Masayoshi Son is back in town. As the second richest man in Japan, 55-year-old Son-San, as he is often called, is an interesting character with a unique business style that I’ve seen up close. Now that his Japanese telecom giant SoftBank has made its move to acquire 70 percent of Sprint, for $20 billion, let’s brace ourselves. In late 1995, the then 38-year-old Son bought the company I worked for, Ziff Davis Publishing (the publisher of PC Magazine and many other computer magazines), for $2.1 billion, $700 million more than he had offered the year before. We employees were ushered into a vacant movie theater down the street from headquarters and a beaming Son bounded to the stage to greet us in his halting English. “I don’t have one-year plan or five-year plan,” he said. “I have hundred-year plan!” Smiling even more broadly, he added, “For me this is not about money. I have $4 billion. If I try to spend a million dollars a year, it will take me 4,000 years! It’s not about money because if it’s about money, I already won! Ha ha ha!” Somewhat flabbergasted, we marched back to the office and got back to work. One thing Son did was load Ziff Davis with $1.5 billion of debt from some other corner of his conglomerate, thereby sandbagging the IPO of the company he launched a couple of years later even before it got off the ground (and I had the worthless stock options to show for it). The press noted his “cavalier attitude to corporate governance” and his “creative accounting.” Ultimately, his hundred-year plan lasted only about four, and a staggering Ziff Davis was delisted and sold in pieces to a series of private equity firms, each of which diminished it a bit more. Today the company is a shadow of its former self. As for Son, he went back to Japan and got much, much richer. "I'm a man," he said in a press conference last week. "It's part of my male ego to strive to be number one." Indeed. As the business press has said, the SoftBank/Sprint deal is insanely complicated and involves moving a lot of money around to a lot of people and places. I’m not surprised. Although Son has spoken about the technological innovation that he wants to bring to Sprint’s network — and we could certainly learn a few things about wireless speed from Japan — he’s not a technologist. He’s a dealmaker who shuffles billions from one pile to another to make quarterly reports look good and to make himself a mint. I hope Sprint fares better under SoftBank’s control than Ziff Davis did. I, for one, will be watching with great interest. SoftBank Will Make Life Interesting for Sprint's Employees
Masayoshi Son is back in town. As the second richest man in Japan, 55-year-old Son-San, as he is often called, is an interesting character with a unique business style that I’ve seen up close. Now that his Japanese telecom giant SoftBank has made its move to acquire 70 percent of Sprint, for $20 billion, let’s brace ourselves. In late 1995, the then 38-year-old Son bought the company I worked for, Ziff Davis Publishing (the publisher of PC Magazine and many other computer magazines), for $2.1 billion, $700 million more than he had offered the year before. We employees were ushered into a vacant movie theater down the street from headquarters and a beaming Son bounded to the stage to greet us in his halting English. “I don’t have one-year plan or five-year plan,” he said. “I have hundred-year plan!” Smiling even more broadly, he added, “For me this is not about money. I have $4 billion. If I try to spend a million dollars a year, it will take me 4,000 years! It’s not about money because if it’s about money, I already won! Ha ha ha!” Somewhat flabbergasted, we marched back to the office and got back to work. One thing Son did was load Ziff Davis with $1.5 billion of debt from some other corner of his conglomerate, thereby sandbagging the IPO of the company he launched a couple of years later even before it got off the ground (and I had the worthless stock options to show for it). The press noted his “cavalier attitude to corporate governance” and his “creative accounting.” Ultimately, his hundred-year plan lasted only about four, and a staggering Ziff Davis was delisted and sold in pieces to a series of private equity firms, each of which diminished it a bit more. Today the company is a shadow of its former self. As for Son, he went back to Japan and got much, much richer. "I'm a man," he said in a press conference last week. "It's part of my male ego to strive to be number one." Indeed. As the business press has said, the SoftBank/Sprint deal is insanely complicated and involves moving a lot of money around to a lot of people and places. I’m not surprised. Although Son has spoken about the technological innovation that he wants to bring to Sprint’s network — and we could certainly learn a few things about wireless speed from Japan — he’s not a technologist. He’s a dealmaker who shuffles billions from one pile to another to make quarterly reports look good and to make himself a mint. I hope Sprint fares better under SoftBank’s control than Ziff Davis did. I, for one, will be watching with great interest. 
