Masayoshi Son

Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It’s February, and that means two things: you can stop wishing p

Masayoshi Son famously built his war chest by pumping $20 million into Alibaba two decades ago. Over the years the Chinese e-commerce behemoth has become a way for the billionaire founder of SoftBank

The Vision Fund was always a funded vision; today we learned just how cloudy that perspective is proving.

If SoftBank investors were already feeling shaken by the conglomerate’s poor performance this year, a news release out of the company tonight isn’t exactly going to assuage their concerns.

SoftBank may cut its startup investments this fiscal year (FY 2023) by more than half, chief executive Masayoshi Son said on an earnings call Thursday, the latest high-profile investor to become vocal

Not for the first time, SoftBank is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. Indeed, even while the Japanese conglomerate is known for its extremes — be it bold bets, internal squabb

If you believe you have a good idea for a startup, go for it. When venture capitalists say this is a good time to be a founder, you know they absolutely mean it.

Slightly falling quarterly venture capital totals and a notable decline in unicorn formation does not a startup winter make. So let’s look at what's happened more recently.

After burning through more than $2 billion in funding, SoftBank-backed construction startup Katerra has told employees that it will be shutting down operations, according to a report in The Informatio

Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, has had a topsy-turvy year or two, but the story he is eager to tell is that he is back and in the black. Such was the overarc

It’s hard to think back to the Vision Fund era today, given the oddities that 2020 has brought. But SoftBank’s gravity-bending investment vehicle only stopped investing last September, end

Motif FoodWorks, the Ginkgo Bioworks spinout focused on developing new plant-based flavorings and food ingredients, is readying commercial scale production of its first product — an ingredient t

SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son said on Thursday he is leaving the board of Jack Ma’s Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group today, a month after Ma left the board of Son’s technology group.

Amidst the blitz of SoftBank earnings news today comes the financials for all of SoftBank’s subsidiaries, which includes Arm Holdings, the most important chip design and research company in the worl

It would be one of the greatest startup investments of all time. Masayoshi Son, riding high in the klieg lights of the 1990s dot-com bubble, invested $20 million dollars into a fledgling Hong Kong-bas

There is a flurry of news out of SoftBank this morning, which announced its Fiscal Year 2019 (ending March 31, 2020) financial results overnight. It’s been a bad year for the Vision Fund, with huge

In the first decade of the twentieth century two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, invented fertilizer — the nitrogen compound which ushered in modern agriculture and saved the world

Mahendra Ramsinghani Contributor Share on Twitter Mahendra Ramsinghani is the founder of Secure Octane Investments, investing in cloud infrastructure and security startups. When he is not investing, h

The Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank Group said it would lose a staggering $24 billion on investments made through its Vision Fund and bets on the co-working real estate company WeWork and sa

The activist investment firm Elliott Management has steadily amassed a $2.5 billion stake in the headline-grabbing, Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank even as a series of missteps battered the