Masayoshi Son is the founder and CEO of SoftBank, the giant Japanese private equity fund that’s the main backer and cheerleader of OpenAI. SoftBank was also the main backer of WeWork, which was alm…
  • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    He’s picked what, Yahoo, AMD, and Alibaba? But then he also lost a huge amount in the dotcom bust and WeWork and doesn’t have have any other notable picks? That’s not a golden goose, that a gambler that got lucky thrice and nearly went bust twice, and it will be 3 times if he keeps tripling down on OpenAI.

    • David Gerard@awful.systems
      OPMEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      SoftBank makes a ton of cash. They have a huge mobile phone company in Japan. They used to have the Japanese monopoly on iPhones. Those are the geese who lay the golden eggs Son then squanders.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        He certainly seems to enjoy the same kind of privilege of an infinite rebuy that Elon gets. It really does feel like there’s a limit of nine digits on the money counter and once you get more than a billion dollars it just overflows to infinity. There seems to be no amount of bad investments they can make or money they can lose that would actually matter or make them come back to the same economy the rest of us live in.

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    10 hours ago

    The fact that the 2014 presentation opens with “SoftBank=goose” just makes the 2026 metaphor even harder to parse. Is SoftBank itself the goose? Is the goose the hypothetical ASI that OpenAI is definitely going to build and monetize any day now? Am I the goose? I certainly feel undervalued sometimes, maybe I’m the goose.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    11 hours ago

    Wednesday’s presentation for 2026 mostly hammers on Son’s love of AI. Son said: [Reuters]

    I think it’s blasphemy against AI if ‌you say it’s a bubble.

    [THIS IS WHAT AI CULTISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE]

    Also, “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs” is a cautionary fable about greed being bad.

    Knowing that would require techbros to actually read, so I’m not shocked