[Part I] Ex-SoftBank Group CFO Alok Sama on Masa Son, startup IPOs, money trap, and more

“Control? This is the grand illusion... Money doesn’t give you control, it buys you a nicer coat.”

That’s Alok Sama’s inner monologue as Mossad spies in London inform him of an intricate global conspiracy and “dark-arts smear campaign” to remove him from his elite job where he “controls billions of dollars”.

The year was 2017, and Sama was serving as the President and CFO of SoftBank Group International. Sama was already seen as the proverbial right hand and trusted dealmaker of the Japanese conglomerate and venture capital firm’s maverick head Masayoshi Son.

Along with Nikesh Arora (now the CEO of Palo Alto Networks), Sama emerged as one of the Group’s two most powerful global executives influencing the financial corridors of New York, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo, while giving wings to Masa’s “crazy guy” vision. This saw SoftBank birthing a brash “spray and pray” investing market and raising tech valuations to stratospheric heights over the past decade.

Sample this: From 2013 to 2023, SoftBank caused the combined market value of all unicorns to skyrocket from $100 billion to $5 trillion, marking up entire portfolios of venture capital biggies like Sequoia. SoftBank was raising “a billion dollars a minute” in 2016 for its gargantuan Vision Fund, which Sama later realised was the “sacred cow”, while he, on the other hand, became “expendable” despite his proximity to Son.

The global smear campaign that cost over a million dollars and recruited “prominent New York lawyers, expensive intelligence agencies in London, and shady operators in Geneva”—as Sama describes in his riveting tell-all book ‘The Money Trap: Grand Fortunes and Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble’ published by Pan Macmillan this year—brought a premature end to his high-flying role at SoftBank in early 2020.