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SoftBank CEO says Khashoggi killing may have impact on Saudi-backed Vision Fund
- arbuge 8y ago> "At the same time, we have also accepted the responsibility to the people of Saudi Arabia, an obligation we take quite seriously to help them manage their financial resources and diversify their economy," said Son. “So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” - Benjamin Franklin
- netsharc 8y agoHah, indeed. Since when is that money realistically the money of the Saudi Arabian people anyway, it's the money of their butchering royal family. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
- 7000skeletons 8y agoBy "people of Saudi Arabia", he's meaning the rich elites and the princes. I lived in that country for a couple of years. The wealth gap there is truly staggering.
- gautamdivgi 8y agolol - yes. That entire article was a very long-winded way of saying "they've got a lot of money so we really don't care about what they do"
- brohee 8y ago> Son said he had not heard of any companies saying they would not want to accept investments from the Vision Fund due to its relationship with Saudi Arabia's PIF Anybody expected otherwise? Many Softbank investments would be in companies that eagerly sells their users to the highest bidders, hardly paragons of virtue...
- loceng 8y agoSurely they don't want to end up like the journalist. Would there be enough employee support to publicly protest?
- gaius 8y agoIf someone is gay working for a Softbank-backed venture then they are quite literally helping to enrich and ensure the longevity of a regime that executes people like them. I am genuinely surprised that this isn't considered a huge issue in Silly Valley.
- wiz21c 8y agoSorry for my super naive question, but since 45 billions of saudi money is in the fund and that fund is said to be 100 billions, does it mean that saudi owns 45% of it and, consequently, more or less 45% of the stuff it funded (be it by shares, intellectual prperty or whatever mean) ???
- jartelt 8y agoThe Saudis are limited partners in the fund, so they don't really have any control over the investments. Investment decisions are left up to the general partner, Softbank. Once the fund reaches maturity and the profits are distributed, the Saudis would get paid (they would get close to 45% of the fund earnings) in cash or shares in the portfolio companies.
- mbesto 8y ago^ This Good graphic on this page that explains it nicely: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-limited-partners-LPs-and-general-partners-GPs-in-the-venture-capital-business https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-limited... Given that the fund is so highly concentrated by one LP, there is a (chilling) hypothetical situation that they (KSA wealth fund) could overstep the traditional bounds of a LP and taking more controlling interests of portfolio companies. This is a new territory where little precedence has been set because (1) we're dealing with international money (2) the size of the fund (3) the funding concentration.
- jacquesm 8y agoOnly if the fund itself already has a controlling interest in the portfolio companies. Otherwise you can just tell them to take a hike.
- mbesto 8y agoWhich is precisely the speculation of the Vision Fund: http://fortune.com/2018/10/10/softbank-visionfund-wework-majority-stake/ http://fortune.com/2018/10/10/softbank-visionfund-wework-maj... (and why I mentioned it)
- exogeny 8y agoWhat a soft, weak, non-stance of a stance.
- dmix 8y agoI agree: > We don’t yet know the clear understanding of the case this is clearly bullshit, we know what happened and regardless of authority chains it was still a normal function of the backwards Kingdom come fully to light. But at the same time controlling $45 billion dollars of someone's money will make you choose your words carefully.
- crwalker 8y agoWeak. SoftBank has always seemed suspiciously large and cavalier. I expect there's a venture analog to the expression "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." Let's hope they stick the WeWork landing ...
- rayvy 8y ago> "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." First time ever hearing this. What an interesting expression
- mikeyouse 8y agoI've heard it with climbers and soldiers as well, seems like it works across many fields.
- crwalker 8y agoIt's a simple way to express the difference between probabilities for an ensemble of game players and probabilities for a particular player over time. If the player is ruined, the game stops for them. More from Taleb: https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf41029d3 https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf410... --edit: added "for them"
- erikpukinskis 8y agoOptimal strategy is probably a curve: start compliant, follow the rules, be conservative, then take bigger and bigger risks until you can go “all in” on a series of risky bets, and if you aren’t obliterated dial back your risks to favor longevity. If you are obliterated, well, you served the population. This is probably more psychologically palettable for men than women. Although some women can do it for sure. Just... well at the population level it doesn’t make nearly as much sense evolutionarily for folks with wombs to take these kinds of risks as folks producing sperm.
