Masayoshi Son

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The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

introduced by a local CEO: “Launching of Startup India Movement,” YouTube, streamed live on January 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=X8T4Xnjuy0Q (Neumann introduced at 52:40). “We’re in nineteen cities”: Ibid. “the beginning of the big bang”: Surabhi Agarwal, “Softbank’s Masayoshi Son Unfazed by Talk of a Funding Crunch or Bloated Valuations,” Economic Times, Jan. 18, 2016. world’s richest man in 2000: “Conversation with Masayoshi Son,” The Charlie Rose Show, March 10, 2014. His father had cirrhosis: Atsuo Inoue, Aiming High: A Biography of Masayoshi Son (YouTeacher, 2013), chap. 31. He barely had a drink: Interview with Hong Lu, April 2020. called him “Rojin-kiraah”: Yuri Kageyama, “ ‘Japan’s Bill Gates’ Strikes It Rich in Cyberspace,” Associated Press, May 29, 1996.

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Neumann would need to change the narrative and find some believers in the next week or so, before the company kicked off its two-week official “road show” with presentations to potential investors. What he’d need most were a few committed believers willing to write huge checks. Just then, a familiar face reached out to Neumann. Masayoshi Son wanted a meeting. CHAPTER 34 A Setting Son Masayoshi Son was getting worried. Reading reactions to the IPO prospectus from his office in Tokyo, he was beginning to see that WeWork’s IPO was going to be ugly. Public market investors, he realized, didn’t view WeWork the way he did. They weren’t going to value it anywhere near the $47 billion mark where Son had made his most recent cash infusion into the company—not even close.

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$15 billion to buy Vodafone’s business: Jathon Sapsford, “Vodafone Sells Japanese Unit to Softbank for $15 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2006. By negotiating directly with Steve Jobs: Takashi Sugimoto, “Masayoshi Son Talks About How Steve Jobs Inspired SoftBank’s ARM Deal,” Nikkei Asia, Sept. 24, 2016. $21.6 billion deal in late 2012: Wakabayashi and Troianovski, “Japan’s Masayoshi Son Picks a Fight with U.S. Phone Giants.” spending $117 million for a nine-acre estate: Katherine Clarke, “The Estate That Wants to Be Silicon Valley’s Priciest Home,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18, 2018.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

In 1995, U.S. venture partnerships raised $10 billion, up from $3 billion five years before.[15] There was so much money in the Valley, and so much faith in the logic of the power law, that Yahoo was almost bound to be funded. The funder who appeared was ideally suited to the moment. He was a short, slight entrepreneur named Masayoshi Son, and he had earned a reputation as the Bill Gates of Japan by hitting it big with a software distributor called SoftBank. Unlike Gates, who came from a privileged background, Son was an extreme example of a self-made man. His family was part of Japan’s marginalized Korean minority, and his childhood home was a squatter’s shack near a railroad that he shared with six siblings.

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By mid-1999, Benchmark had raised and invested three funds, deploying a cumulative $267 million of capital. But after that summer’s crop of IPOs, the value of the portfolio surpassed $6 billion, implying a multiple of about twenty-five times capital.[67] The back-to-basics vision of venture capital was evidently thriving, whatever the message from Masayoshi Son’s example. The contest between these two models would persist into the future. The Benchmark partners practiced venture capital the way that traditionalists loved, intelligently assessing startups, empathizing with founders, and serving as enlightened counselors. Son stood for a less elegant but still formidable approach.

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It didn’t have a bank account to deposit the check into.[6] “Well when you do, stick it in there,” Bechtolsheim said cheerfully.[7] Then he disappeared in his Porsche without saying what share of Google he imagined he had bought. “I was so excited I just wanted to be part of it,” he said later.[8] Bechtolsheim’s impromptu investment signaled the coming of a new kind of technology finance, as significant as Masayoshi Son’s $100 million check two years earlier. Before the mid-1990s, semiretired technology executives had sometimes turned their hands to investing: Mike Markkula had backed and shepherded the fledgling Apple; Mitch Kapor had financed and counseled GO and UUNET.[9] But it took the booming tech market of the middle and late 1990s to turn this “angel investing” into a serious force.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

SIXTEEN The Vision Fund General Atlantic’s investment in Greensill had put Lex on the radar of SoftBank Group Corp’s Vision Fund, one of the biggest guns of global investing. It’s a rule of high finance that if one big financial firm does a deal, others will probably assume that their rivals did their work properly and follow suit. Masayoshi Son, the CEO of giant Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, had launched the $100 billion Vision Fund in 2017. He staked about $28 billion of SoftBank’s own money; Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund put up another $35 billion and about $15 billion came from Mubadala Investment Company, Abu Dhabi’s wealth fund.

