Who owns SoftBank? Ownership structure explained (2026)

SoftBank is one of the most recognizable names in global technology investing, yet its ownership is often misunderstood. The confusion starts with the name. "SoftBank" refers to two different listed companies. SoftBank Group Corp. is the Tokyo-listed holding and investment company that owns stakes in businesses around the world. SoftBank Corp. is its Japanese telecom subsidiary, a separate listed company that runs the mobile network most Japanese consumers think of as SoftBank. This article is about the parent, SoftBank Group, the entity that controls the Vision Funds and the Arm stake.

Understanding SoftBank's ownership matters because control here is unusually concentrated for a public company of its size. Masayoshi Son does not just run SoftBank Group. He effectively owns enough of it to block resolutions he opposes and to steer tens of billions of dollars into bets few boards would approve. That combination of public capital and founder control shapes every part of the story.

SoftBank Group traces its start to September 1981, when Masayoshi Son founded the company in Tokyo as Nihon SoftBank, a wholesale distributor of packaged PC software. Son was 24 and had recently returned from the University of California, Berkeley. The distribution business gave him a foothold in Japan's early technology market, which he used to expand into publishing, internet, and telecom investments.

The company listed its shares in Japan in 1994 and spent the next two decades transforming into a global investor. Two bets defined the early period. In 2000, Son invested about $20 million in a young Chinese company called Alibaba, a stake that would later be worth tens of billions of dollars. In 2006, SoftBank acquired Vodafone's Japanese mobile business and rebranded it, establishing the telecom operation that anchors its cash flow in Japan today.

SoftBank Group is now a holding and investment company headquartered in Tokyo and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under the ticker 9984. It reports its worth primarily through net asset value, the estimated value of its holdings minus its debt, rather than through operating revenue alone. As of June 2026, SoftBank reported record net asset value above ¥72 trillion, roughly $445 billion, and for the fiscal year ended March 2026 it reported net income of about ¥5 trillion. Its market capitalization sat near $200 billion in August 2026, a gap from net asset value that reflects the market's long-standing discount on Son's holding company. That kind of asset-heavy structure is the type of business a business valuation calculator helps put in perspective.

SoftBank Group is a publicly traded company. Its shares are listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under the ticker 9984, and they trade freely alongside American depositary receipts under the symbol SFTBY. In that sense, anyone can own a piece of SoftBank.

Control, however, does not follow the usual dispersed pattern of a large public company. Masayoshi Son holds a large enough personal stake to dominate shareholder votes. SoftBank is public in its financing and its disclosure, but founder-controlled in its decision-making.

Masayoshi Son is by far the largest shareholder in SoftBank Group. As of March 2026, he personally held roughly 30% of the company's shares, with an additional slice held through Son Assets Management, LLC, a private holding vehicle he controls. Counting both, his effective stake is in the mid-30s, reported at around 34%.

That figure is not a rounding detail. Under Japanese corporate law, a shareholder with more than one-third of the votes can block special resolutions, the category that covers major structural decisions such as large share issuances, mergers, and changes to the articles of incorporation. Son has steadily increased his stake over recent years, in part through the company's buybacks, which shrink the share count and lift the proportion held by shareholders who do not sell. His control is therefore both economic and legal.

SoftBank Group is a mature public company rather than a venture-backed startup, so it does not have a conventional sequence of priced funding rounds. Its capital has come from its Japanese IPO, from decades of debt issuance, and from the outside money it has raised into its investment vehicles. The table below summarizes the major capital events behind SoftBank's activities.

The Vision Funds are the key to understanding SoftBank's outside investors. Vision Fund 1, launched in 2017, gathered close to $100 billion, anchored by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala, with additional commitments from Apple, Foxconn, Qualcomm, and Sharp. Vision Fund 2, launched in 2019, is funded mainly by SoftBank Group itself after outside investors grew cautious following early losses. These funds sit under SoftBank Group but bring in third-party capital, so their limited partners back SoftBank's strategy without being shareholders in the parent company.

Because SoftBank Group is public, its shares beyond Son's block are held by a mix of Japanese and foreign institutions and retail investors. As of March 2026, individuals and others held about 38% of the stock, foreign institutions and individuals about 30%, and Japanese financial institutions about 25%.

The Master Trust Bank of Japan is the single largest institutional holder, controlling roughly 16% of shares through its trust accounts. It is a custodial bank, meaning it holds shares on behalf of Japanese pension funds, insurers, and asset managers rather than owning them for its own account. Other custodial and trust holders round out the institutional block, and foreign asset managers own the shares that trade internationally. None of these institutions comes close to challenging Son's control, which is the defining feature of SoftBank's cap table.

As a Tokyo-listed company, SoftBank Group files regular disclosures, holds an annual shareholders meeting, and is overseen by a board of directors. Its single class of common stock means votes track ownership, with no special founder share class. Son needs none. His roughly one-third stake sets the outcome of contested resolutions in a company where the rest of the register is fragmented.

Masayoshi Son is the central figure in every sense at SoftBank. He founded the company in 1981, built it into a global investor, and remains its chairman, CEO, and representative director more than four decades later. He is also its largest owner. That fusion of founder, chief executive, chairman, and controlling shareholder concentrates authority in one person to a degree that is rare among companies of SoftBank's scale. Son personally drove the largest wins, such as the early Alibaba investment, and the largest losses, such as the WeWork bet.

Yoshimitsu Goto serves as chief financial officer and a board director, and he is the executive most responsible for managing SoftBank's heavy use of debt and its financing of new AI commitments. A senior management group oversees the Vision Funds, the Arm relationship, and the Japanese telecom business, but strategy still flows from Son. The company has seen a long history of senior departures, including Nikesh Arora, once seen as Son's heir apparent, who left in 2016.

