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Details Of The Softbank Vision Fund Show Why Apple Buying Disney Is Probably A Bad Idea

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The financial news is breathless this morning with details of the details of the Softbank Vision Fund, a staggering $93 Billion tech investment fund which includes partners such as Apple, Qualcomm, ARM, Foxconn, Sharp, and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment.  I think I like The Register's take the best, which is basically 'The world's biggest tech fund focused on AI and robotics, what could possibly go wrong?' Still, every VC on the planet is rushing into this area — if robots are going to run the world, you probably want to be the one who makes those robots — and that includes SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Apple is in the fund to the itune of one billion dollars, which is pretty much nothing to them, as they famously have cash reserves of over $250 Billion.

When you have that sort of money, other people enjoy telling you how you should spend it.  And as Apple's cash has piled up past that quarter-trillion (trillion!) dollar mark, there's been rising calls from analysts who think they should use it to buy Disney.  It's a bad idea for lots of reasons, but it does make for a lovely headline, so here we are.

But relative to the Softbank Vision Fund news, the Wall Street Journal dropped this little tidbit recently:

SoftBank Group Corp. scrapped a planned $100 million investment in a smartphone startup founded by the creator of Google's Android software, partly because of the Japanese investor's increasingly close relationship with Apple Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

Does that sound like a company who should run a large chunk of the hardware, distribution methods, and — if they acquired Disney — content creation that provides the world with quite a lot of its entertainment?  What happens when want to buy or play Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, etc content on your Apple device?  Perhaps nothing, but perhaps it's also better that we don't have to find out.


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Mark SeifertAbout Mark Seifert

Co-founder and Creative director of Bleeding Cool parent company Avatar Press. Bleeding Cool Managing Editor, tech and data wrangler. Machine Learning hobbyist. Vintage paper addict.
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