According to The Information, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is planning to borrow $16 billion to invest in AI, and may borrow another $8 billion next year. The following points are drawn from The Information’s reporting, and I give serious props to Juro Osawa and Cory Weinberg for their work.

SoftBank currently only has $31 billion in cash on its balance sheet as of December. Its net debt — which, despite what you think, doesn’t measure total debt but rather represents its cash minus any debt liabilities — stands at $29 billion.. They plan to use the loan in question to finance part of their investment in OpenAI and their acquisition of chip design firm Ampere.

According to SoftBank’s reported assets, their holdings are worth about $219 billion (33.66 trillion yen), including stock in companies like Alibaba and ARM.

am I reading this correctly: softbank has $50 billion in debt, equal to about 25% of their total assets? is that... normal? these are genuine questions, not sure whether I'm misunderstanding something/whether this is actually usual