SoftBank’s (SFTBY +1.1%) Vision Fund chief Rajeev Misra embarked on a sabotage campaign to smear internal rivals at the company, The Wall Street Journal says in a striking new report.
His rise to the top of the $100B fund wasn’t traditional ladder-climbing, but succeeded in part by “striking at two of his main rivals inside SoftBank with a dark-arts campaign of personal sabotage.”
Those targets were Nikesh Arora (once heir apparent to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son) and Alok Sama, both of whom have left the company.
And the mechanism included planting negative news stories, ginning up a shareholder campaign to press for their ouster and even attempting sexual blackmail of one of them, according to the report.
A spokesman for Misra says they’re “old allegations,” consistently denied: “Mr. Misra did not orchestrate a campaign against his former colleagues.”
