Their tiny little fund isn't powerful enough for that. They can try that when they have a multi trillion dollar fund. The reason why the vision fund failed is pretty obvious. They dump their money into late stage companies without actually checking if the business is viable. This strategy works with very young companies because initial investments are very low. One million here, 5 million there. If 95% of companies fail it doesn't matter because there will be a unicorn or two. With something like Uber or Wework most of the crazy gains are already gone. They are way beyond the seed stage. When you invest into them you must be careful and check that you are spending money on a company that can actually net a return. When you are spending more than a billion each loss hurts a lot.

Mostly the problem is that their portfolio companies started fighting each other with the SB cash.

Sounds interesting -- would you like sharing an example? I've read about SoftBank and WeWork but don't know much about their other investments

Uber - DiDi is the prime example.

In a way the "global monopoly" vision does not seem very different from the Hunt Brothers trying to corner the market for silver in 1979/80. The plan is to buy up enough supply to create artificial scarcity. [1]

The problem with this approach is that there just aren't that many robust, natural monopolies. I think that's been a defect in VC investment strategies in Silicon Valley for at least a decade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

the nice, short summary of this i saw somewhere is: "Turns out money is not a moat."

> The vision was to create a global monopoly by killing off competitors with artificially low pricing

A global monopoly for.... office space?

I could not think of a more difficult industry, to "kill off competitors with low pricing", than the real estate industry.

Whats the plan there? Buying off every major office in the in the world?

Crazy as it sounds, that seems to be the plan. WeWork is already the largest tenant in New York, Washington, D.C., downtown Chicago, and central London.

Honest question: Has that actually worked?

For most Ubers, you also get a Lyft.

iPhone, Androids. (Even granting profit to Apple in smartphones).

Uber almost killed Lyft. Had it not been for the 2017 #DeleteUber campaign that started in 2017, Lyft might have ran out of money or forced to concede more US markets.

It was Uber trying to steal from Waymo that saved Lyft.

Google gave Lyft $1.5 billion in "fuck Uber" money months after filing suit against Uber.

Crazy how if the executives of Uber hadn't been blatantly evil as fuck, Lyft might not exist today.

My partner and I still exclusively use Lyft just because we don't like the ethics of Uber

I exclusively use Lyft ever since I asked an Uber driver if he also drove for Lyft and he casually mentioned that he couldn’t pass their background check...