With Shouts and Hugs, Sprint Boss Masayoshi Son of SoftBank Drives Turnaround

At a meeting with Sprint executives in October, the chief executive of parent company SoftBank lost his temper about the mobile carrier's advertising, complaining that it wasn't luring enough new customers.

"Are you stupid?" yelled Masayoshi Son, who engineered the Japanese company's takeover of the No. 3 wireless provider in the US in 2103 for about $22 billion, according to three people in the room. He slammed his fist on a table and suggested that Sprint fire all its ad agencies and start over.

The 56-year-old Son, a maverick billionaire and one of Japan's best-known CEOs, wants to use Sprint to upend the US wireless industry much the same way he did in Japan with a takeover of beleaguered Vodafone Japan in 2006. He blames a lack of competition between AT&T and Verizon Communications, which together have more than two-thirds of US mobile-phone customers and nearly all the industry's profits, for what he says are slow networks that cost consumers too much.

Son has established a shadow headquarters in San Carlos (CA), a Silicon Valley city near Apple and Google. Son is bringing in about 1,000 SoftBank employees from Japan, who will try to help turn around the struggling mobile carrier and develop new services that SoftBank can use back at home. [March 7]