Masayoshi Son is 67 years old. He told shareholders in Tokyo on Wednesday he wants another 10 or 15 years. That is how long he thinks it will take for artificial superintelligence to arrive.
This is not the man who lost billions on WeWork. This is the man who bought Arm for $32 billion in 2016.
Arm chips now power most of the world’s smartphones and are central to the AI buildout. SoftBank’s fortune has swung wildly on that bet. Right now it is swinging upward.
Son does not see a bubble. He sees the beginning.
At the annual shareholders’ meeting, the bubble question surfaced again. It always does. He called it an insult to AI.
That is consistent. He has previously called bubble talk “blasphemy.” He has dismissed the people asking as “not smart enough, period.” The language is not diplomatic. It is not meant to be.
The context matters. Son has bet more of SoftBank’s balance sheet on a single thesis than almost any investor alive.
That thesis is that AI is not a sector. It is a revolution. He told CNBC in Paris earlier in June that the AI revolution is “more than 10x, probably 50x bigger” than the dot-com boom.
That boom created trillions in value before it collapsed. Son is saying this one will be larger and last longer.
Sceptics look at the valuations. Nvidia is worth more than $3 trillion. AI startups raise money at billions of dollars in revenue with little profit.
That looks like 1999 to some people. Son looks at the same numbers and sees the early innings of something far larger. He is not alone.
The market is with him. His personal fortune is at record highs.
Shareholders who bought into his vision a decade ago have seen the ride. It has been violent. SoftBank shares fell hard in 2022 when rising interest rates punished tech.
They have recovered. Arm went public again in 2023.
Its stock has more than doubled. The Vision Fund has written down some bets and written up others. The net effect is that Son still commands the room.
He asked those shareholders to stay on for another ride. He intends to keep working into his seventies. That matters because SoftBank is a one-man show in many ways.
Son makes the big calls. He is the one who swung for Arm.
He is the one who sold Alibaba shares to raise cash. He is the one who now says artificial superintelligence will solve problems humanity never imagined it could. The question of whether this is a bubble is not really a question for Son.
It is a question for the people who buy his story. So far, enough of them do.
The stock price reflects it. The shareholders’ meeting reflected it. Nobody walked out.
Son has been calling this moment for years. He predicted the iPhone would change the world. He predicted the internet would change everything.
He was right both times. He is betting his company that he is right a third time.
The difference this time is the scale. The AI revolution, he says, is 50 times bigger than the dot-com boom. That is not a small claim.
It is not a cautious one. It is exactly the kind of claim that makes some people ask about bubbles.
Son does not care. He waved the question away in Tokyo. He has been waving it away for years.
He will keep waving it away as long as the money keeps coming in and the technology keeps advancing. That is the context. That is the story.
Everything else is noise.
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