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The one--and perhaps the only--reason to believe in Son's ambitious plan is that it already seems to be working. Yahoo, E*Trade and GeoCities, among others, are not only dominant among U.S. customers but lead a long list of Softbank companies that Son and his lieutenants say account for more than 90% of all Internet commerce in Japan. As the world's second largest economy has caught on to the power of the Net in the past year, Softbank's stock, which is traded on the Tokyo exchange, has soared. The company's market capitalization is a stunning $79 billion, which puts it ahead of Sony. Softbank has also landed in Europe, establishing joint ventures with Vivendi in France and News Corp. in Britain. Rupert Murdoch is one of Son's growing legion of high-flying fans.
Son's grand vision of the world's Internet future has been gestating since he was a very determined little boy in Kyushu, Japan. Born of Korean heritage in a place with little tolerance of foreigners (particularly Koreans), Son has fought the battles of an outsider all his life. He bore the boyhood name-calling stoically and tried to toughen himself physically by inserting weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs (the better to play soccer). He left for the U.S. when still in high school, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an economics degree and, upon his return to Japan, insisted on using his Korean surname, Son, instead of Yasumoto, the Japanese name his parents had taken.
By 1980, he had made his first million by selling a design for an electronic translator to Sharp Corp. He was so absorbed in the process that he forgot to wheel his Porsche over to Berkeley city hall for his own wedding. He founded Softbank Corp. in Tokyo in 1981. Legend has it that after he stood atop a crate and ranted about the company's future domination of the PC industry, his first two employees quit on the spot. Despite that vote of no confidence, Softbank went on to become Japan's leading software distributor by far.
Still, it wasn't until after he signed a deal to represent hardware maker Cisco Systems in Japan in 1993 that Son's grand Internet vision began to fall into place. "When you have the railroad being laid, you can see the train, you start to imagine the passengers, and you know there will be department stores going up around the station," he says in the midst of one of his characteristic soliloquies. "I had a feeling this was going to be big."
Always the outsider, Son didn't have much of a Silicon Valley Rolodex in 1995, when he returned to the States. But he did have nearly a billion dollars to spend, money practically handed to him by Japanese bankers desperate to breathe life into their country's sagging economy. Son lured a couple of Silicon Valley veterans to run Softbank Technology Ventures, the San Jose partnership that has become the heart of his Internet empire. And so the shopping spree began, as Softbank scooped up the trade-show group that organizes Comdex, the computer industry's biggest convention, and Kingston Technology, a memory-board maker. Son bought all of Ziff-Davis Publishing and its television and Internet assets for $3.2 billion, a price considered at the time a few degrees north of insane.