Author: Ryu Araki

Amancio Ortega, 90, built Zara.

By Forbes’s count, he is also the world’s largest individual owner of real estate.

Since Inditex listed in 2001, he has spent about $24 billion on 216 properties. He still owns 206, worth around $25 billion across 13 countries.

What he did not do was sell Zara.

His stake in Inditex has stayed at roughly 59%.

The buildings were paid for with dividends.

For fiscal 2025, Inditex is paying €1.75 a share. On Ortega’s holding, that is about €3.23 billion a year, paid in May and November.

His investment company, Pontegadea, turns much of that into offices, logistics centres and hotels. Tenants include Amazon.

Most founders diversify by selling stock.

That dilutes control, can signal doubt, and puts a large block of shares on the market.

Ortega’s route leaves the operating company untouched. The diversification happens one level up, one dividend at a time.

It only works because of what Inditex is.

Last year it earned €6.22 billion. It pays out 60% as an ordinary dividend and still funds about €2.3 billion of store and logistics spending.

A business that throws off more cash than it needs can feed a second one.

The two also run on opposite clocks.

Zara’s demand turns over every season.
Pontegadea’s leases run for five to 25 years.

If Zara stumbles, the rent keeps coming, but the buying slows.

As a private investor, this is the idea I keep returning to.

The most important decision is often not what to sell. It is where the income goes next.

Twice a year, Zara pays for the next building.

For most of modern history, fame came with a price: privacy.

If millions of people knew your work, they probably knew your face. They might know your real name, where you grew up, whom you married, and eventually far more than you ever intended to share.

That bargain is beginning to break.

Banksy became one of the world’s most famous artists without publicly confirming his identity.

Ado became one of Japan’s biggest singers before the public had clearly seen her face. By 2025, her Hibana world tour had reached more than 500,000 people across 33 cities. She has since revealed more of her appearance, but crucially, she did not need to do so to become famous.

Then there are VTubers.

YouTube analyzed a sample of just 300 virtual creators and found that they generated more than 15 billion views in 2024.

COVER, the company behind hololive, had 78 VTubers with a combined 95 million YouTube subscribers as of June 2026. Forty-five had passed one million subscribers.

Something fundamental has changed.

Fame used to be bundled:

Name + face + voice + biography + work + private life.

The internet is unbundling it.

You can reveal your voice but not your face.

Your face but not your real name.

An avatar and personality but neither.

Or simply your ideas and work.

This does not mean anonymous celebrities will outnumber conventional ones. Most people seeking fame will probably continue to use their real identities.

But the ceiling for anonymous fame has risen dramatically.

A pseudonymous artist can become globally valuable.

A singer can fill arenas before the public clearly knows what she looks like.

A virtual character can attract millions of fans and become the foundation of a public company.

For creators, this creates a choice that barely existed in the mass-media era.

You no longer have to choose between being unknown and surrendering your privacy.

Fame and identity are becoming separate assets.

The strongest consumer businesses I know sell membership in an obsession.

Ferrari is the clearest example. In 2025, about 84% of new Ferraris went to people who already owned one. The company shipped just 13,640 cars and still earned a 29.5% operating margin.

Those numbers describe a community that keeps renewing itself.

Here’s why I think dense, niche communities are worth paying for as an investor.

1. Demand doesn’t run out. A normal customer stops buying once the need is met. A fan never feels finished. There is always another model, another edition, another piece of the story.
2. Fans market to each other. They talk, compare, show off and recruit. The community does much of the work of keeping the brand visible.
3. Pricing power comes from identity. When a purchase says who you are, a higher price can make it more desirable.
4. Competitors can copy the product, not the bond. Engineering can be matched. Decades of shared history cannot.

The same pattern shows up far beyond luxury. Adult LEGO collectors buy sets no child will ever touch. Different products, same psychology.

The risk is real, though. A community that feels taken for granted can turn on a brand faster than any ordinary customer base.

Overproduce, cut corners or ignore what fans care about, and the asset that drove growth becomes the source of backlash.

