asayoshi Son has been linked to the word bankruptcy more times than any other entrepreneur in recent memory. That's remarkable considering that in the quarter century since its founding his Softbank has never filed for bankruptcy protection. As a matter of fact, Softbank is currently sitting on $5 billion in cash and $17 billion in unrealized gain on its holdings of 177 companies around the world. Not only that, Son's Yahoo! BB is about to pass Japan's equivalent of Ma Bell in the race to wire Japanese homes with superfast DSL service.
Son's rise from the ashes is an excellent guage of how the internet itself is faring because few on the planet have lashed themselves to the internet as completely as Masayoshi Son.
So why does the b-word keep cropping up every time Son's name gets mentioned? It might have something to do with the fact that Softbank is still losing $100 million a month. Or the fact that it hasn't turned a profit in eight years. Then again, maybe it's because Son was worth over $76 billion four years ago — second only to Bill Gates — and is worth less than a tenth of that today.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
Whatever — it's all nitpicking to Son. “Once you get past a certain amount of money you can't spend it anyway,” he likes to say while suppressing a yawn.
Son has made a career of ignoring what others say, at least outwardly. That's probably an essential character trait of a visionary who once held a 37% stake in pre-crash Yahoo!, then sold off most of it to chase his prohibitively expensive dream of battling mammoth NTT to become Japan's leading provider of broadband internet access. Another possible source of his thick skin: growing up Corean in Japan.
Masayoshi Son was born August 11, 1957 in Tosu on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. He was the second generation to be born in Japan, but under stringent naturalization laws, he was still a Corean citizen. As a first step toward obtaining citizenship, his family had taken on the Japanese surname Yasumoto. Nevertheless, young Masayoshi suffered intense prejudice.
“When I was in kindergarten, some kid hit me in the head with a stone,” he recalled. “It hurt me emotionally, and I decided to try to hide my identity.” Repeated encounters with Japanese racism throughout his life filled Son with what he would later call “the blackness inside.”
Masayoshi's interest in business was sparked at an early age by a father who owned a small business. Business offered a path around many of the social and economic barriers imposed by institutionalized racism. Even banks routinely denied loans to people with Corean surnames.
By the time Son was 16, he showed an unusual degree of initiative and perseverance. He sought an interview with one of his business idols, McDonald's Japan president Den Fujita. After many refusals, Fujita finally relented and agreed to the meeting and advised the persistent young man to learn English and study computer science.
Son lost no time. He was only 16 when he left for South San Francisco to live with family friends. After two years of high school, he got into the University of California at Berkeley. He didn't follow Fujita's advice strictly. Son majored in economics, but he did enroll in several computer science courses. He was 19 when he saw a photo of a microchip in a magazine article. He cut it out and carried it with him, convinced that computer technology was the future.
Deciding that the way to wealth was to invent a device incorporating the computer chip, Son disciplined himself to come up with at least one idea every day. He conceived a pocket multilingual translator and developed it sufficiently to secure a patent. He then sold the patent to Sharp for one million dollars. Sharp incorporated the patent into its highly successful Wizard line of PDAs.
PAGE 2
asayoshi Son has been linked to the word bankruptcy more times than any other entrepreneur in recent memory. That's remarkable considering that in the quarter century since its founding his Softbank has never filed for bankruptcy protection. As a matter of fact, Softbank is currently sitting on $5 billion in cash and $17 billion in unrealized gain on its holdings of 177 companies around the world. Not only that, Son's Yahoo! BB is about to pass Japan's equivalent of Ma Bell in the race to wire Japanese homes with superfast DSL service.