Here is what our readers say:
Listen on: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Online “Ideas become part of who we are. People get invested in their ideas, especially if they get invested publicly and identify with their ideas. So there are many forces against changing your mind. Flip-flopping is a bad word to people. It shouldn’t be. Within sciences, people who give up on an idea […]
Listen on: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Online It seems that Softbank stock has been hated and misunderstood every day we’ve owned it – until recently, when Eric Savitz at Barron’s wrote a front-page story that could not have made a better, clearer case for the stock (link to the story). Eric made many points that I’ve made over the years […]
Listen on: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Online A client asked recently for my view on Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group and its substantial investment in WeWork, whose CEO evidently has sold WeWork stock to buy properties in New York City and California that he has leased back to WeWork. The question on my client’s mind is whether this transaction is a […]
When we bought SoftBank a few years ago it was relatively unknown to most US investors. Some of our clients even thought it was a bank. Today Softbank is a daily staple in the business news. It has raised a $100 billion private equity fund. Its leader, Masayoshi Son, is either praised as a visionary […]
Masayoshi Son doesn’t do anything small nor does he do things in a simple way. A few months ago SoftBank Group announced that it would be raising $100 billion to invest in Son’s vision of the singularity. (That is more than the capital of the entire venture capital industry). Singularity is the point when computer […]
I am about to go out on very thin ice. I am a value investor, but I’ll probably get banned from the value community for what I am about to say: Current valuations don’t mean much for companies in industries that are entering an exponential growth phase. As I type this, I catch myself thinking […]
One plus one equals three: That is a business school definition of synergy. Two companies join forces, and the quality and profitability of the combined entity improves more than the arithmetical sum of the parts. On the other hand, when you combine two awful businesses you get the inverse synergy: Negative one plus negative one […]
What would you get if you crossed Warren Buffett, Richard Branson and Steve Jobs? Answer: Masayoshi Son, the Korean-Japanese, University of California, Berkeley–educated founder of one of Japan’s most successful companies, SoftBank Corp.
