Kim Jun-ki
Source of wealth: Diversified
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Modules
Biography
Kim Jun-ki, founder of the Dongbu Group, stepped down as its chairman in 2017 after being accused of rape and sexual harassment.
In 2020 Kim was convicted of the sexual assault charges and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, which was suspended for four years.
Dongbu, now named DB, has interests in chemicals, finance, electronics and real estate.
His net worth includes the shares of his only son, Kim Nam-ho, who is honorary chairman as well as his daughter.
He is a son of a former deputy speaker in the South Korean parliament.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Kim Jun-ki
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 Jun-ki, linked to Diversified and 'Diversified', 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 20 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 1.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.