Masayoshi Son’s Alliance With OpenAI
The charismatic SoftBank founder and CEO is one of the best fundraisers in the world. He has tied the fortunes of his enormous venture investment funds to the success of OpenAI.
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Masayoshi Son is the founder, chairman, and CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate focused on investments in technology. With a market capitalization of around $190 billion (9984.T) as of April 2026, SoftBank is the third-largest publicly traded company in Japan after only Toyota and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial; Son, with a net worth of around $64 billion, is the second-wealthiest person in Japan.1 While SoftBank is a key player in Japan’s telecommunications and information technology sectors, Son’s ambitions are global. From 2017 to 2019, Son founded the SoftBank Vision Fund and raised well over $100 billion in capital with the goal of investing $20 billion annually in tech companies, instantly becoming the largest venture capital fund ever raised, five times bigger than the venture arms of Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, and twenty times bigger than Silicon Valley venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz.2 SoftBank invested $38 billion into over 180 companies in 2019, the most ever by any venture capital investor.3 Since 2024, SoftBank has also become one of OpenAI’s largest investors and financial backers, currently planning to invest a cumulative total of $65 billion into the company for an ownership stake of 13%.4