the company’s ad agency review years later. “Six years ago we had a small
share [of the U.S. electronics market], and six years later, we still have the
same share.”
—
AS A FILM BUFF, Chairman Lee was looking to invest in Hollywood; Sony
had done the same six years earlier, buying Columbia Pictures in 1989 for
$3.4 billion, in a much-watched marquee acquisition. In 1995 and 1996,
three partners—Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen—
founded a start-up company called DreamWorks but were having trouble
finding investors. They needed $900 million in investment money. They
hoped two or three suitors would pool together to come up with the money.
Miky Lee heard from a Los Angeles attorney that Spielberg was looking
for investors. After meeting with Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, she
came away convinced that DreamWorks would be a smart and fun
business. She convinced her uncle, Chairman Lee, to invest.
One night in 1996, the DreamWorks trio welcomed Chairman Lee and
more than a dozen other Samsung guests to Spielberg’s Beverly Hills home
for dinner. During a meal of Chilean sea bass and white wine, the Samsung
executives presented the details of their offer. They were willing to invest
the full $900 million, far more than the amount DreamWorks was
requesting from a single patron. But Spielberg got a funny feeling in his
stomach at the offer.
“The word ‘semiconductor’ must have been used 20 times during that
two-and-a-half-hour encounter,” Spielberg told Time. “I thought to myself,
‘How are they going to know anything about the film business when they’re
so obsessed with semiconductors?’ ”
His partner David Geffen concurred.
“I kept on saying to them, ‘If we were only interested in making money
we’d also build semiconductor plants.’ ”
Yet Samsung insisted on being the only outside investor, giving it
effective creative control. Such deals were standard in South Korea.
Ultimately, Samsung walked away from the talks, feeling that
DreamWorks was “asking for too much freedom and not enough
accountability,” said one executive. And Spielberg didn’t pursue it. The
DreamWorks founders instead went with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen,