Masayoshi Son is going all in with his family's wealth, with a $40 billion bridge loan pressing down. The equity pledge of OpenAI shares isn't enough, so a group guarantee is needed—leverage pushed to the extreme.

CoinWorld News: The SoftBank Group is renegotiating with a syndicate of banks. It plans to apply for a $10 billion margin-loan backed by its stake in OpenAI, and for the first time has raised that it is willing to provide a corporate guarantee as a compromise. The immediate backdrop to the talks is SoftBank’s immense debt leverage pressure: on July 1, SoftBank drew down the bridge loan agreed in March this year to complete the second $10 billion funding round for OpenAI. To support more than $60 billion in investment in OpenAI and related infrastructure, SoftBank is extremely reliant on debt leverage and is currently facing a hard deadline to repay $40 billion in bridge loans before March 2027. Because it is difficult to value equity stakes in non-public companies and hard to liquidate them, banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Mizuho have previously been cautious about a scheme that relies solely on pledging shares. SoftBank’s forced addition of a corporate guarantee this time means that if the pledged shares depreciate, the banks can directly seek repayment from the SoftBank Group. And Ope