> The dotcom crash of 2001 wiped out 99% of SoftBank’s market value.<p>> But one investment—$20m sunk into Alibaba—is regarded as one of the best in history. The Chinese internet titan went public in 2014 in the world’s biggest IPO. SoftBank’s 28% stake in the firm is now worth $140bn.<p>Kind of mind-boggling who the real titan is here: Alibaba. Both Softbank and the late Yahoo (USA)'s core value were derived solely on Alibaba's market cap, able to prop up whole other companies.<p>I've always assumed that Softbank was getting its money from Softbank, but surprising to learn they derived most of their value from Alibaba stock just like Yahoo. If you've ever seen their Pepper robots, it's pretty indicative of how dysfunctional their main offerings are. The robot is somehow everywhere in Japan, but 100% useless as well.
> Putting $4.4bn into WeWork, a provider of shared workspaces, valuing it at $20bn, is another risky bet. The firm leases office space, redesigns it to create a hip vibe and sublets it to startups, freelancers and some big firms. The worry is that WeWork is little more than a commercial-property company that is unjustifiably trading on a tech valuation and will soon be rumbled.<p>I was impressed by how fast WeWork expands. In Berlin it now has 7 co-working spaces all fairly close located. They recently bought meetup.com.
It's these kinds of larger than life personalities who carry humanity forward, or at least make the big leaps possible. Not the conservative ivy league money manilupulators now pretending to be tech visionaries at VC firms in exchange for a quick skim off the top.
If anyone is interested to get a good understanding of Softbank's history and the Vision fund, I can strongly recommend a recent, lengthy episode the great Acquired podcast did on it: <a href="http://www.acquired.fm/episodes/2018/3/22/season-2-episode-4softbank-fortress-and-the-vision-fund" rel="nofollow">http://www.acquired.fm/episodes/2018/3/22/season-2-episode-4...</a>
SoftBank seems to be all over HN this year; I see it mentioned in comments all the time, as some very well known and important player. But I swear I didn't even know that name when this year started. So what's going on? Is it me just not paying attention? Or did something change, and suddenly made this company interesting?
At this point can SoftBank make winners in silicon valley by pouring money on companies and having the other companies they have invested in support each other by using each others products?<p>Is this good/bad for the silicon valley ecosystem? Is there a point at which massive investment groups get treated as monoplies and regulated?<p>Uber and Grab (both SoftBank investments) merged into one in the Philippines:
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/grab-vanquishes-uber-with-local-strategy-billions-from-softbank" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/grab-vanq...</a>
$100B will completely change landscape given the total amount of VC investment per year has only been around $100B to date. Exact figure depends on what source you look at but here's one: <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture-capital-amount-invested-in-the-united-states-since-1995/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture-capital-a...</a>
SoftBank had been good news and bad news both at the same time for tech. The good news is that they have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it. On the top of this, they have moronic non-technical people who were only “technical” like a decade ago to do the evaluations. So if you have a startup and mild ability to hype up to these folks, you come out laughing with millions in your hand almost instantly.<p>The bad news is that they are absolutely incompetent VCs. Just look at their recent investments in things like impossible io. Whenever I think who the hell in their right mind will invest in this completely bogus and fraudulent company, SoftBank comes around and buys them up with billion dollars. They have no differentiation between betting on risky startup vs betting on bogus startup. They are currently biggest party responsible for hyping up lots of startups for absolutely no apparent reason.
So $33B has been invested. What has been done with this money, besides mergers and financial stuff? What has been built that wouldn't have been built with regular sums of money ?
I don't appreciate articles from paywalled newspapers. I can't read them and don't want to do any tricks to gain access. The net is large and full of well written articles that are accessible to read. Let's ignore the paywalled bunch and focus on the open and free.