Kim Beom-su
Source of wealth: Online services
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Modules
Biography
Kim Beom-su is the founder of Kakao, South Korea's biggest messaging app, which is installed in 90% of the country's smartphones. He stepped down as chairman and left the board in 2022.
Kakao's tens of millions of users also use the app for gaming, shopping and chatting.
In 2014 Kakao acquired the country's No. 2 search engine Daum in an all stock transaction worth $3.3 billion, which resulted in a back door listing.
That same year the South Korean government classified Kakao as a large company; it is the first tech startup that made it into the big leagues.
In 2021 Kim signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of his wealth to charitable causes.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Kim Beom-su
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Kim Beom-su, linked to Technology and 'Online services', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 24 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 1.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.