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Eh, some people said. Masayoshi Son was once the richest person to ever exist in this century for 3 full days. But then he lost almost 40 billion dollars in just one night. Imagine, this is the biggest personal loss ever in history. But the talent he has is not only that. He once managed to secure funding worth 45 billion dollars after a 45-minute meeting with someone so rich.
Besides, he is someone who has full responsibility regarding investments. But on the other hand, some people feel that he is just a gambler who treats the world economy like a casino and causes great damage. Here he was, someone so stubborn that he would even threaten to burn himself if he didn't get a business deal.
A man who invests his entire fortune in a business solely based on the glint in their eye. He, Masayoshi Son, is a person that not many people in this world know, but everyone who knows him is focused on him. He has literally changed the world and bet on our future. A very inspiring, scary and crazy story that we immediately witnessed and we traced as an object of thought that helps us to continue learning from crazy people out there.
Masayoshi Son's family is a family that migrated to Japan from South Korea by hiding in a small fishing boat. They had no food, they had no shelter and they couldn't even speak the language. The beginning of Masayoshi's life was very gloomy because he even experienced a bitter life from when he was still in school.
He was considered an outsider, he was stoned by his friends, isolated, ostracized and even disrespected. His father was just a poor man who didn't have enough money to survive and they did anything just to earn money or even just to survive. They raise cattle and sell illegal liquor to make ends meet.
Since childhood, Masayoshi was determined and determined to build a better life for himself. Being isolated in society made him have crazy thoughts. During his high school days he had the idea of becoming the most successful entrepreneur in Japan. A man named Fujita who brought the first McDonald's to Japan was someone he idolized.
In his teenage years he spent many hours calling Fujita's office wanting to talk to him. But the receptionist always said that she was too busy. Fed up, he immediately went to Tokyo and met Fujita. Fujita was impressed by this child's determination and then gave Masayoshi the opportunity to meet for 15 minutes to find out what was on this child's mind.
Then he, Masayoshi, did not want to waste the opportunity and immediately asked and asked for advice on what business he could run. Fujita immediately answered with his mind , "Computer." That simple answer made Masayoshi immediately think hard and finally decided to go to America at the age of 16 to pursue his dream.
He studied English there then went to an American high school . But it only took a few days for him to feel like this was a waste of time and it had been too long. He then went to his school and convinced the school to allow him to take the college entrance exam early. In fact, even though he was intelligent, he was not really ready for the test.
But somehow, he managed to get through it in less than a month. After enrolling in American high school , meanwhile, he also graduated with a master's degree and continued his studies in economics and computer science at the University of California. Of course, he also needed money at that time. Then he asked his friends, "Is there a job where he can earn 10,000 dollars per month, but only work 5 minutes?" A stupid question and a joke that doesn't make sense in our brain, right?
But what would happen if the joke became a reality? Masayoshi spends 5 minutes every day coming up with new inventions, so he can patent the idea and sell it. Of course not all of the ideas are good, but every idea that is generated has a gem in there, which is where it becomes very valuable. Masayoshi took three approaches to generate these ideas.
The first idea is to find solutions to the problems faced in his life. Let's take an example, a pencil rolling off a table, then the pencil must be square so that it doesn't roll. The second approach is to create a point of view from something that is opposite to some of society's points of view. For example, making a large object smaller, or making a white object black.
And the final and most ultimate approach is to combine an object such as a radio with a tape recorder to be able to play radio cassettes. He did all these approaches to get the diamond discoveries that he wanted to turn into a fortune. In the end, he had managed to come up with 250 different ideas. One of the best things he has is a pocket-sized device that can translate text into a variety of different languages.
And then, he found a professor who agreed to help him build a prototype. Spent all his money and looked for corporate donors to buy new equipment. Meanwhile, he paid young Asian men to fill in for him as students in the lectures he missed. In the end, a joke he made about working for 5 minutes and making him rich was successful when he met a company called Sharp and was willing and agreed to buy the patent for the device for 1.7 million dollars.
