CorpDigest
SoftBank Group Corp.
Leadership History
1 leader · Full leadership timeline
Last reviewed: 2026-06-10 · By Swet Parvadiya
ARM Holdings is the engine that makes SoftBank's financial architecture function. Every time a chip incorporating an ARM architecture is manufactured and shipped anywhere in the world — and that includes virtually every smartphone processor, most server chips, and an increasing share of AI accelerators — SoftBank collects a royalty. ARM's licensing model produces perpetual, inflation-resistant income that scales automatically with global semiconductor volume. SoftBank paid $32 billion for ARM in 2016, renegotiated the chip industry's relationship to its own foundational IP, and retained majority ownership through the 2023 ARM IPO while cashing out enough to address its most pressing debt obligations. The Tokyo conglomerate generated $48.1 billion in FY2024 revenue (fiscal year ending March 31, 2024) across two structurally different businesses: SoftBank Corp, the Japanese telecommunications operator that dominates the domestic mobile market and generates the stable, high-margin cash flows that service the group's debt; and the Vision Fund vehicles, which have deployed over $150 billion across technology growth investments and produced returns that swung from extraordinary gains to extraordinary losses within the same five-year period. Masayoshi Son has been running this company since founding it in 1981. He dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley, invested $1.75 million into Space Invaders distribution rights as a student, and has since built one of the most leveraged technology investment platforms in the world. His 300-year vision — a phrase Son uses without apparent irony — is the organizing principle behind investment decisions that regularly absorb losses that would end most institutional careers. The $4.7 billion WeWork investment, the subsequent collapse, and the $9.2 billion write-down in FY2020 did not change the firm's investment posture. Son treats catastrophic failures as data. The 1995 Yahoo! Investment, which reportedly generated a $35 billion gain from an initial $2 million stake, established the pattern. The Alibaba investment in 2000 — $20 million that grew to over $50 billion — confirmed it. The Vision Fund was built on the institutional belief that Son's pattern recognition in technology cycles could be replicated at scale with other people's capital. The WeWork implosion demonstrated the limits of that thesis when governance and business model quality are not weighted alongside market size.
Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Son has been instrumental in the company's strategic evolution, spearheading the massive acquisitions of Vodafone Japan and ARM Holdings, and orchestrating the creation of the $100 billion Vision Fund, fundamentally changing the company's business model and unlocking massive shareholder value.
To understand SoftBank Group is to understand the extreme capital requirements, the immense geopolitical risks, and the visionary ambition that defines the highest echelons of global technology finance; every time a consumer uses a smartphone, a data center processes a machine learning query, or a Japanese consumer streams video on their mobile device, there is a statistical probability approaching certainty that SoftBank's capital, its intellectual property, or its physical network infrastructure enabled that interaction. The second major challenge is the intense geopolitical and regulatory scrutiny facing its most valuable asset, ARM Holdings, particularly regarding its licensing practices and its role in the global semiconductor supply chain. The ongoing technological decoupling between the United States and China poses a severe risk to ARM's global revenue base. The fourth major challenge is the intense operational and execution risk associated with the company's massive, multi-billion-dollar bets on next-generation semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Finally, the company faces a persistent challenge in managing the extreme concentration risk within its investment portfolio and its reliance on a small number of massive winners to drive its overall returns. This concentration risk makes SoftBank's financial performance exceptionally volatile and highly sensitive to the idiosyncratic risks of its largest portfolio companies, requiring the management team to continuously execute complex hedging strategies and partial monetizations to protect the parent company's balance sheet from sudden, catastrophic drawdowns.
Masayoshi Son has been the chief executive officer and chairman of SoftBank since founding the company in September 1981, making his tenure one of the longest among major global technology CEOs at over 43 years as of 2024. He has never publicly contemplated retirement from the chairman role and has repeatedly stated his intention to remain in some capacity through SoftBank's 300-year horizon. Son holds approximately 32 percent of SoftBank Group shares directly and through Son Holdings, representing economic exposure of roughly $30 to $40 billion depending on market price, and votes the controlling block on all major corporate actions. Son also holds personal margin loans collateralized by SoftBank stock, the size of which SoftBank discloses in its corporate governance statements. The personal financial profile creates well-documented alignment between Son's individual outcomes and SoftBank Group share price performance. Son receives a modest direct salary and bonus, with most compensation flowing through dividends and capital appreciation on his founding stake. He occasionally retreats from public earnings communications and has done so since fiscal 2023, delegating quarterly results presentations to CFO Yoshimitsu Goto.
In September 2014 Masayoshi Son hired Nikesh Arora, then senior vice president and chief business officer at Google, as vice chairman of SoftBank with a compensation package of roughly 16.6 billion yen (about $135 million) for his first 18 months, the largest payout to a Japanese corporate executive in history. Arora was rapidly elevated to president and chief operating officer in mid-2015 and publicly designated as Son's successor with a stated handover timeline of around five years. In January 2016 a group of anonymous SoftBank shareholders filed a letter raising conflict-of-interest allegations connected to Arora's prior role at private-equity firm Silver Lake, which Son and the SoftBank board investigated and cleared. In June 2016 Son abruptly reversed his retirement plans and announced Arora's departure, stating he wanted to continue as CEO for at least another five to ten years. Arora left immediately with his accrued compensation and went on to become CEO of Palo Alto Networks in 2018. The episode is widely cited as evidence that SoftBank has no functional succession plan independent of Son's personal preferences.
SoftBank Corp. is the publicly traded Japanese telecom operator carved out of SoftBank Group via a December 2018 IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It operates the SoftBank, Y!mobile and LINEMO mobile brands, broadband and fixed-line businesses, the PayPay payments platform alongside SoftBank Group, and the LY Corporation internet portfolio merging Yahoo Japan and LINE. CEO of SoftBank Corp. is Junichi Miyakawa, who took the role on 1 April 2021 after serving as chief technology officer for the wireless network buildout. Miyakawa is a long-tenured SoftBank engineer who joined in 2006 via the Vodafone Japan acquisition and led the iPhone-era network expansion. SoftBank Group, the holding company, is run by Masayoshi Son and operates as a global investment vehicle. The two share governance overlap with Son sitting as chairman of SoftBank Corp. The structural separation means SoftBank Corp. produces predictable Japan-domestic mobile and internet cash flow with consistent dividend payouts, while SoftBank Group monetizes the dividend plus Vision Fund and ARM exposure to fund global investment activity.
Yoshimitsu Goto is the chief financial officer and a board director of SoftBank Group, a position he has held since 2018. He joined SoftBank in 2000 from Asahi Mutual Life Insurance via subsidiary roles, became head of finance in 2015 and CFO in 2016 before assuming the group CFO role. Since Son withdrew from earnings presentations beginning fiscal 2023 Goto has become the primary external face of SoftBank's quarterly investor communications, presenting consolidated results, Vision Fund segment performance and the holding-company LTV metric. Goto has been the architect of SoftBank's complex capital-markets program including the asset-backed margin loans against Alibaba, the prepaid forward contracts that monetized Alibaba without immediate tax events, the asset-backed financing against ARM, the bond market issuance program and the buyback authorizations. He has also represented SoftBank in negotiations on the failed Nvidia-ARM transaction, the ARM IPO and the Vision Fund 2 capital structure. Goto is not regarded as a successor candidate but operates as the principal executive translator of Son's investment narrative into financial reporting and credit-investor communications.