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At its head was a former Deutsche Bank executive named Rajeev Misra. Raised in Delhi, Misra studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before embarking on a career on Wall Street. At Deutsche Bank, he had run a team of credit traders who profited from the crash in the US sub-prime mortgage market. He had developed a strong personal bond with Masayoshi Son since 2006, when he raised $16 billion in debt SoftBank needed for a large acquisition – the deal had helped make the SoftBank CEO a multibillionaire. Misra joined SoftBank in 2014. His rise to the top of the Vision Fund was described in scintillating detail by my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal in an article that alleged Misra employed a series of dirty tricks to undermine his rivals for the role.

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They bundled themselves into waiting cars and zipped across the city to SoftBank’s imposing headquarters. If the first meeting with Misra had got Lex officially in the door, then this meeting, in Japan, was critical. There were some of the same Vision Fund staff they’d met with before. But critically, Lex and Cameron also met with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son himself. Son is one of the most powerful, and unconventional, investors in the world. He encourages the Vision Fund to invest huge sums of money on companies, so long as they can promise to shoot for the moon. He also compensates his top executives handsomely. Many of the senior lieutenants in SoftBank earn tens of millions of dollars a year.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Cast of Characters The Al Saud King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the kingdom’s founder and father of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, Mohammed’s younger brother and former ambassador to the United States Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, King Salman’s first wife Fahdah bint Falah al-Hithlain, King Salman’s third wife and mother of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and briefly heir apparent Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Al Saud, King Salman’s nephew and a longtime antiterrorism official close to the US government King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and predecessor Prince Miteb bin Abdullah Al Saud, King Abdullah’s son and former chief of the Saudi Arabia National Guard Prince Turki bin Abdullah Al Saud, the seventh son of King Abdullah Prince Badr bin Farhan Al Saud, a prince from a distant branch of the family, minister of culture, and a longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman Prince Abdullah bin Bandar Al Saud, another prince and longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman and head of the National Guard Prince Sultan bin Turki Al Saud, the son of one of King Salman’s brothers, and an outspoken prince whose criticisms got him into trouble with more powerful members of the family The Palace Khalid al-Tuwaijri, the head of King Abdullah’s Royal Court Mohammed al-Tobaishi, King Abdullah’s chief of protocol Rakan bin Mohammed al-Tobaishi, Mohammed bin Salman’s protocol chief and the son of Mohammed al-Tobaishi The MBS Entourage Bader al-Asaker, a longtime associate of Mohammed who runs his private foundation Saud al-Qahtani, an advisor to Mohammed who specializes in quashing dissent Turki Al Sheikh, a longtime companion of Mohammed who has brought foreign sports and entertainment events to Saudi Arabia The Region Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi Tahnoon bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi national security advisor Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, former emir of Qatar Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt Saad Hariri, prime minister of Lebanon Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey Residents of the Ritz Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, a cousin of Mohammed and Saudi Arabia’s most prominent international businessman Adel Fakeih, a Saudi businessman who became minister of economy and planning Hani Khoja, a Saudi management consultant Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, a Saudi businessman with holdings in Ethiopia Ali al-Qahtani, a general Bakr bin Laden, scion of the bin Laden construction family The Critics Jamal Khashoggi, newspaper columnist with a long history of working for and sometimes criticizing the Saudi government Omar Abdulaziz, Canada-based dissident who criticizes Saudi leadership in online videos Loujain al-Hathloul, women’s rights activist who violated Saudi law by trying to drive into the kingdom from the United Arab Emirates The US Government President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an advisor to the president Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, later US secretary of state The Businessmen Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com David Pecker, CEO of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer Ari Emanuel, Hollywood agent and cofounder of Endeavor talent agency Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese tech investor SoftBank Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s Vision Fund Nizar al-Bassam, Saudi deal maker and a former international banker Kacy Grine, independent banker and confidant of Alwaleed bin Talal A note on naming: In the Saudi convention, a man is identified through a patrilineal naming system.

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In the grand marble lobby on October 30, the world’s biggest money manager, Blackstone founder Steve Schwarzman, held court in one corner, while Tony Blair stood in another expounding on Mohammed’s plans to a crowd of bankers. Investor Tom Barrack, a key Middle East advisor to President Trump and founder of Colony Capital, sat with his entourage, exchanging business cards with a stream of visitors. Trump Treasury chief Steve Mnuchin dined with his wife at Hong, the Ritz-Carlton’s high-end Chinese restaurant. Masayoshi Son, founder of Japan’s SoftBank, occupied one of the suites used days later to detain a prince. The startling juxtaposition between Davos in the Desert and the Ritz’s transformation into a prison—and the reversal of so many extraordinarily wealthy men’s fortunes—make the crackdown a singular event in recent world political and business history.

