If I don’t take risks, I don’t even have the right to be on the field.

Article author, source: 0x9999in1, ME News

TL;DR

• Leverage addiction and muscle memory: Son Masayoshi is fully activating his proven strategy—verified countless times with Alibaba—never selling core assets, but instead using them as collateral to secure massive liquidity and achieve infinite leveraging, like stepping on one’s own foot to lift oneself up.
• Opacity is the best breeding ground: OpenAI’s current private status makes it the world’s most attractive and hardest-to-price asset. This “Schrödinger state” of valuation provides SoftBank’s massive financial leverage with the most flexible buffer.
• A suffocating capital loop: the $40 billion bridge loan in March, the $30 billion committed by Vision Fund II, and the additional $10 billion margin loan being sought now form the massive stakes for SoftBank’s return to the table. Masayoshi Son has no shortage of determination—he is desperately short on cash.
• Two-year time lock: The $10 billion loan is structured as “two years plus a one-year extension,” precisely aligning with OpenAI’s potential window for an IPO or a major breakthrough in AGI technology. This is both a head start and a defensive move.
• The endgame logic: This has never been traditional value investing. It’s about using expensive capital to forcibly buy time, then spinning that time on the wheel of fate for a winner-takes-all, explosive payoff.

The gambler returns to the VIP room: Can you hear the gears engaging?

This time, Masayoshi Son has returned to the poker table.

Bloomberg sources have just revealed that SoftBank is actively seeking a margin loan of up to $10 billion.

What is used as collateral?

The asset he is tightly holding—the most sought-after asset on the planet right now: shares in OpenAI.

What are the conditions?

The loan term is two years. If, after two years, SoftBank still feels unsatisfied or the situation remains unclear, SoftBank may exercise an additional clause to extend the term by one more year.

Broaden your perspective. You’ll realize this isn’t an isolated probe—it’s a meticulously planned barrage of firepower. In March this year, SoftBank secured a staggering $40 billion bridge loan. What was the stated purpose? “To increase its stake in OpenAI and for general corporate purposes.”

Go back further. SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, the behemoth that was once decimated by WeWork and various internet bubbles, has now committed $30 billion to OpenAI.

Do the math. $30 billion. $40 billion. $10 billion.

The astronomical figures stacked together have exceeded the calculation models of ordinary financial analysts. This is not prudent asset allocation. This is turning the entire vault upside down and betting everything on a rapidly spinning wheel.

Why borrow? Why not sell some of the other small assets you have?

Because he refuses to accept it. Because he is afraid.

What is Masayoshi Son afraid of? He fears that not only has he missed NVIDIA’s explosive growth over the past three years, but he may also completely miss the next thirty years of humanity’s journey toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

So he had to use leverage. The gears of leverage were grinding wildly, producing a grating, nails-on-chalkboard screech. Those in the know recognized it immediately—it was the familiar formula, the financial illusion that Masayoshi Son was most obsessed with, most skilled at, and most vulnerable to.

The Secret Anatomy of Leverage: Why Must It Be OpenAI?

Let’s peel back the veneer of “margin loans.”

What is a margin loan? Put simply, it’s like pawning items at a pawnshop—except instead of gold and jewelry, Wall Street pawnshops accept shares in top tech companies. You pledge your stocks to Wall Street’s financial institutions, and they give you cash at a certain loan-to-value ratio. As long as your stock price doesn’t fall below the liquidation threshold, you’re free to use that money however you like; if it does? Sorry—your position gets liquidated immediately, and you owe everything back, plus interest.

In this high-stakes game, the choice of collateral determines the boundary between life and death.

Why is SoftBank targeting OpenAI?

The answer is brutally harsh yet incredibly precise: because OpenAI is today’s most sexy, most opaque, and hardest-to-value asset in the world.

What drives financial markets? Not profit statements, but narratives.

OpenAI is the most brilliant diamond on the tree of human technology today. It is the creator of ChatGPT, the architect of Sora, and the Silicon Valley maverick that forcibly integrated large language models into the daily lives of seven billion people.

To Wall Street, OpenAI isn't called a company—it's called a ticket to the future's ark.

When SoftBank walks into the boardrooms of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, or Goldman Sachs with this ticket aboard, how will those shrewd investment banking giants react? They’ll light up. Because this asset not only possesses unparalleled scarcity but also carries strong “political correctness”—in the age of AI, who would dare short OpenAI? Who would dare reject OpenAI’s affiliated businesses?

Owning the most attractive assets gives you the leverage to demand the lowest discount rates and the highest financing amounts at the negotiating table.

But the true sophistication lies in the words “opaque” and “hard to price.”

What would happen if Son Masayoshi borrowed $10 billion today using Nvidia stock as collateral?

