The big money owner behind Jack Ma has fallen

Masayoshi Son, who once talked with Jack Ma for 6 minutes, invested $20 million, has now fallen into trouble. This time, he fell into the hands of a global unicorn with a valuation of over 8.4 billion yuan.

Recently, the emerging social platform IRL (IN REAL LIFE) announced that the company will be closed because up to 95% of the "20 million users" claimed by the company's founder are disguised by robots.

At present, the IRL official website has been announced to be closed.

From becoming Facebook's rival to being exposed and falsified, what happened to this company that caused Masayoshi Son to fall?

01. 20 million users, 95% are robots

As a former social platform upstart, IRL was established in 2017 and is positioned as an offline event community tool that distinguishes it from traditional social platforms such as Facebook.

It is understood that former IRL founder and CEO Abraham Shafi once publicly stated that within 15 months after the outbreak, the IRL user base achieved 400% growth, with 20 million users and 12 million monthly active users.

Based on such a unique positioning and strongly growing number of users, IRL has been favored by Masayoshi Son.

In June 2021, IRL's Series C financing was led by SoftBank Vision 2 Fund, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, with a financing amount of US$170 million (approximately RMB 1.233 billion).

With this huge financing, IRL was in the limelight for a while and was selected into the "2021 Global Unicorn List" of Hurun Research Institute, with a valuation of US$1.17 billion (approximately RMB 8.485 billion).

But what is interesting is that at the end of 2022, IRL was suddenly exposed to lay off 25% of its employees . Under this sudden wave of layoffs, the outside world began to doubt the business conditions of IRL.

In response, Shafi said that the social software WhatsApp uses a small team of 55 people to serve 450 million users, and there are too many IRL people.

But the layoffs eventually became the fuse. IRL internal employees began to question the authenticity of IRL's 20 million monthly users. Meanwhile, the SEC began an investigation into the company's violations of securities laws and misleading investors. At the same time, the IRL board of directors has also begun to conduct internal self-inspections.

As the investigation deepened, the results were astonishing: As much as 95% of the "20 million users" Shafi mentioned were robot accounts, and there were only 1-2 million real users.

This speechless incident led to the majority shareholder's decision to close the company.

At present, the IRL official website has shown "closed at 12 noon on June 27." The IRL app has been removed from the iOS app store.

02. Reduced holdings of 240 million Alibaba stocks, and Masayoshi Son cashed in and saved himself

In 2021, SoftBank Group's net loss attributable to its parent company shareholders reached 1.7 trillion yen (approximately RMB 89.9 billion), setting a reco