2024-01-05 17:50:27
By Claudia Cohen
Published 2 minutes ago, Updated 2 minutes ago
The messaging application claimed nearly 20 million active users in 2022. Tada Images – stock.adobe.com
This incredible episode raises new questions about the group’s CEO, Masayoshi Son.
Some liked to call it “the new Facebook”. With its tempting promises to attract Gen Z in no time, the social network IRL (In Real Life), founded by an American start-up, had attracted the favors of the Japanese technological conglomerate SoftBank. Its Vision Fund 2 had invested no less than $150 million in 2022, valuing it IRL at $1.2 billion.
The messaging application then claimed 20 million active users. But, as the months went by, doubts about the data communicated by the start-up began to set in, before everything finally collapsed in the summer of 2023, when an audit revealed that 95% of users were actually bots… “IRL claimed to have attracted a quarter of American teenagers, even though we had never heard of anyone using this application”entrust to Financial Times ex-employees.
From now on, a legal battle is being fought between the Japanese group and Abraham Shafi, the founder of IRL, who has gone out of business. While SoftBank has filed a complaint for fraud, the founder continues to defend, for his part, that IRL was indeed frequented by several million people and that SoftBank’s communication helped to scare them away. In the world of finance, this incredible episode raises new questions about the CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son. In November, the latter watched helplessly as WeWork filed for bankruptcy, in which it swallowed up no less than 11.5 billion dollars…
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