The Bitcoin fiasco of Masayoshi Son: how the SoftBank mogul lost 130 million

Even legendary investors get burned by market fads. Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of SoftBank and the largest shareholder of Alibaba, learned this lesson the hard way: he heavily invested in Bitcoin at the peak at the end of 2017, then closed positions in early 2018 with losses that reached 130 million dollars (874 million RMB).

Who got him into this? Peter Briger, a Bitcoin evangelist and co-chairman of Fortress Investment ( which was bought by SoftBank in 2017). Fortress had been in crypto since 2013, and when SoftBank acquired it, its cryptocurrency holdings were worth over 150 million. Ironically, while Fortress was in the green, Son's personal bet went straight to red.

The interesting thing is the reflection left after the shock: “After seeing that the price kept rising illogically, I realized that I didn't want to be one of those guys glued to the numbers 24/7. There are more beautiful things in life”. An elegant way of saying: this is a game of speculation, not investment.

The moral is clear: neither money nor experience saves you from FOMO. Even technology giants can confuse boom with opportunity. For Son, it's pocket change (the loss represents less than 0.1% of his wealth), but on Wall Street he is already noted as: “The guy who lost 130M at the peak of Bitcoin 2017.”