Elliott's Implicit Message to SoftBank

Activist investor Elliott Investment Management has bought a more than $2 billion stake in Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, and is making an explicit demand for the company to buy back $15 billion of its shares, the FT scooped today. But the implicit message is telling: Investors like Elliott don’t trust that Masayoshi Son has really learned his lesson from previous mistakes at his investment arm, the Vision Fund.

The pressure comes at an otherwise optimistic time for SoftBank. The company’s stock price has outperformed the broader market this year, surging nearly 50%, lifted by a rally in the stock of Arm, the chip designer it controls, whose shares have more than tripled since the company went public last year.