Billionaire Masayoshi Son–one of Japan’s richest people–has seen his net worth surge 50% in less than a year, gaining $8 billion on the back of chip designer Arm’s soaring share price and his SoftBank reporting its first quarterly profit in more than a year.
Son, 66, has a net worth of $28.8 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaire tracker. That’s up from $20.9 billion in May 2023, when he was ranked No. 3 on Japan’s 50 Richest list. Shares in Son’s SoftBank, which owns roughly 90% of Arm, have been tracking the Nasdaq-listed chip company’s rally following its third-quarter earnings last week that gave a bullish outlook amid strong AI demand.
“We are also seeing strong momentum and tailwinds from all things AI,” said Rene Haas, Arm’s CEO, in the earnings call. “From the most complex devices on the planet for training and inference…more and more AI is running on more edge devices and end devices, and that’s all running on Arm.”
Son’s SoftBank acquired Arm for $32 billion in 2016, taking the formerly London Stock Exchange-listed company private. Billionaire Jensen Huang’s Nvidia tried to buy Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion in 2020, but the deal fell through in 2022 following regulatory scrutiny. Last September, Arm listed on the Nasdaq in the year’s biggest IPO.
SoftBank shares also got a boost last week when the world’s largest technology investor reported its own financial results. In the last three months of 2023, SoftBank earned about $6.4 billion in profit—its first quarterly profit in five quarters—thanks in part to gains from portfolio companies ByteDance, DoorDash and Oyo.
Arm remains a bright spot in Son’s portfolio, which has included boom-and-bust startups WeWork and FTX. In 2021, the SoftBank founder was Japan’s richest man, as a post-pandemic funding bubble fuelled valuations.
A well-known tech investor, Son sold his early-stage venture capital fund SoftBank Ventures Asia to TheEdgeOf, a Singapore-based investment firm owned by his younger brother, Taizo Son, last April. Now rebranded as SBVA, SoftBank Ventures Asia backed two startups on last year’s Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, including tech-enabled laundry delivery app Lifegoeson and AI port monitoring and management system Seadronix.
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