Goldman Sachs Research expects worldwide GDP to expand 2.7% in 2025. Factors driving the growth include: - Rebalanced labor markets - Slowing inflation - Normalizing interest rates Read the 2025 Global Macro Outlook from Goldman Sachs Research.

Despite his achievements, Masa remains an “outsider” among the corporate elite in Japan. For starters, he’s Korean, not Japanese. His grandfather came to Japan in 1917, and his grandmother a decade later. “They were immigrants,” Barber said—economic migrants who took Japanese names to fit in, “literally fourth-class citizens.” His grandparents went back to Korea during World War II, then returned to Japan and spent the next decade destitute, with Masa’s father engaging in bootlegging, loan sharking, and then Pachinko. But by the 1960s, amid the postwar “Japanese economic miracle,” Masa’s family was “quite well off,” Barber said, “although Masa likes to tell everybody that he grew up in a slum and he was really poor. That was actually quite a short time.” The turning point for Masa was when he decided to finish high school in the United States, and then continued on to college at Berkeley. He learned English; he educated himself about the microchip and the burgeoning technology revolution; and upon his return to Japan, he built a software distribution business, becoming a “middleman” between American technology companies and the Japanese market. He was close to Steve Jobs, which won him the exclusive right to distribute the iPhone in Japan. He cozied up to Bill Gates and Bobby Kotick. “‘You want to get into the mass consumer market in Japan,’” he told them, per Barber. “‘I’m the guy. I can unlock the black box of distribution. I can be your cultural interpreter.’” Then he started making bets of his own. He met Jack Ma in 1999 and made a big, early, $100 million investment in Alibaba. (He stuck with the company even after the dot-com crash, and made a fortune.) He made another big, early bet on Yahoo. And yet another big, early bet on mobile phone technology, buying Sprint in the U.S. and then merging it with T-Mobile U.S. to create a viable competitor to Verizon and AT&T. In 2016, he bought Arm Holdings, “Britain’s best technology company,” Barber said, for $30 billion. Arm is now worth around $140 billion, and it’s “the platform for all [Son’s] ambitions in the A.I. space.” In closing this last deal, Masa sought to meet Arm’s chairman on a yacht in the Bosporus, and planned to show up as he did to other maritime billionaire tête-à-têtes—by landing his helicopter on the vessel’s helipad. “He’s obviously thinking it’s some kind of Russian oligarch’s superyacht,” Barber said. “And the poor English guy’s just got a sloop.” They ended up meeting in Marmaris, in Turkey. “Masa just hits him with a big cash offer, unconditional, and then makes two or three other offers, and that’s it,” he said. The entire sale process took two weeks. Part of Masa’s strategy, Barber explained, is to overwhelm founders with his financial largesse. “He says to Jerry Yang of Yahoo at one point, ‘You need $100 million.’ And Jerry Yang says, ‘No, I don’t need $100 million.’ And Masa looks at him and says, ‘Everybody needs $100 million. And if you don’t take it, I’m going to give it to your competitor.’” Of course, that approach can also lead to expensive failures. Masa’s flood-the-zone strategy with WeWork’s Adam Neumann blew up spectacularly and cost him billions. Masa “suffers from what I call ‘founder syndrome,’” Barber said. “If he meets somebody else who talks as big as he does, … and Adam Neumann talks big, … Masa just keeps piling the money in.” As Masa continued down the road with Neumann, there were few people inside SoftBank who were willing to challenge him, according to Barber, even though some believed Masa had to get out and that WeWork was not worth $47 billion. “Masa says, ‘That’s what everybody said about Alibaba, and I was right,’” said Barber. “So he does get these things wrong.”

Masa is often described as the “Warren Buffett of Japan,” but Barber says he has little use for the solid companies (like railways, Coca-Cola, other unimpeachable consumer brands, etcetera) preferred by the Oracle of Omaha. Instead, his appetite for risk favors high-tech gambles. “He is nowhere near Warren Buffett,” Barber said. In fact, Masa and SoftBank executive Rajeev Misra once flew from Tokyo to Omaha to meet Buffett and gauge his interest in contributing to their $100 billion Vision Fund, designed to disrupt the venture capital industry. Buffett gave them a 20-minute tour and a 15-minute conversation. “Buffett essentially isn’t interested, and they fly out,” Barber said.

In the end, Barber managed to get four interviews with Masa, totaling some nine hours of conversation. But he was careful to avoid embedding with him—not that the secretive Masa would have allowed that—and to get what he needed while keeping his distance. (He also interviewed about 150 other people.) He did, however, gain entrance to Masa’s private sanctum on the 37th floor of a Tokyo skyscraper, where Barber had heard he presented his guests with sushi that “some people say [costs] $30,000 or so,” Barber said. “So, I’m thinking I’ve got to find a way of somehow getting into the inner sanctum to see this.” But he didn’t want to ask Masa, lest he owe a debt to the subject of his book. In the end, Masa brought it up himself at the end of an interview. “We shook hands, and then he said, ‘I want to show you something,’” Barber recalled. “And he opened these doors, and there is this Xanadu meets Kyoto. There are three rock pools … and they’re perfectly designed. There are trees with leaves painted individually, with gold tint. It’s an extraordinary thing, plus Japanese art. And, of course, of course, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti wine, which is also $8,000 a bottle or so. There’s four bottles there by the dining table.” Barber continued: “He took me round there, and then he said, ‘You can’t write a word about this.’ I’m thinking, ‘What!?’ So I said, ‘Why not?’ And he said, ‘Because no journalist has ever been in this sanctum.’ And I then, without batting an eyelid, said, ‘But I’m not a journalist. I’m an author.’ Just kind of cheeky, but I got away with it.” In any case, he thinks Masa liked the book well enough—the two ran into each other at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley last summer and chatted; Barber introduced him to his wife. Masa did ask why Barber had called the book Gambling Man. Then he seemed to come around, musing aloud: “‘Gambling Man, Gambling Man. I suppose I am Gambling Man. I suppose I am. Yeah, okay.’”

An insider-friendly tip sheet from Matthew Belloni, who spent 14 years in the trenches at The Hollywood Reporter and five before that as an entertainment lawyer. Subscribers also receive What I’m Hearing+, a companion email focused on entertainment law, the streaming industry, and more.

Puck senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri grapples with the aftermath of what may be the most chaotic and consequential presidential election cycle of our lifetime. With 15 years covering politics, Tara speaks with the smartest political minds to discuss what’s happening behind the scenes in Washington, D.C., from the campaign trail to the Capitol.

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