Before I invest in a consumer company, I ask whether its existing customers would line up for whatever it launches next.

Most businesses spend their lives chasing new customers. The best ones are built on people who never really leave.

In 2001, South Africa’s Naspers invested just $34 million in a little-known Chinese internet company called Tencent.

It acquired 46.5% of the company.

For 17 years, Naspers sold nothing.

Then, in 2018, it sold just 2% of Tencent for $9.8 billion — nearly 300 times its original investment.

In 2019, Naspers placed Tencent and its other international internet assets into Prosus and listed it in Amsterdam.

Today, Prosus still owns roughly 22% of Tencent.

That stake alone is worth about $112 billion.

Prosus itself is worth only about $86 billion on the stock market.

Think about that.

A $34 million investment made 25 years ago has evolved into a stake still worth more than $100 billion — after tens of billions of dollars have already been sold.

The lesson is usually framed as one of the greatest venture investments in history.

But I think the more interesting lesson is about globalization.

Naspers did not build Tencent.

It did not invent WeChat. It did not develop China’s gaming industry. It did not send thousands of South African engineers to Shenzhen.

It identified an extraordinary company in another country, bought a meaningful stake, and held it for decades.

Companies often assume that becoming global means exporting what they built at home.

But products, management systems and corporate cultures do not always cross borders easily.

Capital does.

Naspers began as a South African newspaper publisher in 1915.

Its most consequential global expansion was not exporting South African media.

It was allocating $34 million to the right company 12,000 kilometers away.

You do not always need to build the global winner.

You just need to own one.

Today, the comparison sounds ridiculous.

Elon Musk is worth an estimated $936 billion.

Horie Takafumi is an online Japanese influencer with millions of followers and runs several successful businesses in Japan, but the scale of operations is not comparable to Musk’s.

Rewind twenty years, and the picture changes dramatically.

In December 2005, Horie owned roughly 17% of Livedoor, worth about $1.2 billion.

Livedoor had acquired 27 companies in five years and increased revenue 22-fold to nearly $800 million. Its fiscal 2005 revenue reached ¥78.4 billion (about $712 million), with net income of ¥15.5 billion (about $141 million).

Horie was 33.

Musk, meanwhile, says his after-tax proceeds from PayPal were about $180 million. He was deploying that capital into extraordinarily risky ventures including SpaceX and Tesla.

On observable equity value and corporate scale, Horie was clearly ahead.

Then their paths diverged.

In January 2006, prosecutors raided Livedoor. Horie was arrested, later convicted of securities-law violations, and lost control of his primary compounding vehicle.

Musk kept his.

His PayPal capital ultimately became major stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. The compounding continued for another twenty years.

Horie kept building, despite spending time in prison (2011–2013). Today, his businesses range from media and technology to restaurants and space. In 2026, he said he was involved in operating more than 100 restaurant locations across multiple brands. He is also the director of Interstellar Technologies, a Japanese space infrastructure company developing orbital launch vehicles and communication satellites, which has raised ¥44.6 billion (about $282 million).

There is no reason to assume Livedoor would have become another Tesla or SpaceX.

But at 33, Horie already had a billion-dollar equity position, a fast-growing public company, an appetite for aggressive M&A and an interest in private space development.

Horie isn’t Japan’s Elon Musk today.

But in 2005, he had a credible path to becoming one.

Or perhaps he would never have needed the comparison at all.

He might simply have become known around the world as Horie or Horiemon.

($1 = ¥110.18 for 2005 figures and $1 = ¥158 for 2026 figures)

South Korea has become the global face of demographic collapse.

But on one important measure, it isn’t even the most extreme society in East Asia.

Childlessness.

Among Japanese women born in 1975, 28% never had a child.

In Singapore, the figure is also 28% for women born between 1975 and 1980.

In Hong Kong, it reached 35% among women born in 1971 and remained around 30% for those born in 1979.

South Korea’s comparable figure?

