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The $100B Bet: The Meaning of the Vision Fund (economist.com)
Two years ago, if you had asked experts to identify the most influential person in technology, you would have heard some familiar names: Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Alibaba's Jack Ma or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Today there is a new contender: Masayoshi Son. The founder of SoftBank, a Japanese telecoms and internet firm, has put together an enormous investment fund that is busy gobbling up stakes in the world's most exciting young companies. The Vision Fund is disrupting both the industries in which it invests and other suppliers of capital [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source wasn't immediately available]. From a report: But even if the fund ends up flopping, it will have several lasting effects on technology investing. The first is that the deployment of so much cash now will help shape the industries of the future. Mr Son is pumping money into "frontier technologies" from robotics to the internet of things. He already owns stakes in ride-hailing firms such as Uber; in WeWork, a co-working company; and in Flipkart, an Indian e-commerce firm that was this week sold to Walmart. In five years' time the fund plans to have invested in 70-100 technology unicorns, privately held startups valued at $1bn or more. Its money, often handed to entrepreneurs in multiples of the amounts they initially demand and accompanied by the threat that the cash will go to the competition if they balk, gives startups the wherewithal to outgun worse-funded rivals. Mr Son's bets do not have to pay off for him to affect the race. Mr Son's second impact will be on the venture-capital industry. To compete with the Vision Fund's pot of moolah, and with the forays of other unconventional investors, incumbents are having to bulk up.
just a bunch of businessmen. The most "influential" are guys who go around buying up companies and using tech other people developed.
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Softbank is just a bunch of rich people wasting oil money. Most of the money comes from Saudi Arabia.
'The Money Store' was largely funded by the DuPont family. Nice job redistributing the wealth, whoever pulled that one off.
Old money people are unbelievably stupid and helpless. If you did even a little searching, you could find many formerly rich families.
3 generations removed from the person that made the money, and you are pretty much guaranteed _metric_ room temperature IQs. e.g. The Kennedy family, the Bush family, the DuPont family, the Hunt family, the Rockefeller family, the Hilton family, the other Bush family (of Anheuser-Bush) etc etc etc.
Granting some family are so rich, they can't waste the money fast enough. Those fortunes last until the get an active investor, moron, heir.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Uber; in WeWork, and in Flipkart,
Kind of late to the party there. These guys are already done doing whatever disrupting they're going to do.
How about finding some new ideas that need investment?
Maybe he can find some bio firms and CRISPER all up in that beeotch, but that bandwagon is already well under way. Maybe neural interfaces & mind uploading might be fertile fields.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
just a bunch of businessmen. The most "influential" are guys who go around buying up companies and using tech other people developed.
Tech is not influential if it sits on the shelf. Great ideas often go nowhere until someone puts some money behind them.
Indeed. In 1937, the Rockefeller family has a net worth of about 1.5% of America's economic output, or about $300B in today's dollars. But the assets of the Rockefeller family today has dwindled to almost nothing. A mere $10B.
which is why the government funds science. Albeit in the most round about way possible in the States.
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That is because America's economic output increased quickly. Rockefellers net worth would be about $30B in today's dollars. David Rockefeller was incredibly (financially) successful in banking.
Commie theory, as espoused by the GGP, says that they would simply have to be worth more as time passed.
That's just false, even at the Billionaire level. They've pissed away 2/3 of it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They've pissed away 2/3 of it.
To be fair, a large amount of that money went to philanthropy.
How they pissed it away isn't my problem.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Makes sense, really. I mean, think about it.
Guy makes a fortune in something. Guy then has offspring. You think his offspring will have the same work ethic as their dad? Heck, their dad might have grown up in the poor part of the tracks with barely enough food to eat and clawed his way to money one deal at a time. His kids will never have that experience, growing up in a relatively large house with plenty of food. And having to go without seems hard to do when you have enough money to buy what you want.
Daddy might try to impart some wisdom, but chances are it will fall on deaf ears - there never was a time they had to do without, never a time they needed to work. It's like a lottery winner who wins the big pot - chances are in 5 years they'd be broke and in debt, no matter how much money they won.
When you make your fortune the hard way, you learn the value of a dollar. When you have all the dollars given to you, you don't really know what it's like to not have a dollar and mouths to feed. About the only way to do so is to use that money to get oneself a head start, then abandon it - walk away, and live like every other working stiff does.
... with its piss poor track record of forecasting global affairs. (And local too.) Written for IYIs to give them an illusion they are being better informed about this world of ours.
The cover is more or less the only thing of value in that magazine, artistically speaking.
I'd have said Linus Torvalds.
And I would do the same today.
That's what happens when you have a system designed to ensure the rich stay rich, what's your point?
To be fair, charities are just tax dodges. Being poor on paper is the dream most billionaire obtain, it doesn't make them dumb, just corrupt.
bahahahaahahahahahahaaha
To find someone who doesn't already know this story, in many glorious hues, you'd pretty much have to travel to some remote place where television hasn't been invented yet (and maybe books, too).
Most people on the internet have television, and 99% of us can read with fair proficiency, yet somehow you feel the need to recap that story in its essential outlines here. Obviously, your narrative purpose is not to inform, but rather to scold or remind, or some interesting hybrid thereof; or perhaps to anchor one narrative frame in the discussion, at the expense of another.
There's an extensive and thriving literature on nature vs nurture, and the complex weave of heredity and environment—which your post reduces to a single, commonplace "just so" story.
Another possible name for "just so" stories is base-rate baldies: you can tell a "just so" story by the inability of a superforecaster to do anything with it at all. The universal hallmark of a superforecaster is to first establish the base rate, and then refine the model to increasingly narrow specifics progressing inward by degrees from that firm foundation.
Magic Eight Ball, Magic Eight Ball, tell me a story about a knockout success.
Magic Eight Ball, Magic Eight Ball, tell me a story about another knockout success.
It is really like this: to really get rich simply go down to the crossroads at midnight and sell your soul to the devil.
Catch-22: You have to have one that he[/she/it] won’t get simply by waiting.
The devil then has an ‘in’ on the decedents, the devil has a voluminous catalog of what temptation works where and with whom, and gets them by simply waiting.