AI bubble inflated by SoftBank CEO who once threatened to set himself on fire for…

Masayoshi Son is a man of extremes with his $20 million bet on Alibaba becoming the most successful of all time when it grew to over $70 billion after a decade

(Bloomberg Opinion) – Masayoshi Son is man of extremes. His $20 million bet on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. became the most successful of all time when it swelled to more than $70 billion after a decade. He also lost $70 billion of his net worth in the dotcom crash, but then managed to raise one of the biggest investment funds of all time – the $100 billion Vision Fund – in 2017. The 67-year-old has been on a roller coaster that would put most mortals in therapy for life.

So unusual is Masayoshi Son — known as “Masa” — that he is now the subject of two books, one by former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber and another by Alok Sama, a former president of Son’s telecommunications and technology giant Softbank Group International(Reuters)

He is unapologetically dramatic, once threatening to set himself on fire if he wasn’t granted a telecom license in Japan, and shoots from the hip in business deals. He says he backed Alibaba because of founder Jack Ma’s “strong eyes, shining eyes,” and he convinced the crown prince of Saudi Arabia to put $45 billion into his Vision Fund in a single, 45-minute conversation, by offering him “a Masa gift, a trillion-dollar gift,” according to Son’s 2017 interview with Bloomberg’s David Rubinstein.

So unusual is Son — known as “Masa” — that he is now the subject of two books, one by former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber and another by Alok Sama, a former president of Son’s telecommunications and technology giant Softbank Group International. Both paint a portrait of a global maverick who never seems to sleep, but it’s Sama’s book The Money Trap that looks closely at Son’s potential impact on the booming AI market. “Masa Son’s ambition is to be [AI’s] high priest,” writes Sama.

But Son poses some risk for everyone else in the pond. The clue is in the title of Barber’s book: Gambling Man. Though he’s worth about $16 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Son’s career has been nothing short of volatile. His bet on WeWork – another shoot-from-the-hip deal that came from a 12-minute meeting and car ride with founder Adam Neumann – led to a $32 billion loss for the Vision Fund as the startup went bankrupt. Son later called the bet “foolish,” but his approach to investing doesn’t appear to have been tempered.

That is hardly what today’s AI market needs. It has already shown bubbly dynamics, with soaring valuations (hello, Nvidia Corp.) and intense hype. Son threatens to fuel those dynamics further, pushing the market toward unstainable growth. In the two years since the launch of ChatGPT, investors have added $8.2 trillion to the market valuations of tech’s six biggest firms, but the generative AI market is still in its early stages and doesn’t need the kind of volatility that an eccentric billionaire’s big gambles could introduce.

The obvious consequence of injecting enormous capital into new markets is a pressure-cooker environment, where companies burn through cash to grow exponentially. When many of those companies fail, they can implode spectacularly, just as WeWork did, with painful repercussions.

Today’s AI boom has been defined by people with noble objectives. Its leading visionaries, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, both set out to build their own versions of “super AI” in the hope it would elevate global living standards, cure cancer and solve climate change. Instead, they’ve acted as de facto product arms for Microsoft Corp. and Google, extending the dominance of those companies.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. At a minimum, expect Son’s intervention to make that road much bumpier.