“That kind of investing, not to make financial returns, but almost like an expression of your identity. I mean, that's very much alive in the US. Just look at Tesla or even SpaceX, right?… SpaceX is not valued as a normal company. It's valued as like by like Elon Musk fanboys and girls who will just give him money because they believe in him… It's just what people do.”
Better Offline · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Ed Zitron described Japanese retail investors buying SoftBank bonds partly out of loyalty to its founder. Wigglesworth says the same identity-driven investing is alive in the US. (The transcript garbles Musk's name; corrected here.)
Transcript
…that's like a 4% premium. But the problem is that currencies move around a lot. So you can easily get wiped out on the carrier trade. So it's always one of those kind of popular things when the world looks safe and fine. And then it kind of blows up in people's faces when it suddenly doesn't.
…there are regular people that buy the bonds because of Masayoshi. Son. It's just a completely different thing than you'd have over here in America, partly because we don't have zero interest rates or didn't for a long time. And so a company basically steps in almost like a sovereign bond issuer.
Yeah. It will just benefits from low interest rates. But like interest rates were pretty low in the US for a long time and that benefited all sorts of companies there too. And that kind of investing, not to make financial returns, but almost like an expression of your identity. I mean, that's very much alive in the US. Just look at Tesla or even SpaceX, right? We were talking about SpaceX. SpaceX is not valued as a normal company. It's valued as like by like Elon Fusk fanboys and girls who will just give him money because they believe in him. And it is not something that it is entirely divorced and unanchored for any sort of normal financial analysis. It's just what people do. But like what people are doing with SpaceX in the US was the stock, I guess I didn't know this about Japan, but like maybe Japanese investors are doing with soft bank bonds over there.
Kind of. Actually, this leads me to my final and most complex question. So with that in mind, of all of the bonds that were raised during the interest-free era in 2020, 2021, talk to me about maturity walls. So how big is the when I say maturity wall, just for the listeners, it's a bunch of debt…
I have to admit, like maturity walls, it's just basically, let's say, if I'm like Wiggles Corp and I've issued like a few bonds maturing at different years. So let's say I have next year I only have a billion dollars worth coming due. The year after that, I've got like 4 billion. And then suddenly…
cash flow negative right now. Oracle is in a very weird spot, though, because they run the risk of becoming a fallen angel. But I understand what you mean.
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