Sama opens with a scenario worthy of a Matt Damon hero: threatened with blackmail by an unnamed bad guy, he connects with two ex-Mossad agents in downtown London who deliver the news that \u201cthere is a conspiracy to remove you from your job\u201d and demand a cool million bucks to make it go away. Go away it does not, and Sama\u2019s narrative is peppered with ulcer-inducing moments trying to dodge the unknown threat. There\u2019s big money at stake: Sama is a key advisor to Japanese investor Masayoshi Son, who has $100 billion at his disposal. Sama had had sightings of Son in earlier jobs: in the mid-1990s, Son, for instance, had thrown $100 million at Yahoo, which turned in $30 billion before the tech bubble burst. Feeling undervalued at Morgan Stanley\u2014\u201cI should have walked away, but I didn\u2019t,\u201d he writes. \u201cNobody does; nobody walks out of the money trap\u201d\u2014Sama gladly went to work for Son, only to discover that megazillionaires can be odd ducks with id\u00e9es fixes that don\u2019t always pay off in reality. In Son\u2019s case, he was smitten by Adam Neumann\u2019s WeWork, which, on paper at least, aligned with Son\u2019s own mantra, \u201cMy goal is happiness for everyone. Nobody should be sad. I want technology to make people happy.\u201d Son\u2019s seed money certainly made many a tech startup happy, especially in the ride-share space, although many ventures failed to come through. With billions of dollars swirling around his narrative, Sama is a helpful interpreter of how such things as derivatives and Amazon’s \u201cconsumer value proposition\u201d work\u2014or don\u2019t. Throughout, he is an engagingly funny, self-aware, and often rueful narrator. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sama opens with a scenario worthy of a Matt Damon hero: threatened with blackmail by an unnamed bad guy, he connects with two ex-Mossad agents in downtown London who deliver the news that \u201cthere is a conspiracy to remove you from your job\u201d and demand a cool million bucks to make it go away. Go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}