Kim Sang-beom
Source of wealth: Semiconductors
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Modules
Biography
Kim Sang-beom is chairman of ISU Group, a holding company with stakes in semiconductor, chemical and biotech sectors.
ISU Group's most valuable holding is ISU Petasys, a manufacturer of printed circuit boards in South Korea. Its customers include Alphabet, Nvidia and Microsoft.
ISU Petasys was established in 1972 and listed on the South Korean stock exchange in 2000. ISU Group acquired a controlling stake in ISU Petasys in 1995.
ISU Group was started by Kim's late father, Joon-sung, who founded South Korea's first regional bank, Daegu Bank, in 1967.
Sang-beom joined ISU Group in 2000 as chairman, taking over the reins from his father. Before joining the family business, Sang-beom worked at Daewoo and was a lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Kim Sang-beom
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 Sang-beom, linked to Technology and 'Semiconductors', 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 9 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 0.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.