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Karl Marx, Hans Holbein, George Frideric Handel, Kai Havertz: some Germans do their best work in London. This, plus Germans being, in my experience, the best English-speakers on the continent, can feed the sense that these are kindred countries, despite the first half of the last century.
But Germany specialises in manufacturing. Britain is the second-biggest exporter of services in the world. Germany has a spread of important regions. Britain is more dominated by its main city than perhaps any rich nation of significant size. Germany has coalition governments, with three parties in the current one. British politics is so winner-takes-all that Keir Starmer got a 174-seat majority from a 34 per cent vote share. Germany’s fiscal policy is prudent to a fault. Britain has not run a budget surplus since the turn of the millennium. Germany is federal. Britain is centralised. Germany was a founding member of the European project. Britain joined late and left.
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Even the texture of life in these countries is exactly different. You can ride a space-age train across Germany and then see someone using a fax machine on a non-ironic basis. Britain is better digitised but less good at tangible infrastructure.
These are two distinct, in fact almost oppositional, ways of running a medium-sized, high-income democracy. Yet both are converging on one thing: failure. Britain’s troubles are more famous and chronic, while Germany’s might be more acute. It was the worst-performing major economy in 2023. Its once-serene politics are deteriorating.
The lesson? Never idealise other countries. It feels like a cosmopolitan thing to do, but it is the ultimate in parochialism. The left are repeat offenders. The Sweden-worship of the 1990s was credulous enough. But during the Angela Merkel era, Germany was Shangri-La for UK and US progressives, who hailed proportional representation over brute majoritarianism, industrial strategy over laissez-faire, soft power over Anglo-American militarism. Berlin itself — a hipper and less gilded city than London or New York — became proof of concept.
Well, time has complicated the picture. Multi-party government, it seems, can bring indecision. Shaping the economy can mean backing existing industries over emergent ones. Soft power can be a euphemism for naivety in the face of mortal enemies. Having lots of fine cities but no megalopolis can mean forgoing the economic benefits of agglomeration.
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Never idealise other countries. It feels like a cosmopolitan thing to do, but it is the ultimate in parochialism
When two such different countries get into such similar ruts at the same time, we should doubt if there is a “right” model. What there are are trade-offs. Apart from the basics — property rights, tax collection, universal public services, and so on — almost no policy is an unqualified good. Making one thing better will tend to make another thing worse. Leadership is a matter of choosing which problems to have.
Germany’s choices weren’t wrong. It is still richer than Britain. But if the costs and perverse outcomes were hard to anticipate in Germany, imagine how much harder from abroad. This is the inherent risk of adoring foreign exemplars. The UK and especially the US are set on emulating industrial strategy, but without the pedigree for it, or sufficient awareness of its mixed track record.
In the end, which of these two unalike countries is in more trouble? Economically, Britain. Germany carries less public debt. Its quest to make fewer machine parts and more advanced technologies is entirely doable over time. There is the cushion of the European single market.
On the political score, though, Germany’s extremism problem is worse. It has a Kremlin-smitten far left, not just the most strident of the major hard-right parties in Europe. And the advantage of Britain’s Napoleonic centralisation is a ruthless decisiveness. A bad prime minister or two can (and did) wreck things. But a first-class one would get the country moving again.
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For better or worse, France is Britain’s real twin: in per capita income, in maritime exposure, in being a unified state for so long, in hoarding so much in its capital, in having lost a vast extra-European empire. A Tale of Two Cities is not about London and Munich. Even that Anglo-German point of contact, football, is a laughable mismatch. Germany has four World Cups to England’s one. The fascination in this bilateral relationship lies in the (peaceful) contrast. How droll, then, that when the two sides arrive at last at something in common, it is national malaise.
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At first glance Jack Schlossberg seems like your average Ivy League lunkhead. Tall and handsome, his lanky six-foot-two frame has rangy athleticism, he boasts a thatch of hair that geneticists should task with study and he can always bust a camera-ready, doe-eyed, heartbreaker grin. He’s urban, he’s part of the liberal cognoscenti; he skates about the parks like a real New Yorker in his singlet, cap set backwards with its peak against his nape.
Take a closer look, however, and you start to see the resemblance: the chiselled cheekbones, the glowering brow. He has all the hallmarks of his ancestral bloodline. Jack Schlossberg is unmistakably a Kennedy.
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John “Jack” Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg was born in 1993, the youngest child of Caroline Kennedy and designer and artist Edwin Schlossberg. He is named after his maternal grandfather, the 35th US president John F Kennedy. Ted Kennedy was his godfather and great uncle. He bears an uncanny likeness to his uncle, John F Kennedy Jr, the attorney, socialite and publisher who died in 1999. Schlossberg was a ring bearer at JFK Jr’s wedding, and shares the same proclivity for writing and wearing not too many clothes.
Schlossberg has degrees from Yale and Harvard in history, law and business administration, briefly worked in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and has turned his hand to journalism. He’s written for the Washington Post, New York magazine and People but his chief achievement since graduation has been creating content and cultivating his social media presence with a slew of TikTok films. Some half a million followers now tune in regularly to watch him singing ditties from behind the steering wheel, cogitating on the park run, providing “hot takes” about Big Tech and, increasingly, “memeing for democracy”.
Schlossberg on TikTok, singing a slightly out of tune version of ‘New York, New York’ . . .
