It truly is the end of an era. First, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son dropped his amazing slideshows, and now he’s stopped doing the company’s investor presentations altogether.
From our colleagues Kana Inagaki and Rob Smith:
Masayoshi Son has disappeared from the spotlight for now, opting out of his legendary investor presentation for the first time in decades as SoftBank’s Vision Funds suffered a quarterly investment loss of $5.5bn.
With SoftBank’s bullish founder offstage, its finance chiefs repeated that its balance sheet and investment portfolio was “safe” and “resilient” to placate investors concerned by the group’s borrowing costs as interest rates rise.
We hope the “for now” in the first line is portentous, and that Masa Son comes riding back on a blessing of unicorns soon enough. Because you don’t see charts this beautiful often enough.
That’s the cumulative performance of SoftBank’s Vision funds, lifted from today’s Son-less presentation. It resembles some of the portfolios we’ve seen Reddit “degens” share on WallStreetBets.
Rob Smith also alerts us to another stunner on the 80th slide, which shows some of the duds accumulated by the SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
Remember, this was a fund launched “to facilitate the continued acceleration of the AI revolution through investment in market-leading, tech-enabled growth companies”, and suggested that it had raised $100bn from the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Standard Chartered, a bunch of Japanese banks and the Kazahk sovereign wealth fund.
Please come back, Masa Son.
Further reading:
— Some suggested slides for SoftBank.
— Inside Masa Son’s $5bn SoftBank IOU
— Get some SoftBank-themed swag at the FTAV merch shop
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Farewell, FTAV’s sweet prince Republished from Source https://www.ft.com/content/0d7d010d-952a-46e4-ad1b-020a3b380859 via https://www.ft.com/companies/technology?format=rss