SoftBank Investment (Part 1): Masayoshi Son's "Golden Egg" Yields Big Profits

SoftBank Group launched Vision Fund with a scale of 10 trillion yen in 2017. In 2019, it established Fund 2. As of the end of September, the total investment of the two funds has grown to $163.2 billion (about 25.3 trillion yen), with pre-tax investment gains reaching around 3.7 trillion yen……

SoftBank’s funds under SoftBank Group—especially the SoftBank Vision Fund (SVF)—have performed strongly. Although it once fell into trouble, the “golden egg” IPO cultivated by Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son pushed SoftBank Group to a record profit high in the period from April to September 2025. The strong performance of the Vision Funds has boosted SoftBank Group’s financial strength, supporting massive investments in artificial intelligence (AI) areas such as U.S.-based OpenAI.

“Comrade-style integration”

At the earnings report briefing in November, SoftBank Group’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Yoshimitsu Goto said, “After a long time, we’ve finally welcomed an autumn that lets us breathe easier,” revealing how he felt inside. This is because after several years of hardship—such as the U.S. investee WeWork filing for bankruptcy—the Vision Fund’s investment returns recovered to roughly the level of nearly 3 trillion yen in the consolidated financial statements for July through September.

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The Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the Financial Times merged in November 2015 to become the same media group. The alliance between two newspaper companies—both founded in the 19th century, one in Japan and one in the United Kingdom—is moving forward with collaboration in wide-ranging areas such as joint special features under the banner of “high-quality, the strongest economic journalism.” This time, as part of that effort, the two newspapers’ Chinese-language websites have implemented article exchanges.