. . . and moonwalking to a Michael Jackson song in his dirty socks across a supermarket aisle
Some observers might find Schlossberg a bit peculiar, his goofy brand of humour comes across as slightly odd. Watching him crooning feels like being on a Tinder date that you’d like to exit. And I think it’s a red flag he doesn’t like to shower, wash his hair or brush his teeth. But in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the 31-year-old has been adopted to help explain politics to the young and disaffected. US Vogue signed him up as a political correspondent in July, while Kamala HQ has been using him as an interlocutor to get the vote out and energise Gen Z.
His content is now pivoting away from moochy explainer videos to find him chatting deep dish pizza and policy with Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, hanging out with swing-state senators and doing porch-side interviews with major figures in the Democrat community. His access is formidable: most Democratic elders seem to treat him as you might a hyperactive nephew — an inevitable fixture whom you are fond of but sometimes wish would go away. Schlossberg carries with him the golden privilege of being a Kennedy. He may be a smelly skater-boi crossed with a puppy, but he’s still a scion of the mythic Camelot. He got the chance to remind everybody of that connection at the Democratic National Conference, in Chicago, during which he gave a two-minute speech. He told the assembly why his grandfather was his “hero”: because “he inspired a new generation to ask what they could do for our country. Today, JFK’s call to action is now ours.”
Jackie Kennedy may have coined the expression Camelot to help mythologise her late husband’s presidency, but the myth gets ever stranger and more powerful by the year. One wonders whether a Kennedy can ever be an ordinary mortal or must always cultivate an outsize personality to live up to their famous name. Schlossberg is harnessing more statesmanlike authority while cruising on his hunky affability and adjacent fame. His schtick can feel as though it has been cynically workshopped to “play” with next gen voters, but at other times his uncensored edits seem spectacularly untamed.
As a representative of Camelot 2.0 he ticks all the boxes. He’s politically aspirational, charming, non-confrontational and looks cute in a suit and in running shorts. For a voting sector that has been put off by the relentless negativity of recent politics, Schlossberg is the perfect spokesman: he sandwiches his easy-peasy calls to action — “vote blue” (hell, you don’t even need to know the names on the ballot), “reproductive freedom”, “don’t cry, vote!” — and then gets back to the stuff of life, like moonwalking in the supermarkets in his filthy dirty socks.
And, yes, he isn’t hugely funny, or even amusing, but he’s got that rare ancestral glow. Camelot 2.0 is the same but different and while our collective weakness for Kennedy connections might smooth his transition into more serious politics, as with so many of his brethren it’s hard to work out where the focus starts and the charisma ends.
My family moved recently. A change of address occasions much administrative work, one task of which was to calculate the value of the art collection my husband and I have cobbled together. Seems likely I was displacing some emotion — leaving our home of 14 years was not easy — but this exercise made me philosophical. I could enumerate the prices I had paid for various works; I could extrapolate about the current art market by checking recent auction results. But what did that tell me? The insurance company wanted to know about dollar amounts, but I was stuck on the thornier question of value.
Seven years ago, I saw a retrospective of the artist Agnes Martin, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. I was familiar with Martin’s minimalist paintings, which I admired, and was unprepared to be surprised by the exhibition, let alone deeply moved. I love the experience of communion with films, books, canvases on the wall, but I am rarely overcome by it, and certainly did not expect to cry over an artist known for her cool geometries. But there we were, my companion and I, considering Martin’s final finished painting with tears in our eyes.
I’ve tried to make sense of my state on this day. I was hungry, or tired, or thirsty, or some combination of these — my diagnosis when dealing with my children’s emotional outbursts. Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright’s building had something to do with it, the pitch of the floor making me feel unsteady, the open rotunda making me feel dizzy. Or my response was purely emotional — I’d have to be made of stone to feel nothing after hearing the sobering facts of Martin’s life. Perhaps all this is true, or a factor, anyway, in my tears.
It’s also possible that I experienced something too rare in my secular life in our profane culture — call it the sacred. Already a cliché to say museums are modern cathedrals, built to dwarf the body and awe the senses; worth pointing out that quiet contemplation of anything that’s not my iPhone feels profound, and that the progress I made up the ramp of the Guggenheim was rather like the devout Catholic’s observation of the Stations of the Cross.
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I think art is one of the last provinces of the sacred for me, maybe for most of us. A work of art’s price can’t tell us anything about it, and there’s no point in talking about art in terms of dollars or euro or yen, but perhaps there’s no other metric available to us.
The most expensive thing I’ve ever bought is a painting. It’s a small work, a minor effort by one of the world’s most celebrated artists. I bought it at auction, spending far more than I had intended to, caught up in the competitive fervour, my desire for this work somehow apart from what I would pay for it, by the magical thinking that governs most of my shopping. The way my insurance company judges this untitled painting’s worth is by referring to the record of what I spent on it. That’s the market in a nutshell; things are worth what someone is willing to pay.
When I look at this painting, I don’t think about that number. I think about what a genius can do with paint, and I think about this particular genius’s ability to make images that are at once horrific and beautiful, and I think about the hands of this particular genius touching this artefact that I now possess. But I’m not an underwriter.