NVIDIA is a publicly traded company. Its stock price fluctuates every second, under the scrutiny of tens of millions of eyes on the trading screens at NASDAQ. A sneeze from the Federal Reserve, a 0.1% movement in inflation data, or a single shot in the Middle East could cause NVIDIA’s stock price to evaporate hundreds of billions of dollars within a single trading day.

The assets of publicly traded companies are "transparent" and extremely vulnerable. Once pledged as collateral, SoftBank's finance team would have to monitor price charts daily, bracing for the inevitable margin call.

What about OpenAI?

OpenAI is a private company. Its structure is complex, blending a capped-profit model with nonprofit entities. More importantly—it has no publicly traded stock on a secondary market.

How is its valuation determined?

It was driven by one round of private funding after another. After the last round, the valuation was $150 billion; even if the next round raised only tens of millions, as long as both parties agreed, the valuation could be artificially raised to $200 billion.

What is this called? This is called "the Schrödinger state of valuation."

As long as OpenAI remains private, its valuation remains a deep, still pond—free from short-seller attacks, panic selling by retail investors, and daily P/E ratio scrutiny.

This gives SoftBank tremendous flexibility. As long as the collateral doesn’t decline, the loan won’t be liquidated. Masayoshi Son can use this $10 billion to further boost valuations across the entire AI sector, or even continue secretly funding OpenAI’s ecosystem through covert channels, thereby maintaining or even inflating the book value of this collateral.

Left hand to right hand. Assets turn into cash, cash fuels assets.

In the most opaque black box, playing the most profitable leveraged game. This is the deepest motive behind this $1 billion loan.

The blood-stained echo of history: the giants treated as ATMs

Many are amazed by SoftBank's boldness. But if you understand Masayoshi Son's past, you'll realize that everything happening today with OpenAI is merely a replay of a game he has played countless times before.

In Masayoshi Son's dictionary, there is no such thing as "locking in profits." Good assets should not be sold, but rather treated as inexhaustible ATMs.

Go back more than a decade. The battle that made Masayoshi Son a legend: a $20 million investment in Alibaba, ultimately yielding hundreds of times returns.

However, please note that SoftBank did not choose to simply and aggressively sell large amounts of Alibaba shares on the secondary market for an extended period. Selling shares incurs high capital gains taxes and forfeits future upside potential.

How did Masayoshi Son do it?

He invented a derivative strategy called "prepaid forward contracts." He bundled Alibaba's shares, pledged them to financial institutions, and received a massive amount of cash upfront. The shares remained under SoftBank's name, allowing SoftBank to continue receiving Alibaba's dividends and voting rights; the enormous cash proceeds were then毫不犹豫ly invested by Son Masayoshi into the global mobile internet boom at the time.

Alibaba, during its most glorious years, effectively became the "central bank reserve" of SoftBank's Vision Fund. Masayoshi Son used Alibaba shares to print money and then made acquisitions worldwide.

This is muscle memory. Once you’ve tasted the sweetness of using nonlinear leverage to move the Earth, you can never go back to doing backbreaking labor for pennies.

But has this strategy ever failed?

Yes, and he lost catastrophically, nearly dragging the entire SoftBank empire into ruin.

That name is WeWork.

The opaque private market, once again fueled by the seductive narrative of the “sharing economy.” Masayoshi Son used massive capital to artificially inflate WeWork’s valuation, elevating it to a lofty $47 billion. Vision Fund I not only invested cash in WeWork but also staked SoftBank’s once-unassailable reputation.

However, when WeWork attempted to rush toward its IPO and was forced to expose its deeply flawed financial statements to the light of day, everything collapsed. There was no profit—only debt—and the so-called tech sheen was merely a clumsy disguise of a subletter. Its valuation plummeted overnight, forcing SoftBank to take painful asset write-downs, and Masayoshi Son even had to publicly apologize during an earnings call.

What did SoftBank learn from that battle?

It didn’t make Masayoshi Son give up leverage. It simply made him understand a harsh truth: you must ensure the beast you’re betting on actually has something inside its belly.

Just when the world thought SoftBank was done for, Arm pulled Masayoshi Son back from the brink.

The UK-based chip design company Arm, which was privately acquired for $32 billion, has successfully gone public, propelled by the AI wave after facing setbacks in its attempted acquisition by NVIDIA. Today, Arm’s market value has surpassed $100 billion, becoming an essential foundational infrastructure for global AI computing power.

Arm's tremendous success gave Masayoshi Son two things.

First, breathing room capital.

Second, absolute confidence in returning to the table.

He has proven that he still possesses the ability to turn stones into gold in this era. Thus, a new chapter of the script begins. Alibaba is already history, Arm has gone public and become overly transparent—so who will be the next anchor capable of serving as a super ATM and supporting the ambition of a trillion-dollar empire?

Only OpenAI.

The ticking clock: Time for odds over a two-year period

One of the most peculiar details about this $10 billion margin loan: a two-year term with a one-year extension option.