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An arrogant financial engineer with a taste for debt and risk, Rajeev was a senior Deutsche Bank banker during the financial crisis, overseeing a team that eventually profited from betting against the housing market. He left soon after, making brief stops at UBS and Fortress Investment Group before landing at SoftBank. Rajeev had reconnected with Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s technology-obsessed founder, at a wedding in Italy a few months earlier and subsequently accepted a job trying to help Masayoshi develop complex debt structures to fund his ambitions. The two had worked together years earlier when Rajeev helped Masayoshi raise $16 billion to buy Vodafone Japan in 2006.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

The company had tapped into a desire, especially strong among young workers, for an in-office experience more fulfilling than the one their parents’ cubicles offered. The company’s revenue had more or less doubled every year for a decade, and Neumann had raised more than $11 billion of investment capital. The vast majority came from Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, a Japanese technology conglomerate, and one of the few executives in the world whose ambition exceeded Neumann’s. Son had first invested in WeWork in 2017, partly through the Vision Fund, a $100 billion venture capital bazooka funded primarily by the Saudi Arabian government.

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Elizabeth Holmes, another once-lauded start-up founder, was revealed to be a fraudster who promised something her company, Theranos, couldn’t deliver. Spreadsheets were out; megalomania was in. For all of WeWork’s success, its employees had followed the Theranos story with a growing sense of unease as cracks began to appear in WeWork’s ever-optimistic narrative. SoftBank’s investment was gargantuan by any measure, but Masayoshi Son, Neumann’s chief advocate and business mentor, had backed out of an even larger deal at the end of 2018, as the blistering economy of the previous decade showed signs of quavering. Neumann’s company spent so much money expanding around the world in 2018 that it lost nearly $2 billion, and even his employees didn’t know exactly what it meant to say that they were now trying to elevate the world’s consciousness.

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The frothiness of the start-up economy was so extreme that Miguel’s projection wasn’t entirely unreasonable. The value of the S&P 500 tripled in the latter half of the ’90s, with new companies appearing each week and claiming to harness the nascent power of the internet to disrupt one industry after another. In 2000, a few well-placed tech bets allowed Masayoshi Son, from SoftBank, to rise from relative obscurity and briefly become the world’s richest man. Even as the internet bubble began to burst, Hayden and McKelvey believed they were well positioned compared to other upstarts. “Unlike online bookstores, English, baby! can’t be easily duplicated by merely walking down the street to the nearest book vendor,” an Oregon newspaper wrote about the start-up in 2000.

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

In 1986, he was one of the first Japanese journalists to interview Bill Gates and Ted Turner. The first time he interviewed Masayoshi Son was in 1987 and has since covered him closely for more than 30 years. While living in the USA, he interviewed many celebrities including Irving Wallce, Muhammad Ali, George Harrison, and Jeffrey Archer. Over the course of his successful career, he has published numerous books including The Mentalities and Mindsets of Entrepreneur Masayoshi Son, Tokaton – Masayoshi Son Monogatari. Aiming High Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group, and Disrupting Silicon Valley Atsuo Inoue www.hodder.co.uk First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company KOKORAZASHI TAKAKU: SON MASAYOSHI SEIDEN Copyright © Atsuo Inoue 2021t All rights reserved.

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Waiting for the pair at the Ziff-Davis head office on 5th Avenue in New York was William Ziff, and it took the parties all of 10 minutes to formalise proceedings (an hour or more is normally scheduled for this sort of thing). As of May of that year, 50,000 copies of the Japanese version of PCWeek would be published each week. Ziff would later comment to Hashimoto that he had only known three bona fide geniuses in his entire life: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Son Masayoshi. Son in turn would confide in Hashimoto during this trip that he wanted to buy Ziff’s company one day – which at the time Hashimoto took as a joke, such was the absurdity of his proposal. And yet, the third genius’s eyes were deadly serious: he knew his own American dream was bound to come true sooner or later, which it eventually did in November of 1994, when he acquired Ziff-Davis.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

“I totally believe [in] this concept,”: Sam Shead, “The Japanese Tech Billionaire Behind Softbank Thinks the ‘Singularity’ Will Occur Within 30 Years,” Business Insider, February 27, 2017. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/softbank-ceo-masayoshi-son-thinks-singularity-will-occur-within-30-years-2017-2. The Vision Fund got started: “Masayoshi Son Prepares to Unleash His Second $100bn Tech Fund,” Economist, March 23, 2019. See: https://www.economist.com/business/2019/03/23/masayoshi-son-prepares-to-unleash-his-second-100bn-tech-fund. Force #3: Demonetization Ilumina’s latest generation sequencer: Sarah Buhr, “Illumina Wants to Sequence Your Whole Genome for $100,” TechCrunch, January 10, 2017.