This is the most expensive painting in our collection, but I don’t know if it follows that it is also the most valuable. I have a framed watercolour that my older son did when he was three — bless the Montessori teachers who wrote the date on it. It’s a splash of light blue and is, according to the artist, a whale. Children’s art rarely looks like what it’s meant to depict, but in this case, the thing, perhaps only accidentally, truly resembles a breaching whale. Obviously, there’s no way to convert sentimental value into actual currency.
It’s a great privilege that I’m in a position to spend any money on art, though I possess more sentiment than currency. It’s still possible to buy the work of artists at the start of their career, or editions by more well-known names at small auction houses, or even minor work by true masters.
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I think about the money, because I’m working within the constraints of a budget, but only when I’m in the act of transaction. Then I forget that altogether. I cannot, as George Lucas did, spend $15mn on a painting by Robert Colescott. I could, though, spend about one month’s rent on a small, early work by the same artist. Living with it affords me a pleasure to which I cannot affix a price tag, even though my insurer has asked me to.
Sometimes a work of art is described as priceless. In my imagination this implies more zeroes than one can count, but it’s more accurate to say that with art, numbers aren’t salient. We should call a masterpiece unpriceable instead.
Still, money is so essential a factor of contemporary existence that we cannot help but bring it in. Money borders — even if it should not enter — some of life’s most serious provinces. Family life, religious faith and romantic love may be all that are left to us that are exempt from the logic of buying and selling.
Sometimes a work of art is described as ‘priceless’, but with art, numbers aren’t salient. We should call a masterpiece ‘unpriceable’ instead
The art market is one matter, but even the urge to photograph or otherwise document a museum visit, very common at the moment, is, I think, an economic activity. We reach for our phones from some insipid urge to participate in a culture too attuned to pointless connectivity, yes. But to Instagram a Pollock or a Van Gogh transforms that moment of pleasure into work. We think this ennobling; it’s sadly debased.
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I don’t know whether it’s fair to consider faith a realm wholly uncorrupted by money — it’s certainly possible to enumerate the assets of, say, the Catholic Church (some of which are what we would call priceless). Nevertheless, art can provide an encounter with the mysterious, a territory that borders the mystical. Perhaps that is why I so often find it a balm.
Only a few months ago, on a day I found personally difficult, I fled to the Museum of Modern Art in need of distraction or solace. I saw an exhibition by the video and performance artist Joan Jonas. I spent a surprisingly long time watching black-and-white footage of a performance she’d staged decades ago, in the then-wasteland of lower Manhattan. In those minutes, I truly forgot the worries that had sent me to the museum in the first place.
Last summer, I pulled some strings and was invited behind the scenes at Christie’s Rockefeller Center outpost. I was writing a book in which one character, a billionaire, buys a painting by Helen Frankenthaler. (No deeper meaning in choosing this artist than the personal, as she’s one of my favourite abstract expressionists.) I wanted to see the rooms to which serious collectors are sometimes invited to kick the tyres of the masterpieces they might buy.
A Christie’s staffer led me down a long hall, threw open massive doors to intimate, soundless rooms, simply but strongly lit, containing nothing at all. I thought they felt like chapels. I loved imagining the Warhols and Picassos that had once stood there, ready for inspection.
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My guide seemed surprised to discover that the last room we entered was not empty at all. In my recall, it, too, was bright and silent, but there, on the wall, was a painting. It sounds like something out of fiction but it’s true; it was by Frankenthaler. There are many words applicable: happenstance, coincidence, luck, kismet.
I find that when I’m immersed in the writing of a novel there will be uncanny resonances in my real life. I’ll be served a meal like one I imagined, or meet someone with the same name as a character I invented. There’s no deeper meaning in it, just a funny thing that has happened to me often enough that I understand it as part of the novel-writing process. Maybe this is part of the experience of seeing art, too. There’s some frisson that can’t be put into words, a sense of recognition or kinship.
I don’t know what happened to the Frankenthaler I saw that day. (Christie’s sold a Frankenthaler this spring for more than $4mn, but that’s a detail of interest mostly, I think, to insurance companies.) I like to imagine the person who bought it: that they went into the very room I did, that they smiled with some private pleasure at the thought of being alone with this painting. I like to imagine that they knew and cared about Frankenthaler, that they were tempted to touch the painting, that they had questions about its provenance, that they got close enough to the canvas to smell the paint itself.
I like to imagine that moment brought them joy, a joy they feel every time they glimpse the painting, wherever they’ve chosen to hang it. I cannot bear to think that it went into storage, or hangs in a guest bedroom in a rarely visited vacation home. I prefer to imagine it is with someone who would agree with me that art’s value is not calculable, albeit someone with enough money to say something like this and still be taken seriously. I’d like to tell that painting’s owner how I stole two minutes alone with their painting, and I like to imagine they’d know that is worth everything.
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Rumaan Alam’s new novel ‘Entitlement’ is published by Bloomsbury
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy will press Joe Biden for binding security guarantees before the US president leaves office to bolster Ukraine’s position and compel Russia to join peace talks.
The Ukrainian leader has in recent months stepped up preparations for possible negotiations with Moscow in anticipation of a shift in US policy following November’s presidential election.
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Zelenskyy ordered an invasion of the Kursk region of Russia in August to gain territory as leverage in future talks and has said he is ready for a peace conference with Moscow’s involvement.
Speaking to journalists ahead of a US trip next week where he will attend the UN General Assembly and hold talks with Biden, Zelenskyy said he would present a “victory plan” to the US president that he hoped would end the war.
