Everybody wants to become rich but how many of us have ever thought that being rich can make us sad too? Well, Masayoshi Son, the second richest man of Japan, has felt that way. He claims that at one point of time, he was richer than the technology king Bill Gates; however, it was just for three days and at that time, his net worth was increasing daily by $10 million but that made him think what value money has for him.
Son recalled,
“The way I looked at my friends or other people started getting affected. I start losing the joy of shopping. If I go to the department store, I get no excitement, I can buy the entire department store instead of one bag. So I lost excitement of shopping.”
He accepted that he used to feel gloomy then and thoughts of donating wealth came to his mind. In his words,
“It’s actually sad to be rich.”
However, his life changed the next year when “dot com” burst happened and market cap of his organization was reduced to $2 billion from $200 billion, a loss of almost 99%.
But this made Son happy as he said this lately in the HT Leadership Summit,
“In 2000, I actually became happy. After losing 99 percent, I said now I have to work. Now I feel the joy of work, now I feel the value of money, again.”
Son’s company SoftBank group is investing at a good speed in the Indian start-ups and within two years, the telecommunications and Internet multinational has invested $2 billion with Grofers India Pvt. Ltd, Ola Cabs, Oyo Rooms and Snapdeal.
At present, Son’s net worth is $17.6 Billion and he is happy to have seen a bad phase in his career, he said this at the summit, “I understand the value again and I am still betting for the future.”
Just recently, Son spent a huge amount of $32 billion for buying ARM, the UK-based semiconductor giant, and he is sure that this decision is correct as he says that in the next 25 years, there will be one trillion ‘Internet of Things’ devices and his target is to give power to these devices by using ARM chips. He said, “The Internet of Things explosion is coming. If the Cambrian Explosion happened, so too will the Internet of Things explosion happen.”
It’s quite clear that Son’s vision is very far-sighted and when he was asked as to how he would like to be remembered, he said, “crazy guy who bet on the future”.
Well, that’s really a crazy guy but with great business sense, isn’t he? Do let us know what you think about Masayoshi Son in the comments section below.