Person
Japanese billionaire who founded SoftBank Group and built it into a major global investor in technology and AI, including OpenAI and the Vision Fund.
SoftBank is considering buying Allied Universal in a deal that could value the company at about $18 billion, Bloomberg News reported. The report frames it as a complement to Masayoshi Son's push into AI-powered robots and the infrastructure behind them.
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SoftBank sold a record $11 billion of junk bonds at yields up to 9.75%, Reuters reported. Its 2034 bond pays 4.55 points over Alphabet's 2033 issue, a premium Reuters ties to SoftBank's own risk and concentration.
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SoftBank's Masayoshi Son is seeking up to $100 billion from Gulf investors for a new AI acquisition fund, the Financial Times reported. Outside money would pay for the next deals, while SoftBank's own balance sheet still carries the debt it took on to buy into OpenAI.
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Masayoshi Son, whose SoftBank is projected to commit $65 billion to OpenAI, is now voicing concern about AI safety risks, according to Bloomberg. Holders now have to judge whether the warning changes the money, since the stock has so far traded on what the labs say.
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SoftBank sold $11.1 billion of high-yield bonds, a record by CNBC's count, to pay the final $10 billion of its $30 billion OpenAI commitment. The debt sits with a BB+ borrower, so credit conditions reach OpenAI's money through one investor's balance sheet.
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SoftBank paid the last $10 billion of its OpenAI commitment on October 1, taking its total to $64.6 billion for about 13% of the company. It funded the payment with new senior notes, so a stake worth roughly $110 billion at February's price is now carried on bond debt.
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SoftBank is marketing junk bonds at yields up to 9.875% to raise more than $11 billion toward nearly $65 billion of OpenAI commitments. The yields are the company's highest ever at those maturities, and high-yield buyers are still competing to lend at them.
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Ten billion dollars of notes plus a billion in euros price around September 24 to fund a commitment approaching $65bn. The 13% stake SoftBank is targeting implies a valuation well below the $730bn cited.
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SoftBank's data centre arm filed on September 1 to raise $5bn to $7bn on Nasdaq, and the price under discussion works out at about 180 times an annualized half-year revenue of $139m against $439bn of contracted backlog.
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The $10bn SoftBank owes OpenAI on 1 October is the exact size of the dollar leg of the bond it prices on 24 September. Yields on its 2031 paper have moved from 6.7% in January to about 8.2% in September.
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SoftBank's $450m top-up lifts a bank facility to $6.5bn and buys another year in which it can draw, at 210 basis points over SOFR. More than 20 lenders share it, and it is the smallest number the group signed this week.
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Oracle disclosed the plan on the 11th and said on the 12th that Ellison had terminated it. Priced off the $341.39 close the same account reports for the 10th, the 50 million shares come to $17.1 billion.
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With 2,059 more US data centers planned and three-quarters of Americans opposed to having one near them, local consent is now the part of the buildout that committed capital cannot put on a calendar.
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The reported request arrives three weeks after a near-identical loan closed, which says more about how the $40bn bridge underneath gets refinanced than any single facility does. SoftBank has not commented.
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A majority stake at $6bn sits 40% under the valuation 1X was chasing a year ago, which says less about humanoid hype than about the gap between a price somebody pays and a price somebody wants.
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The record retail sale prices at 4.3% to 4.9% on a credit S&P calls BB+, and even at full size it leaves more than $20bn of the OpenAI pledge unfunded.
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Gravis Robotics says its retrofit autonomy kit works on Caterpillar, Deere, JCB and Hitachi machines. The productivity number is still the company's own.
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Hermann Hauser told CNBC that AI will create more value than any previous revolution, and that recently announced circular financing deals are the structural risk. That distinction has contract consequences.
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The proposed guarantee on SoftBank's 10-gigawatt Piketon project fell from about $250 billion to under $120 billion, according to Crypto Briefing. The plant itself did not shrink.
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