Zelenskyy said the plan, which he wants to be implemented by the end of December, would strengthen Ukraine and force Russia to the negotiating table.
“The victory plan, this bridge to strengthening Ukraine, can contribute to more productive future diplomatic meetings with Russia,” said Zelenskyy on Friday afternoon in Kyiv.
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He described the initiative as Biden’s opportunity to go down in history as the president who secured Ukrainian independence. He emphasised that the plan needed to be implemented before Biden left office in January.
“I think this is a historical mission,” said Zelenskyy. “Let’s do all this today, while all the officials who want the victory of Ukraine are in official positions.”
Ukraine has lost territory daily to Russia this year and Moscow has shown no sign that it was willing to negotiate.
The Ukrainian leader outlined the four points of the “victory plan” but declined to go into detail.
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The first point, he said, were further security guarantees. Ukraine has recently signed long-term commitments with the US and other western allies but wants harder assurances akin to the mutual defence guarantee that comes with Nato membership.
The second was Ukraine’s Kursk operation, which he said was “fulfilling” its task of diverting Russian offensive power.
Zelenskyy’s third request was for “specific” advanced weapons. He did not elaborate on the type of weapons system he wanted. The fourth was the joint development of Ukraine’s economy together with its partners.
“Today you help us in the implementation of this plan and in the future Ukraine will save you a lot of your resources,” said Zelenskyy.
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Zelenskyy does not view the “victory plan” as a replacement for his “peace formula”, a 10-point initiative based on the UN Charter that lays out a framework for a lasting settlement.
Rather, it will give Ukraine what it needs to get Russia to the negotiating table where the peace formula would be discussed, he said.
Zelenskyy again ruled out a Minsk-style peace agreement where the conflict would be frozen, stating that Russia would only invade again. “We need a just and stable peace,” said Zelenskyy.
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Both Brazil and China have put forward alternative peace plans to Ukraine’s peace formula. Zelenskyy said these plans lacked detail and worked as “political icebreakers” against the UN Charter.
After speaking at the UN on Wednesday in New York, Zelenskyy will travel to Washington to present the plan to Biden and Vice-president Kamala Harris, who is running against Donald Trump in November’s election.
He plans to meet Trump after his visit to Washington, he said.
Late one afternoon in October 2023, as the sun slipped down over Tokyo Bay, Masayoshi Son was sitting in his private office at SoftBank headquarters, at the head of a wooden table almost as long as Vladimir Putin’s in the Kremlin. A diminutive, balding figure dressed casually in a jacket and slacks, Son was recounting to me the low point of his career, a year earlier, when he announced he was disappearing from public view.
“What a shitty life!” he exclaimed, with a trace of self-pity. “You know on my Zoom call, I see my face often on the video screen and I hate looking at my face. What an ugly face. I’m just getting old . . . What have I achieved? . . . I have done nothing that I can be proud of.”
At face value, it was an astonishing admission. Son, then 66, ranked among the world’s most renowned investors. He invested in ecommerce giants Yahoo and Alibaba before they became household names. At the height of the dotcom bubble in early 2000, he was briefly the richest man in the world. When it burst, he lost 97 per cent of his fortune, around $70bn.
But he bounced back, launching a successful broadband and mobile phone business in Japan, propelled by an exclusive deal to distribute Apple’s iPhone. Then he disrupted Silicon Valley with the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, and ended up making the biggest swing and miss in the history of investing. (Hence his temporary vanishing act.)
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As editor of the Financial Times, I’d met Son twice and he intrigued me as a subject for a biography. A compulsive risk taker, his story was a classic entrepreneur’s tale of survival and perpetual reinvention. But was Son a tech visionary or simply an inveterate gambler who got lucky? Why was SoftBank, the company he founded in 1981 as a pioneering software distribution business in Japan, so often described as a house of cards?
In western media Son often comes across as a cartoon character. He has compared himself to Yoda in Star Wars; Napoleon (of which more later); and Jesus Christ (who was equally misunderstood, apparently). Obsessed by longevity, he has told friends that he hopes to live past 120, and that SoftBank should be built to last 300 years.
After four sit-downs with Son, as well as interviewing more than 150 people who know or have worked with him, I have concluded there’s a lot more to this restless character than meets the eye. While Son did not invent, control or own a breakthrough technology, he is the archetypal middleman. He has ridden the technological wave which has created untold wealth and penetrated every corner of our society.
His is a story of our times.
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Masayoshi Son is a quintessential outsider. This may explain his bottomless risk appetite and his desire to prove himself, over and over again. He was born in 1957 to poverty-stricken second-generation Korean immigrants on the island of Kyushu in the western Japanese archipelago. The family home was the equivalent of a cowshed, one of dozens of makeshift dwellings on a plot of unregistered land near the railway station.
Years later, Son confessed to a friend that he suffered from a recurring dream, waking up to the stench of pig faeces in his nostrils. His friend told him it wasn’t a nightmare but a childhood memory. “We started at the bottom of society,” Son told me. “I didn’t even know what nationality I was.”
As Korean-Japanese, the Son family followed tradition and lived under a Japanese name, Yasumoto. (Son later persuaded the authorities to let him combine his Japanese first name and Korean surname — a notable breakthrough.) His father Mitsunori was a bootlegger at the age of 14, later diversifying into pig breeding, loan sharking and pachinko, a form of low-stakes gambling that offered a livelihood to Koreans shut out of the Japanese economy.
