In 1995 he began a doctorate at Harvard Business School, where he
cultivated an interest in the dot-com world of eBay and Amazon. Three
years later he married (and later divorced) the granddaughter of the founder
of Daesang, a packaged-food company, and left Harvard without
completing his doctorate, looking to get more hands-on business
experience.
“He was not involved in daily operations of any business of Samsung
Group,” the chairman’s aide Nam S. Lee, who accompanied Jay on trips,
told me. “But he wanted to make an investment in new, promising business
areas.”
Jay had everything a Samsung prince and future leader needed:
personality, likability, curiosity. But he lacked one prerequisite. He had no
balance-sheet success story with which to prove himself.
“Jay Y. Lee was eager to participate in management not a day later than
possible,” wrote one of Samsung’s lead lawyers, Kim Yong-chul, in his
memoir Thinking of Samsung. “The result of this anxiousness was ‘e-
Samsung.’ ” In May 2000, Jay became the chief shareholder of a group of
more than a dozen new ventures under the name “e-Samsung,” consisting of
an online financial services aggregator, a network security firm, and other
dot-com investments popular at the turn of the millennium.
“But a Samsung style of management in a venture business was a recipe
for disaster,” Kim Yong-chul wrote. “And true it was.”
“e-Samsung was supposed to be the crown prince’s sensational debut,”
the lawyer wrote. “It didn’t sit well with me at all....Saying that it would
turn out well because it had Lee Jae-yong’s name on it, they offered [me]
an investment opportunity as though doing me a great favor. Though I
didn’t feel good about it, they said it was looking so good that I invested 20
million won [almost $17,000 at the time].”
Jay, the lawyer recalled, didn’t show up to many e-Samsung meetings,
instead treating his executives to barbecue and drinks after work.
In 2000 the dot-com boom went bust. And now a similar effect was
taking hold in South Korea. Shareholders cried foul that e-Samsung was
benefiting unfairly from the Lee family’s favoritism, getting millions of
dollars in investments from another Samsung affiliate, even while the
future looked grim. Soon, insolvent and with $20.4 million in losses, e-
Samsung was shut down.
But Jay Lee, protected by the Samsung empire, wasn’t the one to take