Chaebol, chips, and the Korean economy
Wake up in Seoul and you can spend the whole day inside a handful of family empires without noticing — your phone, your car, your apartment, the hospital you'd rush to. Here's what a chaebol really is, the 1961 shotgun marriage between a general and a dozen tycoons that built them, and the double edge of a country a few bloodlines run: the miracle, the gapjil, and 'too big to jail.'
Almost every phone, laptop, and AI data center on earth runs on memory chips — and roughly two-thirds of them come from two Korean companies you already know. Here's how a country the size of Indiana got a chokehold on the stuff that makes the AI boom possible, told the Korean way: a state, a chaebol, and a bet-the-company gamble that started in 1983.
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