The Story Doesn’t Match the Vision

Bloomberg Businessweek has a big hilarious story about SoftBank Group Corp.’s messy Vision Fund, which invests $100 billion of largely Saudi money into an odd collection of startups, especially WeWork. I don’t really know what to think about the Vision Fund, which is run by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son. I make fun of it around here sometimes, because it is funny. The story has more funny anecdotes to make fun of. But it’s not obvious that the Vision Fund is bad. Like, at investing. It has some hits and some misses. The current mark to market on WeWork is terrible, but maybe it’ll all work out and the story will be that SoftBank was bold and brilliant in buying WeWork cheap because the public didn’t want it. Uber seems to be another black eye. But there have been some nice wins. Overall returns for the fund seem to be positive.

It would be sort of satisfying, after months of making fun of WeWork, to read that the Vision Fund is a disaster and no one there knows what they’re doing. But that’s not quite the lesson of this story; the fund has lots of sophisticated investment professionals, and it’s not all a disaster. It’s just all … weird. It’s sort of random. There’s no theme: