SoftBank Group Corp. leader Masayoshi Son has much bigger ambitions for transportation than simply seeing his investment in Uber Technologies Inc. turn into more than $13 billion when the company goes public next month.
The Japanese entrepreneur is placing a $60 billion bet in more than 40 companies in a bid to steer the $3 trillion global automotive industry now dominated by vehicles people own and drive to a spectrum of transportation services available at the touch of a smartphone app. Those services range from ride-hailing and car-sharing to delivery robots and self-driving vehicles.
The extent of those investments, based on a Reuters analysis of publicly available data and interviews with a dozen sources familiar with SoftBank's investment strategy, has not previously been reported. They show how Son has emerged as one of the power players trying to influence how people and goods move about the world in the coming decades.
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