SoftBank Investment (Part 1): Masayoshi Son's "Golden Egg" Yields Big Profits

SoftBank Group launched its Vision Fund with a scale of 10 trillion yen in 2017. In 2019, it set up Fund No. 2. As of the end of September, the combined total investments of the two funds have grown to $163.2 billion (about 253 trillion yen), with pre-tax investment gains reaching approximately 37 trillion yen……

The funds under Japanese SoftBank Group (SBG)—SoftBank Vision Fund (SVF)—have been performing strongly. Although it once fell into trouble, the “golden eggs” cultivated by Chairman and President Masayoshi Son, through which it listed, helped SoftBank Group hit a new profit high in the period from April to September 2025. The Vision Fund’s strong performance boosted SoftBank Group’s financial capacity, enabling large-scale investments in artificial intelligence (AI) areas such as the U.S. OpenAI.

**“Comrade-style collaboration” **

At a financial results briefing in November, SoftBank Group’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Yoshimitsu Goto said, “After a long time, we’ve finally welcomed an autumn where we can loosen our grip and breathe easier,” revealing what he felt internally. This is because, after several years of hardship faced by its investment target in the U.S., such as the bankruptcy of WeWork, the investment returns of the Vision Fund recovered to a level of nearly 3 trillion yen in the consolidated financial statements for July to September.

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Nippon Economic News Agency and the Financial Times merged in November 2015 to become one media group. The alliance between two newspaper publishers—Japan and the UK—that were founded in the same 19th century is advancing collaboration across a wide range of areas, with “high-quality, the most powerful business journalism” as its banner. This time, as part of that effort, the two newspapers are exchanging articles between their Chinese websites.