Transcription
When he was growing up, he had a pseudonym. His name was Yasumoto. That's a Japanese name. And he was living undercover. He wanted to be accepted in Japan. He couldn't because he was Korean. And the crucial moment is that he decided when he was 15, 16 to go to America to learn English and forge a new chapter out of Japan. And that's a sort of liberation day.
Can I be cynical for a second? I have a question. So, I actually have relatives who are to Korean. So, you know, obviously did not experience that firsthand, but have heard stories about, you know, what it was like back then and it was very difficult. So, I'm sure um he didn't have it easy.
With that being said, I know, you know, his dad was one of the first people in the town to own a car. He was traveling abroad in his like early teens. By the time he was 16, he was living in the US to study English. To me, like a sense of a part of me is like, you know, did he really have it? Like I'm sure he had it hard, but like how hard was it? And like I feel like he has this great personality of being a chameleon and a charismatic like storyteller. How much of that is kind of tying into the background there?
Oh, he's a great storyteller and he exaggerates and uh, but there is no question that for the first three or four years things were tough. He didn't actually, by the way, uh, grow up inside the shanty town. I've actually been, he was on the outskirts, so it was the grandparents actually lived in the in the shanty town in this shack. And as you say, by the, I mean, he was born in 1957. By the early 60s, I mean, th this family, the Son family is doing pretty well. And his father is the pachinko king in Kyushu. I mean, he's a millionaire. Uh, he's got lots of money and so have the relatives and they did have foreign cars, but they were confined to one segment of the economy. Uh, Masa didn't go to the University of Tokyo. He didn't go uh, he he he didn't uh, go and join an investment bank or or the central bank or anything like that. He couldn't do that. So that's why he went to Japan. So I agree with you. It's not dirt poor for that long. But there's still significant obstacles to him making uh, his fortune.
Do you think that Masa sees himself as more uh Japanese or Korean? Cuz uh speaking on a personal level, so I I grew up in Japan, but obviously my face is not Asian and so my experience is very different and so it's it's complicated when people ask, you know, where are you from or uh, which country do you identify with? Uh, but in Masa's case, I mean, obviously his face is a Asian, uh, his passport's Japanese, um, and, you know, for all intents and purposes, he's essentially Japanese, but what what do you think he sees himself as?
Well, it's a great question because if you think about his name, Masayoshi is Japanese and Son is Korean, and he and he kept his he kept his Korean name even though he uh, he took Japanese citizenship, um, and and and effectively naturalized. So so he had the best of both worlds. Now he claims to be the first one ever to have done that. That's not actually true as I put in the book. But he still, he wanted to be both. He didn't want to completely disown his Korean heritage. But it's important to remember that he didn't actually speak Korean. I he he he'd only went to Korea for the first time in his early teens with his grandmother. So he really wanted to be Japanese. And I I don't accept as one or two Japanese business people who've said to me that he doesn't like Japan. He's an outsider. I don't buy that. I think actually sometimes Masa is almost more Japanese than the Japanese because he wants to be seen as a the most successful businessman, the richest person. He's actually not. He lives with the founder of Uniqlo, Tadashi Yanai. But but he does, I think I think he is, I think he is a patriot and I think he cares about um, Japan and its place in the world.
Was there things from the conversations you had with him that made you think that way? Because I think the perspective that especially a lot of people in Japan have is like he's this great like leader that represents I think Japan, especially in the tech kind of sphere, but he's also super international. He's also very much a hustler that is quite different from um, Japanese people's typical characteristics. You know, he does business in the US, he does business and investments in China. Um, and I think that also plays into this like, okay, is he really um, I guess building or fighting for Japan or is he really just an international man that's kind of building um, this tech legacy for himself?
Well, he's certainly a global capitalist and as you rightly say, yes, he went back to Japan, by the way, and that was difficult setting up his own business. He couldn't get a credit line for a while from a bank. They um, but he went into the software distribution business and and eventually succeeded. But when the Japan economy crashed, the bubble burst, he went back to America and started building businesses there. And then he went into China with Alibaba's Alibaba investment and uh, taking advantage of the internet, and then he goes into India, he's investing in Indian businesses. I mean, and then he's raising money in the Gulf. I mean, this is a true uh, global capitalist, a man who's benefited from borderless finance. And you know, you could argue, you could make the point that some people have is if he cares so much about Japan, how come he hasn't invested in more Japanese companies and he cares about, you know, he's been a venture capitalist. He's formed ventures, um, he's formed alliances, um, to raise money for for venture in Japan, but the record is pretty sparse. Now I I think that's partly true, but it's also true that Japan has not been very good at uh, spawning a kind of Silicon Valley VC venture capital uh, setup. So that he's seen better opportunities, particularly in America.
So I I have this theory or observation, I should say, that American billionaires when they conquer the US or conquer the world, they they tend to want to go to space, whereas Japanese billionaires, it seems like when they conquer Japan, they want to go to America. Is that consistent with with Masa's story?
I think Masa is much more interested in earthly matters than making lots of money uh, on the ground. I don't think he has any ambitions to go into outer space. I don't think he's interested in colonizing Mars. I think he sees enormous opportunities particularly in the American economy on artificial intelligence and that's why he's formed the partnership with Sam Altman of OpenAI and Larry Ellison's Project Stargate where he's promised rather outlandishly to raise $500 billion uh, for uh, AI infrastructure as he calls it. That's data centers and probably chips as well, um, over the next four years. I don't think he'll get to that figure, but I think he's making a serious play in the area of artificial general intelligence and that's what he's been talking about for 25 years.