Well, he was also the richest person in the world for 3 days in 2000.

I'm as skeptical of the vision fund as anyone. But it's pretty impressive to go from nothing to the richest person in the world. Lose the most money in history (still being a multi-billionaire, though), and in the span of 20 years, 10x your fortune AGAIN -- to be again one of the richest people in the world.

If anything, that's an impressive story -- at least to me.

He's an interesting guy. Here he talks about making his first million while a student at Berkley https://youtu.be/--dReMGY_WY?t=459

He's showing signs of making some of the losses back already: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-ipo-breakingvie...

I wouldn't write him off just because he got a little conned on WeWork.

>I wouldn't write him off just because he got a little conned on WeWork.

I'm not able to believe a guy with Son's record gets conned by WeWork. I'd say Son was trying to con others, but got caught holding the bag.

I'm reminded a bit of his investment in Alibaba - when he met Jack Ma he says he had no business plan or revenue but he could tell he had charisma and leadership and so invested. I guess he tried to do similar with Adam but it didn't work out quite the same.

The whole WeWork saga stinks to high heaven, did Neuman con Son or was Son just not aware of what's going on till all truth came out in the S1. And, was he stupid to believe that the company could still go IPO based on what was in the S1.

He's always showing signs of making money before losing more of it. Personally I think TikTok is a paper tiger and wouldn't throw a dime of my money near them.

it seems to be the first major Chinese player who makes inroads with global (and in particular American) audiences, something that other Chinese companies are notoriously bad at. And they really seem to be onto something when it comes to young users. I wouldn't brush them off.

All they realized was that people wanted Vine, even if it wasn’t called Vine anymore. I still don’t know why Twitter shuttered them, it seems stupid in hindsight.

I have massive distrust in companies headquartered in China. No company of TikTok's (purported) scale w.r.t revenue/valuation is going to be divorced from the influence if not ownership by the CCP.

I would not invest in the Chinese government, and therefore would not invest in a large Chinese company since they are two sides of the same coin. Not only out of morality, but because I don't want to expose myself to financial risk by betting on a communist government/dictatorship not to fuck me.

TikTok's projecting $17bn revenue and some profits this year. That's got to be worth something.

Is anyone auditing these projections?

Agree he has a stake in something good now that he has control. WeWork in the long tail will be a great cash generator but it’s unlikely to return anything for at least a decade and due to the leases there is some risk that needs mitigating. However the model is sound We just needs better cost controls, many years of investment and a customer obsession.

> little conned

Understated.

But I agree.

Interesting, I hadn't known that. What's a good link to read about his story?

Not to be a smartass, but... Wikipedia for a start? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son

Yes, a single sentence on the event is probably what he was asking for, thank you.

There are whole sections about his specific history at each company and stage. If you’re looking for three sentence summary then I can’t help you.

NPR's Planet Money did a decent piece on him earlier this month.

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

I believe this is a baloney quip. If you want to know how he fared in dotcom you should look at his worth before and after, not compare the peak of the funny money to the bottom of the crash.