The impact of Masayoshi Son’s $100bn tech fund will be profound

HERMAN NARULA named his company Improbable for a business plan so outlandish and fraught with computing problems that only two outcomes are plausible. As the British entrepreneur tells it, the result will be outright failure or success unmatched. He wants to create virtual worlds as detailed, immersive and persistent as reality, where millions of people can live as their true selves, earn their main income and interact with artificially intelligent robots. If that happens, it will be partly because Mr Narula drew the attention of a similarly improbable, wildly ambitious technology fund. The Vision Fund has put close to $500m into Improbable, which had previously raised only $52m.

An outsize investment in an unconventional business is typical of a fund that itself is both vast and resistant to definition. It is the brainchild of Masayoshi Son, an unusually risk-loving Japanese telecoms and internet entrepreneur. It is too big to be considered a conventional venture-capital firm, which would typically manage much smaller sums. It eschews many of the practices of private-equity funds, such as shaking up management and applying plenty of debt. Yet this impressive-but-puzzling experiment is having an impact on everyone who invests in technology. At a recent gathering of financiers in New York, Bill Gurley of Benchmark, a venture-capital firm that has invested in numerous well-known tech firms, called the Vision Fund “the most powerful investor in our world”.