- liftbigweights 8y agoJust to play devil's advocate here. What is it that people want? Countries and companies to stop doing business with murderous regimes and governments? Then who is there to do business with? Should anybody do business with the US, EU, China, Russia, etc? It's crazy how millions are suffering in Yemen due to saudi/US/EU backed war and yet the entire media apparatus is going crazy over one person. Makes me wonder what's really going on here.
- umeshunni 8y agoYou're being brigaded/downvoted, but to answer your question - the real reason there's manufactured outrage over this killing in the US is that Khashoggi worked for an influential US media company (WaPo). Otherwise, this is just a case of the Saudi administration 'taking care of' one of their own who turned against them. For the last few years, the Saudi regime has been kidnapping and imprisoning others who have done the same, only with limited external reporting and even less outrage. BBC Newsnight had a fascinating report in this about a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2KYQWPUbG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2KYQWPUbG4 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40926963 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40926963 [transcript]
- Aqueous 8y agoAnother significant reason for the (non-manufactured) outrage is that the man who ordered the murder, Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (a.k.a. MBS) is much, much too close with Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of the current President of the U.S and a senior White House official. There are questions about Kushner's connection to this killing, whether he and Trump could have stopped it but chose not to (because they have been in possession of intelligence that warned them it was going to happen), or worse, whether, in fact, they deliberately allowed the killing to happen. These questions are still unanswered. This isn't about America's selective attention or double standards. Dictators and despots in foreign countries feel free to murder journalists from the US media because Trump has given them, either implicitly or worse, permission to do so.
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- milin 8y agoWhat a pathetic excuse of an address
- sandworm101 8y agoWhat about the fact that the killing was botched? Isn't that telling of dysfunction within the Saudi Administration? There are professional people in this world that can handle such situations. The Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the all have people who can clean up a mess well enough to keep things away from the media. But such people are professionals. This saudi team looks more like a bunch of frat boys: well-educated but where they are because of connections. The operations smacks of "assassination for dummies." These people had not done this before. They didn't have a playbook. They were inventing everything. My point: The Saudi regime doesn't use professionals, doesn't know how to employ experts. Instead they employ friends and family. That deficiency surely bleeds into other areas too.
- throw7 8y agoThe Russians are worse to me... their botch up hit job actually killed a british citizen. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if that happened on u.s. soil?
- sandworm101 8y agoWhen the Russians "botch" a job they do so with a reason. If you want to quietly disappear someone you don't do it with chemical weapons or radioactive material. You use such things when you want people to know about it, when the goal is remind everyone exactly who they are dealing with. Dig into things and you will find lots of Russian agitators disappearing under suspicious circumstances. They know how to do things properly when they want to. They don't dress up in the dead man's clothes and do a little dance for the cameras. Whether any killings have happened on US soil is an open question. But, without mentioning the T word, I think not much would happen. Both chemical and a nuclear weapon were deployed in Britain ... and Russian operatives still move in and out of the UK freely. Russian money still invests in London real estate. I don't see why anything different would happen in the US.
- brohee 8y agoWhat do you mean by nuclear? If you think polonium, it's lethality is not linked to it's radioactivity, it's purely chemical.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoI have a feeling that soon this will be forgotten. His family will get $50 million from SA and an "apology"...and within a few months to years, the world will focus on the next horrible thing. Maybe the Saudi money will be slightly laundered with bigger funds so "we didn't get Saudi money, the fund we got the money from has a lot of investors" and the world will keep going. Money and geopolitics talk. He, a commoner, already caused a lot of problems to a soon-to-be King. If he was in SA, he would have been charged with espionage or whatever and left to rot in jail or beheaded, with virtually no complaints.
- Animats 8y agoThis is going to be interesting. Until recently, SoftBank was thought of as being a Japanese operation. Now they seem to be a front for Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. They seem to be the world's largest source of dumb money. They keep Uber afloat. $375M for a pizza making robot company. WeWork. Cruise. $300 million in Wag, a dog-walking company. They do have big stakes in ARM and NVidia, which actually make useful stuff profitably. But the investments in the last two years have been strange. The goal may not be profitability, but influence. The Cruise investment gives them some pull at GM. The WeWork investment gives them some pull in the US real estate market. The Uber investment lets them influence the future of transportation. Those all make strategic sense for an oil power. Someone there likes robots; they bought most of the robot companies Google dumped, plus a few others. [1] https://www.recode.net/2018/2/5/16974032/this-is-where-chart-softbank-vision-fund-masayoshi-son-venture-capital https://www.recode.net/2018/2/5/16974032/this-is-where-chart...
- erikpukinskis 8y ago> The goal may not be profitability, but influence. Or money laundering?