What would a $20 million initial investment turning to a paper valuation of about $50 billion means in metric returns. A whooping 2500X! That was the estimated return that Masayoshi San pulled off with his investment in Alibaba Group in 2000. In the startup world, it’s an often used phrase,”You only need to get it right once” but Masayoshi San might be stretching it too close to the end of the rope, let’s see why. Born as a third generation Zainichi Korean(Ethnic Koreans with permanent residency status in Japan), Masayoshi Son is a Japanese billionaire technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, well known as the founder & CEO of SoftBankGroup Corp. (SBG), a strategic technology-focused investment holding company.

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Starting in the 1980s and experiencing a boom in the 1990s and 2000s, he became a well-known businessman in Japan by making a name for himself in the distribution of PC software, publication of books and magazines about computers, and telecommunications. Over the course of the company's existence, Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group's poor investment choices have resulted in a variety of lost investments. Since Son founded SoftBank in1981, he has invested in a number of companies, but the majority of those ventures have failed. As a result, Son's reputation as an investor is almost entirely based on his initial $20 million investment in Alibaba Group in 2000.This stake had increased to a paper valuation of about $50 billion just before Alibaba's IPO in 2014. In 2018, SoftBank's 27 percent ownership in Alibaba was valued at $132 billion, taking into account further stock acquisitions made since 2000. He gained international recognition as a stock investor when his telecom business, SoftBank Corp., transformed into the investment management company SoftBank Group Corp. However, Son's investment approach in the first and second SoftBank Vision Funds, formed in 2017 and 2019, has been characterised as one that relies on the larger fool hypothesis- if something is valued higher than its true value then it might outpace the true valuation and give even higher returns in the future. Son is a contentious individual who has been referred to as a gambler, made fun of in certain niche media, and considered the worst investor ever. He had the title of having lost the most money in history for a long time (more than $59 billion during the dot com meltdown of 2000 alone, when his SoftBank shares fell), a record that was eventually exceeded by Elon Musk in the years that followed.

This article was ideated thanks to the fact that the vision fund lost a whooping $32 billion in the fiscal year that ended in March 2023, as a deteriorating global economy contributed to value adjustments across its portfolio of private and public software businesses. The loss 70% increase  YoY over the same time last year, when SoftBank announced losses of $19 billion in the Vision Fund division. The losses occur despite SoftBank's increased caution in previous quarters when allocating fresh financing to companies. The Japanese giant listed unrealised losses of $1.6 billion in SenseTime Group, $800 million in DoorDash, and $1.6 billion in each of GoTo as some of the losses. SoftBank's portfolio's fair value decreased by $2.3 billion to $138 billion during the course of the quarter.

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Vision Fund invests in everything tech that includes internet of things, robotics, communications infrastructure, telephony, computational biology, biotech, cloud technologies, financial technology, mobile applications etc.,and these are just a few of the industries that the fund invests in. The Fund is intended to be a catalyst for technological advancement in the hope that it would increase SoftBank's capabilities and hasten the transition to SoftBank2.0. It aspires to invest in companies and key infrastructure that SoftBank thinks will transform and revolutionise the world in the future.

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Even after all the losses, It is the biggest technology-focused investment fund in the world, with a capitalisation of more than $100 billion.

Uber, Alibaba, andDoorDash are just a few of the businesses that the SoftBank Vision Fund has invested in. A few major investments in Indian firms, like Flipkart and Paytm, have also been made by the fund. The Vision Fund attracted notice right away for its historically large investments in start-ups and IT firms. With its huge war fund, it was able to make multi-billion dollar bets on enterprises that would disrupt a variety of industries, including biotechnology, autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, and e-commerce. Uber, WeWork, DoorDash, andByteDance (the parent firm of TikTok) are a few significant investments.

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The worldwide technological scene has been significantly impacted by the SoftBank Vision Fund. Some of the most successful digital businesses in the world, like Uber and Alibaba, have had their development accelerated thanks to the fund. The fund has also contributed to the global creation of employment and business possibilities. As a relatively new fund, the SoftBank Vision Fund is still too early to predict what its long-term effects will be. The fund might, however, have a significant impact on how the global technological landscape develops in the future. The fund is in a good position to keep making investments in developing technology firms with the potential to dominate the world market. The fund also provides the tools necessary to support the expansion and scaling of these firms' operations. As a consequence, the SoftBank Vision Fund is probably going to be making a big difference in the world of technology for years to come.

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The SoftBank Vision Fund has encountered some difficulties recently. The fund has written down billions of dollars in losses as a result of its investments' failures in WeWork and OneWeb. The firm has, however, also made several profitable investments, including DoorDash and Coupang. A second fund for the SoftBank Vision Fund was being raised, to concentrate on making investments in Chinese, American, and Indian technology firms. In the Indian context, almost all the big popular startups you see, have some sort of investments from the vision fund as you can also see.

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The SoftBank Vision Fund is a significant participant in the world of technology. The fund is expected to have a big effect for years to come and has the capacity to influence how the technology sector develops. The SoftBank Vision Fund continues to be a significant player in the field of technology investing, altering sectors and fostering game-changing inventions. The fund has a significant impact on the startup environment and the larger technology economy, despite the difficulties and controversy it has encountered. Maybe Masayoshi San just needs another Alibaba to silence the critics and come back stronger than ever from this slump and we excitedly await to see how SoftBank's Vision Fund will impact the development of technology and entrepreneurship in the future.