A scorecard of SoftBank’s biggest home runs and heart-breakers, from 20-year-old Jack Ma to the “fish that got away”
🎯 The Hits
| Deal | Year | Check Size | Today’s Value / Outcome | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alibaba | 2000 | $20 million | Peaked at ≈ $60 billion | The venture-capital return every VC dreams of. A 3,000× return that seeded the Vision Fund mythos. |
| Arm | 2016 | $32 billion | $60 billion+ (IPO pop in 2023) | SoftBank still owns ~90%. The crown jewel that survived Son’s other fires. |
| T-Mobile/Sprint | 2013–2020 | $22 billion outlay | Merged in 2020, stake now worth >$30 billion | Blocked under Obama, greenlit under Trump—turned a stranded asset into a U.S. 5G powerhouse. |
| DoorDash, ByteDance, Uber | 2017–2018 | $12 billion combined | $30 billion+ realized and unrealized | The Vision Fund’s few cash-printing exits that carried its 2023 rebound. |
💔 The Misses
| Deal | Year | What Went Wrong | Loss / Missed Gain | Son’s Mea Culpa |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WeWork | 2017–2019 | $18.5B pumped in at $47B peak; IPO failed, SPAC wiped out | $14B written off | “I was foolish… a very harsh lesson.” |
| Wirecard | 2019 | $1B invested days before the fraud collapse | 100% loss | No public apology; Vision Fund books took full hit. |
| Greensill Capital | 2019–2021 | $1.5B via Credit Suisse supply chain funds | Total loss after bankruptcy | Cited by regulators as textbook liquidity-risk hubris. |
| OneWeb | 2017 | $1B for satellite constellation | Bankruptcy in 2020 | SoftBank refused to fund final bridge round. |
| Nvidia | 2019 | Sold 4.9% stake for $3.3B ($700M cost) | Stake now worth ≈ $175–213B | “That fish got away… I had to tearfully sell the shares.” |
🐟 The One That Got Away: Nvidia in Three Acts
Act I – The Hook (2017)
The Vision Fund quietly accumulates a 4.9% stake in Nvidia for ~$700 million, becoming its largest external shareholder.
Act II – The Line Cut (January 2019)
A crypto-mining crash cuts Nvidia’s stock in half. SoftBank sells all shares for $3.3 billion, securing a 4.5× gain and soothing nervous LPs in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.
Act III – The Trophy Fish (2024)
That same stake is now worth ~$200 billion—more than SoftBank Group’s entire market cap. At the 2024 Tokyo AI Summit, Son mock-wept onstage as Jensen Huang reminded the crowd:
“Masa was once Nvidia’s largest shareholder.”
🔄 The Redemption Play: 2024–2025
- Re-buying Nvidia: SoftBank tripled its stake from $1B to $3B in Q1 2025, hedged with TSMC and Oracle.
- Stargate: Named financial lead on the $500B U.S. AI data-center buildout, partnering with OpenAI and Oracle.
- Arm + Blackwell Supercomputer: Over 4,000 Nvidia B200 GPUs now running in Tokyo; plans underway for a Grace–Blackwell exascale system.
🎲 Takeaway
“The difference between a visionary and a gambler is often the calendar.”
— Anonymous SoftBank LP
Masayoshi Son has lived both sides of that aphorism. His $20M bet on Jack Ma paid for a generation of moonshots. His $3B exit from Nvidia will finance business-school case studies for the next. Whether his current AI spree becomes the next Alibaba or the next WeWork will define his legacy this decade.
