James Gorman and Hiroshi Mikitani lead very different companies on opposite sides of the Pacific. One is an Australian-born banker who rebuilt a Wall Street giant and now chairs Disney. The other is a Japanese founder who turned a small online shopping mall into a telecom, banking and e-commerce group. No public record ties them together in a joint deal. Yet their careers run on parallel tracks, and that is why people search for them together.
Two Very Different Starting Points
Gorman was born in Melbourne. He studied arts and law at the University of Melbourne, then earned an MBA at Columbia University. He holds law and arts degrees from Melbourne and an MBA from Columbia. Before Wall Street, he began as a lawyer in Melbourne, became a senior partner at McKinsey, and later held a series of executive roles at Merrill Lynch.
Mikitani, born in Kobe in 1965, took a more direct route into finance. He joined the Industrial Bank of Japan in 1988 after Hitotsubashi University, and took leave between 1991 and 1993 to earn an MBA at Harvard Business School. The 1995 Kobe earthquake changed his direction. It hit his hometown hard, and the tragedy pushed him to leave banking and start a business.
James Gorman: Rebuilding Morgan Stanley Around Wealth
Gorman joined Morgan Stanley in February 2006 to run its wealth management arm. He became CEO in January 2010 and chairman in January 2012, and held the CEO job until December 2023. His central bet was to make the bank less dependent on volatile trading revenue.
The first big move came in 2009. He led the merger of Morgan Stanley’s wealth business with Citi’s Smith Barney unit, and by 2013 the firm had more than 16,000 advisors and $1.8 trillion in client assets. In 2020 he went further. Morgan Stanley announced two multibillion-dollar acquisitions that October: E*Trade and Eaton Vance. The Eaton Vance deal was worth $7 billion and brought roughly $500 billion in assets under management.
The results were visible. Client assets stood at $6.5 trillion in 2022 and passed $7.5 trillion by the third quarter of 2024. Euromoney offered a useful yardstick for the change: wealth management was once a low single-digit margin business, but it reached a 26% pre-tax margin in 2023.
Hiroshi Mikitani: From 13 Stores to a Digital Ecosystem
Mikitani started small. He founded MDM, Inc. on February 7, 1997 with three co-founders and $250,000 of their own money, and launched the Rakuten Ichiba marketplace on May 1, 1997. The site opened with 13 vendors and a six-person team, was renamed Rakuten in 1999, and went public in 2000. Its edge was a merchant-first model. Unlike Amazon, Rakuten let vendors build their own storefronts and keep the customer relationship.
Expansion followed. Around 2010 he led international acquisitions including Buy.com, PriceMinister, Kobo and Viber, and invested in Pinterest and Lyft. In the same year he introduced a bold internal policy, making English the official company language. Not every bet paid off. Rakuten’s $300 million Lyft investment produced losses, and Mikitani left Lyft’s board in 2020.
His biggest gamble was mobile. Rakuten launched a $5.5 billion mobile service in 2020, and in 2021 Tencent, Japan Post Holdings and Walmart invested over $2 billion in the group.
Two Playbooks, Compared
Gorman worked as a professional steward. He improved an existing institution through acquisitions, cost discipline and careful succession planning. Mikitani is a founder who kept building new businesses around one customer base: shopping, cards, banking, securities and mobile all feed each other.
Both carry risk, but of different kinds. Gorman’s risk sits in execution, integrating large deals and handing over leadership well. Mikitani’s risk is financial. Rakuten reported a net loss of about $1.1 billion on $16.1 billion revenue for 2025, its seventh straight year in the red, largely because building a mobile network costs so much upfront.
Where Each Stands in 2026
Gorman’s current focus is Disney. He became Disney’s chairman on January 2, 2025, after chairing its succession committee. That committee finished its main job early this year. On February 3, 2026, Disney named Josh D’Amaro to succeed Bob Iger as CEO, effective at the March 18 annual meeting. Gorman said the board considered more than 100 prospective candidates. The 10 board members, including Iger, approved the choice unanimously.
Mikitani, meanwhile, reached a milestone many doubted. Rakuten Mobile passed 10 million subscribers on December 25, 2025, roughly five years and eight months after its full launch in April 2020. The financial results were mixed but improving. Rakuten recorded its 29th straight year of record revenue, and the mobile business posted its first full-year EBITDA profit. Rakuten Bank reached 17.63 million accounts, and Rakuten Securities passed 13.26 million.
What Business Readers Can Take Away
Three lessons stand out. First, a company can change its identity without abandoning its core. Morgan Stanley shifted weight toward wealth, and Rakuten added mobile on top of commerce. Second, succession is a skill of its own: Gorman ran Morgan Stanley’s handover, then took charge of Disney’s. Third, patience is expensive. Mikitani’s mobile bet took years to show operating progress, and its full payoff is still unproven.
Japan gives the two a loose link. Morgan Stanley’s biggest strategic partner there is MUFG, and its executives said in January 2026 that they want deeper collaboration across wealth management, trading and investment banking. That is a Morgan Stanley story, not a Rakuten one, but it shows why the Tokyo financial scene matters to both leaders’ worlds.
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Conclusion
James Gorman and Hiroshi Mikitani prove that a finance background can lead to very different careers: a steward who reshaped an old institution, and a founder who kept building new ones. Watching how Disney performs under its new CEO and whether Rakuten Mobile turns its subscriber growth into steady profit will show whose strategy ages better.
I’m Muhammad Ubaid, founder of YBR Magazine. I research and write detailed guides on America’s National Parks — covering entry fees, permits, best times to visit, and planning tips — using official NPS sources and up-to-date information.
