🧧 SoftBank’s Vision Fund: The $100 Billion Experiment That Burned Bright—and Then Just Burned
🚗 Let’s Begin with a Wild Thought
Imagine you’re at a poker table.
Now imagine you don’t just have chips — you have a mountain of them. Enough to raise the stakes at every hand, even if your cards are trash. That’s exactly what Masayoshi Son — founder of SoftBank — did in the world of tech startups.
And the poker table? That was the global venture capital industry.
In 2017, SoftBank launched something no one had ever seen before: a $100 billion venture fund. Just pause on that. One fund. A hundred billion dollars. Backed by oil money, tech dreams, and a burning belief that “if you fund the future hard enough, it will show up.”
They called it the Vision Fund. But not everything they saw came true.
🤖 What Was the Vision Fund Trying to Do?
The pitch was simple: the world is changing fast — AI, robotics, e-commerce, automation — and someone has to bankroll the revolution.
So Masayoshi Son went out and did just that. He raised money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, and SoftBank’s own cash pile. The plan? Bet big, bet early, and bet often.
No more $10M startup rounds. Now it was $300M, $500M, even $1 billion checks. SoftBank wasn’t funding companies. It was fueling rocket ships.
🌐 What Did They Invest In? The Good, the Bad, and the Absurd
Let’s not pretend it was all fire and chaos. The Vision Fund had some solid wins.
The Wins:
- Coupang (Korean e-commerce giant) — went public, big profits.
- DoorDash — timing was perfect; exit was huge.
- ARM — not from the fund directly, but a SoftBank holding that’s now red-hot in the AI world.
But then there were the faceplants. The kind that make seasoned investors cringe.
The Hall of Shame:
- WeWork: Invested nearly $10B in a real estate startup that wanted to be a tech company. The founder partied, surfed, made up words like “WeGrow.” IPO collapsed. Valuation cratered.
- Katerra: Construction tech unicorn. Burned $2B, built… almost nothing.
- Zume Pizza: AI-powered robotic pizza delivery. Sounds fun? Sure. Profitable? Not even close.
- OYO, Paytm, Ola (India bets): Overfunded, underwhelming, often in cleanup mode.
If you’re sensing a pattern, you’re right. The Vision Fund threw gasoline on ideas that barely had a matchstick.
🇮🇳 What About India?
SoftBank was obsessed with India. Rightfully so. Huge population, mobile-first market, lots of under-penetrated sectors.
So it backed:
- Paytm — payments + everything else
- OYO Rooms — affordable hotels
- Ola — Uber’s rival
- Lenskart, FirstCry, InMobi — consumer internet plays
Some scaled. But most ran into trouble the moment public markets came calling. IPOs flopped. Valuations collapsed. Retail investors who bought the hype? Burned.
🤯 Why Did It All Go So Wrong?
Let’s not sugarcoat this. The Vision Fund model was built on steroids.
Here’s what went wrong:
- Too much money, too soon — Founders got lazy. They stopped scrapping and started spending.
- Charismatic founders > sustainable businesses — Some were cult leaders, not CEOs.
- No brakes — Companies were told to grow at all costs. Profits? Later. Culture? Optional.
- IPO pressure — Once these startups hit the public markets, reality hit back — hard.
And worst of all?
SoftBank forgot that gravity exists.
😬 The WeWork Meltdown Deserves Its Own Chapter
You can’t talk about the Vision Fund without unpacking WeWork.
Adam Neumann. The man, the myth, the barefoot-walking, tequila-shot-taking, spaceship-dreaming CEO. He pitched WeWork not as an office space rental company, but as a “physical social network.”
SoftBank bought it. Literally.
Over $10 billion went into a company that, at its core, leased buildings and sublet desks. When WeWork tried to IPO in 2019, the numbers didn’t lie. They screamed.
The company was bleeding billions. And yet Neumann wanted to be the world’s first trillionaire.
Long story short:
- IPO failed
- Neumann walked with a $445M golden parachute
- SoftBank had to save face
- Billions lost
It was the crash that changed the fund’s entire future.
🧱 Vision Fund 2: Humbled, Quieter, Still Bleeding
After the WeWork disaster and other flops, SoftBank came back with a new plan: Vision Fund 2.
- Smaller: ~$30B
- No outside backers (just SoftBank’s own money)
- Supposed to be more careful, more strategic
But timing was brutal. The tech crash of 2022-23 meant that almost every portfolio company was in the red. Quarterly losses ran into tens of billions. Headlines looked like autopsies.
👨🚀 Who Is Masayoshi Son, Really?
The man behind the madness is Masayoshi Son.
- He turned a $20M Alibaba bet into over $100B
- He once lost $70B in the dotcom crash
- He speaks in centuries, not quarters
- He has no fear of failure — just fear of missing out
Some call him a visionary. Others say he’s a gambler. Maybe both are true.
Son believes in finding the one moonshot that pays for everything else. He doesn’t hedge. He doesn’t play safe. He plays to win — or lose epically.
🧠 The Big Lessons from the Vision Fund Era
If you’re a founder, investor, or just curious about how money moves the world — here’s what SoftBank’s saga teaches us:
- Capital doesn’t solve everything.
- Founders need discipline, not just vision.
- Public markets won’t buy what private hype built.
- Burning fast is fun — until you’re out of fuel.
- Retail investors often hold the bag.
🚨 Conclusion: A Bet That Changed the Game (Even If It Lost)
The Vision Fund broke rules. It made people uncomfortable. It messed up — loudly and often. But it also forced the VC world to reckon with itself.
It asked: What if we don’t just bet on the future — what if we fund it so hard, we force it into being?
The answer? Turns out, you still need timing, talent, and truth.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund will be studied for years — not just for what it got wrong, but for how bold it dared to be.
Because love it or hate it, you can’t ignore a $100B swing at the future.
📚 References
SoftBank Vision Fund – Overview.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Vision_Fund
SoftBank Group Corp. (Official Site).
→ https://group.softbank/en
SoftBank Vision Fund Portfolio (Official).
→ https://visionfund.com/portfolio
WeWork – History and IPO.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeWork
Masayoshi Son – Biography and Investments.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son
Bloomberg – SoftBank Vision Fund Articles.
→ https://www.bloomberg.com/topics/softbank-vision-fund
CNBC – SoftBank Vision Fund Coverage.
→ https://www.cnbc.com/softbank/