The Soft Banker

His penchant for thinking big, risk-taking and shrewd negotiating skills made him a source of inspiration for Japanese entrepreneurs. 

This eccentric Internet billionaire is the richest man in Japan, despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history by an individual ($70 billion).

He’s the most followed person on Twitter in Japan.

Childhood

Masayoshi Son was born on August 11, 1957. He grew up in an impoverished, ethnically Korean family crammed into a shack with no official address. Grade school classmates threw rocks at Son because he was Korean.

After his 16th birthday, he traveled to US to study English and computer science after taking advice from his idol, Den Fujita, Japan McDonald’s president.

He studied at Berkeley University, and invented the automatic translator, which then he sold to Sharp for $1million. He exited from University with solid knowledge in economic and informatics. 

Career

Son returned to Japan to start a software distribution company called Nihon SoftBank in 1981 — the name was later shortened in 1990. 

Despite having no software to sell, Son managed to nab an exclusive contract with top electronics retailer and Japanese software developer, quickly rising to the top of the country’s nascent computer industry, grabbing 50% of Japan’s retail market for computer software by 1984. 

Over the years Son got involved in a number of other ventures including a telephone-routing device, magazine publishing, the Comdex trade show, and broadband internet service, before betting big and losing, to the tune of a billion dollars, on Kingston Technologies in the late 90s.

The dotcom crash crushed SoftBank and Son, who lost $70 billion personally. By 2004, SoftBank’s stock price was down 98% from its peak. However, Son bounced back after he bought Japan telecom in 2004 and Vodafone Japan for $14 billion two years later. Now his company is the third-largest mobile internet provider in Japan.

Philanthropy

Son has received a lot of attention for his philanthropy. In the wake of the disastrous tsunami in 2011, the CEO donated $125 million to relief organizations and pledged all his future salary from SoftBank to orphaned children in the region.