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Traditionally, SWFs have invested money in public equities, infrastructure and natural resources, but as the economic promise of startups continues to climb, these funds are increasingly hunting outsized returns on entrepreneurial shores. In 2017, according to the Sovereign Wealth Lab research center at Madrid’s IE Business School, forty-two SWF deals valued at around $16.2 billion flowed in this direction. And this pales beside Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son’s mega-fund, the “Vision Fund.” Driven by his belief in the “Singularity”—Ray Kurzweil’s idea that developments in AI will lead to unprecedented technological growth and unfathomable changes for civilization—Son decided to try to accelerate this process. “I totally believe [in] this concept,” he said in a recent speech.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

., https://twitter.com/megwhitman/status/890754932990763008. 315 the firm filed a lawsuit: Mike Isaac, “Uber Investor Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud,” New York Times, August 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/technology/travis-kalanick-uber-lawsuit-benchmark-capital.html. 315 “We do not feel it was either prudent”: Mike Isaac, “Kalanick Loyalists Move to Force Benchmark Off Uber’s Board,” New York Times, August 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/technology/uber-benchmark-pishevar.html. 317 He bankrolled his college years: Cyrus Farivar, “How Sprint’s New Boss Lost $70 Billion of His Own Cash (and Still Stayed Rich),” Ars Technica, October 16, 2012, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/how-sprints-new-boss-lost-70-billion-of-his-own-cash-and-still-stayed-rich/. 317 He returned to Japan: Andrew Ross Sorkin, “A Key Figure in the Future of Yahoo,” Dealbook, New York Times, December 13, 2010, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/a-key-figure-in-the-future-of-yahoo/. 317 “crazy guy who bet on the future”: Walter Sim, “SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, the ‘Crazy Guy Who Bet on the Future,’ ” Straits Times, December 12, 2016, https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/softbanks-masayoshi-son-the-crazy-guy-who-bet-on-the-future. 317 He designed the investment vehicle for speed: Dana Olsen, “Vision Fund 101: Inside SoftBank’s $98B Vehicle,” PitchBook, August 2, 2017, https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/vision-fund-101-inside-softbanks-93b-vehicle.

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If Benchmark were off the board, it would give Kalanick the room he needed to return as CEO. More than a clever stalling tactic, it might have actually worked. As Kalanick, Gurley and their allies traded blows in public, a new figure was circling like a vulture over the company, drawn by the smell of money. That figure was Masayoshi Son. Known more colloquially by the business world as “Masa,” Son was the founder and CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese mega-conglomerate with stakes in some of the world’s most successful finance, telecommunications and technology companies. He also happened to take a “madman” approach to the world of business; rivals could never predict Masa’s strategy, could never guess his next move.

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The thing that finally severed Kalanick from his leadership of Uber wasn’t the vote to name Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO, nor was it Gurley’s lawsuit against him for defrauding investors. It was a deal that would come months later, in the form of what Gurley called “the Grand Bargain,” courtesy of SoftBank and Masayoshi Son. In December, Son reached a deal with Khosrowshahi and Uber’s board, in which SoftBank would purchase some 17.5 percent of Uber’s overall shares in what was called a tender offer, a way for outsiders to buy stock from existing shareholders in the company. The SoftBank shares would come from a group of people, including employees who were long waiting to sell but couldn’t due to Kalanick’s restrictions.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

SunPower CEO Tom Werner offered the bullish view that the alliance would “change the way the world is powered” (see Exhibit 8.2).6 Exhibit 8.2 Top 10 solar module producers (by MW shipped in 2010) *Joint venture between Hanwha of South Korea and Solarfun Power of China. ** In 2011, French oil major Total agreed to buy 60 percent of SunPower for about US$1.3 billion. Source: PVinsights, May 2011 In Japan, Masayoshi Son, the one-time Internet investment pioneer turned telecom corporate stalwart, is directing his own multi-billion dollar fortune to the pursuit of solar power. Son, whose company SoftBank is the No. 3 mobile phone operator behind NTT DoCoMo and KDDI Corp., has set up the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation to work on his proposed renewable energy project encompassing at least ten solar plants, each of 20 MW.

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It has a concentrated solar power generation venture with the Abu Dhabi government, a photovoltaic cell project, a biomass to liquid process, and a wind power business in Japan. SoftBank’s “New Energy” Vision One company that does not yet figure in a list of Japan’s biggest energy producers is Internet and mobile phone conglomerate SoftBank, the group created by the billionaire maverick entrepreneur Masayoshi Son. But if Son gets his way, that may change. He wants Japan to shift 60 percent of its electricity requirements to renewable energy sources over the next 20 years, cut down on nuclear power, and build a Japan “super-grid” that would move power around the country, with an expansion eventually to the Asian mainland.

…

The extensive debate about energy that emerged in the aftermath of the disaster has made me keenly aware of something that is obvious, but easily taken for granted: that telecommunications, and the information revolution itself, depend by their very nature upon the availability of energy. . . in pursuit of our vision we have therefore started a new initiative to examine the possibilities of developing a business around power generation from renewable energy sources. —Masayoshi Son, Internet entrepreneur and SoftBank founder, August 2011 Indicative of Son’s approach is his suggestion that farmland contaminated by seawater from the tsunami be revitalized not for agriculture but as an “East Japan Solar Belt” that would create jobs and exploit Japan’s capability in solar technology.

