SoftBank Group

“We just announced, we being SoftBank SoftBank Neo which is our intent to become a Neo cloud.”

“So, yes, I, I'm leading the direction of Ampere and Graphcore and another company called Stack AV that's doing things around Autonomous, but maybe a better way to think about it, Elad, is that I'm kind of in the room on a lot of discussions that Masa's having …”

“He's the oldest man I know with the risk appetite of a teenager. As he gets older, his risk appetite becomes bigger.”

“He looked at me and says, if you put in that much effort on the company that's doubling, they might quadruple. We might make more money on the one that quadruples than you fixing the one that's broken. That's an insight. Like, that was an insight from him to m…”

“He's been the richest man in the world, and he's become poor. He's the richest man for eighty-some days. Then he went back being worth nothing.”

“Since Washington stepped in, as you know, Jordy Intel has pulled five billion of investment from NVIDIA, two billion from Japan's SoftBank, and its shares have more than quadrupled, trouncing those of rivals.”

“My attrition before the round happened was, you know, very, very, very low. My attrition in the company after the round happened within two years, I don't know, like, 40%.”

“And, you know, Masa negotiates a little bit and says, I'll put in 200. And that was it.”

“Yeah, well, they led the round of a billion, yeah. And he was like, whatever the price of freight is, you'd just be 10% cheaper than everybody, and then if someone matches you, you'd just be 10% cheaper than that, which is like a terrible strategy. I did not d…”

“American government owns 10% of Intel. Nvidia and SoftBank own five percent each.”

“We were over fifty million dollars in ARR, 200 employees, like a fairly large business, profitable. We raised sixty million dollars of venture capital from pretty good names, like SoftBank was an investor.”

“It's around two X levered, right? One and a half to two X levered in terms of equity, right? What that means is a 30, 40% decline, you know, wipes them out.”

“Because they own 90%, roughly 90% of the company. It was a full buyout in 2016. That's right. They bought the entire company for something around 25 thirty billion US USD. Buy the entire company. They still own 90% today. So their purse, their, like, SoftBank'…”

“The only problem is SoftBank seems tapped out. They're hitting their debt limits. They just announced this week, right? That they're flashing above their covenants.”

“OpenAI raised a hundred and ten billion dollar round of funding from Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank.”

“Nvidia are putting more money in, but also SoftBank, the big Japanese conglomerate. They're talking about writing another thirty billion dollar check to finance this.”

“They were early to figuring out that there would be a huge opportunity in AI. So, you know, they famously were in NVIDIA in, in that fund you know, and they did some really good investments, like Slack, like Garnet.”

“SoftBank is closing two separate deals right now. They're closing their roughly three hundred billion pre direct investment, and they're also doing a share buyback from exist from some existing employees of five hundred billion.”

“He owns 90% of Arm still in SoftBank, and Arm is trading ninety-odd billion, so he's got eighty billion of equitable equity there.”

“So, but it very easily could see him back in the news with an incremental twenty billion. He could lever this. He could take twenty-five billion against the arm position easily.”

“So to me, this is like a relatively low octane masa move.”

“They announced they're taking a five billion dollar margin loan that's secured against its chip unit against ARM Holdings. They've actually taken out 18.5 billion dollars of margin loans against ARM shares.”

“You know, soft bank proved to everyone's complete satisfaction, right? That money alone cannot make winners, right? And which is very kind of them to run that economic experiment and, you know, prove the negative.”

“The second is the OCI build out. And I think there's some five, six, seven gigawatts about to be built out. And so working with OCI and OpenAI and SoftBank to build that out. Those projects are contracted.”

“Pushing it to late stage growth, I thought was a much harder strategy, both for companies to consume that capital valuations that you needed to pay to get into those deals, to justify that capital”

“Capital is not a huge moat. It was with the vision fund. That was like awesome strategy. I just out raise everybody a way that I could do deals that no one else could do. You know, Warburg Pincus had that for a while too.”

“SoftBank led by Masa suddenly agreed to put two billion into the company, part of its campaign to bet on us firms and appeal to Trump.”

“SoftBank had already pledged to spend at least a hundred billion in the U.S. On AI and other tech investments. A move announced by Sun at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club last December.”

“Six or seven SoftBank VC representatives marched out of the room, and, ah, my Harvard Business School friend was anxious, and like, I didn't even understand what was happening. Still, I did not. And they came back in, and they go, okay, ten million dollars.”

“About 30, 37% is held by the promoters. the second, then it's a. Which includes you and? No, promoters are Kunal, Rohit, Acevector, which is our parent company. then it is SoftBank which is through their balance sheet. It's not through the Vision Fund.”

“The guys who priced it at six billion were right. And the guys, which is Sequoia and the guys who priced it at forty five billion were wrong, which is SoftBank.”

