$SpaceX(SPCX.US) shorting SpaceX, repeatedly betting on the wrong track: the investment failures behind Masayoshi Son's grand narratives

SpaceX's listing on NASDAQ set a record for the world's largest IPO in history and is about to be included in the Nasdaq-100 Index. Established institutions like Sequoia have maintained long-term, firm holdings, with paper returns reaching tens of billions of dollars. The capital market generally recognizes the long-term value of commercial spaceflight and space computing power. However, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son publicly expressed bearish views on Musk's space ambitions, bluntly stating that the space data centers championed by SpaceX are not worth the cost and have little value, firmly believing that the outcome of AI competition depends solely on ground-based computing power and that he will not venture into the space track in the short term.

This statement once again exposes Son's consistent investment weakness: he tends to make extreme predictions but frequently misjudges, with many of his past major bets and public visions failing to materialize.

1. Unfulfilled Industry Prophecies

1. Pepper humanoid robots for mass adoption: Once claimed robots would be standard in every household, but the product experience was ultimately poor, production lines were shut down, and the vision for consumer robots completely collapsed.

2. Aggressive AI timeline: Boasted of achieving global AI infrastructure coverage by 2025 and AI replacing over 90% of jobs in the short term, but progress has fallen far short of those early expectations.

3. Overestimated WeWork's growth potential, claimed it could rival Alibaba, blindly drove up its valuation, completely ignoring the fatal flaws of shared office spaces having no technological moat and incurring continuous massive losses.

4. ARM's trillion-dollar IPO expectations fell through, with its stock price remaining below the issue price for a long time after listing, leading to a significant shrinkage in asset returns; earlier promised to retire at 60, later directly extended his tenure, rendering the promise void.

2. Projects SoftBank Heavily Invested In But Exited With Huge Losses

1. WeWork: Cumulative investment of nearly $20 billion, valuation plummeted from $47 billion to nearly zero, the company went bankrupt, causing the Vision Fund to suffer massive losses.

2. Boston Dynamics: Acquired the humanoid robotics company at a high price, failed to commercialize it for years, sold most of its stake at a low price.

3. OneWeb satellites, Wirecard payments, Brandless budget e-commerce: The first went bankrupt due to cash flow issues and underwent restructuring; the latter two exposed operational/financial scandals, resulting in total loss of investment.

4. Sprint telecom, Uber, Didi: Made large, concentrated investments, suffered long-term losses with persistently low stock prices, returns fell far short of expectations.

5. Perfectly missed NVIDIA: Entered at low prices early on, liquidated all holdings before the AI boom, missed out on hundreds of billions in gains, later publicly expressed regret.

After his legendary success with Alibaba, Masayoshi Son has often used extremely grand future narratives to leverage capital, but repeatedly overlooked fundamental flaws in business models and made frequent errors in judging long-term tracks and timing. While dismissing the currently hot SpaceX space computing power route, he holds a long list of unfulfilled blueprints and loss-making investments. The capital market has no permanently accurate prophets; narratives that are too far ahead of industrial realities will ultimately lead to repeatedly stepping into pitfalls.