I'm a fan of Masayoshi Son's audacity. However, the outlandish premise floated in the article (raising $100b funds every few years) is all premised on the back of the freak Alibaba return being repeatable over and over again. That's not going to happen, there's one China and its boom phase is mostly over. The last China-like outcome, was a century prior to that (the US).

I watched Masayoshi Son make the same mistake of incorrect extrapolation, 20 years ago.[1] The pitch - the same one he made 20 years ago - only works while the tide is high, when the tide goes out it's ugly. There were countless articles touting his 300 year plan for the future back then, while he was riding very high on the epic Yahoo returns (at one point his investment into Yahoo was worth something like $44b, a particularly huge return to generate in a short amount of time back then). Alibaba will have legitimate staying power, unlike Yahoo's bubble valuation circa 1999/2000, however it won't change the fact that there aren't going to be endless lines of Alibabas to generate vast returns off of to justify raising $100 billion every few years. Alibaba will prove as rare in China as Microsoft or Google are in the US.

[1] http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2053732,00...