Softbank Needs to Fire Son

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 12, 7:30AM EDT

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Softbank Needs to Fire Son — © Christian Guiton / iStock via Getty Images

Masayoshi Son, the founder and chief executive officer of Softbank, needs to be pushed out. He started the company in 1981. It has been everything from a wireless operation to an investment holding company. Its Vision Funds have made and lost tens of billions of dollars. The emphasis at this point should be on the losses. (These 14 billionaires went broke.)
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Of the dozens of companies Son has invested in, the sole, clear home run is China’s Alibaba. However, this has not erased the extraordinary failures simply based on bad judgment.
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Softbank just lost $32 billion in its most recent quarter because of declines in the value of Vision Fund investments. CNBC says, “Over the past year, SoftBank has been exiting some of its highest-profile investments to raise cash. It narrowed its overall losses through sales of shares in T-Mobile and Alibaba.” These companies are a very modest part of his portfolio.
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What does Son have left to recover? An interest in chip company Arm, which he hopes to take public. According to several sources, this could raise $10 billion. The emphasis should be on “could.”
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Son’s most recent scheme is to invest in artificial intelligence, the same strategy many major tech companies have employed. He will find it hard to elbow into a market that is already so competitive.

It will be hard to dislodge Son because of his decades-long role at Softbank. It is time for the board to react, and react publicly.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.