In April 2023, Mitsunori, 87, sitting in the family home adorned with photographs of his favoured second son, described how he rearranged the pins on his pachinko slot machines so that everybody in town thought they were a winner. His upfront losses were eye-watering. Then he moved the pins back into place — and started making serious money.
Watching his father, Son learnt how to hustle. But the boy’s ambitions went way beyond pachinko gambling. He wanted to escape Japan and a lifetime of discrimination. Aged 16, he announced he wanted to learn English and study in the US. His family were dismayed, but soon relented.
Son’s six years in California, which included three years as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, were a life-changing experience. He saw first-hand the PC revolution. He read about Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs. He also made his first fortune, developing a pocket speech synthesiser with the help of a team of UC Berkeley engineers led by Professor Forrest Mozer, a nuclear particle physicist.
I tracked down Professor Mozer, then aged 92, during a visit to Berkeley in October 2021. He described Son as a modest student with little technical background but a businessman with a capital B. “That guy is going to own Japan one day,” he told his wife.
Later Mozer claimed that Son had gone behind his back and contracted with Japanese companies to sell American microchips (for the speech translator) that did not exist and for prices that he’d invented. He said he was not told Son was due to earn almost $1mn in fees. “I was his first business partner,” Mozer told me, “and on his first business deal he lied and cheated me.”
When questioned, Son rejected that, and insisted he had wrongly assumed he had permission to do what he did. (Mozer himself concedes there was no written contract between the two, just a gentleman’s agreement.) Son unravelled the Japanese deals and vowed to take more care in future. Perhaps the episode marks Son’s “original sin”, a short-cut on the way to the top that many entrepreneurs would recognise.
After his sojourn in California, Son returned home. In 1980, Japan seemed destined to be the world’s number-one economic power. Son was perfectly placed to act as a gateway for US tech businesses seeking to penetrate the Japanese market.
Bill Gates describes Son as a cultural interpreter as much as a commercial middleman. “Whenever you’ve been three or four days in Japan, and have had nothing but polite things to say to each other, invariably through an interpreter. . . then there’s this guy who speaks perfect English. It was such a relief. Masa was easy to talk to. He was an insider but an outsider too.”
After software distribution, Son pivoted to investing in internet-related business, placing two spectacular bets: on Yahoo, which earned him a six-fold return ($3.5bn), and on Alibaba, which gave a 1,310-fold return ($97bn). While he built a successful Japanese affiliate, Yahoo Japan, he never took his eye off the US market.
In the mid-1990s, he acquired Las Vegas-based Comdex, then the number-one tech trade fair, the Ziff Davis computer publishing empire and a host of dotcom properties. In 2013, he went one better and bought Sprint, the lossmaking US telecoms operator, finally pulling off a merger with T-Mobile that created a “third force” alongside Verizon and AT&T.
Throughout, SoftBank took advantage of the almost three decades of near zero interest rates in Japan. Son borrowed cheaply to pay generous prices for US assets, raising billions on the corporate bond market. “You don’t understand,” he once told a fretting colleague, “in Japan, money is free.”
In assessing Son’s track record, it is important to distinguish between SoftBank Corp, the listed company responsible for the operating companies, and SoftBank Group, the publicly quoted group holding company and major investor.
Businesses such as Yahoo Japan and SoftBank Mobile have proved highly successful and profitable. The Sprint acquisition, initially a dud, proved a winner after the T-Mobile merger. But Son has always cared more about growth than profits. SoftBank Group has long been highly leveraged, meaning it has a lot of debt in its capital structure. At times, it has ranked as one of the world’s top 10 indebted companies — not a comfortable position when inflation roared back in 2021.
Son is a major shareholder and a major borrower, using his SoftBank shares as collateral. Risk is built in. Suppose SoftBank shares fall sharply, lowering the value of the collateral, as has occurred many times during Son’s wild ride. Then panicky banks might demand the loans be repaid, destabilising the entire corporate structure.
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Son bristles when challenged, emphasising that as a co-investor he has “skin in the game” and therefore an incentive to invest responsibly. Nevertheless, some associates believe SoftBank’s founder is “addicted” to leverage. They told me he became hooked after the $20bn bid in 2006 to buy Vodafone Japan, the largest leveraged buyout in Asia at the time. He succeeded thanks to a financial magician by the name of Rajeev Misra, a former Deutsche Bank debt trader whose reward was to be put in charge of the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund in 2017.
Misra was one of several talented executives trained as mathematicians, who applied their engineering skills to finance rather than academia. Over time, they lent a mercenary streak to SoftBank, stoking their boss’s appetite for dealmaking.
To some degree, the cultural shift was inevitable as SoftBank evolved from a Japanese technology conglomerate to a global investment group. But it was also a recipe for infighting at the top, latterly between Misra and Marcelo Claure, a 6ft 6in Bolivian-American who led the Sprint turnaround. Often the spats played out in the media. “They leaked like septic tanks,” says a SoftBank colleague.
Although Son adopts an abstemious public profile, his private consumption is more extravagant (albeit drawing on his own money rather than the company’s). He pays for his private plane and his favourite red wine (from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, at a minimum $6,000 a bottle). He has extensive properties around the world, including three conjoining houses in central Tokyo likened by one visitor to Wayne Manor, fictional home of Batman.
