SoftBank founder lost $130M on Bitcoin
wsj.comWhy do we talk about this guy as if he is some sort of genius? He lost 99% of his wealth in the first dot-com bust. The only reason he is still around is he happened to invest in Alibaba. This doesn't demonstrate anything other than that if you have enough money, it doesn't matter what you do or how stupid you are, you'll remain rich.
I can't read the article as I don't have a subscription.
So if you're this dude, how do you make this investment?
Presumably you just call your fiance guy and tell him to put a huge amount of money into Bitcoin and the order gets passed down to someone who knows what their doing and somewhere there is a PC out there with a bazillion dollars in Bitcoin sitting in cold storage?
I gotta think the end guy who makes the buy is a pretty big target for criminal types as far as figuring out where such coins are stored....
There are companies that specialize in coordinating large, off-exchange trades. I listened to an interview where they mentioned security practices such as: keys are stored on laptops that were bought new, had the hard drive replaced, and the Ethernet and USB ports epoxied shut. All transactions are offline and multi-sig. Etc...
Yeah I was thinking the security would have to be pretty high / multi layered / rightfully paranoid.
Ledger offers enterprise grade solutions for this now.
All you have to know is he bought a lot of Bitcoin when the price was at its all time high of 20k USD and he sold them when it was low (its been as low as 3k USD). It is now at 5,5k USD.
there are Over The Counter (OTC) trading desks/companies who can help with that. One of them is Circle. I think Kraken also offers this service.
Which in context of his net worth is pretty much noise
If you're worth $20k and you find $20 on the street, it's 0.1% of your net worth.
If you're Jeff Bezos and you find 0.1% of your net worth on the street, it's $150,000,000.
Lets take that thought experiment further, would Jeff Bezos even waste the time in bending down to pick up the $20 since it is worth so little? The act of bending down, the minuscule risk of falling over, possibly scraping a knee, possibly wasting more time trying to get back up, etc. Is the $20 worth the potential hassle of picking it up?
For me: without a hesitation. It's roughtly 130 times my average 5 second earnings.
For Jeff: probably a net loss.
I hate such comparisons. How about just simply cleaning up after yourself and not polluting the world with 20$?
If I dropped 20$ off a cliff, I would not get it, but I know I should.
Didn’t someone ask Bill Gates this exact question, and he confirmed that he would pick it up?
Yeah I would expect one of the world's richest people and a notable investor to put a decent sized bet on BTC, just like he has with countless other companies and ideas.
Masayoshi seems great at picking market tops and buying into them.
either he wins big, or no big deal, the advantages of having money.
So far, he lost more money in his funds than he ever made.
But he makes $1B+ a year just from fees.
This is a very twisted idea of "winning big"
He's not investing. He's laundering money at scale.
also laundering reputations - lots of SV companies seem to have no issues with accepting Saudi money if it's via Softbank
Full-text, for those blocked by the paywall:
SoftBank Founder Masayoshi Son Lost $130 Million on Bitcoin
Japanese billionaire made a huge personal investment in the digital currency as prices peaked
By Rachael Levy and Liz Hoffman April 23, 2019 7:00 a.m. ET Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of SoftBank Group Corp. 9984 0.31% , made a huge personal bet on bitcoin just as prices for the digital currency peaked, losing more than $130 million when he sold out, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Son, who launched the world’s biggest venture-capital fund on the strength of his long-term investing acumen, made the investment at the recommendation of a well-known bitcoin booster, whose investment firm SoftBank bought in 2017, the people said.
The investment came at the peak of the bitcoin frenzy in late 2017 after the digital currency had already risen more than 10 fold that year. The exact size of the bet couldn’t be determined, but bitcoin peaked at nearly $20,000 in mid December 2017 and Mr. Son sold in early 2018 after bitcoin had plummeted, the people said.
Bitcoin closed Monday at $5,381.05.
Mr. Son is known for quick investment decisions and big risky bets, most of which have paid off. He decided to back Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. after spending just five minutes with its founder, Jack Ma. He took a half-hour to greenlight a $200 million investment in a startup that grows vegetables indoors.