So at the age of 19, he was declared a young millionaire. Then, this young millionaire started having a side job. Masayoshi began importing space invader arcade machines from Japan to America. Where he installed them in bars and in restaurants. The machine was incredibly popular and within just 6 months, Masayoshi had imported as many as 350 arcade machines.
And made a profit of more than 1 million dollars. He continued to carry out these import activities using more expensive, but also faster, aircraft. Sometimes he can even make a profit from the arcade machine before he pays the arcade machine supplier . From this side, we can see that Masayoshi is a genius entrepreneur.
Enjoying the times where he has to work hard, little sleep to get the diamond idea 7 days 7 nights to fight and bet with his mind. And see that all the results he got paid off. After returning to Japan, he knew that he could use all the money he earned in America to build an even bigger business in Japan.
He started brainstorming new business ideas and mapped out 40 potential businesses he could start. Then rank them based on different metrics. It was at that time that he began to sharpen his arrows and found new weapons to fight in Japan by starting a company that distributed computer equipment and the company was named SoftBank.
In the early 80s, personal computers still sounded like a distant memory to the world. But he is sure that this business will be promising, especially with the influence of his mentor, Fujita. Masayoshi believed that SoftBank could become a leading distribution company in Japan despite the fact that he had no experience whatsoever with computers.
He hired employees to help him. One morning, he stood up and said that SoftBank would become a company the world would reckon with and be worth billions of dollars. As usual with the previous people who threw the joke, the employees thought that Masayoshi was a crazy person. But they began to believe and helped build that dream by slowly creating several strategies for their company by creating a magazine about computers and computer education.
All those strategies didn't work out and everyone even told him to stop because he might end up spending a lot of money on failure. But Masayoshi ignored it and continued walking as he thought. And eventually SoftBank became the company that was sought after to distribute computers in the 90s and that's when disaster struck.
Masayoshi was diagnosed with chronic hepatitis and could only lie in bed. He was so scared and asked the doctor how long it would take for him to recover. The doctor did not guarantee a cure because the disease was already very chronic. Masayoshi may have made his company a success, but now he is faced with the reality that he may not live much longer .
His 1-year-old daughter and his pregnant wife will complicate matters. Masayoshi had taken out a bank loan to fund his company and he knew they would withdraw all his funds if they found out he was dying. But he still pretended to be fine and sneaked out of the hospital to attend a meeting. But slowly but surely his health began to improve.
But because of his previous health it had a big impact on Masayoshi and convinced him that he needed to act faster, crazier and even bolder. In the 90s, SoftBank had 800 employees and 1 billion dollars in revenue and could have taken the company public and raised more money. The computer distribution was very successful, but it was not enough for him.
He had a clear vision that technology would change the world so he invested in other tech companies and became known for making bolder business bets . For example, he spent millions of dollars on Yahoo and a new company called Google with a valuation of 40 million dollars. When the company had its IPO a few months later, it was valued at $808 million meaning SoftBank had made a huge profit in just a few months.
Masayoshi never saved his money, he always made it into new arrows and made it into weapons so he invested it in other companies. In the 90s, SoftBank was a giant conglomerate company. SoftBank is no longer a company that has a product. It is a company that will buy other technology businesses that Masayoshi believes in.
For example in 1998 he put $400 million dollars into E-Trade. So by the 90s Masayoshi had already invested $3 billion dollars into 800 different tech startups. And SoftBank employees are the best employees he has. Masayoshi meets with 200 entrepreneurs every 3 months to find bigger opportunities. Of course, everything he did ended in failure.
But he had come to the realization that one great victory would cover all his previous failures. In the 2000s Masayoshi made what is considered to be the best capital investment of all time. When he heard about an internet company in China called Alibaba, of course he liked what they were doing. Founder Jack Ma initially said that his company did not need anyone to invest.
