Masayoshi Son is not known for half measures. The SoftBank founder’s career is littered with eyebrow-raising bets, each seemingly more outrageous than the last. His latest move is to cash out his entire $5.8 billion NVIDIA stake to go all-in on artificial intelligence, and while it surprised the business world on Tuesday, maybe it shouldn’t. At this point, it’s almost more surprising when the 68-year-old Son doesn’t push his chips into the center of the table.
Consider that in the late 1990s, Son’s net worth soared to $78 billion by February 2000, briefly making him the richest man in the world. Then came the ugly dot-com boom months later. He personally lost $70 billion – which, at the time, was the largest financial loss of any person in history – as SoftBank’s market capitalization plummeted 98% from $180 billion to just $2.5 billion.
But in the midst of this horror, Sean made what would become his most legendary gamble: a $20 million investment in Alibaba in 2000, he decided (the story) after just a six-minute meeting with Jack Ma. This bet would eventually be made and it would be worth it 150 billion dollars by 2020, making him one of the most famous figures in the venture industry and financing his comeback.
This Alibaba success often made it harder to see when Sean was left at the table too long. When Son needed capital to launch his first Vision Fund in 2017, he didn’t hesitate to seek $45 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — long before taking money from Saudi Arabia was accepted in Silicon Valley. Following the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, Sean condemned the killing as “horrific and deeply saddening”, but insisted that SoftBank could not “turn our backs on the Saudi people”, maintaining the company’s commitment to managing the kingdom’s capital. In fact, the Vision Fund actually boosted trading soon after.
That didn’t turn out so well. A big bet has been made on Uber paper losses for years. Then came WeWork. Son overcame the objections of his lieutenants, “fell in love” with founder Adam Neumann and assigned the partner company a staggering $47 billion valuation in early 2019, after making several previous investments in the company. But WeWork’s IPO plans fell apart after the famous announcement disturbing S-1 filing. The company never quite recovered — even after ousting Neumann and enacting a series of belt-tightening measures — ultimately costing SoftBank $11.5 billion in equity losses and another $2.2 billion in debt. (The son reportedly later called it a “stain on my life.”)
But Son has been coming back for years and Tuesday will no doubt be remembered as a momentous moment in his history. Indeed, it will likely be recalled from the day SoftBank sold all 32.1 million shares of NVIDIA — not to diversify its bets but instead to double down elsewhere, including a planned $30 billion commitment to OpenAI and to join (it reportedly hopes) a $1 trillion AI manufacturing hub in Arizona.
If selling that position still gives Sean heartburn, that’s understandable. At about $181.58 per share, SoftBank came in just 14% below NVIDIA’s all-time high of $212.19, which is a strong showing. This is remarkably close to the peak valuation for such a huge position. However, the move marks SoftBank’s second full exit from NVIDIA, and the first was extremely costly. (In 2019, SoftBank sold a $4 billion stake in the company for $3.6 billion, shares that would now be worth more than $150 billion.)
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The move also rattled the market. As of this writing, NVIDIA shares are down nearly 3% following the disclosure, even as analysts stress that the sale “should not be seen as a cautious or negative stance on Nvidia,” but reflects SoftBank’s need for capital for its AI ambitions.
Wall Street can’t help but wonder: Is Sean seeing something right now that others aren’t? Judging by its track record, maybe — and that ambiguity is all investors have to go on.
