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

SoftBank Group launched the Vision Fund with a size of 10 trillion yen in 2017. Fund 2 was established in 2019. As of the end of September, the total investment across the two funds had increased to $163.2 billion (about 253 trillion yen), and pre-tax investment returns reached about 37 trillion yen……

The funds under Japan’s SoftBank Group (SBG), the SoftBank Vision Fund (SVF), are performing strongly. Although it once fell into trouble, the “golden egg” listing cultivated by Chairman and President Masayoshi Son, which ran from April to September 2025, helped SoftBank Group set a new record high for profits. The strong performance of the Vision Fund strengthened SoftBank Group’s financial capacity, supporting massive investments in artificial intelligence (AI) areas such as the U.S. OpenAI.

“Comrade-style integration”

At a financial results 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 difficulties stemming from investee company U.S. WeWork’s bankruptcy and other issues, the Vision Fund’s investment gains recovered to nearly the 30 trillion yen level in the consolidated financial statements for July through September.

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The Nikkei Inc. and the Financial Times merged into the same media group in November 2015. An alliance between two newspapers—Japan and the United Kingdom—which were also founded in the 19th century, is moving forward with collaboration across a wide range of areas such as joint special features, under the banner of “high-quality and the strongest economic journalism.” This time, as part of that effort, article exchanges have been carried out between the Chinese websites of the two newspapers.