Masayoshi Son
Japanese businessman
Masayoshi Son (Japanese: 孫 正義; born Masayoshi Yasumoto, August 11, 1957) is a Japanese entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. A Zainichi Korean, he is the founder, chairman and chief executive of SoftBank Group (SBG), a technology-focused investment holding company, as well as chairman of UK-based Arm Holdings and US-based Stargate LLC.
As an entrepreneur, he achieved notability in software distribution, computing-related book and magazine publishing, and telecommunications in Japan, starting in the 1980s and booming throughout the 1990s and 2000s. His early $20 million investment in Alibaba Group in 2000 grew substantially over the years, reaching a valuation of around $75 billion by 2014 following Alibaba's IPO, and contributing significantly to SoftBank's financial success. SoftBank's 27 percent stake in Alibaba was worth $132 billion in 2018, including additional purchases of the stock since 2000. The morphing of his own telecom company SoftBank Corp. into an investment management firm called SoftBank Group Corp. made him noted worldwide as a stock investor. He is known for his bold investment strategies, sometimes resulting in major losses, particularly with the first and second SoftBank Vision Funds.
In 2013, Son was placed 45th on the Forbes magazine's list of the World's Most Powerful People. In 2017 he was named Entrepreneur of the Year at The Asian Awards.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q717038. VIAF identifies the subject as 66009155. The Library of Congress control number is no00014096. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957, 2000, 2014 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Masayoshi Son” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.