저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
손정의(소프트뱅크)의 2000년 닷컴 버블 손실과 이후 투자 이력을 소개하고, OpenAI에 총 640억 달러를 투자한 대형 베팅을 다룬다. 차입과 엔비디아 지분 매각 등 자금 조달 구조를 설명하며, 손정의식 집중 베팅의 위험을 경고하고 한 곳에 과도하게 투자하지 말라는 교훈을 제시한다. 투자 권유가 아닌 이야기 형식의 콘텐츠다.
다듬은 글
In the year 2000, one man lost seventy billion dollars in a single year. No one in history has ever lost that much money. Now, twenty-six years later, he's doing it again. On October first, twenty twenty-six, he sent ten billion dollars to a company that has never made a profit. It was the last payment on a sixty-four billion dollar bet.
All of it went into one company: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. To pay for it, he borrowed billions. He sold one of his best investments. And today, this bet, plus one other company he owns, makes up about three-quarters of everything his business owns. His name is Masayoshi Son. He has been right about the future more times than almost anyone alive.
And it has still cost him more money than anyone alive. By the end of this video, you'll know the one mistake that cost him seventy billion dollars the first time, and whether he's making it again. Masayoshi Son was born in a small town in the south of Japan. His family came from Korea, and back then, many people in Japan treated Korean families like outsiders.
His family lived in a poor area right next to the train tracks. When he was sixteen, he moved to California by himself. He finished high school there and got into a top college, the University of California, Berkeley. In college, he gave himself a rule: come up with one new invention every day. One of his ideas was a small machine that could translate languages.
He didn't build it himself. He got his teachers to help build it. Then he sold it to a big Japanese company called Sharp for more than one million dollars. He was still a student. In 1981, when he was twenty-four, he moved back to Japan and started a company that sold computer software. He called it SoftBank.
There's a famous story about his very first day. He stood on top of a wooden box and told his only two workers that one day, his company would make trillions of yen. That's Japanese money. Both of them quit. In the 1990s, Son saw that the internet was going to be huge, before almost anyone else in Japan.
He put money into Yahoo early and bought pieces of hundreds of internet companies around the world. Then the internet craze took off. Son says his money was growing by ten billion dollars every week. Not every year. Every week. In early 2000, he says, he was the richest person in the world for three days.
He never got to enjoy it. Then the internet bubble popped. In just two months, SoftBank's stock lost three-quarters of its value. By the end of the year, it had lost more than ninety percent. Son lost about seventy billion dollars, and his company almost went broke. Most people never get over losing a thousand dollars.
He had just lost seventy billion. But in all that mess, one small bet was still alive. That same year, Son put twenty million dollars into a tiny Chinese internet company. The company was called Alibaba. That twenty million dollars grew to be worth tens of billions. It was one of the best bets anyone has ever made.
After that win, Son kept going. In 2006, he paid about fifteen billion dollars for a phone company in Japan. Many experts thought it would ruin him. Instead, it became one of the biggest phone companies in Japan. In 2013, he tried the same move in America. He paid about twenty billion dollars for most of Sprint, a big American phone company.
This time, it didn't work so well. Sprint lost money for years, until it finally joined with T-Mobile in 2020. But it didn't matter. The man who lost seventy billion was a billionaire again. Then his bets got even bigger. In 2016, he bought a British company called Arm, which designs computer chips.
He paid about thirty-two billion dollars. Years later, Arm became worth several times what he paid. Remember that name. It comes back later. One year after buying Arm, he started a giant pot of money called the Vision Fund. It held about one hundred billion dollars, and a lot of it came from Saudi Arabia.
And he spent it the only way he knows. Fast, and all at once. He put money into a robot pizza company, a dog-walking app, and a company that wanted to build houses in factories. Many of those bets lost money. The most famous example is WeWork, a company that rented out office space. Son reportedly decided to invest after a short tour of its office.
At one point, WeWork was valued at forty-seven billion dollars. SoftBank put about eighteen and a half billion dollars into it. In 2023, it went broke. All that money ended up worth almost nothing. In just one year, the Vision Fund lost more than thirty billion dollars. Son told investors that SoftBank was going into "defense mode." For a man who bets everything, that's like slamming on the brakes.
That is the pattern of Son's life. When he is right, he wins huge. When he is wrong, he loses huge. And either way, he bets everything. Which brings us back to OpenAI. SoftBank first put money into OpenAI in September 2024. A few months later, in January 2025, Son stood at the White House next to the President of the United States and OpenAI's boss, Sam Altman.
Together, they announced Stargate, a plan to spend up to five hundred billion dollars building giant computer centers for AI in America. By 2025, SoftBank had put more than thirty billion dollars into OpenAI. In February this year, Son promised thirty billion more. The last payment went through on October first.
All together, that's sixty-four billion dollars, for about thirteen percent of the company. But he didn't have all that cash lying around. So he borrowed forty billion dollars from banks, as a short loan that has to be paid back fast. SoftBank also borrowed about eleven billion more by selling something called junk bonds.
Junk bonds are loans that pay the lender extra, because there's a bigger chance the money won't come back. He also sold all of SoftBank's shares in Nvidia, the company that makes the chips that power AI, just to get more cash. And right now, he is reportedly asking investors in the Middle East for up to one hundred billion more.
Remember that number from the start? Arm and OpenAI together now make up about three-quarters of everything SoftBank owns. So far, it's working. OpenAI keeps growing in value, which makes SoftBank billions of dollars on paper. And Son is once again the richest man in Japan. But back in 2000, his money was only on paper too.
So what does Son's story really teach us? It's not "bet big." Son has been right about almost everything. The internet. Alibaba. Smartphones. Computer chips. And being right still cost him seventy billion dollars. Why? Because he was too early, and he put too much in one place. That's the mistake. Not being wrong.
Putting too much in one place. Being right is not enough. You also have to survive the times when the market goes against you. Son survived the 2000's because one twenty-million-dollar bet happened to turn into Alibaba. Most people who bet everything never get their Alibaba. So for your own money, here are three rules.
One. Never put more into one idea than you could stand to lose completely. Two. Be careful with borrowed money. It makes your losses bigger, just like it makes your wins bigger. Three. A great new technology is not always a great thing to buy. The internet was a great idea in 2000. But its stocks cost way too much.
Masayoshi Son is sixty-nine years old. And he is making the biggest bet of his life on the same kind of big change that almost wiped him out when he was forty-two. Maybe he saw the AI age coming before anyone else. Or maybe he'll become the only person in history to lose seventy billion dollars twice.
Either way, we're about to find out. If you knew that Son was the one behind ChatGPT's funding, subscribe. This isn't financial advice, just a story worth learning from. See you in the next one.
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