Masayoshi Son

He is married with two children.

Masayoshi Son was born on August 11, 1957, in Tosu, Saga, Japan, into a second-generation Zainichi Korean family.

Intelligent and curious from a young age, he was fascinated with America and went to the US for a short-term study abroad program when he was 16. He then decided to quit school in Japan and moved to the US for a longer period.

He completed his high school and enrolled at Holy Names University. After two years he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied economics and computer science.

During this time he realized that computer technology would soon revolutionize the business world and he could make a fortune out of microchips. In keeping up with this spirit, he decided to come up with at least one entrepreneurial idea a day. By the end of the year he had more than 250 ideas some of which would translate into huge profits in future. He graduated with a BA in economics in 1980.

Soon after graduation he started Unison in Oakland, California. The company was later sold to the Japanese multinational, Kyocera. Son then returned to Japan and started a software distribution company called Nihon SoftBank in 1981—the name was later shortened to SoftBank.

Despite having no software to sell, the young entrepreneur was able to strike an exclusive deal with both Osaka electronics retailer Joshin and top Japanese software developer Hudson.

The deals proved to be very profitable and within years SoftBank rose to the top of the emerging computer industry in Japan by grabbing around 50 percent of the nation’s retail market for computer software by 1984.

The success of the company motivated Son to venture into other arenas and he became involved in a telephone-routing device, magazine publishing, the Comdex trade show, and broadband internet service. However, not all of his ventures were successful. He lost almost a billion dollars on Kingston Technologies in the late 1990s.

He faced a major loss in 2000. During the dot com crash, he lost approximately $70 billion—and gained the inglorious distinction of losing the most money in history. However, even a loss this big could not break his spirit and he determinedly worked towards rebuilding his fortune.

Son established SoftBank Group Corp., a multinational telecommunications and Internet corporation with operations in broadband, fixed-line telecommunications, e-commerce, Internet, technology services, and finance among other ventures. As on 2015 it was ranked in the Forbes Global 2000 list as the 62nd largest public company in the world.