Why two years?

In a financial market where corporate bonds with ten- or thirty-year maturities are routinely issued, locking in a $10 billion loan for only a two- to three-year window is an aggressively aggressive and deeply anxious time frame.

Let’s look at the data and the cost behind this.

A Bloomberg report hides a critically important metric: the initial spread discussed for this loan was approximately 425 basis points above the benchmark Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR). At current SOFR levels, the annualized interest rate for this loan would be close to 7.88%.

$10 billion, with an annualized interest rate of nearly 8%. This means SoftBank must spend nearly $800 million per year just on interest payments!

Is Son Masayoshi insane? To bear such high funding costs just to set the loan term at only two years?

No, he’s not crazy. He’s calculating.

The past two years have been the decisive two years that settled the global AI landscape.

Take a look at the current AI battlefield. The Scaling Law of large language models is being challenged by diminishing returns. Training models at the level of GPT-5 requires tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of H100/B200 chips, with a single training run costing close to hundreds of millions of dollars. The insatiable hunger for compute power is beginning to hurt even giants as wealthy as Microsoft.

OpenAI needs money. Huge amounts of money.

And this two- to three-year period is precisely when OpenAI made its final push to transform from a “research-focused nonprofit” into the world’s largest AI commercial empire.

Over the next two years, two major events could change the course of the world:

First, the prototype of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is emerging.

If OpenAI can demonstrate within the next 24 to 36 months that its models possess transformative reasoning capabilities and have truly reached the threshold of AGI, its tangible value will no longer be measured in hundreds of billions, but will start at trillions of dollars.

Second, a century-defining IPO.

Even without mentioning AGI, the capital market's patience is limited. OpenAI is currently working intensively to restructure its equity ownership and resolve historical issues. Around 2028, two years from now, could be the ideal moment for OpenAI to knock on the door of Nasdaq and launch a historic IPO.

Once OpenAI goes public, all problems will be solved. SoftBank’s shares will instantly gain exceptional liquidity and a remarkable premium. At that point, a mere $10 billion in principal and a few billion in interest will mean nothing—just a small appetizer at a trillion-dollar feast.

So, a two-year term with a one-year extension doesn't mean SoftBank can't secure longer-term funding.

This is the timeline that Masayoshi Son has drawn for the future.

He is using expensive capital costs (8% annual interest) to forcibly secure these three critical years. During this period, as long as OpenAI doesn’t collapse and successfully reaches its goal, the odds on this financial leverage will be so favorable that SoftBank can return to the pinnacle of the world.

He never intended to repay slowly and steadily. He was waiting for the big explosion.

Conclusion: The Old Boy on the Roulette Wheel

If I don’t take risks, I don’t even have the right to be on the field.

This may be the most accurate portrayal of SoftBank today. In 2026, with NVIDIA at its peak, Microsoft holding steady, and Google fighting desperately to catch up, the space left for external financial investors—even SoftBank with its massive Vision Fund—is extremely limited.

Pure equity investment? Sorry, the entry price is too high.

Build your own model? The computational power barrier is insurmountable.

The only way to break through is to leverage your unparalleled financial engineering capabilities to weaponize your top-tier core assets to the extreme.

$10 billion in margin loans. $40 billion in bridge loans. $3 billion in investment commitments.

These numbers stacked together do not depict the balance sheet of a venture capital firm, but the indomitable spirit of an elderly gambler in his sixties.

He is too familiar with this strategy: using the most opaque private assets as cover, the coldest financial leverage as a spear, and hundreds of millions in interest to purchase that time-limited ticket to the next era.

Time, ultimately, is the enemy of all capitalists. But Masayoshi Son attempts to use leverage to squeeze out the last drop of value from time, converting it into the extraordinary odds he desires most.

The curtain has risen; loan documents may now be whirring through photocopiers on Wall Street. On the other side of the bet lie the humming servers of Silicon Valley and the unpredictable future of AGI.

Look, this is ultimately not a game for the weak. Win, and he becomes the greatest kingmaker of the AI era; lose, and it’s just replaying the WeWork script with a more expensive cast.

But for someone who once had nothing and once owned the entire world, this detachment from life and death may be the true reason he repeatedly walks onto the gambling table without hesitation.

Source:

1. Bloomberg News financial report:SoftBank Seeks $10 Billion Loan Secured by OpenAI Shares (April 2026).
2. Ken Suzuki. The Mind of Masayoshi Son [M]. Oriental Publishing House, 2018: Explores SoftBank’s long-term asset leverage strategy and financial methods behind its early investment in Alibaba.
3. The Wall Street Journal.The WeWork IPO Collapse (Historical Case Reference and SoftBank Vision Fund Financial Review).
4. Reuters and Jiemian News macro market dynamics tracking: Related reports on SoftBank's SOFR rate fluctuations and the $40 billion bridge loan (March–April 2026).