Former editor of the Financial Times Lionel Barber has written a lively and detailed account of the rollercoaster life of Masayoshi Son, founder and head of the Japanese investment company SoftBank, which is quite some feat when you consider “Masa” (as he’s known to friends) is said to have made a fortune of $200 billion (€183.5 billion), and also spent $200 billion by betting big on technology. How to sum that up? “Was Son a tech visionary,” asks Barber, “or simply an inveterate gambler who got lucky?” If it was a case of deal or no deal, it seems Masa usually risked the first option.
In Gambling Man, Barber focuses mostly on all the daring deal making – it’s a dashing book, to the point where it’s hard to keep on top of all the finance – while rustling up whatever views he could from those in Son’s private circle and garnering personal details of the notoriously private Korean-Japanese investor. (Son’s origin story is one of the strongest sections of the book, with all the cultural complexities involved being born to impoverished second-generation Korean immigrants on an island in the western Japanese archipelago. Barber calls him “a quintessential outsider”).
Sixty-seven-year-old Son invested early in Yahoo and China’s answer to Amazon, Alibaba, in the budding days of the internet boom, and opened up the Japanese market to Vodafone, making him the richest person in the world at the turn of the millennium before the dotcom bubble burst. Other heavy investments have not been so kind, though, such as the office-share start-up WeWork, which had disastrous consequences, reportedly costing SoftBank $10 billion.
Barber’s book is a dizzying tour of global tech with the usual names – and many with lower profiles – attached, with the expected dressings of private jets, high-end hotels, late-night negotiations, and bottles of Romanée Conti La Tache that will tantalise and thrill a reader who reveres tech bro billionaire boom-and-bust culture.
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A general reader might worry about what kind of world these people wish for; you would think having made and lost more money than anyone on the planet must give philosophical pause to someone when they turn in at night. But it appears Son is already looking at his next big bet: AI, naturally, which he claims will be running households in a few years’ time. There could be a second act for Masayoshi Son yet, and maybe another volume for Barber.
NJ McGarrigle is a critic
