Masayoshi Son
Source of wealth: Telecom, Investments
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Modules
Biography
Masayoshi Son founded and runs investment giant SoftBank Group, which reported net profit of 3.2 trillion yen ($20.5 billion) on sales of 5.7 trillion yen ($37 billion) for the nine months ended December 31, 2025.
Investors in Son's Vision Fund 1 include Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn, the family office of billionaire Larry Ellison and Saudi Arabia's sovereign fund.
The Vision Funds have invested in over 400 companies, including ride-share firm Grab, Korean e-commerce leader Coupang and India's food-delivery platform Swiggy.
Son is investing billions of dollars in AI, including in the $500 billion Stargate Project, in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle and MGX, to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
In November 2025, SoftBank sold its entire stake in chipmaker Nvidia for nearly $6 billion to fund its investment in OpenAI. It plans to invest $30 billion in three tranches between April and October 2026.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Masayoshi Son
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Masayoshi Son, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Telecom, Investments', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 552 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 36.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.