As of mid-2026, SoftBank Group's board consisted of around 13 directors, including roughly seven independent external directors, a mix the company has expanded in response to governance criticism. External directors have included Rene Haas, the CEO of Arm, alongside academics and business figures such as Yutaka Matsuo and David Chao. The board provides oversight, but because Son holds a controlling stake and chairs the company, its independent directors check management within limits set by a controlling owner rather than governing a widely held firm.

The most persistent concern raised about SoftBank is governance concentration. Son is founder, chairman, CEO, and controlling shareholder at once, and his roughly one-third stake lets him block special resolutions that other shareholders might favor. Supporters argue this lets him pursue long-term bets that a committee would never approve. Critics argue it removes a meaningful check on a single person's risk appetite. The lack of a clear, tested succession plan deepens the concern, since the company's direction depends heavily on one founder who is in his late sixties. Investors weighing that dependence often treat it the way they would any concentrated risk, the kind captured in a formal risk register.

SoftBank's investment in WeWork became the defining example of its governance risk. Son pushed capital from both SoftBank Group and the Vision Fund into the office-sharing company, lifting its private valuation to about $47 billion in early 2019. WeWork's planned IPO then collapsed amid scrutiny of its finances and its founder, and SoftBank was forced to rescue it. Son publicly admitted his judgment had been wrong. The episode cost SoftBank billions, contributed to the group's worst annual loss, and made the outside investors who had backed Vision Fund 1 far more cautious about a sequel.

SoftBank funds its ambitions with heavy borrowing, and its debt load is a recurring source of scrutiny. The company has taken large margin loans against its most valuable holdings, including its Arm shares, to raise cash without selling them outright. That leverage magnifies both gains and losses. The persistent gap between SoftBank's net asset value and its market capitalization has drawn activist investors, including Elliott Management, which has pressed for buybacks and clearer governance to close the discount.

SoftBank's recent strategy has narrowed around artificial intelligence. Its value increasingly rests on a small number of large positions: its majority stake in Arm, its multibillion-dollar commitment to OpenAI, its role in the Stargate data center project alongside Oracle and others, and its purchase of chip maker Ampere Computing. If the AI investment cycle disappoints, the concentration that could produce enormous gains could just as easily produce steep losses.

Ownership is the key to understanding how SoftBank behaves, because control here rests with one person rather than a board answering to dispersed shareholders. Masayoshi Son can commit tens of billions of dollars to a single idea, absorb a loss that would end most executives' careers, and keep going. That is possible only because he owns enough of the company to withstand the pressure that outside owners would otherwise apply. The upside is conviction and speed. The downside is that the company's fortunes rise and fall with the judgment of its founder.

For investors, this structure is a double-edged proposition. Buying SoftBank stock means buying into Son's vision and accepting that he, not the market, sets the risk level. The persistent discount between SoftBank's net asset value and its share price reflects that trade-off. Shareholders get exposure to prized assets like Arm and, increasingly, to the AI buildout, but they get it filtered through a holding company they cannot steer. The activist interest from firms like Elliott is a direct response to that gap.

The distinction between the two SoftBanks matters here too. SoftBank Group is the investment company Son controls. SoftBank Corp., the Japanese telecom business, is a separate listed company in which the group holds a large but no longer full stake. Investors who want the mobile network buy the subsidiary; those who want the Vision Funds and the Arm stake buy the parent.

For the companies inside SoftBank's portfolio, ownership by a Son-controlled parent brings both patient capital and key-person risk. A founder who can move quickly is a valuable backer in a capital-intensive field like AI infrastructure, where its bets on OpenAI and partners such as Oracle require staying power. But dependence on one investor's continued conviction, and on the debt he raises to fund it, is a risk portfolio companies inherit whether they like it or not.

SoftBank Group Corp. is a public company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under the ticker 9984, so its shares are owned by public investors. Control, however, rests with founder Masayoshi Son, who holds roughly 30% personally and about 34% counting shares held through his private vehicle, Son Assets Management. Institutions, led by The Master Trust Bank of Japan as a custodial holder, own most of the rest.

Yes. SoftBank Group trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under the ticker 9984 and through American depositary receipts under the symbol SFTBY. Its Japanese telecom subsidiary, SoftBank Corp., is separately listed under the ticker 9434, and SoftBank Group holds a large stake in it rather than owning it fully after the subsidiary's 2018 IPO.

Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank in Tokyo in 1981 as a distributor of PC software. He built it into a global technology investor and still serves as chairman and CEO more than four decades later. He is also the company's largest shareholder, which makes him both its leader and its controlling owner.

The largest shareholder by far is founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, with an effective stake of around 34% counting his personal holdings and Son Assets Management. The largest institutional holder is The Master Trust Bank of Japan, a custodial bank holding roughly 16% on behalf of Japanese pension and insurance funds. Foreign institutions and individual investors own most of the remaining shares.

SoftBank Group carried a market capitalization near $200 billion in August 2026. The company also reports net asset value, its holdings minus debt, which reached a record above ¥72 trillion, roughly $445 billion, in mid-2026. The gap between the two reflects a long-standing market discount on Son's holding company. Its value is driven heavily by its majority stake in chip designer Arm, whose own market value has topped $300 billion, and by its expanding AI bets alongside chipmakers like Nvidia.

SoftBank's roughly $20 million investment in Alibaba in 2000 grew into one of the most profitable venture bets in history, worth tens of billions of dollars at its peak. Over the 2020s, SoftBank sold down most of that position to raise cash, reducing its stake from around 24% to roughly 15% and, through forward contracts, monetizing much of what remained. The proceeds helped fund buybacks and its pivot toward artificial intelligence.