My dad gave me some life advice as a kid: If I wanted to make money in my career, I needed to be close to money. Now, we had immigrated from Hong Kong, back then the premier financial hub in Asia, and he was channeling a bit of the prestige—and mystique—that commoners in HK felt about the city’s vaunted finance industry. I did take that advice to heart, though; a lot of my career intersects with the industry in some way, including the bulk of my software industry experience residing solidly in the FinTech space.
But I have always wondered what would have happened had I taken the other path, towards the Master in Financial Engineering or investment banking. These positions have earned tough reputations: long, grinding hours, but also huge bonuses and decadent luxuries. The Money Trap, by Alok Sama, is a first-hand memoir of a guy who not only to succeeded as a managing director at Morgan Stanley, but then pivoted that experience to become CFO of SoftBank Group, executing deals and slinging around billions of dollars all around the globe—the absolute pinnacle of what such a career can amount to.
It doesn’t take long for the author to establish their credentials. The preface starts out with blackmail, which also serves to show the types of high-end establishments that he frequents, and that he’s important enough to be the target of corporate espionage. As the story gets into rhythm, he’s jet-setting around the world, hopping between London, New York and San Francisco—and eventually Tokyo, once he formally joins SoftBank. Well, there are also a bunch of exotic vacation destinations too—Turkey and Ibiza and Thailand and African safaris—though their inclusion in the book are usually as a backdrop for the business-centric parts of the narrative.
The nexus of the book is, of course, SoftBank Group Corp and its CEO, Masayoshi Son or just Masa. It’s a Japanese investment firm that has engineered some of the biggest mergers and acquisitions in technology; it successfully bet on Alibaba early on, and used those proceeds plus additional leverage to then buy out ARM (eventually IPOing) and Sprint (eventually merged with T-Mobile). In the past decade, SoftBank is best known for its Vision Fund: $100 billion USD, backed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and aggressively deployed in some of the biggest names in tech, including Uber, WeWork, Nvidia, ByteDance, and Coupang1. As the firm’s CFO, Alok was instrumental in many of these deals, and though he spares much of the technicalities of dealmaking in his writing here, his descriptions of how they get negotiated and finalized, and the strategies and raw financial numbers that go into that final handshake, reveal a process and a world that few others could know about. The whole thing reminds me a bit of Bob Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime.
What’s fascinating to me about The Money Trap is the insights it gives into how bankers think. Alok is obviously very intelligent and worldly; his prose casually weaves in pop culture references, lessons on Indian history and mythologies, plus some Tolstoy quotes for good measure. Throughout the book, he takes the time to point out all the material niceties that are a part of his environment: the Amanpuri resort2; his Porsche 911 Targa; his office’s David Linley desk. It validates the financier stereotype of overt materialism, that all the money and luxury is there mostly to keep score and acquire status symbols fancier than your industry acquaintances. Although, I appreciate the honesty in expressing his thought processes, rather than ginning up a sanitized, fake sense of humility.
I’m not sure I can recommend The Money Trap. It was interesting to me mostly from the investment banking angle, but that’s not an exciting field for most, particularly when you strip away the disproportionate comp packages as a focal point. I couldn’t discern that many life lessons from the story either, and while SoftBank is influential in tech as an outsized funding source, the book glosses over the Vision Fund’s impact to the global startup ecosystem3 and only mentions it in the epilogue. Maybe I just prefer more commentary and thematic narrative, and this book wasn’t written with that objective.
That said, the fund also invested in plenty of other companies that didn’t work out, like Zume and View and Greensill Capital; they’re unfamiliar names because they filed for bankuptcy or shut down completely.↩
By contrast, the same resort was referenced in the Facebook exposé Careless People and that author’s reaction was horror at the decadence of rich people.↩
It’s generally not seen as positive, too much money injected into companies that felt pressure to spend it, sometimes frivolously.↩