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Hittinger, “Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Technology,” Scientific American 229, no. 2 (September 30, 1973): 48–59. 10 Tout, “Sharp QT-8D.” 11 Takashi Sugimoto and Tomomi Kikuchi, “Obituary: ‘Rocket Sasaki,’ Executive at Sharp and Mentor to Masayoshi Son,” Nikkei Asia (Nikkei, February 15, 2018), https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Obituary-Rocket-Sasaki-executive-at-Sharp-and-mentor-to-Masayoshi-Son. 12 Lojek, History of Semiconductor Engineering, 359–360. 13 Aspray, “Interview with Tadashi Sasaki,” sec. Microprocessors and Busicom. 14 Kadokura, “Chronology of Japanese Calculating Machines”; “Operator’s Manual for Busicom HL-21 Hand-Operated Calculator” (Tokyo: Busicom Computer Corporation, n.d.), 1. 15 “Manual for Busicom HL-21.” 16 Serge Devidts, “Busicom 161 (Version-1),” Calcuseum, June 19, 2020, http://www.calcuseum.com/SCRAPBOOK/BONUS/44984/1.htm; Rick Bensene, “Nippon Computing Machine Co.

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Then, in 1959, Fairchild’s Robert Noyce combined two breakthroughs—an improvement in chip fabrication pioneered by his colleague Jean Hoerni, and his own novel process* for depositing electrical circuits directly onto silicon chips—to transform the integrated chip from a hand-soldered curiosity to a mass-produced commodity.6 The Japanese semiconductor industry leaned heavily on Noyce’s “planar” technique, and Sasaki’s own rise at Sharp owed much to his licensing of it.7 “Rocket” Sasaki was a formidable figure in his own right.8 He had persuaded Rockwell, an American semiconductor firm, to gamble on a new type of low-power, high-density microchip and had negotiated an exclusive contract to buy Rockwell’s production of such chips.9 These metal-oxide semiconductor large-scale integrated chips—MOS LSI, for short—powered Sharp’s handheld QT-8D and QT-8B calculators and helped make them persuasive alternatives to Canon’s Pocketronic.10 Sasaki would go on to become a doyen of Japan’s electronics industry, with both Apple’s Steve Jobs and Masayoshi Son of Japan’s giant SoftBank conglomerate happy to call him a mentor.11 For now, though, Sasaki had bad news for his guests. Sharp’s deal with Rockwell forbade the Japanese company from buying chips from anyone else, even the one and only Robert Noyce.12 But perhaps Sasaki could help in another way.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

he persuaded Goldman Sachs to buy 23 percent of the company: Although Goldman Sachs subsequently sold its stake, Softbank held on to its shares, seeing them rise to be worth more than $58 billion as Alibaba prepared its initial public offering. See Bruce Einhorn, “Masayoshi Son’s $58 Billion Payday on Alibaba,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 7, 2014, available at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-07/masayoshi-sons-58-billion-payday (accessed September 9, 2014). orders placed through Alibaba Web sites account for around 70 percent of all package deliveries: See Lulu Yilun Chen, “Alibaba Earnings Surge Boosts Valuation Ahead of IPO,” Bloomberg, April 16, 2014, available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-15/alibaba-profit-grows-ahead-of-initial-public-offering.html (accessed September 9, 2014).

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

Just look for the scarf. We are sitting at our normal table in the restaurant, waiting for the food to arrive. A headline has just hit on WeWork, and all of us are checking our phones. WeWork is run by a guy named Adam Neumann, and its largest shareholder is a company called SoftBank, run by Masayoshi Son.5 SoftBank has been pouring money into fast-growing tech companies. Masa Son famously lost $70 billion, the most money lost in stock market history, during the dotcom bust. He’s back at it again and swinging for the fences. WeWork is his new crown jewel and is considered one of the unicorns. Unicorns are high-flying growth companies with valuations in excess of $1 billion, companies that don’t actually make any money.

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Tom Petters was convicted in 2009. 4 An International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) agreement is what makes Wall Street tick. Most derivative products, which use leverage (i.e., borrow money), require the use of these agreements to establish the legal and credit terms. They are very important to Wall Street traders. 5 Masayoshi Son, referred to as Masa Son by the media, is also the founder of SoftBank. He was named by Forbes as one of the most powerful people in the world. 6 A thank you to Michael Lewis and Liar’s Poker for this. 7 Cash for Clunkers was a $3 billion US federal program intended to provide economic incentives to US residents to purchase new, more fuel-efficient vehicles when trading in an older model.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Although electric power companies looking to diversify from fossil fuels are the most likely candidates for solar supermajors, they are not the only corporate players tempted by solar power. A recent entrant to the industry, the Japanese technology giant Softbank, has made an enormous bet on solar power. Led by Japan’s richest man, Masayoshi Son, Softbank leaped into solar after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, developing 500 MW of solar in the country and then pledging $20 billion to invest in India. In late 2015, I sat down in New Delhi with the CEO of Softbank’s energy subsidiary, Raman Nanda, a tall, charismatic, Oxford-educated McKinsey veteran.

