This doesn't seem to line up with the reality presented in the article at all. I caught the Jamal Khashoggi reference but don't see where the evidence is that suggests this is somehow motivating SoftBank.
>SoftBank is back to its old, bold ways after a brief lull. But to keep up the pace, it will need major new commitments from the world's largest investors.
Indicates that, from the author's perspective, this is largely a return by SoftBank to their old ways.
>Meanwhile, SoftBank has reportedly only closed $2 billion of its second Vision Fund. The two sovereign wealth funds that contributed nearly half of the original Vision Fund—Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company—have yet to commit to the new fund.
Means that there is a lot of potential money on the table if returns can be made.
None of this implies an underlying fear that someone at SoftBank is going to have their head removed by the Saudis due to bad investing.
I might have misunderstood your point but I don't follow why this is a thing you would want to remedy at the business level. Has modern Google been shown to be less effective as a business than past-Google due to ideas like the DoD contract? Companies exist to service an identified demand and there doesn't seem to be a reason technology companies would be different in this respect. If people don't want companies chasing the demand for services like Dragonfly then they should vocalize those concerns as clear demands at the political level so that additional regulations can be implemented. Unless the strategy itself was unsound, which I realize might have been your broader point, it seems weird to consider these sorts of changes as a negative thing for the business.
Think of farmers in this instance as refineries that use soybean feed to convert Piglettes into Pork-Pigs. Tariff relief on USA brand soybean feed means that Chinese Piglette refineries will probably demand more of the USA brand feed than before because of the now lower price relative to other feed brands. However, at the same time, the refineries are experiencing a shortage of Piglette to mix with the imported soybean feed due to ASF and so they simply have lower feed needs/demands than before. You could make it more complicated by adding nuance like whether this will drive an increase in demand for imported pork as well which could, over time, stimulate USA/Worldwide feed demand as non-Chinese Piglette refineries expand and compete to fill the heightened demand for foreign pork (assuming things play out this way) but the overall gist is simply that there's pressure in two directions but probably not equal pressure.
Just wanted to say thanks for voicing this better than I could have. I constantly see people downplaying the censorship happening in places like the USA because "This is different!" Meanwhile they cheer for society at large slowly adopting the same authoritarian tendancies they villify when present in other nations purely because in their view it's acceptable as long as it's not the government itself acting in an authoritarian fashion.
>SoftBank is back to its old, bold ways after a brief lull. But to keep up the pace, it will need major new commitments from the world's largest investors.
Indicates that, from the author's perspective, this is largely a return by SoftBank to their old ways.
>Meanwhile, SoftBank has reportedly only closed $2 billion of its second Vision Fund. The two sovereign wealth funds that contributed nearly half of the original Vision Fund—Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company—have yet to commit to the new fund.
Means that there is a lot of potential money on the table if returns can be made.
None of this implies an underlying fear that someone at SoftBank is going to have their head removed by the Saudis due to bad investing.