Masayoshi Son used SoftBank and its $100 billion Vision Fund to remake the world in its image. It’s not a pleasant picture.

All this brings us to the main point: the Vision Fund invested in firms that depended on directly or indirectly achieving monopolies, which they failed in doing, even as they successfully altered regulations, consumer behavior, and daily life to be more hospitable to their business model.

“Here’s a different way of thinking about it: you have large international investors who have funneled billions of dollars into these business models and a core part of their logic was that the only way they were ever going to get any return on their investment is this effort to fundamentally restructure regulatory structures around work,” Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Hastings, told Motherboard. “They were banking, literally, on doing what capitalists have attempted to do for over a century: evading, lowering, or getting rid of the minimum wage. This was an investment in deregulation.”

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