…

The “Global Energy Interconnection,” as they called it, would cost $50 trillion, link every continent with undersea transmission lines, and power the globe with clean energy. Windmills on the North Pole and solar panels in the Sahara Desert would export their power to run the world’s megacities. And oh, by the way, this supergrid would also secure world peace and harmony. At least one half of the odd couple had made a habit of proposing audacious goals. For Masayoshi Son—the second-richest man in Japan, where as something of a celebrity, he is often called just “Masa”—the supergrid is his latest superlative. Masa has also set his sights on turning Softbank, the conglomerate he leads, into a business empire that will last 300 years, and in 2017, he launched a mammoth, $100 billion fund to invest in the tech sector.

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All of this means that perhaps Masa and Liu, the visionaries behind the global supergrid, actually weren’t thinking big enough to envision going beyond even a supergrid to a hybrid grid. Or rather, they weren’t thinking both big and small enough. Notes 1.  Schumpeter, “Sonic Boom,” The Economist, April 1, 2017, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21719842-risk-one-japans-greatest-tech-tycoons-his-messianic-streak-masayoshi-son-goes?frsc=dg%7Cd. 2.  Leo Lewis, Kana Inagaki, and Simon Mundy, “SoftBank: Waiting for the Next ‘Big Idea,’” Financial Times, July 13, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/213582f2-453e-11e6-9b66-0712b3873ae1. 3.  John Boyd, “Trio of Nations Aims to Hook Asia Super Grid to Grids of the World,” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, September 13, 2016, http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/trio-of-nations-aim-to-hook-asia-super-grid-to-grids-of-the-world. 4.  

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

(Like rockets, most satellites are assembled by hand in clean rooms, which is one reason for their expense.) Intelsat, another major operator in communications satellites, invested as well, perhaps hoping to ape SES’s successful incorporation of O3b into its collection of space assets. In 2016, OneWeb would win its own $1 billion investment from the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, whose tycoon CEO, Masayoshi Son, was spearheading a $100 billion technology investment fund. And, because every space venture needs a space billionaire, Richard Branson threw his hat in the ring, investing in OneWeb through Virgin Group and joining its board. The deal also entailed a contract to launch ten of the satellites on Virgin Orbit, a subsidiary of Virgin Galactic that would be spun out in 2017.

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See also Atlas V; Titan IV rocket financial failures, 32–33 joint venture with Russian state rocket company, 59 NASA space taxi program bid, 113 Proton rocket, 171–73 X-33 failure, 226 Low, George, 136, 151 Lueders, Kathy, 165, 168 Luxembourg, 174–75 commercial satellite backers, 52 M; MacDonald, Alexander, 47–48 Mars, travel to, x, 54, 58, 197–98, 243–44 financing issue, 46–49 history of interest in, 48 Mars Curiosity rover, 198 motivation for, 47–48 pro-ams in Mojave desert, 50–51, 58 “Red Dragon” program, 41–42, 44 Mars Society, 45 Marty, Alan, 113, 167 Masayoshi Son, 234 Maser, James, 99–100, 118, 131, 192 McAuliffe, Christa, 23 McCain, John, 185, 186, 190, 192 McCaw, Craig, 2 McDonnell Douglas, 18, 27, 69, 125. See also Boeing; DC-X, prototype reusable orbital rocket; Delta II rocket orbital rocket contract, 19 McGregor, Texas, 87–88, 137, 225, 248 Melvill, Mike, 95–96 Merlin rocket, 92, 113, 153, 165 Block V engineering for CCDEV, 165 design upgrades, 90 development of, 87–88, 108 engineering design, 134–35 in the Falcon 1, 133–34 Metzger, Phil, 68 Meyerson, Rob, 124 Microcosm, 64, 66 Microsoft, 2, 27 Mikulski, Barbara, 143 Millennium Falcon, 81 Mir (Russian space station), 53 Mojave Desert, 50, 63, 87, 211 Mojave Desert Advanced Rocket Society, 51 moon and moon landing debate on exploration, 243–44 manned lunar orbit and outpost, 244 motivation for, 242–43 NASA public-private lunar research, 244 South Pole’s Shackleton Crater, 241–42 volatiles, 240–41 Moon Express, 242, 244 Mosdell, Brian, 20–22, 146 Mueller, Tom, 54, 62–63, 66, 87–90, 108, 192, 243 Muilenburg, Dennis, 244 Musk, Elon, x, 1.

