Masa Son, Trump's Japanese buddy with the Midas Touch

by Simon STURDEE

Masayoshi Son, the Japanese tycoon helming US President Donald Trump's big new AI push, is the son of an immigrant pig farmer with a spectacular but also sketchy investment record.

Trump's "friend Masa" was born in Japan in 1957 to ethnic Korean parents who scratched a living rearing chickens and hogs while battling discrimination.

"We collected leftover food from neighbors and fed it to cattle. It was slimy. We worked hard," he said later. "And I've worked hard."

He went to the United States aged 16 and, while studying at Berkeley, developed a translation machine that he sold for around $1 million.

In his 20s, Son founded investment group SoftBank and made colossally successful early bets on Yahoo! and Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba in the 1990s.

The former reportedly made him -- for a few days -- the world's richest person and the latter seemed to cement his Midas Touch reputation.

"I could smell him. We are the same animal," Son said of Alibaba's founder Jack Ma.

Ma replied: "He probably has the biggest guts in the world on doing investments."

- Failures -

At his eagerly awaited news conferences, Son would show slides showing geese laying golden eggs and set out glorious visions for the future.

He launched his tech-focussed $100-billion Vision Fund investment vehicle in 2017, securing huge funding from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and others.

But Yahoo! and Alibaba proved to be the exceptions, not the rules, and many other Silicon Valley investments have failed, some spectacularly.

This included office-sharing firm WeWork, which went bankrupt, and the hospitality chain Oyo Rooms, and Son shied away from the limelight.

In the 2022-23 financial year, SoftBank's two Vision Funds posted a whopping 4.3 trillion yen ($32 billion at the time) in losses.

- AI pivot -

But the irrepressible Son, 67, decided to pivot to artificial intelligence (AI).

Key to the coming revolution, Son hopes, will be majority Softbank-owned Arm, the British chip designer whose technology is in 99 percent of smartphones.

Son wants Arm to compete with the likes Nvidia -- the two are currently partners -- and make chips for AI processes.

Son promised SoftBank would invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 jobs within Trump's first term.

Appearing alongside the US president-elect in December, Son said he would now "double down" with $100 billion and generate employment for 100,000 Americans.

On Tuesday Son appeared at the White House along with Trump with OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman and Oracle founder Larry Ellison to announce Stargate.

The aim is to build infrastructure to develop AI with an initial $100 billion and reaching $500 billion during Trump's second term, Son said.

Son will be chairman, SoftBank will be responsible for financing and OpenAI for operations. Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI will provide the technology.

"This is the beginning of a golden age for America," Son said, predicting artificial general intelligence (AGI), a benchmark of human-level intelligence, "very very soon."

"After that artificial super intelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind never ever would have thought could be solved," he said.

- 'Mojo back'-

SoftBank shares soared on the announcement, adding 10.6 percent on Wednesday in Tokyo.

"Masa has his mojo back," said Kirk Boodry, a SoftBank analyst at Astris Advisory.

"Inevitably, there are going to be questions about how Softbank funds this but we expect they will be able to pull in limited partners (likely Middle Eastern money as they did with Vision Fund) whilst asset sales are very likely on the agenda," Boodry said in a note.

Amir Anvarzadeh from Asymmetric Advisors was less sure, saying that Son and Trump "both like numbers".

"Unless Softbank sells its stake in Arm, which is massively overvalued anyway, where is all the money going to come from?"

© Agence France-Presse