Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
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Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#2It has already committed $65 billion to acquire big stakes in Uber, WeWork, Slack, and GM Cruise.
Uber and WeWork[1] are money drains buying market share. GM Cruise is a "fake it til you make it" operation. Is Softbank the biggest dumb money operation of all time?
(WeWork is strange. Most real estate businesses buy property and rent it out. WeWork rents property long term and rents it out short term.)
[1] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/wework-details-run-rate-rev...
Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#3It has already committed $65 billion to acquire big stakes in Uber, WeWork, Slack, and GM Cruise. Uber and WeWork[1] are money drains buying market share. GM Cruise is a "fake it til you make it" operation. Is Softbank the biggest dumb money operation of all time? (WeWork is strange. Most real estate businesses buy property and rent it out. WeWork rents property long term and rents it out short term.) [1] https://new…
What makes you say Cruise is faking? The disengagement data would suggest they're the most viable self-driving car venture behind Waymo.
Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#4"Son tells Bloomberg Businessweek that he plans to raise a new $100 billion fund every two or three years and will spend around $50 billion a year. For perspective, in 2016, the entire U.S. venture capital industry invested $75.3 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association."
This is an absurd statistic. If that's actually true, startups have a long and potentially exhilarating road ahead of them.
I wonder what this would do to the startup landscape in the long term though. Will this make startups look more like big incumbents more than a sprawling landscape?
Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#5> the prospective investors—executives from a state-owned fund in the Middle East
Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#6[deleted]
Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#7Saudi Arabia invested 45% of the 100B. It’s rare for a state to make such risky investments.
Either they have a lot of available capital, and the 45B is nothing but a line item, or they’re trying to dig themselves out of a hole and they need to take on big, risky investments to do that.
Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#8Thanks SEC for ensuring that all the returns from high growth tech companies are accruing to foreign billionaires and corrupt oil princes rather than to american retirement accounts and pension funds!
Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#9It has already committed $65 billion to acquire big stakes in Uber, WeWork, Slack, and GM Cruise. Uber and WeWork[1] are money drains buying market share. GM Cruise is a "fake it til you make it" operation. Is Softbank the biggest dumb money operation of all time? (WeWork is strange. Most real estate businesses buy property and rent it out. WeWork rents property long term and rents it out short term.) [1] https://new…
How is Cruise BS?
Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road
#10Saudi Arabia invested 45% of the 100B. It’s rare for a state to make such risky investments. Either they have a lot of available capital, and the 45B is nothing but a line item, or they’re trying to dig themselves out of a hole and they need to take on big, risky investments to do that.
I don't know if $45B is a line item to them, but to give you a sense of scale of how much money the Saudis have, Aramco had a net income of about $34B in the first half of 2017 [0].
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-13/saudi-a...