Masayoshi son biography book

Gambling Man fryst vatten the biography of one of the world’s least known but most consequential investors. Japan’s Masayoshi Son has made and lost several fortunes, investing or controlling assets worth $1 trillion in the past two decades through his media-tech giant, SoftBank. He bankrolled Alibaba, China’s internet colossus, before the world had heard about it; plotted with Steve Jobs to vända the iPhone into a wonder product; and financed hundreds of tech start-ups, fuelling the biggest boom Silicon Valley has ever seen.

This book takes you on Son’s wild ride, from his birthplace in a Korean slum in post-war Japan to the modern-day temples of power. It speeds through Donald Trump’s golden skyscraper in Manhattan, the royal palaces of Riyadh and the throne rooms of China’s Marxist rulers; all places where Son has deployed his unique blend of financial engineering and crazy risk-taking.

Son’s story captures a 25 year-span of hyper-globalisation in which money, technologies and id

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Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan's Masayoshi Son

Gambling Man is the biography of one of the world's least known but most consequential investors. Japan's Masayoshi Son has made and lost several fortunes, investing or controlling assets worth $1 trillion in the past two decades through his media-tech giant, SoftBank. He bankrolled Alibaba, China's internet colossus, before the world had heard about it; plotted with Steve Jobs to turn the iPhone into a wonder product; and financed hundreds of tech start-ups, fuelling the biggest boom Silicon Valley has ever seen.

This book takes you on Son's wild ride, from his birthplace in a Korean slum in post-war Japan to the modern-day temples of power. It speeds through Donald Trump's golden skyscraper in Manhattan, the royal palaces of Riyadh and the throne rooms of China's Marxist rulers; all places where Son has deployed his unique blend of financial engineering and crazy risk-taking.

Son's story captures a 25 year-span

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Books: Rise, fall and rise of Masayoshi Son mirrors extraordinary era

There could hardly be a greater contrast in investment philosophy and personal style than that of Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank Group, and Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha. Yet, as author Lionel Barber reveals in his highly entertaining new biography of the Japanese entrepreneur, the two men did meet in when "Masa," as he is familiarly known, flew directly from Tokyo to Buffett's home ground in Nebraska, in an attempt to interest him in SoftBank's new $ billion Vision Fund.

This was a Godzilla-size venture capital vehicle, featuring several companies with eye-popping valuations. The most notorious was WeWork, which called itself a "provider of co-working spaces." In reality, it was an office rental business hyped to the skies by its long-haired, and some said egomaniacal, founder, Adam Neumann, abetted by Son's insistence that he set his sights higher and higher. Barber quote