Mr. Son’s previously unreported loss shows that even some of the world’s most sophisticated and wealthiest investors got caught up in the frenzy. With a net worth estimated by Bloomberg LP at $19 billion, Mr. Son will hardly notice, though it dents his reputation as a patient and prophetic investor.
A SoftBank spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Son’s behalf.
Mr. Son was encouraged to make the investment by Peter Briger, the co-chairman of asset manager Fortress Investment Group, the people said. SoftBank bought Fortress in February 2017, inheriting the asset manager’s bitcoin reserves along with its more traditional investment funds.
Fortress under Mr. Briger first bought bitcoin in 2013, when it was still a fringe technology used mainly in the darker corners of web commerce. By the time the SoftBank deal was completed, its holdings were worth more than $150 million.
Mr. Briger declined to comment through a spokesman.
Mr. Son built SoftBank mostly on long-term technology investments and used his record to launch the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund. The fund, backed by the government investment fund of Saudi Arabia, owns big stakes in Uber Technologies Inc. and WeWork Cos., and has been credited with driving up valuations of some of the biggest private technology companies.
The Vision Fund is facing a test of its success with the coming initial public offering of Uber, which is aiming for a valuation of as much as $100 billion, below previous expectations but still above where the fund invested.
Even as it looks ahead to futuristic technology, SoftBank’s most immediate problem is its controlling stake in U.S. mobile phone company Sprint Corp. The 2013 deal has weighed down the conglomerate with debt, limiting its investing options.
Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint and T-Mobile’s merger had been challenged by U.S. Justice Department staff lawyers, who expressed concerns that the all-stock deal would threaten competition.
Sprint, hoping for approval, said in a regulatory filing last week: “Sprint is in a very difficult situation that is only getting worse. Sprint is not on a sustainable competitive path.”
A true hero.
It's only a loss if he sold, HODL!
I do know he sold, was just being silly.
I like how you can be a literal billionaire bank founder and still buy a speculative asset at it's peak and sell at it's lowest after a 90% crash
Buy high sell low
>>The investment came at the peak of the bitcoin frenzy in late 2017 after the digital currency had already risen more than 10 fold that year. The exact size of the bet couldn’t be determined, but bitcoin peaked at nearly $20,000 in mid December 2017 and Mr. Son sold in early 2018 after bitcoin had plummeted, the people said.
Well 10% is better than less or nothing, right? Shows his lack of confidence in it going up any further - or at least within a timeframe that there aren't better investments.
>Well 10% is better than less or nothing, right? Shows his lack of confidence in it going up any further - or at least within a timeframe that there aren't better investments.
Pretty much any good book about investing (eg. The Four Pillars of Investing) teaches you that following your human emotions and irrationality in investing is the worst you can do, basically selling when everybody IS selling is the worst move (Warren Buffett: Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012116/warre...)
So I'm pretty surprised to see Masayoshi Son acting like a rookie investor, and following the crowd of uneducated investors buying during the mania and selling during the crash
It's the opposite of investing 101
You’re oversimplifying.. selling while everyone else is often due to irrationality, but quite often it is the best move. In the case of a crashing asset that is determined to be unlikely to recover, selling with “everyone” else is the rational action. cf cutting your losses. In fact I’ve feel like more experienced investors are prone to the opposite problem... irrationally holding on to a hopeless asset when they could have cut it.
Cut your losses and let your winners run.
How I can read this without a subscription?
If the click comes from Facebook or Google, you won't need a subscription.
sadly not true for me.
Looks like https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/softbank-founder-lost-130m... is the same article.
That has a paywall as well.
Oh? Sorry - it doesn't for me. Maybe it's location-based (I'm in the UK)?
Curious - now it does! The first one's free, maybe?
https://outline.com/aN2Nkz seems to work.
I have no evidence of this, but it sadly (probably) makes sense to apply a paywall after N referrals from a particular domain, or even after X traffic over Y time as a social trick for getting people's peers to subscribe
this can be handy https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
For all the perma-bears out there...Bitcoin is well off last year's low and now around $5500. Crypto has been trending up for weeks. Some top tokens like BNB (Binance's token) are at all time highs.
It’s amazing what wash trading and fake volume can do to prop up an ecologically destructive and pointless technology.