About 13%.

Yet all four now have extraordinarily low fertility rates: 1.15 in Japan (2024), 0.87 in Singapore (2025), 0.73 in Hong Kong (2025) and 0.75 in South Korea (2024).

This reveals something fertility rates alone can’t explain.

There are different ways to become a low-fertility society.

In Japan, an unusually large share of women never become mothers at all.

In South Korea, historically, more women became mothers but fewer went on to have larger families.

In 2022, third and higher-order births accounted for only 8% of births in South Korea, compared with 17% in Japan.

So East Asia doesn’t have one fertility crisis.

It has several.

South Korea has extraordinarily low annual fertility.

Japan and Singapore have exceptionally high permanent childlessness.

Hong Kong has gone even further.

We obsess over the total fertility rate. But permanent childlessness asks a simpler question:

What percentage of a generation goes through life without ever having a child?

For some recent completed cohorts in Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong, the answer is roughly three in ten.

That is not a projection.

It has already happened.

Yamaha motorbikes. Vietnamese coffee. Bánh mì.

And shelves full of Detective Conan.

Detective Conan follows a teenage detective trapped in a child’s body, and has over 270 million copies in circulation worldwide.

Seeing a familiar Japanese character surrounded by Vietnamese text made me look more closely at the business behind the bookshelf.

JETRO’s 2024 report cites annual comic printing of 60 million copies in Vietnam in 2019, alongside an industry estimate that Japanese manga accounted for around 90%.

An older estimate, certainly. But useful context for the shelves I photographed.

The business extends well beyond books.

MANGA Research Institute estimates that the global market built around Japanese manga IP—including publishing, screen adaptations, games and merchandise—was approximately ¥4 trillion (26.7 billion USD) in 2023.

Up 9.7% from the previous year.

Overseas markets accounted for 44%, or roughly ¥1.8 trillion (12 billion USD).

These are market-size estimates, not export receipts or profits flowing back to Japan. But they show how far the commercial life of a story can extend beyond its original publication.

On a spreadsheet, that international reach is a percentage.

In Ho Chi Minh City, it was a bookshelf full of familiar faces.

It was my first visit to the city. Detective Conan had already found a place there.

For me, a familiar character from home. For someone picking up a volume, perhaps their first encounter with a story that could keep them coming back for years.

I’ve already left Vietnam.

Conan is still on the shelf, waiting for the next reader.

(USD equivalents are approximate, using an illustrative exchange rate of ¥150 per US dollar.)

In the 1990s, Masayoshi Son, Hideo Sawada and Yasuyuki Nambu were counted among Japan’s most prominent entrepreneurs.

SoftBank.
H.I.S.
Pasona.

Three founders. Same country. Same era.

They were known as the “Three Musketeers of Japanese Entrepreneurship”.

Thirty years later, all three have built substantial businesses.

But the outcomes are radically different.

H.I.S. became one of Japan’s best-known travel companies.

Pasona became one of its best-known human resources groups.

Both survived multiple economic cycles and built brands recognized across Japan.

Son, however, played a different game.

He didn’t just keep building the business he started.

He repeatedly repositioned SoftBank — and its capital — around what he believed would define the next technological era.

Software distribution.

Internet.

Alibaba.

Broadband.

Mobile.

Semiconductors.

AI.

Some of those bets were spectacular successes, especially Yahoo Japan, Alibaba, Vodafone Japan (later SoftBank Mobile) and Arm.

Others were spectacular failures. WeWork alone made that obvious.

But the asymmetry is what matters.

As of September 25, 2026, SoftBank Group’s market capitalization was roughly $223 billion.

September 2026 figures put H.I.S. and Pasona each well under $1 billion.

They’re all successful but from a capitalist pov, SoftBank is in a league of its own. The rivalry is no more.

The difference is well over a hundredfold in market capitalization — not a comparison of shareholder returns.

That gap wasn’t created because Son was right all the time.

He wasn’t.

