Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son (孫正義; born 11 August 1957) is the founder of SoftBank Group and has stood at the top of the company for the forty-five years since its founding in September 1981. His current title is representative director, corporate officer, chairman and CEO; his date of birth is published in the company's official biography. According to the English Wikipedia he was born in Tosu, Saga Prefecture. The same official biography records that he held 1,865,511,164 shares in the company as of 1 June 2026.

SoftBank's corporate history is on the organization page. This page deals with what belongs to the man who made its decisions.

Berkeley and a picture of a microchip

According to the company's history, Son studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he immersed himself in various inventions and businesses. While studying in the US he came across a picture of a microchip in a science magazine, which, the company says, convinced him that the age of personal computers was coming. After returning to Japan he founded Nihon SoftBank in September 1981 as a business distributing packaged PC software throughout the country; the name meant a "software bank" that would serve as infrastructure for the information society. In May 1982 it launched two monthly magazines, Oh! PC and Oh! MZ, which covered PCs and software by manufacturer.

Time Machine Management and the American acquisitions

Around the time the company renamed itself SoftBank Corp. in July 1990, it was pursuing what it called "Time Machine Management": bringing businesses born in the US to Japan. With JPY 20 billion raised through an over-the-counter share offering, it took a stake in the operator of the COMDEX computer trade show and acquired Ziff-Davis Publishing, the publisher of PC WEEK. The company's history says Son described these deals as a way to "get a map and a compass" for a voyage into the centre of information technology. Through Ziff-Davis the company found the newly founded Yahoo!, took a stake in November 1995, and in 1996 set up Yahoo! JAPAN as a joint venture.

Becoming a carrier

In the 2000s Son turned SoftBank into a telecommunications operator. It launched the Yahoo! BB ADSL service in September 2001 and acquired the fixed-line carrier Japan Telecom, and in April 2006 he became chairman of the board, president and CEO of Vodafone K.K. He has also been a director of China's Alibaba.com Corporation since October 2005. In mobile, the company released the iPhone 3G in Japan as its exclusive carrier on 11 July 2008.

In June 2014 the group company SoftBank Mobile unveiled the humanoid robot Pepper, with Son himself at the launch.

Arm and the turn to investment

In September 2016 he became chairman and executive director of ARM Holdings, which SoftBank had acquired, and since August 2023 he has been chairman and a director of the Nasdaq-listed Arm Holdings plc (see the ARM architecture). In 2017 the SoftBank Vision Fund held its first major close, and the company leaned further towards being a holding company built around investment in high-growth companies that use AI.

ASI and Stargate

In recent years Son has made artificial superintelligence (ASI), AI far surpassing human intelligence, his theme. In his message on the company's website he identifies what SoftBank's 2010 "Next 30-Year Vision" called a "brain computer" with what is now called ASI, and sets the goal of becoming the No. 1 platform provider for the ASI era. On the bubble question he writes, "Some people say that AI may be a bubble. I disagree," and compares the current evolution of AI to the early days of the internet.

The investment in OpenAI and Stargate, announced at the White House in January 2025, are where that vision took concrete form. In Stargate SoftBank has financial responsibility and OpenAI operational responsibility, and Son is chairman.

Assessment

Son's forty-five years trace a capital that kept moving to the centre of each era: PC software, the internet, broadband, mobile phones, chip design and now AI. The decisions have been concentrated in one founder, and the company's own reason for nominating him as a director is that he has been at the helm of the group's management since its founding. His forecasts about ASI should be read as the claims of the party with the most capital riding on them.