Mr. Son paid it anyway. And he continued a buying spree, picking up stakes in dozens more companies, many of them "unicorns"--startups that have grown to valuations over $1 billion--such as Uber Technologies Inc. and WeWork Cos. In some of those deals, too, he had to argue with directors and advisers who thought he was paying too much. Investors want to understand just how Mr. Son goes about deciding on his billions of dollars of bets, among the largest in the tech industry, which he does through SoftBank and affiliated investment funds. Current and former SoftBank directors, executives, investing partners and others who know Mr. Son give a glimpse into how he works.

We live in a crazy world where a robot was recently given citizenship to a sovereign country for the first time. Granted, the country is Saudi Arabia and the robot's creator is creepier than the robot itself, but it's hard to ignore the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving quickly and becoming ingrained in various aspects of our lives. Programmatic advertising online is a space that was driven by empowering computers to make decisions by taking into account enormous amounts of data that the human mind could never process. Is influencer marketing, a space that has been plagued by a lack of automation, in line for a revolution? If you ask me, automation will streamline the influencer campaign process.

We live in a crazy world where a robot was recently given citizenship to a sovereign country for the first time. Granted, the country is Saudi Arabia and the robot's creator is creepier than the robot itself, but it's hard to ignore the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving quickly and becoming ingrained in various aspects of our lives. Programmatic advertising online is a space that was driven by empowering computers to make decisions by taking into account enormous amounts of data that the human mind could never process. Is influencer marketing, a space that has been plagued by a lack of automation, in line for a revolution? If you ask me, automation will streamline the influencer campaign process.

Infinidat, which specializes in petabyte-scale data storage systems, on Nov. 14 launched the latest release of its InfiniBox core operating software, v4.0, that now uses machine-learning algorithms to produce high performance. The rise of enterprise digital transformation requires new ways of thinking about information storage, the company said. Infinidat offers a new storage architecture that is fundamentally different from the consumer-centric cloud storage platforms of the last decade and earlier legacy enterprise storage systems. Unlike conventional enterprise storage systems that rely on flash hardware for performance, InfiniBox takes a software-optimized approach, using machine-learning algorithms to extract high performance and reliability out of low-cost hardware. This includes the same ultra-high capacity drives widely employed by Google, Facebook and other hyperscale cloud operators for large-scale data storage, the Waltham, Mass.-based company said.

Moshe Yanai has been re-thinking the box for more than 40 years, inventing new configurations of the large containers in which we keep the data generated by our constantly expanding digital lives. Data is eating the world and Yanai has been staying on top of its exponential growth by applying smart algorithms (what is now popularly called "artificial intelligence") to cost-effectively store and manage data. First at Siemens-Nixdorf, then at EMC, he went against IBM, the dominant data storage player at the time, and won. Then Yanai re-configured storage twice again, with XIV which he sold to IBM in 2007, and now as founder and CEO of Infinidat, a startup valued at $1.2 billion (in 2015) which grew 144% last year. Along the way, he also figured out disruptive innovation.

Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing Co. is betting that speed, both in supplying its stores with the latest fashion and getting custom-made products to shoppers, will allow it to overtake apparel powerhouse Zara. Fast Retailing plans to shorten the time it takes from design to delivery to about 13 days, roughly the same as Zara, owned by the world's biggest clothes retailer Inditex SA, Uniqlo's billionaire owner Tadashi Yanai said in an interview at the company's new design and delivery center that opened Thursday in an industrial area of Tokyo. The new complex will also help Uniqlo expand direct-to-consumer, custom-clothing sales and improve the efficiency of its same-day delivery in the Tokyo area, he said. "We need to be fast," he said. "We need to deliver products customers want quickly."