The basement features an artificial golf course where Son and guests can play in all-weather conditions on any course in the world. One portion of the house is decorated in the Empire style, the period between 1800 and 1815 when Napoleon modernised France and redrew the map of Europe. I discovered Son has a fascination with the Corsican Little Corporal, a fellow outsider.
In early 2020, a team from Elliott Management, the New York activist investor, paid a visit to Japan. Having bought a 3 per cent stake in SoftBank, their goal was to persuade Son to improve corporate governance, thereby boosting the share price. When an Elliott executive invoked the example of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, or Bill Gates of Microsoft, Son erupted in frustration.
Delusional? Not if you believe that Son is bent on “Making Japan Great Again”. After the collapse of the bubble economy in 1989-90, Japan entered a “lost decade” characterised by deflation and tepid growth. Son, the outlier, remains an object of suspicion among the Japanese business establishment. He counters by playing the patriot, claiming he wants to revive the country’s animal spirits. But his vision of a resurgent Japan contains a megalomaniacal streak.
When Son launched the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, an arms race in the world of venture capital ensued, leading to wholesale value destruction. Doling out sums of between $100mn and $200mn would have meant Son meeting hundreds of individual founders to check their credentials. Even with his legendary stamina, working 20-hour days, often flying on his private jet through multiple time zones, that was a physical impossibility.
Crucially, much larger sums — $500mn or more — were required to move the needle in a giant fund like the Vision Fund. The target companies couldn’t be start-ups as such; they were “later-stage” companies, turbocharged for growth by the injection of SoftBank capital. One of these companies was WeWork, founded by Adam Neumann, a tall Israeli with a planet-sized ego.
Son was utterly sold on Neumann, a fellow dreamer who spoke about world domination. When WeWork’s losses piled up, colleagues pleaded with Son to stop. The boss refused to budge.
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“As you all object, I am becoming more and more interested in this company,” he said. “I am looking at Alibaba and only he [Neumann] looks like Alibaba today.”
The initial Alibaba investment in 2000 — two bets of $20mn and $80mn — turns out to have been a curse as much as a blessing. Eager to prove his success wasn’t a one-off, Son talked about creating 10 SoftBank Vision Funds with a total war chest of $1tn dollars. These were castles in the air — the stuff of hubris.
Those who know Son say he is a brilliant operator (when he focuses), an average investor and a terrible trader. Between 2019-21, as markets turned down, Son suffered heavy losses on Vision Funds 1 and 2. He tried to recover by speculating wildly on options trading, using an in-house hedge fund called Northstar. SoftBank was left nursing multibillion-dollar losses.
For 18 months, he withdrew from public view, ostensibly serving penance but in reality plotting a comeback. Today, he is betting the house on artificial intelligence in order to reclaim his position as one of the world’s leading entrepreneur futurists.
To date, his record is fitful at best. Between 2017 and 2022, he mentioned “AI” more than 500 times in quarterly and annual results presentations. Yet when it came to OpenAI and its breakthrough product ChatGPT, the lead investor was Microsoft. Son never got a look in.
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Part of the problem was timing. In the Vision Fund years, AI businesses were either small scale, early in development or out of the public eye. During the Covid pandemic, Son was grounded in Tokyo. In early 2022, when travel restrictions were finally lifted, with the exception of China, SoftBank was sandbagged by record losses.
Had Son conserved his firepower rather than splurging money on more than 500 separate companies in the Vision Funds, he would have been perfectly placed. With company valuations beaten down by higher interest rates, Son could have acquired stakes in promising AI-related businesses at bargain prices. In hindsight, he admits, “Timing-wise maybe we were a little too early.”
It’s a familiar story: right instincts, wrong timing. (If he’d held on to his 5 per cent stake in advanced chipmaker Nvidia in 2019, he could have made another fortune.) Yet one of Son’s AI bets has paid off handsomely. UK chip designer Arm — acquired in 2016 — is at the centre of yet another super-vision: a $64bn plan to transform SoftBank Group into a sprawling AI powerhouse, including a foray into the development of artificial-intelligence chips, announced in May. The goal is to build a prototype by 2025, with each chip being able to process vast volumes of data. This hugely ambitious venture aims to create SoftBank Group’s own vertically integrated AI ecosystem, from manufacturing chips and operating data centres to industrial robots and power generation.
True, SoftBank cannot touch the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but Son is a customer and supplier to the hyperscalers. His new chipmaking venture involves billions of dollars of investment. Once a mass-production system is established, the AI chip business could be spun off, realising billions of dollars of value to its parent SoftBank.
How does this movie end? Those betting on a financial apocalypse have been disappointed. Call Son lucky, call SoftBank too big to fail. After four years studying the world’s greatest disrupter, my message is unequivocal.
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Don’t ever count him out.
‘Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Masayoshi Son’ by Lionel Barber is published by Allen Lane on October 3
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Saudi Arabia’s grand boxing project is going global. At London’s Wembley Stadium tonight, British fighters Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois face off in the first European showdown organised by Riyadh Season. It follows last month’s fight night in Los Angeles also under the Riyadh Season brand, which began life as a programme of cultural events in the Saudi capital.
