Young Asian: From Billionaire to Montenegro jail, could'v just take over Samsung

[theking]

From billionaire to Montenegro jail: The rapid rise and fall of Terra chief Do Kwon


Do Kwon, 31, whose full name is Kwon Do-hyung, was born in South Korea and graduated from Daewon Foreign Language High School in the capital city Seoul.

Daewon is one of the country’s most prestigious private schools, with alumni such as Lee Boo-jin, the 52–year-old eldest daughter of former Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee, who built the company into South Korea’s biggest conglomerate, or chaebol.

In 2015, Kwon completed his bachelor’s degree in computer science at California’s Stanford University, regarded as the most selective of all U.S. colleges with a 5% acceptance rate, the same as Harvard University. It also boasts the most winners of the Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computer science.

(In an irony of coincidence, Sam Bankman-Fried grew up on the Stanford campus, where his parents taught law. Like Kwon, Bankman-Fried built a multibillion dollar cryptocurrency empire that unraveled over a matter of days. Unlike Kwon in a Montenegro jail, Bankman-Fried is living back on campus in his parents’ house on bail, though he also faces allegations of fraud; charges he has denied.)

Kwon reportedly spent three months in a software engineer internship at Apple Inc. in 2012 during his studies and then another three months at Microsoft Corp. in 2015 after graduating from Stanford.

It is not clear if Kwon was offered a job at the companies, but in January 2016 he founded a peer-to-peer telecommunicat ions company known as Anyfi Inc., according to his LinkedIn profile. He was also working on a cryptocurrency white paper with college classmate Nicholas Platias, who later became head of research at Terraform Labs.

At some point, Kwon formed a partnership with established South Korean entrepreneur Daniel Shin, 38, who would become a co-founder with Kwon of Terraform Labs.

Shin, whose full name is Shin Hyun-seung, started an e-commerce company in 2010 known as Tmon Inc. and built it into one of the biggest of its kind in the country with revenues of US$100 million by 2021. Like Kwon, Daniel Shin went to a top U.S. university, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.