The occasion for Son’s star turn in the White House Roosevelt Room on Jan. 21 was an announcement that [hotlink]SoftBank Group[/hotlink], Son’s Tokyo-based conglomerate, would put up most of the funding for Stargate, an ambitious partnership with OpenAI and Oracle that aims to turbocharge American leadership in artificial intelligence. At its peak in 2020, SoftBank’s Alibaba stake was worth more than $200 billion, enabling SoftBank to borrow money for investments in hundreds of other ventures. Two years later, as OpenAI developed one of the world’s most sophisticated AI models, Son offered to invest $1 billion in the venture.