As one of the most talked-about figures, Masayoshi Son has built a significant fortune. Our team analyzed the latest data to provide a clear picture of their income.
What Is Masayoshi Son's Net Worth?
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Early Life and Career Beginnings
Masayoshi began his first business ventures while still a student at Berkeley. Assisted by some of the school's professors, he created an electronic translator that he managed to sell to Sharp Corporation for $1.7 million. He made equally significant money by importing used video game machines from Japan and installing them in restaurants and on college campuses.
Masayoshi Son was born on August 11, 1957, in Tosu, Saga, Japan. He is a third-generation Zainichi Korean, meaning he is ethnically Korean and a naturalized Japanese citizen. He has three brothers, includingTaizo Son, who also went on to become a serial investor and entrepreneur. Son wasn't always so rich; he was raised in a poor farmer family, living among the sheep and pigs. After working at a McDonald's in Japan, he left to complete his education in California. There, Masayoshi finished his high school studies at Serramonte High while staying with family and friends in San Francisco. Son went on to attend the University of California, Berkeley as an engineering major.
Son went on to use his money to invest in early Internet services, including Yahoo!, with which he formed a joint venture in 1996. A few years later, he made a $20 million stake in the Chinese technology company Alibaba, which turned into a $60 billion stake when Alibaba later went public in 2014.
At the age of 24 in 1981, Son founded the Tokyo-based company SoftBank, which started as a software distributor. The next year, it entered the publishing business with the launch of "Oh! MZ" and "Oh! PC" magazines, which covered the Sharp and NEC computers, respectively. The company went public in 1994 at a value of $3 billion. SoftBank continued to expand exponentially over the ensuing years. In 1995, it bought the media conglomerate Ziff Davis for $2.1 billion and purchased the computer expo trade show COMDEX for $800 million.
In October 1999, SoftBank became a holding company. It invests primarily in the energy, technology, and financial sectors, and operates the Vision Fund, which is the largest technology-focused venture capital fund in the world. Among SoftBank's specific areas of operation are fixed-line telecommunications, e-commerce, marketing, and information technology. The group stands as the second-largest publicly traded company in Japan after Toyota.
Son has pledged 94 million shares as collateral against loans. He also serves as the chairman of the British company Arm Holdings, which his company purchased in 2016. Despitelosing the most money of anyone in historydue to the 2000 dot com crash, Son remains one of the richest people in the world.
Masayoshi Son is a Japanese tech entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist who has a net worth of $13 billion. Masayoshi Son is the founder and CEO of the multinational holding company SoftBank. Son owns roughly 25% of SoftBank which is invested in about one thousand internet businesses.
After graduating from Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1980, Son launched the company Unison in Oakland. Upon returning to Japan, he decided to permanently use his Korean surname instead of the family's adopted surname of Yasumoto in order to be a role model for other ethnically Korean kids in Japan.
In summary, the total wealth of Masayoshi Son reflects strategic moves.
Disclaimer: All net worth figures are estimates based on public data.