Hello and welcome to money talks, the slate money podcast where we talk to fascinating people about fascinating things. I'm Felix Hammond of Axios, and

joining us from London is the one and only Lionel Barber. Lionel, welcome. Nice to see you, Felix.

Lionel, introduce yourself. Who are you? I am the author of the first Western biography of

Masayoshi Son of Japan, one of the world's most consequential investors, and I was for 14 years

the editor of the Financial Times. And I am currently the co-host of Media Confidential, the weekly

podcast, the other co-host being Alan Rusbiger, the long-time editor of The Guardian.

We are not going to talk about media on this show. This is a 100% Masa show. We are going to talk about Massa Son, the Korean, other than Japanese, but also Japanese, billionaire, investor, entrepreneur, risk-taker in the title of your book, Gambling Man.

We're going to talk about his bets, his personality, his upbringing, and how he has fared and where he stands today.

It's all coming up on Money Talks.

We've talked a bit about Massa on this podcast,

but as you say, he is an incredibly important individual. We can never

have too much insight into him. And you know him better than most people. You talk to him,

what, like four times for this book? Four sit-down interviews, went to Tokyo six times. He blew me off twice, saying he was too busy. But, you know, after being editor of the FT, you need to learn a little bit of humility. And also, you know, he's like stalking a tiger.

Okay. So let's just start at the end, because I want to get back to the beginning

and the middle, but let's start at the end because where we are now with Masa is where exactly.

In the grand scheme of his ups and downs, would you say he's up or down right now?

He's definitely coming back up quite quickly. I would say this is

the fourth or fifth big comeback in Masa's lifetime. He's 67 now. He lost 97% of his wealth in the

dot-com crash, almost got wiped out in the global financial crisis, almost got wiped out

in the credit bubble, and now he's making his big bets on artificial intelligence.

And Felix, you know, I didn't plan it, but this week he put in $500 million into Open AI.

Is Sam Altman's 6.5 billion or so fundraising round?

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