The Baffling World of Masayoshi Son's Presentations (2020)
bloomberg.comHere's an example of his latest presentation slides: https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/investor...
Slide number 55 is a beauty.
Skimmed through this hoping it was some sort of joke, and there was a genuine "gotcha" moment before diving into the stuff professional analysts spend lots of time examining.
Turns out, the joke was on me. I got pictures of fucking geese.
Goose value 0?
Gosh that one got me good. I haven't had a genuine chuckle from a post on here in ages, nevermind one that's from a a CEO of a multibillion dollar firm, who's presentation I was up until that point more or less agreeing with.
IE; It went from "ya know, this is actual a reasonable take to provide investors from a 70+ y/o CEO" to "Goose value 0?"
“Is the value of the goose 0?”
hmm g00se?
I love slide 18 with the implication that researchers don't create and engineers don't think.
I can't speak to the numbers, but the values it espouses sound reasonable.
Preposterous. Clearly the goose is full of golden eggs
translation: goose has constipation
Really blurs the like between genius and crazy
I think he left that line behind a long time ago.
ASI as Alien Slop Intelligence is already here. The next phase is hardening the slop, I suppose.
One of Masayoshi Son's recent slideshows has been doing the rounds on the FediVerse this week. If you've seen people making odd comments about 'Goose was not valued.' or 'Goose value 71.' or 'eggs do not lay eggs' over the past few days then Son's 2026 presentation to shareholders is what they are going on about.
* https://discuss.systems/@dev/116807460725864716
This is the context that a lot of us didn't have. Son has been doing this since 2010, the goose laying golden eggs going back to at least 2014, and the 2020 earnings report having a run of 23 slides of geese and eggs. Other weird things over the years have included dog telepathy and a representation of COVID-19 as flying unicorns jumping out of a ditch. As the Bloomberg people pointed out, this significantly came to the attention of the world outwith Japan, which largely boggled at some of the slideshows sans context, in 2019 and 2020. Part of the world is discovering this afresh in 2026.
* https://vice.com/en/article/these-delusional-powerpoint-slid...
* https://trillium.substack.com/p/golden-geese-stirring-the-po...
* https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/202...
* https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/presenta... (https://group.softbank/en/news/webcast/20100625_01_en)
Some of the criticism over the years has focussed not on the more oddball aspects of these slideshows, but on the stereotypical way in which the graphs with projections just suddenly make lines shoot upwards.
TBF the presentation as a whole makes a lot more sense than the 4 slides out of context.
The baffling thing is how SoftBank still hasn't gone under.
Lucky bets that paid off enough to cover thousands of bad investments.
That's the nature of most venture capital isn't it?
Downside is capped, upside is uncapped, why not bet on as many companies as you can?
Softbank aren't really doing this any more though. They are making very large bets on relatively few companies. Their vision fund 1 was something like 100 billion spread between about 100 companies, so 1 billion each. This is rather different than the usual VC. It's hard to get data, but most data suggest smaller rounds have better success [1].
[1]: https://carta.com/uk/en/data/vc-fund-size-performance-2024/
Due to the power law distribution of startup outcomes, the "expected value" of the "average" (mean) startup is infinity (assuming there are infinite startups). This means YC's model to invest a modest amount in as many startups as possible is the rational strategy. Even the tiniest percentage of equity in infinite companies yields infinite returns.
This seems as counter-intuitive as saying "superconductors have zero resistance". It makes people think you meant to say "nearly zero resistance" or "approaches zero resistance".
But both cases are true - the power law distribution really does tell us that the expected return is actually infinite and superconductors really do have zero resistance (up to the critical current limit).
Is a small number of people with huge amounts of money investing in things nobody wants better than lots of people with small amounts of money investing in things they want?
the one on top didn't work for me, this one did: https://archive.is/oe6NR
This feels like the same PE theory / sell job: "Untapped value that can only be unlocked with PMaaS - Professional Management as a Service", only scaled up "because AI". They're trying to change the narative so that SB has a huge intrinsic value, while it's common knowledge that venture funding is a hit-driving business. I don't blame them but it's total bullshit. Funds do this when they're out of ideas and throw a lot of very expensive spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
I once has the displeasure of using a SoftBank SIM in Japan which relentlessly spammed my phone with unblockable ads. The continuing survival of this company is proof that billionares that got lucky once cannot possibly fail.
