there's reason to believe SoftBank is gonna go "boom", and in a big way:
- they have tons of illiquid assets (equity in startups and early stage companies - hard to shed - see later)
- SoftBank Vision Fund "borrows" from its huge illiquid assets (Uber + other SV stuff) in order to make the market by throwing around insane amounts of cash ($billions); in other words, they make their own markets in order to pump up their valuations but the underlying thing is fantasy-land VC goop (see any problems here?);
- the only way to shed many of these assets are with buyouts or IPOs and the most recent ones haven't been great (the 'big names' of which [UBER, LYFT] were treated like hot garbage even shorted by IPO underwriters in case of UBER) so it's not like this garbage can be punted to someone else
- SoftBank routinely sells assets to its Vision Fund and uses shady stuff like this in order to provide non-standard accounting; we have no idea what their financial health is due to a maze of non-standard reporting
- SoftBank owns over half (!!) of Japanese corporate bonds
- they have insane amounts of debt - "¥15.7tn ($143bn) of interest-bearing debt and ¥27tn of total liabilities, far greater than its ¥11.6tn market capitalisation"
as best i can tell this is approaching Ponzi territory. once more greater fools wake up to the fact that VC isn't all the rage, get the hell out of the way of anything that SoftBank touches.