick tick They said come invention come come It worked that one was the electronic dictionary and you sold it to Sharp and you made a lot of money. Yeah 1.7 million dollars

Now, Lionel Barber, I believe, Son, when he says he set a clock and said in five minutes have to come up with an idea. But with his showman's flair, he seemed to skip all the rest of the work that had to happen after that to actually create his electric dictionary or at least enough so that he could file a patent for it.

But tell us more about these years in the United States in college and thereafter and how it sort of accrued so that he started making more and more money.

Well, Meghna, I need to choose my words carefully here because I'd hate to get involved in any kind of litigation or libel. And I've obviously put this to Masa himself. But what you just heard with Masa talking to David Rubenstein is, shall we say, very elastic with the...

interpretation of events. And the reason I know that is that when I went to Berkeley, California in 2022, I tracked down the Berkeley professor who is a nuclear particle physicist and innovator, a man called Professor Forrest Moser, who was the true inventor of the

electronic dictionary. And Forrest Moser Meghna was 92 years old when I met him and I rang him up at home, went and spent breakfast with him. And then we've been in touch. And in fact, he was in touch with me only the other day after the publication of the book in the U.S.,

And I'll leave our listeners to read the full account in the book. But essentially, Boris Moser was the inventor of that device. Masa, very cleverly, to give him his credit, understood that that electronic dictionary, speaking dictionary,

could have a great application in places like an airport where foreign travelers could come and ask for directions and they could speak into the device and out would come answers. But also,

Masa, and he claims it was a misunderstanding, he sold that technology to Sharp without the knowledge of the then important distributor, National Semiconductor. And there was a big row about it. And he had to undo the deal. But he did make his million dollars. And by the way, Forrest Moser didn't receive a red cent. Huh.

Just saying. But let's be... He's pretty clear in that tape, though, Lionel. He says he thought for five hard minutes and invented the electric dictionary. Yeah, I did hear that tape. And I was slightly gagging, as we say in England. But Meghna, the thing is, to be fair to Massa, and we'll try to because Boris Moser is still sore about this.

Masa was young, he was barely 21 years old, he was a young entrepreneur, he wanted to make things happen, he was determined to be a success, and he brilliantly understood how that device could work. By the way, just so you know, I also tracked down the 88-year-old other computer scientist who worked on the project.

And he gave me the same account. So rock solid reporting here. Oh, I do not doubt at all your reporting. What I'm beginning to doubt is the

integrity of Masayoshi's son? Well, we need to be careful because he's done many, many other things. He's been a great entrepreneur and I give him huge amounts of credit. It's just he does tend to embellish things. The one true thing, by the way, is that he is unbelievably ruthless about the division of his time. And he does divide it into five minute segments. And he also, and we need to say this on the program, he really does insist that

This was just a big misunderstanding between him, Forrest Moser, and he did the right thing in the end. He did the right thing in the end by what? Doing what? By unscrambling the deal. Ah, got it. Whereby he was distributing the product in Japan without the knowledge of national semiconductors. Understood. Okay. Fair enough. But to your point about Professor Moser not having received a red cent...

I mean, Masayoshi Son being the 51st richest man in the world right now, I mean, he could probably sneeze and a million dollars would fall out of his pocket. He probably, you know, perhaps a good thing to do would be to give it to the inventor of the actual inventor of the electronic dictionary. But from this early, even if somewhat qualified success at Berkeley, what else? What were some of his big investments later that really propelled him into the ranks of global billionaire hood? Yeah.

He went back to Japan and created a totally new business of software distribution, which is the company that he then took public. And on paper, in Japan by 1995, having launched the company in 1981 called SoftBank, he was on paper a small billionaire.

But then what he did was invest in Yahoo, the premier search engine company at the time, and then crucially, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which was his most successful bet by far, where he initially put in $20 million, then $80 million, which turned into $125, $130 billion. So

The Yahoo investment as well, he took 40% of Yahoo, formed a joint venture in Japan called Yahoo Japan. That, again, was phenomenally successful. So he's been a brilliant, if somewhat mercurial, tech investor. But it's more than luck. Yes, he seems to have an eye for, instead of sort of standalone apps or businesses, companies that you would, I think you used this word earlier, that were more sort of structural to the digital age.

