The Japanese Tech Titan Who Came To Kiss Trump’s Ring

One by one, they lined up to pay tribute to President Donald Trump. Business leaders, critics, media pundits and vanquished political opponents: All made the trek to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s retreat in Palm Beach, Florida. The scenes evoked the court of a medieval king.

Among the visitors in mid-December was Masayoshi Son, the Japanese founder and CEO of media technology conglomerate SoftBank. Son is probably the most powerful tech mogul who is not a household name. After playing six hours of golf with Trump, Son pledged to invest $100 billion in the U.S. economy — twice the amount he pledged at a carbon copy meeting in Trump Tower in December 2016.

Like Trump, Son is a showman. His recent big-money talk seemed like a ringing vote of confidence in the U.S. economy. Their meeting looked like another piece of political stage management, but there was more to the Japanese pledge than mere words.

For years, Son acted as a bridge between the U.S., Asia and China. He was a prime beneficiary of “hyperglobalization,” the age of borderless finance and friction-free trade. But the world has moved on since Trump was last in office. China and the U.S. are engaged in an AI arms race. Trump is doubling down on tax cuts and tariffs. Decoupling and de-risking supply chains reflect how economics and national security have become inextricably linked.

Now the man known as “Masa” has been forced to choose sides. And he chose Trump’s America.

This adapted extract from Gambling Man, my biography of Masayoshi Son, explains why.

In November 2016, Trump, real estate mogul, reality TV host and born-again populist, defeated Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House. While liberals and Democrats wrung their hands, Masa was sanguine. Anyone was better than Barack Obama, whose administration had blocked SoftBank’s efforts to merge Sprint with T-Mobile to create a “third force” in the U.S. telecoms market. By contrast, Trump was the best friend of Big Business.

Masa sounded out prospects for a meeting at Trump Tower, the future president’s gaudy headquarters on Fifth Avenue, near Central Park. Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire casino owner and Trump’s single biggest donor, provided the introduction. Adelson’s political clout was legendary (he would be the force behind Trump moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018). As for Masa, Adelson was still grateful that the Japanese tycoon had stepped in to buy his declining Comdex trade fair at a generous $842 million price, allowing him to borrow even greater sums to finance a global gambling empire.

Ahead of his meeting with the president-elect, Masa was prepped by Adelson and Steve Schwarzman, the private equity billionaire and boss of Blackstone. Both counseled him to emphasize that SoftBank was investing in America, playing to Trump’s vanity. Masa listened carefully. Then, armed with an iPad and his ever-present magic pen, he took a seat in Trump’s penthouse suite in Trump Tower. (This account has been constructed from interviews with a person present at the meeting and two people familiar with its fallout.)

“Here is my positive vision for your administration,” he said. “I am promising 50,000 jobs with $50 billion of investment in the U.S.”

The words “Sprint” and “T-Mobile” never crossed Masa’s lips, though he did make a reference to being let down by the Obama administration. He then outlined a multimillion dollar commitment to the U.S. on behalf of Foxconn, the electronics company based in Taiwan. Foxconn had made a fortune manufacturing the Apple iPhone at its factories in China and happened to be a long-time business partner of SoftBank, Masa explained.

Trump grew visibly excited. “This is so good, we should tweet this. Do you think we should tweet this? Absolutely!”

Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff, said maybe it would be a good idea to do some due diligence. Like which state the Foxconn factory would be in.

“Put the factory in any state,” Trump replied.

Masa barely got past the first page of his slide deck. Trump was already tweeting out the good news in real time.

At the end of the meeting, Trump retreated to his adjacent bathroom suite. Just as he was about to apply a comb to his hair in front of the mirror, he spotted Masa waiting dutifully outside. Trump knew that when big news was about to break, the little details counted the most.

He motioned to Masa and offered his best styling tips, apparently oblivious that the SoftBank boss was seriously thinning on top. Taking a comb to his head, Trump brushed backwards in a brisk sweeping movement before lightly patting down his dyed blond hair — a well-rehearsed routine to look his best in front of the cameras. Finally, the president-elect inserted a Stars and Stripes in his own lapel button. Both men straightened their ties, both Trump red, and descended in an elevator to the foyer.

Trump trotted out Masa’s line about 50,000 new jobs and $50 billion of investment in the U.S. Masa beamed into the TV cameras, but grew flustered when one of the American reporters confused him with Terry Gou, the Foxconn boss. “No, no, no,” said Masa. “I am Masayoshi Son, and SoftBank is not a bank.”

Soon after, a Saudi adviser to Masa saw his iPhone light up with texts from Riyadh. “What is Masa doing?” said the man from the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. “This is our money!”

In a typical act of chutzpah, the $50 billion which Masa had just pledged to invest in the U.S. came from the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund which he had launched in October 2016. Yet the bulk of the Vision Fund’s money came from the Gulf petro-states, notably Saudi Arabia under the youthful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the United Arab Emirates.

Terry Gou of Foxconn was similarly caught off guard by Masa’s pre-emptive strike. “What the fuck are you doing?” he said, wondering how his company had been set up with a huge U.S. investment commitment. “I’ve had Beijing on the line.”

