The Founders' Circle

Here's a fact that surprises most people: Red Bull isn't really an Austrian company. It's a Thai one that Austria happened to bottle better. The drink that fuels Formula 1 teams and gives 8.7 billion cans a year to people who need to pull an all-nighter was invented by a Bangkok pharmaceutical salesman, and to this day his family owns more of the company than the guy whose name is on every marketing deck. Photo by Sanket Sawale on Pexels That family has also spent the last decade at the center of one of Thailand's ugliest justice-system scandals, after a grandson allegedly killed a police officer with a Ferrari and simply never came home to face it. A Thai Truck Driver's Son Beats a Multinational to the Punch Chaleo Yoovidhya grew up poor, the son of Chinese immigrants in Thailand, and built a pharmaceutical company before inventing a syrupy energy tonic called Krating Daeng (literally "red gaur," the wild ox on the can) in 1976. It was cheap, sweet...

For four decades, Kelly Zong Fuli was known as the only child of China's most famous bottled-water tycoon. Chinese media called her the "Princess of Wahaha." Then, months after her father's death, three strangers walked into a Hong Kong courtroom and said: actually, we're his kids too — and we want $2 billion. Photo by Keegan Checks on Pexels This isn't a rumor cooked up by tabloids. It's playing out right now in one of the biggest family-fortune fights Asia has seen in years, and it says a lot about what happens when a self-made billionaire builds an empire on secrecy and never bothers to write it down properly. The Billionaire Who Rode Economy Class Zong Qinghou founded Wahaha (literally "laughing baby") in 1987, selling bottled drinks and yogurt out of a tiny school-supply distribution stand in Hangzhou. By the time he died in February 2024, Wahaha was one of China's largest beverage companies, and Zong himself had built a reputation...

If you were the founder of the biggest company in South Korea and you had three sons, which one would you hand the keys to? Lee Byung-chull had an easy answer, by tradition: the eldest. That's not what happened, and the reason why is one of the wildest corporate succession stories to come out of Asia. Photo by Minsu B on Pexels This isn't ancient history buried in a corporate museum. It's the origin story behind why Samsung today is run by the branch of the family it's run by — and why two of the founder's own children spent decades convinced they'd been cheated out of billions. A Smuggling Scandal Took Down the "Rightful" Heir First In 1966, a Samsung subsidiary called Korea Fertilizer Co. got caught trying to smuggle 55 tons of saccharin into the country disguised as construction materials. It became a national scandal. President Park Chung-hee personally ordered an investigation, and the fallout landed squarely on Lee Byung-chull's second...

On the morning of March 27, 1995, a man walked up the steps of a Milan office building, pulled a revolver, and shot Maurizio Gucci three times in the head and neck. He collapsed in the marble foyer of his own company's headquarters. The shooter, a pizzeria owner turned hired gun named Benedetto Ceraulo, had been recruited for the job by someone who knew Maurizio better than almost anyone alive: his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani. Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pexels That murder became the ending everyone remembers, thanks in part to Ridley Scott's 2021 film House of Gucci with Lady Gaga playing Reggiani. But the killing wasn't the first time a Gucci turned on a Gucci to save the family business — it was the last chapter in a decades-long pattern where blood ties kept losing to boardroom power. The Founder's Sons Split the Company Into Warring Camps Guccio Gucci started the company as a leather goods shop in Florence in 1921. By the time his sons Aldo and Rodolfo were...

Picture a town so small everyone knows everyone, split down the middle by two brothers who hated each other so much that even the local butcher, baker, and church picked sides. That's not a metaphor. It actually happened in Herzogenaurach, Germany, and it's the reason your closet probably has both an Adidas and a Puma box somewhere in it. Photo by Chris F on Pexels Adolf "Adi" Dassler and his older brother Rudolf ran a single shoe company together for over two decades. Then, in 1948, they split it in half and spent the rest of their lives — and their afterlives, buried in the same cemetery on opposite ends — refusing to speak to each other. One Factory, Two Brothers, and a World-Beating Shoe The Dasslers started making athletic shoes together in the 1920s in their mother's laundry room. By the 1936 Berlin Olympics, their shoes were already on the feet of gold medalists — most famously Jesse Owens, whose wins were a very inconvenient advertisement inside Naz...

In October 2010, Bernard Arnault picked up the phone and told Hermès' CEO something that made the entire luxury industry's jaw drop: LVMH now owned roughly 17% of Hermès. Nobody at Hermès had seen it coming. Nobody was supposed to. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels That's because Arnault hadn't bought the shares the normal way. He'd used a financial instrument most people had never heard of, and by the time anyone noticed, his stake was already too big to ignore. How You Buy 17% of a Company Without Anyone Noticing Under French securities law, any investor has to publicly disclose a stake once it crosses 5% of a listed company. LVMH found the loophole: cash-settled equity swaps. Instead of buying Hermès shares directly, LVMH paid banks to hold the shares on its behalf through derivative contracts, keeping each individual position under the 5% disclosure trigger. On paper, no single bank or subsidiary ever owned enough to trigger a filing. In reality, LVMH controll...

In February 2020, one of India's most famous businessmen stood up and said his net worth was zero. Not "down." Not "under pressure." Zero. The man was Anil Ambani, and fifteen years earlier he'd been co-owner of one of the largest business empires on the planet. What happened in between is one of the wildest sibling rivalries in modern corporate history—and it ended with his estranged older brother quietly paying his debt so he wouldn't go to prison. Photo by Vitthal Dikonda on Pexels A Father Dies Without a Will, and Everything Falls Apart Dhirubhai Ambani built Reliance from a small textile trading operation into India's largest private company, and when he died in July 2002, he left behind an empire worth billions—and no formal succession plan. That gap turned out to be a landmine. His two sons, Mukesh and Anil, had grown up working side by side inside the company, but without a clear line of authority, the question of who was actually in char...

Picture a 92-year-old man firing his own son as chairman of a multi-billion-dollar company. Then, the very next day, that son calling an emergency board meeting and firing his father right back. That's not a soap opera plot. That's exactly what happened inside Lotte Group, South Korea's fifth-largest conglomerate, on July 27 and 28, 2015. A Gum Salesman in Occupied Japan Builds an Empire Shin Kyuk-ho's story doesn't start in a Seoul boardroom. It starts in postwar Tokyo, where a young Korean immigrant was scraping by delivering milk and newspapers. In 1948, watching how much American GIs loved chewing gum, he started a small confectionery company and named it Lotte, after Charlotte, the heroine of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther." That gum company grew into a sprawling empire spanning candy, hotels, department stores, duty-free shops, and chemicals — first across Japan, then, starting in 1967, back in his home country of Korea. By the time Sh...