This is a sign of things to come. Unlike golf, those leading Saudi Arabia’s sporting push have found a rhythm in the world of boxing, bringing rival promoters together under the Riyadh Season umbrella so that fans and broadcasters get the fights they’ve been craving. Boxers and promoters, meanwhile, get bumper paydays.
Boxing is one of the most biddable sports with a global audience, but the Saudis have had recent success in tennis too. Perhaps this is the big lesson drawn from the expensive LIV Golf experiment — it’s much cheaper to join forces with the establishment than to upend it.
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This week we’re looking at the latest big news from Nike, where the chief executive is out. And we ask if football fans are reaching breaking point in the face of rising prices. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor
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On June 27th, Nike chief executive John Donahoe presided over one of the bleakest earnings calls in the history of the sportswear maker. Not only was the company still trying to find its level between online and brick-and-mortar sales, he said, but consumer demand for the brand’s trainers and athletic apparel was slowing.
The company made its name outfitting world-record runners, but the swoosh earned a dubious distinction of its own that day: the worst stock drop in Nike’s nearly 44-year history as a public company. So swift was the market reaction that co-founder Phil Knight issued a rare statement saying “I am optimistic in Nike’s future and John Donahoe has my unwavering confidence and full support.”
Barely three months later, Knight yanked that support away. On Thursday, the board of directors announced Donahoe will retire next month, to be succeeded by Nike veteran Elliott Hill.
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Donahoe, 64, leaves a mixed record at the world’s largest athletic brand. He ably steered the company through the pandemic, despite only taking the helm in January 2020, accelerating a push towards higher-margin online sales that padded profits. He pulled the company to its overdue revenue goal of $50bn just last year. But while Donahoe proved adept at tech and sales — he was poached by Nike from software company ServiceNow after a career spent at consultancy Bain and online retailer eBay — he lacked an essential component for a shoe brand: knowing what’s cool.
Several of Nike’s shoe “drops”, or limited edition releases, either missed the mark or reeked of desperation, such as an announcement this summer of the commercial sale of a once, collector-only Wu Tang dunk. Partner retailers which sell Nike shoes like JD Sports and Foot Locker praised rival brands like Adidas, New Balance, and On, for “newness”.
In selecting Hill, 60, as the next CEO, Nike’s board is going back to the future. Texas native Hill was once an assistant athletic trainer for the Dallas Cowboys and later started at Nike as an intern after business school. He has 32 years experience at the swoosh, including five years at European HQ in the Netherlands, and oversaw all of Nike’s commercial and marketing operations before his retirement in 2020.
“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Elliott back to the team. His experience, understanding of Nike and leadership is exactly what’s needed at this moment”, said Knight in a statement issued on Thursday. “We’ve got a lot of work to do but I’m looking forward to seeing Nike back on its pace”.
When the European Super League launched (briefly) in 2021, one of the main arguments for tearing down football’s status quo was that fans were being deprived of exciting matches between elite teams.
Evidence this week suggests that argument was built on sand. When Liverpool visited AC Milan in the opening game of this season’s Champions League, one of the main talking points was of empty seats inside the San Siro. While the Italian club had an average home attendance for league matches last season of just under 72,000, local estimates put Tuesday’s turnout at around 60,000. So what’s going on?
Milan have started the season slowly — and lost the game against Liverpool 3-1. But more than 71,000 showed up a few days earlier to see the Rossoneri host Venezia in an Italian league match.
The main culprit for Tuesday night’s empty seats appears to be rising ticket prices — seats in the lower tier of the San Siro began at more than €120.
The issue of rising costs for football fans has been creeping up the agenda across Europe in recent months.
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This year 19 of the 20 English Premier League teams announced increased season ticket prices, while some did away with certain discounts for concessions.
At Nottingham Forest, for example, a child’s ticket in one part of its home ground more than doubled. Fans of Wolverhampton Wanderers urged the club to reconsider price hikes in order to “preserve the very lifeblood of this famous old club”. Fulham supporters held up yellow cards to protest against the £3,000 rate for a season ticket in some sections of the new Riverside Stand.
“Ticket prices are a ticking time bomb and club executives have their hands over their ears. Something has to give”, the Football Supporters Association said last month.
And it’s not just ticket prices. The cost of replica shirts has also been rising fast. The new Manchester United home shirt starts at £85, but will set you back over £100 if you want a name and number on the back, or if you want an exact copy of the match-worn version. (Although that’s still some way off the £900 options outlined in this weekend’s HTSI.)
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Price rises are being propelled by various factors. Inflation across the globe has driven costs for everything from electricity to wages and food. Ticket prices are a quick and easy lever to pull in response — effectively passing on rising costs to the end consumer.
But there are other pressures at work. Tighter spending rules both at European and domestic level are pushing clubs to focus relentlessly on maximising revenue.
The globalisation of the game also means there is a growing pool of football-mad tourists only too willing to pay whatever it takes for a chance to see a top team in the flesh, especially in holiday hotspots like Rome, Paris and London.
In the Milan example, it’s hard to ignore the influence of institutional investors. After private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners bought the club in 2022, revenue generated on matchdays rose to €73mn from €33mn a year earlier and €34mn pre-pandemic. Commercial, TV and sponsorship income all rose considerably too — helping the club to its first annual profit in 17 years.
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Tuesday night’s empty seats may prove a one-off. The issues could also be specific to club and competition.