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Asian regulators are also adopting central counterparty clearinghouses (CCPs) as part of the G20 capital market reforms. 26 Preqin, “Preqin Special Report: Asian Private Equity & Venture Capital,” Sept. 2017, http://docs.preqin.com/reports/Preqin-Special-Report-Asian-Private-Equity-and-Venture-Capital-September-2017.pdf. 27 Crunchbase, Global Innovation Investment Report: 2016 Year in Review, https://static.crunchbase.com/reports/annual_2016_yf42a/crunchbase_annual_2016.pdf. 28 Apple also made a $1 billion investment in DiDi in 2017. 29 Judith Balea, “Grab’s Anthony Tan on His Unforgettable Meeting with Masayoshi Son, brotherhood with Didi,” Tech in Asia, May 25, 2017; https://www.techinasia.com/grab-anthony-tan-on-his-unforgettable-meeting-with-masayoshi-son-and-brotherhood-with-didi. 30 India’s trade in and consumption of gold is mostly private, while China’s is mostly public, given that it is the world’s largest producer and consumer of gold. 31 Philip J. Landrigan. Richard Fuller, Nereus J.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

The lessons of 2008 and 2013 should’ve been obvious: Any sort of delay could knock over the fragile financial house that Tesla had built and eat into what limited cash it had. * * * — Concurrent with all this, a massive new venture capital fund was being created by SoftBank, the Japanese tech conglomerate with stakes in Alibaba, Sprint, and others. CEO Masayoshi Son was on the verge of controlling a nearly $100 billion fund that was intended to rewrite the rules of investing in Silicon Valley and pick world-changing winners, infusing them with the kinds of cash that a generation ago would’ve seemed impossible in the private market. Goldman thought a meeting between Musk and Son might be fruitful.

…

More than two hours after the first tweet, he elaborated on his reasoning: “Hope all shareholders remain. Will be way smoother & less disruptive as a private company. Ends negative propaganda from shorts.” The next day the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation. * * * — Musk and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank may not have hit it off, but after the heady dinner that Musk’s friend and investor Larry Ellison had assembled at the Fremont factory in March 2017, the Saudis had kept in touch with Musk. As his war with the short sellers moved through July 2018, the fund requested a meeting. Musk met with them on Tuesday evening, July 31, a day ahead of announcing Tesla’s second-quarter results, in which he promised to continually turn a profit going forward, and a week before the tweet heard around the internet.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

• • • A burst of investment in crypto in early 2018, such as Peter Thiel’s $20 million bet, convinced some that the bubble hadn’t burst, but by May it became clear that the good times were over. Retail investors who had made smaller bets on crypto felt the pain first; the big players came next. Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, had also bought at the top of the bitcoin market only to take a drubbing to the tune of $130 million when he sold off his position months later. Goldman Sachs, the investment bank whose aversion to tech had led Fred Ehrsam to quit in frustration, had finally, it appeared, come around to bitcoin.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

From June through August, the Nasdaq Composite had a strong rally, rising by 24 percent, and the big tech stocks that led the charge did even better than that. That wasn’t mere good luck, though, because the whale’s gamble was even bigger than believed. By early September it emerged that the buyer was Japan’s SoftBank Corp., led by the risk-loving billionaire Masayoshi Son. Reporters also learned that his $100 billion Vision Fund had simultaneously purchased billions of dollars of many of the underlying tech stocks. At face value that just sounds like two gigantic bets instead of one. There was a method to Son’s madness, though. As with short selling, options dealers are taking on a theoretically unlimited risk by transacting with you, and they aren’t in the risk-taking business.

Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn by Nick Kostov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, bitcoin, business logic, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, Masayoshi Son, offshore financial centre, rolodex, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, the payments system

These weren’t just comic books for kids—manga strips about successful entrepreneurs were what young salarymen read for inspiration during their commute. If Ghosn cooperated, the publisher told him, he would have some say over the content. If not, “We’ll do it anyway, and we’ll have total freedom.” Ghosn phoned Masayoshi Son, a billionaire tech entrepreneur who had already been made into a manga. “Collaborate!” Son told him. “I didn’t, and the mangas were a catastrophe for me.” Ghosn spent more than eight hours talking to the manga writers and provided numerous family photos. The admiration extended beyond his being a superexecutive extolled in coffee jingles and comics.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

There was nothing innovative about what the business model was, and yet it had a tech element to it, and he owned none of his real estate and somehow was going to make money subleasing all this stuff.” In fact, WeWork’s valuation and size were almost entirely due to a different man entirely: the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank who also happens to back Uber. He’s probably done more to inflate the Silicon Valley bubble than anyone else, but after losing a fortune twice and gaining it back three times, he’s still making big bets that any company he takes a shine to can end up owning a sector thanks to the sheer amount of cash he pumps into it.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

But while they hold the same aspirations for market domination and follow their predecessors’ familiar playbook, their scale is far greater and their reach into our lives far deeper. Their tentacles are already encircling the globe and will shape how we travel for decades to come. Nowhere are the ambitions of tomorrow’s traction tycoons clearer than in the empire assembled by SoftBank, the Japanese holding company founded by Masayoshi Son in 1981 (Figure 7-2). From its humble beginnings as a computer parts store, SoftBank has grown into the world’s largest technology investor. The group’s $100 billion Vision Fund, launched in 2017, wields a purse that is itself bigger than the entire venture-capital industry, which invests a mere $70 billion annually worldwide.

