If asked to name the most consequential global business figure of the last half-century, few would choose Masayoshi Son. The Japanese billionaire has not invented any transformative technology, like Steve Jobs of Apple or Bill Gates of Microsoft. Nor has he pioneered any new service, like Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook or Jeff Bezos with Amazon. And while Son and his company SoftBank have provided plenty of fodder for the business pages over the last five decades, he is hardly a household name anywhere outside Japan. 

Yet as one of the world’s leading technology investors, Son has a claim to be ranked among such luminaries. Certainly his life story, as told in this meticulous and fascinating biography by Lionel Barber, the former editor of the Financial Times, is a Forrest Gump-like journey through all the key moments in recent financial history. Son was there, typically at the heart of the action, throughout, from the dawn of the age of the personal computer to the arrival of the internet, the dotcom boom and bust, the emergence of China, the global financial crisis and the arrival of the age of AI. He seems to have known everyone and owned everything, or at least tried to buy it. Along the way, he has nearly been wiped out three times. 

Son’s story is all the more remarkable because he was born in 1957 into poverty as part of Japan’s oppressed Korean minority. His earliest years were spent in a makeshift home shared with the family’s pigs on the side of a railway track. Yet by the time he was