
The Eccentric, Relentless Deal-Making of Masayoshi Son - iamben
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-02/inside-the-eccentric-unstoppable-deal-making-of-masayoshi-son
======
throwawayMA
Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

Masayoshi Son broke his promise to our startup. He signed an agreement with us
for a deal somewhere south of $100M and never delivered. After he signed, the
terms changed, and changed again, and it was as though his team was not
listening to him and did not follow his orders.

Be careful trusting too much in the impulsive decisions of Masa and the
follow-through of his team. He's too rich to need to care about his
reputation, but to me, his word does not count for much.

He will insist that you take too much money, and he does that because he wants
more control. Which, fine. That's like half the VCs in the world.

He will also make similar promises to your competitors and occasionally invest
in them instead of you.

------
pcr0
> _Anthony Tan, who co-founded the Grab taxi-hailing service, recalls first
> meeting Son a few years ago when the Japanese billionaire was considering
> investing in his startup. As the two chatted, Son mentioned his early
> support for Ma, then an unknown school teacher who is now the richest man in
> China. “Years ago, Jack Ma sat there,” Tan recalls Son telling him.
> “Anthony-san, you take my money. It 's good for you. It's good for me. If
> you don't take my money, not so good for you.”

Like so many others before and since, Tan took Son’s money._

He sounds like The Godfather of VC investing.

~~~
justicezyx
Alibaba does give him the authority to offer a unrejectable offer. Although
the math behind statistics and big enough capital is the true decider. Like
Godfather, he is not making an offer unrejectable, he just knows how to force
the other party to accept it...

------
indescions_2018
The top allocations are all solid: ARM, NVidia, FlipKart, WeWork, Uber,
OneWeb. Thematically it is precisely what Son says it is: a bet on the
connected future.

~~~
vadimberman
Portfolio theory. 1 investment succeeds, 9 fail. The one that succeeds pays
for the rest. That's why they are "top allocations".

The question is, how many of his investments worked out? If the ratio is less
than most, then it's mostly sheer luck with the really good ones.

------
jasonjei
_> Longer term, Son will have to do a better job articulating how his deals
fit together. At the company's annual shareholders meeting in June, he closed
with an awkward video the company has used for years to explain its view of
technology’s future. It opens with a blond man wandering among stone ruins.
“Sorrow is inherent to the human condition,” he says, staring into the camera.
“Since the beginning of time, humans have sought to overcome sorrow.” The clip
goes on to explain how technology will connect people on opposites sides of
the world and allow them to share thoughts and ideas. It closes with the man
wading through a field of waist-high grass. “Together we'll open the doors to
a new century of happiness and joy,” he says. Bafflement ensued.

> Even as his allies describe it, Son's vision seems like garden-variety
> optimism about a technological future that has been enunciated by many
> industry leaders: a trillion connected devices, generating data that will be
> analyzed by artificial intelligence to supposedly make the world a better
> place._

This almost sounds like a _Silicon Valley_ TV show parody, where Hooli’s CEO
tries to articulate his vision of fixing the human condition in a series of
awkward TV ads and speeches.

~~~
idoh
Here is the link to the video if anyone is curious:
[https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/webcast/?wcid=s7ez7167](https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/webcast/?wcid=s7ez7167)

I watched the video, it is a bit trite and generic but not really baffling.

~~~
eps
That was painfully trivial and over-the-top pompous. So it _is_ baffling.

