Masayoshi Son may be the oddest of the oddball billionaires

In 2019, Elliott Management, an activist investment fund which had built up a 3 per cent stake in Softbank, demanded a meeting with the company's founder and chief executive officer Masayoshi Son.

- Adrian Wooldridge

Elliott complained that the company's governance was such a mess that the stock was trading at least 50 per cent below net asset or "fair" value - the board was tame, the corporate structure was overcomplicated, and "transparency" was not even a concept. Other business titans such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had bowed down before the god of good corporate governance. Why not Masa Son?

Mr Son's reply came as a surprise. "These are one-business guys. Bill Gates just started Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. I am involved in 100 businesses, and I control the entire (tech) ecosystem. These are not my peers. The right comparison for me is Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin (builder of the Great Wall of China). I am not a CEO. I am building an empire."

Emperor Son stands out as an oddball, even in a world oversupplied with billionaire oddballs. He has made and lost more money than any man alive, topping the list of the world's richest people in February 2000, then losing 97 per cent of his wealth in the dotcom crash. He has been the largest foreign investor in both capitalist America and communist China, the biggest start-up funder in the world, and the owner of 70 per cent of Japan's internet economy. He signs his e-mails "Big Boss", and his private plane has the tail number N25TID, T standing for trillions and D for dollars.

He lives in the biggest house in Tokyo. But he also has other mega-properties - a "starter castle" in Woodside, near Stanford University, which he bought for US$117.5 million (S$155 million), and, more oddly, another one in Kansas. His office desk is Putin-sized. But if you slide open two wooden doors, you enter a magical world: A vast open space with three trees - symbolising spring, summer and autumn respectively, their leaves exquisitely hand-painted to capture the changing seasons and three rock pools.