A look at how Masayoshi Son picks and manages investments for SoftBank's $100B Vision Fund, which sources say has achieved a 60% ROI in its first year
Apple's Next Big ‘Reveal’ Event Is Coming Next Month Tweets: @cnbc : Take a look inside SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son's secret meetings with the founders he picks for his $100 billion Vision Fund. http://www.cnbc.com/... Alex Sherman / @sherman4949 : A bunch of founders that took $ from the Vision Fund tell cool stories about meeting Masayoshi Son. Son meets with every founder of every investment the fund makes - often several times - before investing (despite living in Japan for much of the year): http://www.cnbc.com/... Ari Levy / @levynews : Masayoshi Son has a message for his Vision Fund companies: You're a family http://www.cnbc.com/... via @sherman4949 Tracy Chou / @triketora : interesting tidbit about masa, esp for those who've read pachinko: friends say much of his energy, drive, and personality trace back to growing up bullied as a korean in japan and experiencing that discrimination http://www.cnbc.com/... Thanks: @mattrosoff
Context & Ripple Effects
This CNBC piece lands mid-arc in a run of reporting on how Masayoshi Son runs SoftBank's $100B Vision Fund. Earlier coverage documented his hard-edged dealmaking style and his habit of moving fast while bypassing the fund's investor committee and SoftBank's own directors; by May 2018 the fund had already deployed $30B across 24 companies in its first year.
What the new reporting adds is the process detail — Son meets every founder of every investment, often several times, despite being based in Japan for much of the year — plus a sourced claim of a 60% first-year ROI. That figure is what made the concentrated, personality-driven model look vindicated before the later reckoning.
First-order effects
- Founders taking Vision Fund money are effectively underwriting a relationship with Son himself, not just a check — the meetings are the diligence, and his personal sign-off sits above the fund's investor committee and SoftBank's board.
- SoftBank's governance structure is subordinated to one decision-maker: sources describe investments closing quickly and detached from the committee and directors who would normally gate a $100B vehicle.
Second-order effects
- Rival investors chasing the same late-stage deals must compete against a fund whose speed comes from skipping internal checks — pricing pressure flows to founders, but so does concentration risk in a single allocator's judgment.
- Portfolio companies inherit Son's involvement as both an asset and an oversight gap; the later employee accounts of sycophancy, rivalries, and recklessness inside the fund suggest the same founder-access model that produced returns also suppressed internal dissent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mega-funds consolidate allocation authority around individuals rather than committees — a structure whose durability gets tested when strategy reverses, as it did when Vision Fund 2 made just one investment each in August and September 2022 amid Son's rethink (CB Insights data via Nikkei).
- The arc from 60% ROI claims to the 2022 pullback points toward a structural lesson for limited partners: returns attributed to one person's judgment are inseparable from that person's blind spots, pushing LPs toward demanding real governance in future vehicles.
The trend: The Vision Fund era marks the peak of concentrated founder-capital — one individual allocating unprecedented sums on personal conviction — and its subsequent retrenchment is the stress test of whether that model survives contact with losses.