Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son

Last year, I wrote about The Money Trap, written by SoftBank’s former CFO. This feels like the continuation that zooms in on SoftBank’s founder, Masayoshi Son, and how he grew up as a relatively poor ethnic Korean in Japan. He famously gave away free coffee at his father’s coffee shop to get customers to buy higher-margin items like baked goods - an oddly prescient preview of how he’d build a tech empire. SoftBank stock had a phenomenal year (up 90%) in 2025, and now that I understand how Son thinks in leaps: how his capital becomes narrative, and how his disruption is often indistinguishable from chaos, it makes the company’s rise more understandable.