IN 1968, B.C. FORMALLY reinstated himself as chairman of Samsung. He
was determined to pass the company to his youngest son, Lee Kun-hee,
eventually.
“In the future, Kun-hee will be leading Samsung,” he told the family in
September 1976, according to his son Maeng-hee.
“I cannot forget the sudden shock I felt after hearing my father’s
words,” Maeng-hee wrote in his memoir. “By that time, there was already a
schism between my father and me, but I had still believed that he would
someday pass the reins of Samsung to me.”
Dejected and defeated, Maeng-hee later went into virtual exile in a
bucolic fishing village, where the local fishermen called him by the
nickname “The Chairman.” Walking with a slight limp, a complication of a
hereditary neurological disorder, he told those he met that his father had cut
him off financially. At one point, he didn’t even have enough money for
bus fare.
The fallen prince became increasingly paranoid and was rumored to be
violent and mentally ill.
“Actually, I was the one who had to flee, chased by my father swinging
a golf club around like crazy,” Maeng-hee told a visiting journalist. He was
convinced he was being followed, that people within Samsung were plotting
to have him institutionalized or kidnapped.
An unofficial South Korean biographer called him “Prince Sado of
Samsung,” recalling a historical tragedy of dynastic strife run amok in
South Korea during the eighteenth century. Prince Sado, a twenty-seven-
year-old feudal heir accused of being mentally ill, was locked up in a rice
chest as punishment by order of his father; he died there from starvation in
1762.
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WITH THE FERTILIZER BUSINESS gutted, B.C. turned Samsung to a much
riskier, faster-paced endeavor: electronics. South Korea, on the precipice of
a bonanza, defied a chorus of Western critics who believed such a rags-to-
riches story in the global marketplace was impossible.