Bloomberg
How Masayoshi Son’s ‘Money Guy’ Lex Greensill Went From Hero to Zero
(Bloomberg) — In February 2020, SoftBank Group Corp.’s Masayoshi Son visited Indonesia, offering to invest billions of dollars toward the development of a new capital city. Lex Greensill, at the time a favorite of Son’s, was part of the entourage.SoftBank had invested $1.5 billion in Greensill’s eponymous finance company, but in a meeting with Indonesian president Joko Widodo, Son introduced Greensill as the “money guy,” according to local TV footage.One year later, the money guy has become a money pit. Greensill Capital collapsed in March in one of the most spectacular financial blow-ups of recent years, sending shock waves through a Swiss banking giant, two of Japan’s largest firms and a British tycoon’s industrial empire.Son has had to write down his investment, making it among the worst in the history of his Vision Fund, alongside the implosion of WeWork Cos., another SoftBank portfolio company. That’s unlikely to prevent SoftBank from posting its strongest quarter on record, including a profit of more than $30 billion at the Vision Fund, thanks to the IPO of South Korean e-commerce firm Coupang Inc. and a soaring valuation of Chinese ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing Technology Co., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Still, the episode underscores the risks of Son’s strategy of taking big equity stakes in startups and then encouraging those portfolio…
