By February 2000 Masayoshi Son was making $10 billion a week, and for three days he was richer than Bill Gates. Six months later his stock had fallen 99 percent and $70 billion of his own money was gone. Fourteen years later one $20 million bet he had never sold was worth $90 billion. He had built SoftBank selling software, then started buying the internet before most people had used it. He put $100 million into Yahoo when it had fifteen employees. By 1999 his net worth was climbing faster than anyone's in history. Then the market turned and kept turning for six months. He almost went bankrupt. There is a recording of him walking through all of it in careful, unhurried English, stopping to find the words. No spin, no lesson bolted on the end. He names the number he lost and the three days he spent above Bill Gates, and softens neither. Watch the part where he explains why he backed Jack Ma. Alibaba had no business plan, no revenue and about forty employees. Son handed him $20 million anyway. He says he did it because of the man's eyes, that they were strong and shining. He was not buying the company. He was buying the person running it. That $20 million came back as $90 billion, four and a half thousand times his money, on a business whose plan he thought was wrong. People think the trick was picking Alibaba. He made that bet the same year everything collapsed, and it paid him nothing for fourteen years. The skill was staying in business long enough to still own it. You judge a decision by what it did this year. His best one looked dead for over a decade. The bet that made him whole was already on the books before the crash that nearly finished him. The largest loss in human history did not make him careful. He still writes cheques on the way a man talks.