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If you rue missing out on the monster rally in Nvidia<\/a> shares, know that you\u2019re in good company. Even the savviest of tech investors can get it all wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n Masayoshi Son, founder of the legendary Softbank Vision Fund, missed out on his biggest deal ever even though it was directly within his grasp.\u00a0<\/p>\n Japan\u2019s wealthiest man owned 5% of the chip vendor behind the AI revolution, a position currently worth<\/a> about $160 billion. Instead he dumped the entire stake more than five years ago, when it was worth less than $4 billion, after a perilous drop in the stock threatened his fund\u2019s performance.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI had to tearfully sell the shares,\u201d Son told Softbank shareholders today at the firm\u2019s annual meeting, according to remarks cited by the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>. \u201cThe fish that got away was big.\u201d<\/p>\n Had he held on, it would be more valuable than his prescient investment in Alibaba, in which his holding company, Softbank, was at one point the largest shareholder.<\/p>\n Son is best known for being an early investor in Jack Ma\u2019s Chinese e-commerce platform, when Softbank poured $20 million into AliBaba in 2000. The value of its stake eventually reached $60 billion when the Amazon<\/a> rival went public in 2014, the\u00a0largest IPO in history<\/a>\u00a0until Saudi Aramco<\/a>.<\/p>\n Son parlayed that success into his next endeavor\u2014the creation three years later of Softbank\u2019s Vision Fund. Until then, no one ever had the audacity to try and raise\u00a0$100 billion<\/a>\u00a0into a single investment vehicle that would deploy its capital in disruptive technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n Armed with this unprecedented firepower, it made billion-dollar bets in ride hailing leader Uber<\/a>, enterprise software provider Slack and, less successfully, office-sharing company WeWork<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of those it bought into straight away was Nvidia, which had been minting money at the time selling graphics cards to crypto miners up until a prolonged \u201changover<\/a>\u201d as CEO Jensen Huang described it. The sentiment swing led to a brutal\u00a050% drawdown<\/a>\u00a0in value in the space of four months, and Son ended up selling his shares what would turn out to be very prematurely.<\/p>\n In February 2019, Softbank revealed it had\u00a0exited its position<\/a>\u00a0entirely when it was worth around $3.6 billion. Had Son held on, he would have made far more money for Softbank and its Vision Fund investors than he ever did with Amazon.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s frustrating to remember the ones that I missed,\u201d Son conceded.<\/p>\n To make good, the Softbank founder is working on a new $100 billion fund<\/a> for artificial super intelligence<\/a> (ASI) named after the Shinto\u00a0god of creation<\/a>\u00a0Izanagi. Asked about the plans, Son declined to go into details but promised it would be as grand as the name implied and even suggested it was why he was put on this Earth.<\/p>\n Referring to himself in the third person, he said: \u201cI seriously believe the reason why Masayoshi Son was born is to make ASI come true.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nSubscribe to the Fortune Next to Lead newsletter to get weekly strategies on how to make it to the corner office. Sign up for free<\/a> before it launches on June 24, 2024.<\/div>\n