Indeed, he heard that Yahoo was the coming force in Silicon Valley, the brightest light, if you like, and got in there pretty early, just after Sequoia, the VC business. On Alibaba, Goldman Sachs,

was ahead of Masa, but then sold. Masa stayed with it. You have to give him credit for that. Lionel Barber, hang on for just a moment. Much more in a second. This is On Point. Support for AI coverage in On Point comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

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You're back with On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty and Lionel Barber joins us today. He's the former editor of the Financial Times and author of the new book, Gambling Man, The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son. And Lionel, you had been telling us about those sort of big and very successful investments that Son had made into Yahoo and more importantly,

Alibaba. Well, thereafter came what I think is perhaps the most important part of Sun's current importance in the United States. And that's the SoftBank Vision Fund, which is a VC fund he created, I believe, in 2017. It's got $100 billion in assets and capital. So perhaps the world's largest VC fund. And it includes investors like

Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. So here's Masayoshi Son on The David Rubenstein Show in 2017. In one hour, you convinced him to invest $45 billion. 45 minutes, $45 billion. Okay, sorry. Okay, I apologize. $1 billion per minute. What could you have said that was that persuasion to get $45 billion in one meeting? I said, I want to give you a gift.

I want to give you a Masa gift, the Tokyo gift. You invest $100 billion to my fund. I give you $1 trillion. Lionel Barber, tell us about the SoftBank Vision Fund. After those investments in the internet companies like Yahoo and Alibaba, the dot-com bubble burst. Masa lost 97% of his wealth. So he came back.

15 years later and there he is with our hundred billion dollar vision fund. He has always been a gambler and he decided to go for a model where he essentially flood the zone. He'd wipe out the competition just by throwing money at the problem. And where would he get that money? Well, right

In the middle teens, the country that was most eager to get an entree into the tech ecosystem and also engage in a long-term project to reduce dependence on oil was Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a young man. I've actually interviewed him, by the way. I spent nearly two hours with him in Riyadh in 2015. And even then,

I saw the burning light in his eyes. This was a guy who wanted to modernize Saudi Arabia. So he teamed up with Massa to give Massa $45 billion, not $100 billion, by the way. That's another slight exaggeration. He gave him $45 billion of the $100 billion, well, it was actually $98.6 billion in this vision fund, which was to invest in...

AI-related companies in the future. It didn't work out so well, partly because Masa had promised a guaranteed 7% return.

And then he made some wild bets, notably on a company called WeWork that we all know about with Adam Neumann, this real estate leasing company, office leasing company. And it ended up having to be rescued. And then finally, after COVID, went bankrupt. That was the biggest, highest profile. Yes. So Lionel, I'm going to talk about that in detail because it's also linked to Masayoshi Son's previous promise of investing in the United States. But I

I want to just go back to something that's just that's nagging me a little bit. And perhaps this has to do with all multibillionaires. But, you know, I hear Masayoshi Son with his now it seems like typical bombast approaching the Saudi crown prince and saying, I will give you a tenfold return on your investment.

And I just feel like we're talking about a group of men who live on a completely different plane, right? I mean, including the crown prince, because, of course, whenever I hear his name, honestly, the first thing I think of is the death of Jamal Khashoggi. But the journalist who died in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, or was killed there, I should say. And it just...

Masayoshi Son, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Elon Musk. These are all people of such fantastic wealth, unimaginable wealth that, you know, for the rest of us, the great unwashed back here on planet Earth, it seems like they have they've reached a point where there is no consequence whatsoever.

When those men actually bet wrong or fail, there's no consequence for them. Did you come away in your conversations with these men feeling that they had any sense of that whatsoever?

Yes, because Masayoshi Son has regularly done penance in public and said, I screwed up or I dared to dream too big. And latterly, after COVID, he actually disappeared from the public view for a year. Of course, he was plotting his next comeback. But I came at the end of this book, and it took me three years to research and write,

with a little bit more sympathy for the great visionaries. I mean, these are the people who think of the future and make it happen. So somebody, when I asked them to explain the mentality, they went back to Ronald Reagan

and his Star Wars vision of having a space-based missile defense against the Soviets. Well, actually, it's happened. Sort of 40 years later, you see what Israel's done with its Iron Dome defense. I mean, there are things you need to have dreamers. If they fail, okay. The shareholders suffer.

They suffered to a degree on their reputations, but I'm rooting for the dreamers on this one, Meghna. Yeah, no, fair enough. I think history is rife with examples where someone with the kind of personality profile of Masa, with a very high tolerance for risk, a single-minded devotion to a dream, like history turns on those people. I completely agree with you. But at the same time, I think it's worth saying

you know, sort of scrutinizing what happens when promises are made with a showman's flair. I'm starting to warm to this showman's flair part of Sun.

With the rest of us who sometimes have to carry the consequences of the failures of those promises, the rest of us deserve to have a chance to measure what success is. It's true. It depends, Meghna, if you've invested in SoftBank or not. If you had, you would have made reasonable returns, but certainly nothing like the returns that Masa has promised. But do you know something? He has made...

so many people rich. A lot of it, we haven't talked enough about it, is borrowed money. He's borrowed from the banks. Remember, Japan had record low interest rates for more than 20 years because of the crash that happened in 1989. So he's borrowed money, he's then invested, he's spread a lot of money around, and he's made a lot of people rich. Yeah, no, completely. I

of, uh, smart investment is OPM, right? Other people's money, use that as leverage to make even more money, completely, completely take your point. But I think where my skepticism starts creeping in more forcefully is when, um, billionaires like this become entangled with politics because then the cost of failure is truly spread out amongst more people, I'd say, than simply shareholders. So let's use a particular example to, uh,

to scrutinize this a little bit. As you know, Lionel, back in...