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

They fulfill these duties in a range of health, hospitality, finance, and domestic service environments, including nursing and residential homes, hospitals, hotels, schools, shopping malls, banks, and airports. Although there are different designs and purposes, the central aim that unites these social robots is to connect with humans. Regarding Pepper’s launch onto the consumer market in June 2015, Masayoshi Son—the chief executive of Japanese company SoftBank Robotics, the robot’s manufacturer—described it as a “baby step on our dream to make a robot that can understand a person’s feelings, and then autonomously take action.”4 He went on to say that “when people are described as acting like a robot, it means they have no feeling or emotions—we start challenging this concept today.

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

The initial investment in WeWork was $4.4 billion, implying a valuation of $18–$20 billion. Despite claims by CEO Adam Neumann that the company was profitable, it was not—it made huge losses. By 2018 the company had burned through its cash and needed more, so an IPO was planned. The deal, arranged by Neumann and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, valued WeWork at $47 billion. As part of the deal, $1 billion would go to buying shares from existing investors, including the board of directors. When the IPO prospectus became public, reactions to the history of losses, the increasingly erratic behavior of Neumann, and the company’s fluffy mission concept were negative.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

South Korea has become a model of change; Japan, a symbol of the status quo. As the KOSPI index became a mirror of world markets in recent decades, Japan’s Nikkei index fell into a long swoon largely impervious to global trends. It is symptomatic of these shifting fortunes that today the richest man in Japan is an ethnic Korean, the billionaire entrepreneur Masayoshi Son. No Service Please, We’re Korean My sense of what’s happening on the Korean peninsula has changed dramatically since the great global boom of 2003–2007, when the Korean “miracle” appeared to be running out of steam. Like most Asian nations, South Korea had grown since World War II by manufacturing low- or moderate-priced goods for sale to rich nations, and this strategy seemed to be reaching its limits.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

To emphasize the change coming in the country for the young Saudis who were watching online, he pulled out what looked like an “old” BlackBerry—circa 2005—and a current iPhone. The difference between the two, he said, is how Saudi Arabia would change. The image went viral. But there were also definite limits. At one point, one of the panelists, Japanese tech tycoon Masayoshi Son, became so excited by the “dream” of the plans for the futuristic new half-trillion-dollar city, Neom—with robots busily at work, even doing people’s shopping—that he exclaimed that it would be nothing less than a “new Mecca.” That was too much. The crown prince grabbed the microphone. “No, no, no,” he said.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

He pursued the acquisition earnestly, according to several colleagues—even over any concerns from Amit Agarwal, who would have the frightening responsibility of integrating two disparate brands and money-losing supply chains. In March 2018, Bezos hosted Sachin Bansal and Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy in the boathouse behind his home on Lake Washington. A few weeks later, he spoke over the phone with two of Flipkart’s most influential backers, Tiger Global partner Lee Fixel and SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son, aka “Masa,” who particularly favored a deal with Amazon over Walmart and seemed determined to enlist Bezos as a long-term ally. The sticking point in the Amazon-Flipkart talks was a breakup fee. Flipkart’s investors feared the uncertainty of the regulatory review process and knew of Amazon’s infamous reputation for engaging in discussions only to not follow through, or to try to raise the price for a more determined rival.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Fear of the unknown is one of the most potent kinds of fear, and the natural reaction is to get as far away as possible from what is feared. Unknown unknowns make most of us withdraw from the game. These, however, are also the circumstances in which extraordinary returns are possible. (Readers should study the case study of the most successful investment ever in the history of mankind—Masayoshi Son’s investment in Alibaba in 1999 which delivered a 6,500× return.) Fortune favors the brave, and market prices and valuations tend to reflect our innate tendency to avoid uncertainty. One way to think about unknowable situations is to recognize the hugely asymmetric payoffs they offer. If you have a chance to multiply your money ten to twenty times, and that chance is offset by the possibility that you could lose all of it in that particular commitment, then it is a good bet to be exercised, provided you are sufficiently diversified.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Facebook’s initial public offering of stocks in 2012 raised $16 billion and gave the firm an overall valuation of $104 billion. In less than a decade, the value of a 10 percent stake—which cost Thiel half a million dollars and Accel $12 million a year later—had risen to more than $10 billion. At the other end of the spectrum is a case involving Japan’s SoftBank Group. Its risk-taking chairman, Masayoshi Son, set up the $100 billion Vision Fund, which came to be known for undertaking private equity investments in technology companies in their infancy. Early investments in companies such as Alibaba, Yahoo!, and Uber yielded substantial profits. Son acquired the reputation of a visionary investor in technology start-ups.