Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks at the SoftBank World event in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg
Masayoshi Son, the chairman and CEO of global tech investment giant SoftBank Group in Japan, suffered a $13.1 billion wealth wipeout on Wednesday – the biggest net worth drop among all billionaires in Asia, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List, amid a global selloff triggered by worries over lofty stock market valuations.
The 68-year-old founder, who now has a fortune of $71.5 billion that is mostly based on his stake in SoftBank, is still the richest person in Japan, according to Forbes estimates. SoftBank’s shares plummeted 10% on Wednesday.
“SoftBank is the highest-beta expression of Asia’s AI trade,” says Charu Chanana, Singapore-based chief investment strategist at Saxo, referring to stocks that are highly sensitive to market swings. “The sharp selloff reflects shifting sentiment around high-growth tech names, rather than any company-specific news, and its heavy weighting in the Nikkei is magnifying the market’s drop.”
Investors are concerned that some AI-related companies can’t meet their high growth expectations. The fear was amplified after a raft of U.S.-listed tech firms reported lackluster results overnight. Advanced Micro Devices, an AI chipmaker headed by billionaire Lisa Su, disappointed investors on Wednesday with its revenue forecast for the fourth quarter. Super Micro Computer, whose servers are being used to handle AI-related tasks, missed investors’ expectations.
Risk-averse sentiment spread to SoftBank as markets in Asia opened for trading, with Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index falling 2.5% and South Korea’s KOSPI index down 2.9%. SoftBank, on its part, has come to be viewed as a proxy for investing in OpenAI, as Son directs the firm to fund several of the ChatGPT creator’s financing rounds. The American giant, now valued at $500 billion after employees sold shares to companies including SoftBank and Thrive Capital in October, remains privately held and offers no easy way for the public to invest in it.
“[SoftBank Group] is levered to tech cycle and in particular OpenAI,” says David Gibson, Sydney-based senior analyst at MST Financial.
Gibson says investors have assumed a “lot of upside” to the SoftBank stock. And even with today’s fall, shares are still up almost 150% this year. The Japanese conglomerate has made other AI-related bets, including spending $5.4 billion in October to acquire the robotics unit of Swiss industrial giant ABB. Son envisions fusing robotics with AI technologies to create super intelligent machines. “SoftBank’s next frontier is physical AI,” he said in a statement back then.
Yet investor sentiment may remain downbeat for a while, as markets need time to adjust to the new reality, according to Hironori Akizawa, Singapore-based chief investment officer at Tokio Marine Asset Management International.
“As seen in the early to mid-2024, if no good news for the equity market to hit the new high again, there is a possibility that it will stay at the current level for about three months,” he says. “I don’t think the adjustment will take a long time, but it will take time to get rid of the market overheat.”