But it wasn't Masayoshi who couldn't see and charm others into following his magic. Jack Ma and Masayoshi finally agreed to SoftBank's deal to invest $20 million dollars into the company. And that stock would eventually be worth more than $70 billion dollars. At the same time in the same year Masayoshi also expanded his Japanese company and began to provide funding to hundreds of internet companies because he believed that the internet was the next big phase of technology that would change the world.
And it was then that for 3 days in the middle of 2000, he surpassed Bill Gates as the richest person in the world. But unfortunately there was a dot com burst, the market crashed and Masayoshi lost his fortune of $70 billion dollars. More than any investor in the world has ever lost. But hearing this, we then think that the losses will make the company even slower and fall.
Come to think of it, this is Masayoshi. Masayoshi instead took more risks and bet bigger. In fact, he is sometimes described as a Wall Street trader, but he doesn't really need to be because he already has enough money to spend. In 2001, Masayoshi successfully broke into the broadband business in Japan.
After breaking into the broadband business of the Japanese government telecommunications office, he shouted, "This is the end. If you don't help me, I will pour gasoline all over myself and set myself on fire ." Then he launched a broadband business in Japan at half the price of competitors and despite this, Masayoshi lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Masayoshi believes that in the future they can profit by offering additional services although he is very unsure when the business will turn a profit. Many are skeptical about the internet, but all have been refuted. In 2007, Masayoshi had already believed that there was a next big wave happening on the internet, namely the shift to mobile phones instead of computers.
So with his extensive network, Masayoshi called another hero, Steve Jobs. He originally had the idea to make a computer but a mini version to Steve Jobs. But Apple already has that concept with the product we all know, the iPhone. But Masayoshi looked for another opportunity by asking if it was permissible to sell Apple's iPhone products exclusively in Japan.
Steve Jobs laughed at him because even the iPhone itself was still in its experimental stage and Masayoshi came one step further, asking if he could sell it exclusively in Japan. Even Masayoshi doesn't own a mobile phone company in Japan. But hearing that, it wouldn't be Masayoshi if he wasn't persistent.
In that year, he bought a mobile company of course with cotton candy in debt to buy Vodafone Japan for 20 billion dollars. But because of that persistence, Masayoshi now has the rights to sell the iPhone in Japan and this deal means he is free to price it lower to gain market share. Meanwhile, he is also still investing in various technology companies such as robotics which creates robots with the ability to read human emotions.
He even thought that SoftBank would become a telepathic company in the next 300 years with the various advances that he had thought about over the years . But when Masayoshi was able to buy all the companies that many investors dreamed of , it turned out that all of that was not enough for him. He still wanted more.
He even wants to raise around 100 billion dollars to develop more for his business. A number that is higher than the number itself. Even we ourselves find it impossible to imagine having that much money throughout our lives. But Masayoshi did not lose his mind. It's time for us to move on to the ultimate story of how he managed to make 45 billion dollars in 45 minutes.
He started going to Arab countries, countries that were very rich in oil. Crown Prince Mohammed Salman is keen to expand his oil profits into other profitable businesses. So who better to talk to than Masayoshi? Masayoshi went to Arabia to meet Prince Salman and to see firsthand whether the Prince was interested in his business and vision for the future.
On the plane, he changed the 30 billion dollar deal to 100 billion dollars in his presentation proposal. The team and all the employees were so shocked and saw this crazy thing. But Masayoshi said, "We must reach higher than we think." Just when the important meeting took about 45 minutes and he got 45 dollars as initial capital.
1 billion dollars per minute. Imagine how powerful it would be. SoftBank combined the funds with those of several other very large companies. And Masayoshi can raise funds of around 100 billion dollars. What would he do with that much money? Yes, AI is a technology that Masayoshi is confident enough in to develop it further.
And Masayoshi is someone who wants to be known as a madman who bets on the future. That is the story of a Japanese man who was so powerful that he would do anything to achieve the future he wanted. But behind all that there will always be a dark side to these crazy people. But we won't cover that here as this is our first introductory video.
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