Masayoshi Son is paying the price for the third time in his career. If he still has a pair of swimming trunks, it's thanks primarily to his two historic investments in Alibaba and Arm Holdings - and to his decidedly extraordinary "chutzpah" (a form of insolent audacity).

The value of the investment in Alibaba, it should be remembered, has been multiplied by x1300 in the space of twenty-three years, while Arm will be listed on the US market in the coming months. Together with investments in operators SBKK and T-Mobile, these four listed holdings represent almost half of the net asset value.

The other half is the famous Vision Fund. From an unrealized capital gain of $66 billion at the peak of the pandemic, the fund has moved to an unrealized capital loss of $8.5 billion in 2023. It's highly likely that the former has been over-inflated, and the latter downplayed - that goes without saying.

"Focused on defense", he explains, Masayoshi Son invested $15.6 billion in the first quarter of 2021, at the height of the speculative peak. Over the full year 2022, the amounts invested fall to $3.2 billion despite the deflation of the bubble and plummeting valuations. A strange sense of timing.

Yesterday, Softbank's Chairman delivered to his shareholders the kind of epic presentation for which he has the secret. This morning, the press is reveling in the best parts from the era of "super-humans" to Son's determination to "rule the world". All, of course, wrapped up in artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

In the meantime, Softbank's net asset value - theoretical and, let's repeat, very likely over-inflated - is back where it was ten years ago. Son would probably have been well advised to liquidate everything during the pandemic, then go on vacation.

This is also what the market thinks: the market capitalization of $69 billion represents a 35% discount on the - theoretical - net asset value of $105 billion. The gargantuan share buy-backs - between $35 and $40 billion accumulated over the last five years - have so far done nothing to change this.