Gambling man The secret story of the world's greatest disruptor, Masayoshi Son

English journalist Barber, editor of the Financial Times from 2005 to 2020, delivers a meticulously researched, balanced, thoroughly readable, utterly dizzying insider's account of SoftBank founder/CEO Masayoshi "Masa" Son, born an ethnic Korean in Tosu, Japan, and coming from the humblest of origins--his father raised pigs on land the family occupied illegally--to become one of the planet's most influential investors and, consequently, one of its richest men. Maddeningly opaque, prone to placing impulsively huge bets on unheralded start-ups, adroit at keeping rivals and employees off-balance, managing dozens of investments like they were so many spinning plates, Masa nevertheless played a critical role in the fortunes of Yahoo, Alibaba, British chipmaker Arm, Apple, Sprint, and, disastrously, WeWork, among other major companies in the tech world. Barber leads readers into Masa's aerie of transactional wealth and power--and its concomitant, often-decadent perks--stopping only occasionally to consider their impact on people down at ground level, including Masa's own wife and two daughters. "What have I done?," Masa would ask in a rare moment of humbled self-reflection. It could take another lifetime for anyone to sort through the answers to that question.

Barber (The Powerful and the Damned), a former editor at the Financial Times, provides an entertaining biography of tech mogul Masayoshi Son. The son of impoverished Korean immigrants, Son had a hardscrabble upbringing in 1960s Japan. After studying computer science at Berkeley, he returned to Japan in 1980 and launched the software distribution company SoftBank. Barber details how bottomless reserves of chutzpah helped Son transform SoftBank into a multinational tech conglomerate, describing how in the company's early days, he secured a $450,000 loan on little more than confidence (he at the time had "no collateral or track record"). Tracing the highlights of Son's career, Barber credits him for investing in the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba when it was only six months old and recounts how he secured a deal to become the exclusive distributor of iPhones in Japan. However, Son's propensity for risk-taking could also cause major financial troubles, Barber writes, noting that Son's decision to funnel billions into the startup WeWork backfired after it declared bankruptcy in 2023. Barber's evenhanded portrait depicts Son as ambitious, stubborn, and above all scrappy, recounting with quiet admiration how he blustered his way to the peaks of corporate power. This real-life rags to riches story enthralls. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)