TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025: SoftBank
'AI is a defining force that will shape the future of humanity. We must think big,' says Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank. And by big, he means historic. In March, the Japanese banking giant invested $30 billion in OpenAI, the largest private tech deal in history, cementing SoftBank's influence in the race to scale AI. Its impact is also evident in the massive Stargate project, chaired by Son. Unveiled in January and backed by SoftBank, OpenAI, and other investors, the joint venture will plow at least $500 billion into building AI-focused data centers across the U.S. Meanwhile, SoftBank may pour about $1 trillion into building AI-powered robot factories to address U.S. labor shortages. And in April, feeling bullish on crypto in the Trump 2.0 era, the company announced it would back a $3.6 billion bitcoin venture.
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OpenAI's Sam Altman Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has become one of Silicon Valley's most prominent tech giants thanks to OpenAI 's premier product, ChatGPT. The company launched a chatbot demo in 2022, and it quickly went viral on social media as people inquired about everything from diets to recipes. Over the last three years, OpenAI has shared more advanced GPT programs with users and is working to expand its global reach despite competition from Chinese tech companies like DeepSeek. This January, President Donald Trump announced a $500 billion private-sector investment in AI infrastructure called Stargate. OpenAI was among the companies asked to help with that project. So, it's unsurprising that Altman uses AI to streamline tasks his his personal life. Altman appeared on Adam Grant's "ReThinking" podcast this January, saying, "Honestly, I use it in the boring ways." Altman said the AI bots help him process emails or summarize documents. 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Zillow's Jeremy Wacksman Real estate tech companies like Zillow are also leaning into AI. The company announced in 2023 that it implemented an "AI-powered natural-language search" to help users navigate the website. CEO Jeremy Wacksman, like the other executives, has begun using AI to be more efficient. "I spend a lot of time either catching up on meetings I've missed or on asynchronous documentation," Wacksman told The New York Times Dealbook. "You can tell ChatGPT, 'Treat me like my role. Here's all this data — summarize it for me the way I would need to know going forward,' and you can get a personalized summary. That's just — that's far more valuable to me than to try to read a transcript at one-and-a-half speed or watch a video at one-and-a-half speed." Wacksman added that he wants Zillow staffers to experiment with the technology. "We've had what we call 'AI days,' where we showcase work and celebrate examples," Wacksman said. "We've also started weaving it into our bigger meetings, like product reviews: When a product manager-design-engineering team is prototyping, oftentimes, they're now using an AI tool called Replit. They're prototyping really quickly to get something in front of a user."
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an hour ago
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The 15 Best Deals of the Week (Including a Sale on Japanese Pantry Staples)
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