Lee Hae-jin
Source of wealth: Internet
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Modules
Biography
Lee Hae-jin is a cofounder of Naver, South Korea's No. 1 search engine.
In 2018, he stepped down from Naver's board but remained its global investment officer, focusing on the company's expansion. In 2025, he returned as chairman to drive the company's AI business.
In 2021, Naver and SoftBank agreed to a joint venture, taking control of their respective subsidiaries Line and Yahoo Japan.
In November 2025, Naver said its payment arm, Naver Financial, will acquire crypto exchange operator Dunamu in a stock swap that values the combined entity at $13.6 billion.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Lee Hae-jin
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 Lee Hae-jin, linked to Technology and 'Internet', 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 11 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 0.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.