Lee Byung-chul

Lee Byung-chul was born on 12 February 1910 in Korea. At 28, in 1938, he founded Samsung. Over nearly five decades he steered it into the sprawling chaebol that would anchor South Korea's industrial rise. The conglomerate became the country's largest, and Lee's name became shorthand for a particular brand of postwar Korean capitalism. He died on 19 November 1987, leaving behind a structure that outlasted him by orders of magnitude.