Their 30 year plan slide deck was easily the best. That’s where the sorrow slide is from.
Wild that decks like that get produced and approved by such a big company
(2020)
Softbank is a codesmell. If u have worked for a Softbank startup, you'd know. I don't use any Softbank backed services. The employees are in extreme stress. Nothing good can come out of that environment than money printing for the big dogs.
Masayoshi Son for me has always been the best living example of survival bias. Got very lucky once, been taking terrible decisions ever since. Zuckerberg is another great example.
This makes no sense. Masa has at least 2 extraordinary investments and Zuck bought Insta for 1 billion USD.
And then spent 80 billion on the Metaverse, while actively making the world a worse place. Masayoshi son has lost absolutely stupid amount of money on things like WeWork, which he deemed as revolutionary as "AGI", which he is still pushing as inevitable. These are immensely stupid people, with a lot of capital and non-existen ability to self-reflect or care, both enormous advantages when you play a game that favors carelessness.
It's like somebody winning the lottery once, constantly investing all of their money into more lottery tickets, and going "holy shit, look at how smart I am at picking lottery numbers; I've already won something four times!"
Given that the lottery has a typical expected value of -$1.00 per ticket you really should revise your opinion of how lucky/smart these people who repeatedly make tens of billions by pouring all their money into tickets are.
David Walsh and Zeljko Ranogajec would beg to differ:
https://www.championbets.com.au/betting-academy-article/tass...
Interesting that you would use as an example two people who ingeniously built complex systems, through lots of hard and clever work, to turn the odds in their favour.
Softbank's past performance seems pretty random, so I'll stick to my opinion.
What else can you do with your life after you're rich? Life is meaningless. Most of us strive for money - when you have money, what's left? You're the dog that caught the car.
This is AI Alzheimers not AI psychosis.
I mean, he was pretty vindicated on Uber. Which kind of hurts me to say, I was a long time Uber bear. But it did indeed emerge from the pandemic stronger.
Quick Google suggests Uber is up 66% on its IPO price, but the S&P index is up 85% over the same time period. I think Softbank also sold out around 2022, so the return (vs IPO price) would have been even lower. Didn't check for stock splits etc but I don't think Uber was a home-run for Softbank at all.
They also spent a ton of money to get an unchangeable law passed in their favor to bypass employment regulations.
> unchangeable law
WTF do you mean by this? Even constitutions can be amended, and if an odious law cannot be changed through politics then that only means it will be changed by other means.
yeah I was a uber bear too, some how it has turned around
I was betting on the taxi drivers revolting, but the capital markets have prevailed
In what country would taxi drivers revolt?
I think in most countries the drivers get paid by the taxi license holders and usually can make more money and/or more have more flexible working conditions driving for Uber.
See eg https://www.statista.com/chart/6971/fare-deal-taxi-drivers-e...
> In what country would taxi drivers revolt?
Germany.
Better the taxi drivers revolt in Germany than artists!
No, their customers revolted. If a business based on "Get in cars with random strangers" beats you in the marketplace, your business model sucks and chances are good that you do, too. That's the taxi industry in a nutshell.
The old taxi union+licensing+bully hybrid system common in many parts of the world was far worse than the cruelest thing uber could do.
>I was betting on the taxi drivers revolting, but the capital markets have prevailed
Capital Markets found in favor of giant corporation Uber instead of giant corporation Cabcharge.
They were right that economics is a dismal science, but to me these days it's not only about the ugly Moloch-like consequences, but also because these utter wierdos are in charge of it, and the medium of economic domination is a PowerPoint of nonsensical AI slop.
I assume that the PowerPoints can be absolute slop because they do not matter at all, the power is elsewhere.
It all comes to names here. The world puts waaay too much faith in successful people being successful again, and too much of the success is attributed to their inherent talent. It’s a classic fallacy of authority.
Ironically, because everyone thinks that everyone thinks that they will succeed, investing on them does yield good returns, because others are likely to invest after. And they do indeed continue to succeed!
It’s as arbitrary as tulips. Bubbles of names. That’s why it’s weirdos, because it’s quite random who is chosen, and I suppose weirdos have a more pronounced brand.
Of course it’s not completely arbitrary, there’s real merit in cracking the initial chicken-and-egg, depending on where you start in life. And there are plenty of ways of squandering the opportunities that come after. But still.
True but these particular powerpoints predate AI slop by far.