Masa’s goal with the Vision Fund was to disrupt the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley, but it ended up massively inflating valuations. Coupled with the Fed’s record low interest rates, the flood of money resulted in a tech bubble reminiscent of the dotcom boom.

Masa rode the wave, investing in U.S. tech behemoths such as Uber, WeWork and Slack, but also in Chinese powerhouses such as Didi Chuxing and ByteDance, the developer of TikTok. But as Trump’s “America First” foreign policy escalated into an across-the-board confrontation with China, Masa’s balancing act between east and west became ever harder to sustain.

Trump accused Beijing of cyber-espionage, theft of intellectual property, Iran sanctions-busting and military adventurism in the South China Sea and against Taiwan. Democrats and Republicans agreed that China had “gamed” the international trade system and the U.S. had been taken for a ride.

In geopolitical terms, SoftBank was “in the middle of the bullseye.” The U.S. ranked as the number one investment in terms of dollars spent for SoftBank Capital and the Vision Fund, followed by China. But SoftBank was overly dependent on its stake in Alibaba, “the Golden Goose” e-commerce giant which at times accounted for more than 50 percent of its market value. SoftBank was also exposed politically because of its Chinese base, such as its long-term commercial relationship with Huawei, the world’s dominant telecoms equipment supplier and bête noire of the U.S. government.

“We became a topic of conversation in Washington,” says a SoftBank insider. “Masa found himself in an awkward place.”

Masa soon understood that he could no longer go shopping for assets in China. There, too, the political dynamics had shifted. In late 2020, President Xi Jinping ordered a crackdown on the $4 trillion tech industry and its plutocratic leadership. The first prominent victim was Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Masa’s long-time partner. After criticizing China’s financial regulators, Ma watched helplessly as his company’s planned flotation of Ant Financial, Alibaba’s mobile payments affiliate, was abruptly pulled. The cancellation of the IPO cost Ma $37 billion. Along with Ma, the most prominent non-Chinese victim was Masa himself, as Alibaba’s largest shareholder.

In a world characterized by nationalism, populism and great power tensions, especially between the U.S. and China, SoftBank had to pick sides. “We had to choose,” Masa told me in an interview, “and we chose the U.S., Europe and Japan.”

Masa and Trump are both disruptors who talk a big game. How far does the rhetoric stack up to reality? SoftBank says that thanks to the Vision Fund, it invested more than $70 billion in more than 250 companies in the U.S. These include Uber, Nvidia, Sprint, OpenAI (developer of ChatGPT) and a host of start-ups, including Zume, a robot pizza maker which shut down in 2023.

The 50,000 jobs pledge is more questionable. Most of SoftBank’s money went into private companies which are not obliged to disclose such information. Many of the start-ups which SoftBank invested in either laid off workers or did not survive when interest rates rose and credit grew tighter. SoftBank’s defense is that the 50,000 jobs number was surpassed at one point, but not necessarily sustained.

Trump’s own job pledges remain suspect. According to a 2019 Pro Publica investigation, a number of corporations, including Alibaba and Foxconn, both partners to SoftBank, were cited as sources for new jobs. However, many of the gains never materialized. In the case of Foxconn, the promised $10 billion plant in Wisconsin and 13,000 jobs fell short on both counts. The final tally was more like 1,500 jobs.

What chance is there that Masayoshi Son and Trump will meet the new 100,000 jobs and $100 billion investment in the U.S. economy? On the positive side, the sums being invested in AI are mind-boggling. Big U.S. technology companies, including Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon are set to spend more than $1 trillion in coming years, according to Goldman Sachs.

On the other hand, AI-specific companies like Sam Altman’s OpenAI or Anthropic employ dozens of highly paid engineers rather than thousands of workers in, say, a manufacturing plant. To reach a target of 100,000 jobs would likely involve a generous interpretation of the boost to employment in ancillary industries like construction.

Overall, the AI revolution is genuinely transformational, and the U.S. has a head start in the race to develop artificial generative intelligence, the moment when machines think faster, learn faster and react faster than humans. This will not only require formidable computing power in the form of strategically located data centers but also colossal amounts of energy. In both cases, SoftBank and Masayoshi Son are well-placed.

Masa owns 90 percent of ARM Holdings, the advanced semiconductor designer whose chips are typically high-speed but low on power consumption. SoftBank insiders confirm that his overarching goal is to develop a super-chip to rival Nvidia, the supplier based in Santa Clara, California, whose value has shot up above $3 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.

He has also long been a proponent of alternative energy sources, notably solar power, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. In each case, Masa is looking to use available cash (around $30 billion) to leverage SoftBank’s balance sheet and to raise money from the Gulf to reach the $100 billion necessary to play at the top table.

Like the rest of the Big Tech bosses in the U.S. who have been paying homage or making contributions to Trump’s inauguration this month, Masa knows the importance of having a friend in the White House. By instinct and temperament, he won’t have much sympathy for tariffs, but he appreciates that the tech sector is heavily dependent on federal policies in global trade, mergers, foreign investment and cryptocurrency.

But staying on the right side of Trump has its limits. When the president-elect asked him to double his pledge to $200 billion on the spot, the SoftBank boss laughed and called Trump a good negotiator.

“I will really try,” he said, adding a pointed caveat. “I’ll need your support though.”