SoftBank Just Bet $40 Billion on OpenAI—And That's Not Even the Week's Biggest Story
When you casually exit a $5.8 billion Nvidia position to fund your next bet, you’re either catastrophically wrong or playing a different game than everyone else. SoftBank chose the latter this week, dumping those chips into a $40 billion stake in OpenAI. That’s not a typo. Forty. Billion. Dollars. For context, that’s roughly what Disney paid for Fox’s entertainment assets, or what Microsoft spent acquiring Activision Blizzard after a year-long regulatory cage match. Except SoftBank just did it for a slice—about 10%—of a company that makes chatbots. Well, chatbots that happen to be reshaping how we work, write, and think about intelligence itself. ...