Masa Son is promising a massive investment in Trump’s America. Don’t hold your breath
Analysis by Allison Morrow and David Goldman, CNN
New York (CNN) — Another day, another enigmatic billionaire turning up at Mar-a-Lago to pump up the Donald Trump brand as the president-elect prepares to return to the White House.
ICYMI: On Monday, Japanese investor Masayoshi Son joined Trump to announce a $100 billion investment in US projects over the next four years, with a goal of creating 100,000 new jobs in emerging technologies, including the development of artificial intelligence. (Because what investment in 2024 isn’t tied to AI?) The planned investment will come from Son’s SoftBank Group, which, despite its name, is not a bank — more of a sprawling global tech investing company.
This is hardly the first time a president has sought to gin up economic goodwill through agreements with companies on the promise of reviving American industry. But, as Trump knows well from his first term, these sorts of arrangements are often heavy on fanfare but light on actual value.
In perhaps the most famous example, Trump and Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn in 2017 announced plans to build a $10 billion electronics factory in Wisconsin and create 13,000 new jobs. But the company eventually abandoned most of its plans for the facility and the high-tech products it was set to build. In 2021, Foxconn said it would invest just $672 million in a revised deal that would create fewer than 1,500 jobs.
Foxconn has said that it invested $1 billion into the state, and it still has a major manufacturing site for data servers with more than 1,000 employees. But the facility Trump once touted as the center of the rebirth of American manufacturing has instead become the site of a future Microsoft data hub that aims to train employees and manufacturers to use AI.
This isn’t SoftBank’s first rodeo, either. Before Trump began his first term, the Japanese conglomerate committed to a $50 billion investment with grand promises of creating 50,000 new jobs. Included in that investment: a satellite startup called OneWeb, which at the time was seen as a competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink.
SoftBank, which did not respond to a request for comment, did invest roughly $75 billion in US companies through the company’s venture capital arm, the Vision Fund, CNN has learned. But SoftBank never made clear how many of those jobs it actually created — and how many were actually a result of a new investment.
A SoftBank spokesman previously told CNN that it had already been in talks with the OneWeb startup for “a long time.” (OneWeb eventually laid off most of its 500-plus staff and filed for bankruptcy in 2020. It was later acquired by a French satellite operator.)
Another example of overpromising: Back in 2009, when President Barack Obama was less than a month into his first term, he told Caterpillar employees that his nearly $800 billion economic stimulus plan could save some of their jobs, just weeks after the company announced it would lay off nearly a fifth of its workforce. But Caterpilllar’s leadership followed through with thousands of layoffs, telling NBC at the time that the stimulus wouldn’t move quickly enough.
Not every example of a big-name CEO making a big presentation with a president has gone bust. In 2017, Intel’s then-CEO Brian Krzanich pledged from the Oval Office to spend $7 billion to restart construction on a semiconductor factory in Arizona that had been mothballed. The factory opened in October 2020.
But you get the idea. Good intentions are great, and then they often encounter economic realities.
Son, who famously bet on Yahoo and Alibaba in the 1990s, is no stranger to those realities, especially in recent years. The SoftBank Vision Fund, his venture capital project that launched in 2017, has developed a reputation for backing major flops, including WeWork, the bankrupt co-working space company. Softbank also blew a billion dollars on Wirecard, the German payments company at the center of an international fraud investigation, shortly before the firm unraveled.
Bottom line: Son’s investment strategy may not always be on point, but Monday’s announcement was not a typical investment. The ROI comes from making Trump happy. Son is just the latest in a parade of billionaires who’ve been vying for Trump’s attention and affection. Others, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI boss Sam Altman, have opted to toss in a million bucks apiece to the president-elect’s inaugural fund.
They’re all after roughly the same thing: a spot on Trump’s “nice” list, or at least a shot at remaining off the “naughty” list for as long as possible.
CNN’s Kayla Tausche contributed to this report.
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