SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has been planning his comeback

A new Financial Times profile of Masayoshi Son opens with SoftBank’s CEO seeming to hit bottom, staring at his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I have done nothing I can be proud of.”

Indeed, Son largely disappeared from the public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund took huge losses from investments like WeWork. But FT writer Lionel Barber, whose new biography of Son is called “Gambling Man,” writes that while Son appeared to be “doing penance,” he was actually “plotting a comeback.”

Now SoftBank is betting big on AI, and finding success by taking chip design company Arm public.

There are also some fun personal details in the profile, like Son’s apparent fascination with Napoleon. When an activist investor brought up Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 meeting with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business guys.”

“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”

A previous version of this article misspelled Masayoshi Son’s name. We regret the error.