But as the pull from new regulation and the need to generate investment returns leads more clubs to raise prices wherever they think they can, executives will face increasingly tough choices — and less forgiving supporters.
Cricket has been booming thanks to the Indian Premier League gold rush. But are we reaching saturation point? And is there now a bubble? Those are some of the questions we look to answer in this Big Read.
Lord Sebastian Coe is one of seven candidates to replace Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee who steps down in March next year.
Adrian Wojnarowski, veteran NBA journalist for ESPN who single-handedly transformed sports reporting for the social media era, announced his retirement from the industry and will become the general manager of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University.
Glasgow has agreed to stage a slimmed down Commonwealth Games in 2026, which will be partially funded by Australian taxpayers. The state of Victoria had previously been lined up as hosts, but pulled out after deciding it was too expensive.
Raj Sports has paid $125mn to bring a new WNBA team to Portland, Oregon, the latest step in raising the total number of teams in the league from 12 to 15. Raj Sports also owns the Portland Thorns women’s football team.
The Diamond League has announced an increase in prize money, the latest salvo in the battle for the future of athletics.
Qatar Airways has replaced Turkish Airlines as a main sponsor of the Uefa Champions League. The six-year deal is worth up to €500mn, according to SportBusiness.
Shohei Ohtani had the single best game by a baseball player in the history of the sport on Thursday night: three home runs, two stolen bases, ten runs batted in for the Los Angeles Dodgers in their 20-4 rout of the Miami Marlins. Even wilder, he became the first player in more than a century of Major League Baseball to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season, establishing the so-called 50/50 club. (Non-baseball fans may be familiar with the 40/40 club, the previous benchmark of a power player, as it inspired the name of Jay-Z’s exclusive Manhattan lounge.)
“That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time”, Ohtani’s teammate Gavin Lux said Thursday night. “I’ve never seen anybody do that even in little leagues.”
Scoreboard is written by Josh Noble, Samuel Agini and Arash Massoudi in London, Sara Germano, James Fontanella-Khan, and Anna Nicolaou in New York, with contributions from the team that produce the Due Diligence newsletter, the FT’s global network of correspondents and data visualisation team
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A few years ago, the UK’s National Theatre staged an exceptionally moving Christmas show. Among the characters were a pregnant woman and her partner, searching for a place to rest. So far, so seasonal. But Love, by Alexander Zeldin, wasn’t set in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago — it took place in a temporary accommodation hostel in modern Britain.
Now Zeldin is back at the National Theatre with a very different project — at least on the surface of it. The Other Place comes with the subtitle After Antigone, so you might expect an updating of Sophocles’s great tragedy. But Zeldin, 39, has barely arrived in a small room in the theatre before he’s emphasising that that is not the case: there’s no Theban princess — or modern equivalent — facing down her royal uncle over the burial of her disgraced brother. Instead, he has gone back to what he feels is the engine of the original and reworked it in a contemporary domestic setting.
Zeldin is not the only writer and director grappling with Sophocles this winter. London is about to embrace two high-profile productions of Oedipus, one staged by Robert Icke, one by Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter, while Hollywood star Brie Larson will play Elektra in January. For Zeldin, the tragedian throws down a gauntlet to a modern writer.
“The challenge of a contemporary tragedy is really exciting for a playwright,” he says. “Antigone takes place in less than 24 hours: it’s one action, one place. It’s a real test to write something that has the mechanism of inevitability . . . There are situations in life when there is no resolution possible and acknowledging that has a great value.”
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Zeldin, a warm, friendly presence, looks tired but wired after the week’s rehearsals. He leans across the table, intent on clarity, bringing the same restless honesty to the conversation as he does to his work. His new play is funny, he says — “I like laughing a lot in theatre” — but it is also an attempt to face up to difficult questions without flinching.
Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it?
“At the centre of the play is somebody who has been in crisis for a long time,” he says. “The question that is central to it, and to our time, is: what to do in the face of the suffering of others? Because we know about suffering everywhere. It’s very hard to live with. But that’s where theatre has a space. It can bring us into something that we don’t normally see and that’s essential to live — to really live.”
“When someone dies you want to live,” he says. “So I lived hard. I had a bit of a rough time as a teenager. Theatre for me was a space where it was possible to say anything. And it still is . . . That’s the purpose of art — to make the unsayable sayable. And inside that it’s an act of kindness, it’s a moral act. We need it.”
Still in his teens, he took a production to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received the accolade of “worst play of the year” from one critic. “It was a real badge of honour,” he grins. But where many might have slunk off, defeated, Zeldin was hooked. He knew he had found something in which he really believed. “I realised theatre was a way of cutting through the bullshit and getting at what is essential.”
“The question was whether you can carve a story out of just life,” he says. “Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it? I’m interested in empathy. I’m interested in dignity.”
After university, Zeldin travelled extensively, seeking out different ways of making theatre. He worked with the great director Peter Brook in Paris, where he still lives (though he’s considering moving back to the UK), and in 2019 set up the A Zeldin company, partly with the intention of touring. An outward looking theatre culture is “very valuable” he suggests.
Fourteen years after falling in love with the stage, he remains besotted. But, in a sense, it’s a tough love. “I always ask myself the question, why theatre? What do people need to see? What’s useful?” he says. “I remember hearing a Greek director say, ‘I want this play to travel in you.’ I love that.”
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