Chalk and cheese: When Steve Schwarzman first met Masayoshi Son

• Chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group Stephen Schwarzman is one of the world’s largest alternative investment firms.
• Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of Japanese investment giant Softbank, has groomed some of the world’s biggest startups from Alibaba to Uber.
• They first met in a restaurant in Davos in 2001.

Stephen Schwarzman is the Chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest alternative investment firms and Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of Japanese investment giant Softbank, has groomed some of the world’s biggest startups from Alibaba to Uber.

But even while staying away from publicly-listed companies and looking for outsized returns in relatively less-explored spaces, both Schwarzman and Son could be described as different as chalk and cheese.

This was clear from their first meeting itself. “The first time I met him (Masayoshi Son) it was in Davos (Switzerland) in 2001 in a restaurant where the food was not great. I said “tell me about yourself.” He said I was the richest man last year, and this year I have lost 99%,” Schwarzman revealed at the ET Global Business Summit in New Delhi on March 6.

Schwarzman was quite taken aback by the volatility in Son’s career and at the same time his calm demeanour in the face of such extreme swings in fortune.

But the private equity giant explained why he thinks Son is a genius. “Amazon never made any profits for about 20 years it kept growing but never made money. It kept driving other people out of business. Today, Jeff is the richest man and an unstoppable force,” Schwarzman said.

“There were a lot of such startups. They call them unicorns because they don’t make any money. I came from a more traditional background where if you dont make money something bad happened to you,” he added.

Masayoshi Son entered this risky space where Steve Schwarzman won’t venture into. “Banks will never give them money. Masa saw an opportunity; If he can be the only guy who can finance these companies and it was a stroke of genius,” Schwarzman said, adding that this was as big as Michael Milken who started the junk bond market in the 1970s that changed the world of finance forever.


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