The story of Soft Bank. This quarter should have been Masioshi's victory lap,

but we work as back to spoil those plans as losing bets continued away on what has become

one of the biggest tech investors in the world. It's Thursday

November 9th. Welcome to the Tech Check podcast. I'm dear Dravosa.

And I'm Mark Gilbert. Softbank, the Japanese conglomerate controlled by billionaire Massasan, a legendary telecom executive

who has become in the last decade one of the biggest tech investors in tech and in startups.

It posted another huge loss in its second quarter.

And D, this is just another black eye for Soft Bank.

It's definitely not how Massasan wanted this quarter to go because it's been a rough few years

But this was the quarter they successfully listed arm that should have been a big win

Largest semi-IPO ever, fifth largest U.S. listing of all time.

And to go back a little bit and put this in context, it's the Vision Fund.

When we call Massasan, one of the biggest tech investors in the world it all happened

and I think it was like the mid 2010s when he came out with this 100 billion dollar

fund to invest in tech startups and they would do so mostly in late stage so cutting huge checks a billion

dollars or more and that has just he was investing at the peak when interest rates were

near zero and valuations were going out of control and there was unicorns and decacorns and that has not turned out to be

very lucrative over the last few years. Right and and we I mean we should say that this was

originally you know a telecom company,

it's a Japanese telecom company that just spun off a lot of cash.

And that cash led to some huge investments, notably

Alibaba, which was hugely successful for them,

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