SoftBank’s Latest Gambit: The Information’s Tech Briefing

With its high-priced Vision Fund investments, SoftBank drove up the value on private tech startups over the past few years. More recently, it has been doing the same with the price of public tech giants through massive option purchases on tech stocks.

That’s according to a couple of reports on Friday, in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, that identified SoftBank as the “whale” investor that was buying billions of dollars worth of options on tech stocks and helping stoke the intense buying that kept tech stocks soaring—until Thursday’s sell-off which continued Friday.