“They just overpaid and they're going to get converted and they're going to trade at 30, 40 cents of what they originally paid.”

“And they came back in and they go, okay, ten million dollars.”

“As we saw, I think with both SoftBank and Tiger Global, if you try to change that demand supply imbalance, you just end up creating a mess.”

“Tiger's the obvious example. Now, they're still around, but a shadow of their former selves. Their quote unquote relevance in 2021 meant that they saw every deal that year, but they picked badly, so they got sent home. Same thing with SoftBank.”

“Six months after Japanese billionaire Masayoshi stood shoulder to shoulder With Sam Altman and President Trump to announce the Stargate project, the newly formed company charged with making it happen has yet to complete a single deal for a data center.”

“Part of the reason they're able to claim Stargate is off the ground is because they changed the definition of it. Previously, it had to involve open AI, Oracle, the data center provider, SoftBank, the financier and MGX, which is a huge New sovereign wealth or …”

“By the end of the year, OpenAI must convert to a for-profit entity, or SoftBank does not have to give them more than twenty billion dollars total.”

“SoftBank, to give OpenAI that money, And to buy Ampere for, I think, six billion or something, they had to get a one-year, fifteen billion dollar convert, convertible bridge loan, even. And it, they had to go to 21 banks.”

“Department of Defense had a budget for AI in 20, 24 of 1.8 billion. You just saw like the announcement with Oracle open AI and SoftBank for five hundred billion. And that's like only part of their investment for only three companies. And so you're just never g…”

“He was the richest man in the world for a few days, and then he was almost bankrupt at one point in time.”

“I did sell secondaries, thankfully in 2019 as part of the soft bank round which actually was very helpful.”

“I know full well, I know this is an investor. That the marks that you made up or the marks of SoftBank listed something somewhere are completely irrelevant. In fact, the negative signal in a lot of cases. So like the marks are irrelevant and stupid.”

“Like, then you raise, like, three rounds, and end of the twenty-twenty-one, SoftBank was talking to me about, you know, leading an eight billion dollar round, and obviously we didn't, you know, entertain that conversation.”

“All of the rounds before the three hundred billion dollar round from SoftBank had essentially a feature where there was like a hard rate of return and the ability to put the stock back if they weren't able to do the conversion To a for-profit company, et ceter…”

“I mean, the big, I mean, the big momentum, the two biggest momentum players Of the last decade, Tiger and SoftBank are already out of the game.”

“They're expecting next year, 12 and a half billion. That's gonna then go to twenty eight billion dollars, and a third of that revenue is going to come from SoftBank. SoftBank spending on OpenAI for all of its own companies and portfolio companies.”

“SoftBank and OpenAI investor has committed three billion dollars to use OpenAI's agent products this year alone.”

“The funny thing is I got a lot of notes from, I made some like snarky comments about how soft bank is like the worst investor ever. And Moss is crazy.”

“Whenever SoftBank buys, you sell. Right. Like they are the worst investors in the history of the world. Right. And so it's just like, I've watched them crush so many companies by over capitalizing them by get, they're like, you know, they, it's hilarious. I lo…”

“Boards, I think actually we are going to see, if not just because of soft banks, a hundred billion dollars that they maybe do or don't have we will see a lot more of in the United States soon.”

“The information had an important story last week, which was inside OpenAI's revenue forecasts, and the biggest revelation is that SoftBank is expected to contribute a third of their revenue growth this year by paying them for their product.”

“March of 2019 is when we went to market and there was this great good story when zero to almost two two to almost seven, seven to almost 18 when SoftBank came in and invested at almost a billion dollar valuation. So three years of extraordinary growth. Our ave…”

“They just, they were just trying to raise from Massa and SoftBank. At a two hundred fifty billion dollar value. Two hundred fifty billion dollar, two hundred forty billion dollar valuation.”

“I did not take money from Masa. So he begged me to take money for years, and we did not take it because he is a, he's a, what's the word I'm looking for? He's a promiscuous investor. So once he invests in you should probably count on him and using your informa…”

“We did stuff with the Saudis, Before even Vision Fund existed, they stroked a three and a half billion dollar check when that was like the biggest thing that ever happened.”

“I remember having the founder of SoftBank, Masayoshi's son, tell me in 2000 that we weren't losing enough money.”

“SoftBank will likely have to sell off a chunk of its stake in the company to fund Stargate. We think investors are largely missing this point and mistakenly view this announcement as materially incrementally good news.”

“One of my number one rules of seed investing is that the second SoftBank buys, you must sell. I've learned this the hard way several times.”

“Probably the worst investors in history. We've lost so much money in valuable companies because of SoftBank.”