Donald Trump's first administration, Masayoshi Son met Trump after his 2016 victory at Trump Tower. And Masa promised Trump that SoftBank, this is again in December 2016, would invest $50 billion in U.S. tech companies. And here's the thing. He actually gave us a way to measure whether or not this promise would be successful because he also committed to creating 50,000 new jobs.

And after the meeting, Sun spoke to reporters. I just came to celebrate his new job, and we were talking about it. And then I said, I would like to celebrate his presidential job and commit. Because he would do a lot of deregulation. I said, this is great. United States, U.S. will become great again.

So that's Masayoshi's son in December of 2016 after his meeting with Donald Trump following Trump's first election win. Now, Lionel, just for the sake of our listeners, I want to go over what happened to that $50 billion investment. As far as I can see, SoftBank actually and the Vision Fund did make almost the entirety of that $50 billion investment in the U.S. economies. What they did was...

Invested in a bunch of companies, lots of them from Silicon Valley, Slack, DoorDash. Almost half of it, as you pointed out earlier, went to WeWork, which then subsequently completely collapsed and failed.

The question about the jobs, though, which is what I think matters to more American, the 50,000 jobs, I'm not sure if it was ever determined that that promise was fulfilled because the majority of the investments went to private companies. So there was no public data available to say this money translated into this many jobs. So it was almost impossible to hold Sun to account on that basis.

And so, therefore, does it give us perhaps a little incentive to retain a healthy skepticism about this half a trillion dollar investment promise that he's making now? The number of jobs, I've asked SoftBank about that. And what they say is, well, some of them were construction jobs, so they didn't necessarily last all the way through to today.

And then other companies failed during COVID. So it was true at a certain point in time in the 50,000 figure. But then maybe there was some slippage thereafter. What we're now talking about, which is $500 billion,

That, I think, is something we really do need to look closely at, whether he can really do that inside four years. And does he have the money? He's certainly going to borrow. He's certainly going to get institutional money like pension funds. But I think that, to my view, is something of a stretch. But they do claim that they got to 50,000 by about 2020, 2021. That's their claim.

Well, I'm trying to be fair here. As you know, I'm no pussycat. Indeed, you tracked down a decades-old inventor of the electronic dictionary. So, I mean, I'm...

I'm speaking, let's say, on behalf of the listener. But so, OK, so with all of this in mind, I mean, how would you in the last few minutes that we have, Lionel, how would you describe why you say that he is Masayoshi-san is the world's greatest disruptor, as you put in? We talked about the gambling man part of your title, but what is it actually that makes him this global disruptor? Well, look at home in Japan at first.

First of all, he got into software distribution. That's a black box in Japan. He managed to insert himself between the manufacturer and the retail distributor. Amazing insight there. Then he took on

NTT, Docomo, which was one of the world's most valuable companies at the turn of the century and created his own mobile phone company. And then he went into the mobile internet. I mean, this is disruption on a huge scale, taking on incumbents. He mobilized not just one vision fund at 100 billion, but then $38 billion of his own money and

put that to work in the area of venture capital and tech. That, true, inflated valuations overall, but it was a serious disruptive force in Silicon Valley. Now he's doing the same in artificial intelligence.

I give him a lot of credit for that and for being a truly consequential investor. You know, you wrote written also that at one time, at least, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Sun played kind of a role of being a bridge between the U.S. and China. But there's an article that you have in the FT, I think, that says now he's picked sides.

Yeah, he told me that in the last interview that I did with him. I asked him, you know, you've been investing in the likes of Alibaba and some of the other tech companies. He's in ByteDance, by the way, which is a TikTok. He's invested in all these companies, but he's also invested in America. And he'd do that at a time when US and China are in an arms race.

technology arms race and also decoupling. And he said, look, I had to choose, and we've chosen the West, we've chosen America. So I think he's still got some legacy investments in China, but clearly his major push is the United States. What's he like in person? Charming, cautious. He speaks fluent English, but he is a great salesman.

And you have to look past that and get to the man. And the man is somebody who's just an edge of sadness because he's never satisfied. He always wants to go on to the next big thing. A bit like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill. It's a half trillion dollar boulder now, Lionel. Yeah, it is. Large boulder. The book is fantastic.

fantastic. It's called Gambling Man, The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi's Son. It's by Lionel Barber. Lionel, thank you so much for joining us today. Magna, it's been a great pleasure talking with you. I'm Magna Chakrabarty. This is On Point. On Point.