Masayoshi Son

Son founded SoftBank in 1981 and built it from a software distributor into a telecom operator and globe-spanning technology investor, most visibly through the Vision Funds. His career is defined by outsized, concentrated bets — some spectacularly successful, like an early investment in Alibaba, and others costly.

In AI, Son has positioned SoftBank strategically: majority ownership of chip-architecture company Arm, a lead role in the OpenAI-anchored Stargate infrastructure program committing hundreds of billions of dollars to US data centers, and some of the largest single investments in OpenAI itself.

Son has framed the pursuit of artificial superintelligence as SoftBank's central mission, redirecting the group's capital and strategy accordingly. That concentration makes him both a major enabler of the AI buildout and a barometer of the financial risk it carries.