It was created because he kept risking capital on new technological waves — and when he believed he had found one, he was willing to bet at a scale large enough to change the trajectory of the entire company.

That is a very different model of entrepreneurship.

Most founders spend decades becoming better at the business they started.

Son kept asking a different question:

What is going to become exponentially more important from here?

And then he tried to put himself — and his capital — in front of it.

Over 30 years, those decisions compounded.

There is a broader lesson here.

Execution matters enormously.

But over a long enough period, what you choose to compound may matter even more than how efficiently you compound it.

A great operator in a stagnant industry can create an excellent company.

A great capital allocator positioned in front of a structural change can create something orders of magnitude larger.

The biggest outcomes rarely come from doing the same thing 10% better for 30 years.

They come from being positioned correctly when the world changes.

Japan has roughly 39,000 registered CPAs.

ACCA — the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants — has more than 257,900 members.

That is roughly 6.6 times the number of Japanese CPAs.

These are not directly comparable qualifications. Their examinations, experience requirements, professional roles and regulatory frameworks differ.

But the difference in scale highlights something we often overlook when evaluating professional qualifications:

Network size matters.

Living in Malaysia has changed the way I think about this.

In Japan, professional credentials are often judged primarily by difficulty.

How hard is the examination?

How many years does it take to pass?

What percentage of candidates succeed?

These are reasonable questions.

But there is another question that may matter just as much:

How portable is the qualification?

A Credential Is Also a Network

A professional qualification looks like an individual achievement.

But economically, it is also membership in a network.

The examination is only the entrance mechanism.

The real asset includes everything surrounding it: employer recognition, professional standards, training infrastructure, alumni, institutional relationships, and compatibility with other markets.

This resembles the network effects we normally associate with technology.

A payment system becomes more useful as more merchants accept it.

A language becomes more useful as more people speak it.

A professional qualification can similarly become more useful as more employers, regulators and institutions understand what it represents.

This is why the difference between roughly 39,000 Japanese CPAs and 258,000 ACCA members is interesting.

The numbers do not tell us which qualification is better.

They tell us something about the scale of the networks in which those qualifications operate.

Difficulty Is Not the Same as Value

We often assume that harder qualifications should be more valuable.

But that does not necessarily follow.

Imagine two qualifications.

Qualification A requires enormous effort but is primarily recognized within one country.

Qualification B may require a different level or type of effort, but is widely understood by employers and institutions across many markets.

Which is more valuable?

There is no universal answer.

For someone planning to spend an entire career in one country, the domestic qualification may clearly be the better choice.

But for someone whose career might move between Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong or London, the calculation changes.

Difficulty is only one variable.

I increasingly think about professional qualifications through four factors:

Difficulty × Recognition × Portability × Market Size

A qualification that performs strongly across all four dimensions can create a very different set of opportunities from one optimized primarily for a single domestic market.

Japan Built Deep Systems. Britain Built Wide Ones.

Japan created extraordinarily sophisticated domestic systems.

Its universities, professional examinations, corporations and regulatory institutions developed to function within one of the world’s largest and most advanced economies.

For decades, that was an enormous advantage.

And Japanese professional qualifications remain extremely valuable in the markets for which they were designed.

But specialization can also create limits when careers become international.

A qualification that is immediately understood in Tokyo may require considerably more explanation in Kuala Lumpur or Dubai.

British-rooted qualifications developed within a very different historical network.

Britain once governed territories around the world. English, common law, educational structures and professional institutions spread internationally.

The political empire disappeared.

But many of those institutional connections remained.

More importantly, many continued to expand.

Professional qualifications are one manifestation of that legacy.

ACCA is an especially interesting example because it has evolved far beyond Britain itself. Its membership today is international, and its institutional network extends across a large number of markets.

That does not mean British qualifications are inherently better.

It means some of them operate within unusually wide international networks.

And networks compound.

The Educational Arbitrage

This creates what I think is an interesting form of educational arbitrage.

People naturally compare credentials by prestige and difficulty.

