The man who bought everything

Mitsunori Son was a nine-year-old boy who dreamed of a better life for his family.

As ethnic Koreans known as Zainichi they were treated as second -class citizens by a beaten and embittered society.

Masa was 16 when he travelled to America , where he completed high school and enrolled at University of California, Berkeley , spending six years in the state.

Aged 24 , with a growing business, he went for a routine health check and was told he had incurable liver disease that could kill him within a year .

Son bought a third of the search company Yahoo , which he valued at more than ten times the figure arrived at by the company’s other investors.

For a brief period during the very peak of the dot-com bubble, his wealth was growing by more than a billion dollars a day.

For about three days he was the richest man in the world.

Then the bubble popped, and he lost an estimated $70bn .

This is not the real future, this is not what we might think of as a real business. It is a game, the game of saying yes, and no one plays it like Masayoshi Son . Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan ’s Masayoshi Son Lionel Barber Allen Lane , 416pp , 30 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org , who support independent bookshops.