SoftBank's Billionaire CEO Admits Charm Offensive Defeated

Masayoshi Son did what he promised and skipped the SoftBank earnings call for the first time. But first...

Today’s must-reads:

• Nintendo’s Switch is finally starting to show signs of its old age

• AI hype is driving Google and others to release their own ChatGPT

• Baidu’s shares  after it announced a chatbot named Ernie

Personality only goes so far

Masayoshi Son always keeps snacks in his pockets. The billionaire founder of SoftBank Group Corp. is generous about sharing them, even with reporters who’d stalk him at elevators. He once gave me the Japanese cracker Happy Turn while sidestepping my question. It worked — I laughed and let him go. 

Son knows his charm is his biggest asset, and through the years he’s pounced on every opportunity to use it to promote SoftBank and its bets. Whether in the hallways of Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, on trade show floors, or at seemingly endless earnings calls where he’d field questions from analysts, reporters and bloggers alike, tirelessly proselytizing his view of the future. 

So I bet that Son would be there on Tuesday’s earnings call in Tokyo after all. I thought he would be unable to stay away, despite his 25-minute swan song in November when he declared that would be his last earnings call for the time being.

I was wrong. Son never showed up. His CFO Yoshimitsu Goto presented, using the language of bankers and caution, speaking of loan-to-value ratios and cash reserves. 

Sure, SoftBank’s results weren’t pretty. But I doubt that was what fazed Son. The scrappy 65-year-old who used to talk of his grandmother collecting food scraps for pigs has seen far worse.

After the dot-com crash wiped out more than 95% of SoftBank’s market value, he faced angry shareholders and creditors, apologized and told them to bet on him again. “Believe in me,” he said at the first AGM after the bloodbath, and they invested more. “Believe in me, and lend me money,” he told banks, and they did.

My theory is that Son now sees not only the limitations to charisma and optimism, but downsides too.

The hopeful approach was an an asset in early-stage investing, allowing Son to make a $20 million bet on an English teacher in China and hang on through the dot-com bust to realize thousands-fold returns on Alibaba.

But with the Vision Fund, his unfettered faith became a liability. With billions at its disposal, Vision Fund teams vied with one another to pitch ideas that would capture Son’s attention in the span of 30 minutes. Often, the grandest ideas with the most ambitious trajectories won out. Cheap capital flooded into startups with no way to spend it.

In the end, the world’s most aggressive tech investor spent billions helping to lift valuations, only to see them tumble. Son’s Vision Fund no longer has the capital to sustain its former spending, although this gloomy market would seem the optimal time to be a believer in tech.

Some investors may be relieved that Tuesday’s earnings call featured none of Son’s colorful metaphors to distract from Goto’s statements about how the company is paying down debt. There were no golden eggs dancing under a goose, no tofu on conveyor belts, no flying unicorns. 

Some analysts say that’s a positive. Others say it’s a negative.

One thing’s sure, though. No matter how much Son talked, the skeptics outnumbered the believers.

At his very first presentation to SoftBank’s first two employees, Son said they would some day count revenue in trillions of yen, in the same way that a tofu maker might count chunks of tofu. Baffled, both employees resigned the next day.

Since then, Son has kept the faith in technology’s promise.

But he seems to think that at least for now, silence is more effective, and that he can do more for SoftBank as the billionaire in the shadows. The eye rolls have spoken. Maybe they’re right.

The big story

Coupang, the South Korean e-commerce pioneer that has lost billions of dollars since its founding, is rolling out an army of robots at fulfillment centers in a bid to reach profitability.

Get fully charged

The squabble between crypto billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Digital Currency Group’s Barry Silbert appears to be over, paving the way for a resolution of one of the industry’s biggest bankruptcies.

Watch: What is behind Apple’s discount sales in China and why are Apple’s latest earnings encouraging?

Yet another tech startupslashing

More from Bloomberg

Coming Soon: Bloomberg’s newsletter chronicling corporate bankruptcies, distressed debt and turnaround stories, delivered Tuesdays and Fridays. Sign up for The Brink

This week on the Crash Course podcast, host Tim O'Brien explores the past, present and future of the multi-billion-dollar sports betting boom. Find this special miniseries of the Crash Course podcast on or wherever you listen.

in your inbox:

• Power On for Apple scoops, consumer tech news and more
• Cyber Bulletin for coverage of the shadow world of hackers and cyber-espionage
• Soundbite for reporting on podcasting, the music industry and audio trends
• for reporting on the video game business, delivered on Friday
• Screentime for a front-row seat to the collision of Hollywood and Silicon Valley