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 the…
I have a conspiracy theory kicking around in my head that Softbank might be a money laundering or tax saving scam of some sort. Why else would you invest 300 million in a dog walking app ?
It's a pretty standard interpretation that the Softbank funds are a vehicle to deploy capital that is otherwise hard to invest (because of political controversy, dubious origins, etc). That's why they can afford to throw cash around so liberally.