But perhaps another comparison deserves more attention:

Effort required to acquire the credential versus number of opportunities the credential can potentially access.

A qualification that is exceptionally difficult but geographically concentrated may offer a very different return on invested time from one that can travel across multiple labor markets.

Again, this does not mean everyone should choose the international qualification.

A Japanese accountant planning to spend an entire career practicing regulated accounting in Japan has very different requirements from someone building an international career.

Local expertise has enormous value.

But for young people who genuinely do not know where they may live or work twenty years from now, portability has economic value.

The same applies to parents thinking about their children’s education.

The future location of a career is increasingly difficult to predict.

Tokyo today.

Singapore ten years from now.

Dubai after that.

Or perhaps somewhere we are not currently considering at all.

In that environment, a portable qualification preserves options.

And the younger you are, the longer those options have to compound.

Portability Is Optionality

This is ultimately why I find the comparison between Japanese CPAs and ACCA interesting.

The headline numbers — roughly 39,000 versus 258,000 — are not a ranking of the two qualifications.

They illustrate two different types of professional ecosystems.

One developed within a deep and sophisticated domestic market.

The other developed across a much wider international network.

When evaluating a qualification, perhaps the most interesting question is therefore not simply:

How hard is it to obtain?

But:

How many doors can it open once you have it?

Difficulty matters.

Prestige matters.

Technical competence certainly matters.

But network size and portability matter too.

Portability is a form of optionality.

And optionality has value.

Eduardo Saverin is often described as lucky.

That is fair. Meeting Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard was an extraordinary piece of luck. Saverin provided some of the early money that helped get Facebook running, became its first CFO, and received a large ownership stake.

There is no useful lesson in “meet the next Zuckerberg at college.” You cannot replicate that.

What happened afterward is more interesting.

As Facebook moved to Silicon Valley, the relationship between Zuckerberg and Saverin broke down. Saverin’s stake was heavily diluted, and the dispute eventually ended in litigation and a confidential settlement.

He could easily have ended his financial relationship with Facebook there.

He didn’t.

Saverin fought to protect his ownership and remained a shareholder. He eventually sold some of his shares, but continued to benefit enormously as Facebook grew.

That decision interests me most.

It is easy to hold a company when you like the founder, work there every day, and feel personally invested in its success. Saverin’s situation was almost the opposite. His relationship with Zuckerberg had collapsed. He was no longer helping to run the company.

But owning a company and working for a company are two different things.

Facebook continued to add users, engineers, advertisers and eventually billions of dollars in revenue. Saverin did not need to return to the office to participate in that growth. His shares did that for him.

This is one of the things I find most interesting about equity.

You can stop working for a company without necessarily wanting to stop owning it.

By Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Saverin was living in Singapore and had renounced his US citizenship. The tax consequences of that decision attracted considerable attention, although the actual long-term savings are difficult to know from public information.

What is much easier to see is the value of the Facebook stake.

As Meta grew, so did Saverin’s fortune. He subsequently co-founded B Capital and built a substantial investment business of his own. Today, he is regularly ranked among Singapore’s richest people, with a fortune estimated at more than $30 billion.

There is an obvious warning here.

Holding a concentrated position in one company is not automatically smart. Plenty of founders have held declining companies all the way down. Sometimes selling is exactly the right decision.

But Saverin’s story illustrates something that is easy to forget, particularly for entrepreneurs.

We tend to think about our contribution to a company in terms of work: the meetings we attend, the decisions we make, the people we manage.

This is especially true in Japan, where hard work is deeply respected while income earned without visible effort — particularly investment gains — is sometimes viewed with suspicion.

But ownership works differently. That is true in Japan just as it is anywhere else.

If you own part of an exceptional business, other people can continue creating value on your behalf long after your own operating contribution has ended.

Saverin was extraordinarily lucky to get his original opportunity.

Keeping an economic interest in Facebook after everything that happened was a separate matter.

And in the end, that may have been almost as consequential as getting the opportunity in the first place.