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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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'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'
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.
Softbank is a bank in Japan ...
SoftBank is not a bank. It is a tech holding company.
Also, while Masayoshi Son is a Japanese citizen, he is ethnically Korean, and is seen as an outsider in corporate Japan. He has attributed his success to being forced to follow a less cautious path, and being shutout of many of the cross-ownership deals between Japanese corps, that in hindsight have been a boat anchor impeding the growth and innovation of his competitors.
Most Japanese are ethnically Korean.
If you want to get pedantic, why not go all the way, and point out that we all came from Africa?
The modern Japanese migrated to the archipelago several thousand years ago, and are linguistically and culturally distinct from Koreans.