Former executive close to the deal-maker says his Korean identity, supreme confidence and gambler’s mind are key to his personality
Masayoshi Son knows how to grab attention. The Softbank Group chief dominated tech headlines last year by launching the US$100 billion Softbank Vision Fund to invest in new technologies and undervalued tech firms worldwide. In a year-long saga, he also plowed US$5 billion into China’s Didi Chuxing and US$9 billion into US-based Uber Technologies in a two-pronged bid to corner the global ride-hailing industry.
These moves have triggered a burst of often conflicting articles in the Western press speculating as to Japan’s richest man’s motives. Adding to the confusion are stories that describe him alternately as a bully, a bubble maker, a master of due diligence, a consensus-seeker or the epitome of a one-man show.
Much focuses on what the tech tycoon has done. There’s less on how 60-year-old Son thinks and what actually drives him.
Stanley Chao’s read on Son is better than most. The Los Angeles-based business consultant and author served as Son’s executive vice-president for Asia-Pacific in the 1990s when Softbank owned Kingston Technology, a maker of memory chips for electronics in Fountain Valley, California.
Chao spent hours with Son behind closed doors, sat in on meetings and served as his problem solver. He offers unique insights on what shaped Son’s personality, his thought processes and what inspires his deals....MORE
Proud of his Korean roots
A lot of coverage, Chao says, doesn’t delve deeply enough into the life experiences that molded Son’s worldview.
One major factor is ethnicity. Son is a third-generation Korean-Japanese, born in Kyushu. According to Chao, Son and his family had plenty of exposure to the racial discrimination experienced by Japan’s more than 850,000 ethnic Koreans.
“Son has a chip on his shoulder,” Chao told Asia Times. One thing that drives Son is that he wants to prove that he isn’t a second-class citizen in his home country. “He wants to show the Japanese that a Korean-Japanese can make it big, and being the richest Japanese partly proves his point.”
But even that is not enough for a man whose grandparents emigrated from Korea to Japan. He also wants to leave a long-lasting legacy in Japan and in the rest of the world, according to Chao. “He’s looking for respect in a land that has not respected him, his family or this ethnicity. I believe this is the biggest reason that drives him.”...
