Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son was born in 1957 on the island of Kyushu, Japan, into a family of ethnic Koreans who had come to Japan generations earlier and still faced widespread discrimination. His family was poor, living for a time in an unregistered shack near a railway line, and for much of his childhood he used a Japanese surname, Yasumoto, because Korean names invited prejudice in schools and jobs.

At sixteen he travelled alone to California to finish high school and study economics at Berkeley, teaching himself English and supporting himself with odd jobs and, briefly, income from an early invention, an electronic translation device he sold to Sharp. He returned to Japan in 1981 and founded SoftBank as a small distributor of computer software, choosing at that point to use his Korean name openly rather than hide it.

The company grew through distribution and publishing before Son bet heavily, and often controversially, on the internet and telecommunications, building stakes in Yahoo Japan, buying a struggling mobile carrier, and later founding the Vision Fund, one of the largest technology investment funds in the world. His career has swung between huge gains and huge losses, including billions lost when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and later setbacks from failed investments.

He has spoken about the discrimination his family endured as motivation rather than a source of bitterness, and has funded programmes in Japan supporting young entrepreneurs from backgrounds like his own.