Part IThe Story
In the spring of 2026 the richest man in Korean entertainment began giving his company away, slowly, in the passive voice of regulatory filings. On March 31, Bang Si-hyuk transferred 546,120 shares of HYBE to the corporation itself, valued at ₩209.16 billion (about $182.8 million), to be used, according to the disclosure, for employee and executive compensation at HYBE and its affiliates. Three weeks later, on April 21, South Korean police asked for a warrant to arrest him. They accused him of misleading HYBE's early investors before the company's 2020 listing and of collecting profits through a related private equity fund. Prosecutors declined to pursue the warrant within days. In May the company unveiled a new corporate identity and a new mission statement, Discover a New Universe, Unlock an Immersive Journey, and a footnote in the announcement said the old principle, three words long, would be kept for internal use. On May 20, Bang gave away another 192,126 shares, worth ₩45.15 billion.
The three words were We believe in Music.
That year his production credits also kept accumulating, as they had every year since a college student entered a songwriting contest named for a dead balladeer. He is credited on Katseye's "Pinky Up." On four songs from Le Sserafim's Pureflow Pt. 1, among them "Boompala" and "Celebration." On "RedRed," "Acai," and "Wassup" for Cortis, the newest boy group at the label he founded in 2005 with almost nothing. On "Bed of Thorns," from a Tomorrow X Together album titled, with what reads like accidental precision, 7th Year: A Moment of Stillness in the Thorns. By the evidence of the liner notes, the man the police wanted to detain spent at least part of the year in the studio.
The facts of the case are still contested, and they will be contested in courtrooms for some time. What interests me is the coexistence. A billionaire who has spent three decades insisting he is a producer first is now accused of having been, at the decisive moment, a financier first. And he keeps answering, as he always has, with songs. To understand how those two figures came to share one name, and why the Korean state could honor him and then investigate him in roughly the time it takes to make an idol, you have to go back to a civil servant's house in Seoul and a gift that, by the father's account, was the only thing the father ever did.
By the Numbers
From Four Employees to a Conglomerate
4Employees at Big Hit in 2007, when the company neared bankruptcy
15RM's age when Bang signed him as the first member of BTS
₩2.66THYBE revenue in 2025 (≈ US$2.32 billion)
28.42%Bang's stake in HYBE as of May 21, 2026
$1.05BPaid to Ithaca Holdings shareholders and bondholders, 2021
30%Share of private equity fund profits Bang was reportedly entitled to
₩263BAlleged gains frozen by court order in 2026 (≈ US$193 million)
An Aesthete in the Civil Servant's House
Bang Si-hyuk was born on August 9, 1972, into a household that loved music and did not want its son to make a living from it. His father, Bang Geuk-yoon, would rise to become president of the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Corporation, an administrator of the state's provisions against injury. His mother, Choi Myung-ja, was later profiled in the Korean press under a headline praising a love both "gentle and strong." There was a younger sister. Both parents, by the boy's own later account, steered him away from the music business.
He took the approved road anyway, and he took it with distinction. He went to Kyunggi High School, one of the most storied finishing schools of the Korean establishment, and then to Seoul National University, the summit of the national examination system. There he studied aesthetics. It is a beautifully impractical choice for the son of a welfare administrator: four years on the philosophy of beauty, on why some arrangements of sound and color move us and others don't. In a country where university admissions are close to a national religion, it was also a way of staying obedient to the letter of his parents' wishes while betraying their spirit.
The betrayal had started early. In middle school he formed a band with friends and performed songs he had written himself. In college he debuted as a composer. In 1994 he won the Yoo Jae-ha Music Contest, the songwriting competition named for the singer-songwriter who died in a car accident in 1987, months after releasing the only album he ever made. Decades later the Chosun Ilbo would describe the contest in a headline as the competition that "produced the father of BTS." In 1994 that father was twenty-two and had won a prize in a dead man's name. He began writing and producing songs in earnest.
Some context on what he was walking toward. In the year Bang won his contest, a Yonsei University geology student named Park Jin-young released his debut solo album, Blue City. The next year Park released a second album and titled it Tantara, a romanization of ddanddara, an old and faintly contemptuous Korean word for entertainers: the song-and-dance people, the ones respectable families did not want their children to become. Park was naming the stigma out loud. Bang, for his part, was going toward it with a Seoul National University degree in his pocket.
He was about to spend thirty years making the ddanddara respectable. The irony he could not have anticipated is what respectability would eventually cost.
Two Hitmen
Park Jin-young is the first of the doubles in this story, and the most important.
Born in Seoul in December 1971, Park spent three childhood years in New York after his father, a news correspondent, was posted to the United States. He came home with an ear for American soul and funk. He studied composition for two years under Kim Hyung-suk, one of the most celebrated pop writers in the country. His first group, a trio called Park Jin Young and the NG, released an album called Floating Time that went nowhere. He went solo and broke through with "Don't Leave Me." He was a performer in a way Bang never was: hips, falsetto, a gleeful taste for provocation. And he understood earlier than almost anyone that the money in Korean pop sat in the system that manufactured performers, not in performance itself.
The two met in 1997. That year Park founded the company that would become JYP Entertainment, then called Tae-Hong Planning Corp, and Korea's corporate filings still list Bang as a co-founder. Park and Bang worked as a songwriting duo, with Bang as composer, arranger, and producer for the new house. Their defining early project was a five-member group they were hired to prepare for debut. It came out in 1999 as g.o.d.
g.o.d became one of the best-selling and most popular boy bands of the early 2000s. Bang's arrangements sat underneath "One Candle" and "Road," songs that have outlasted the era that produced them. The success gave both men a reputation as hit makers, and it gave Bang the name he would carry onto every credit sheet for the next quarter-century: "Hitman." The nickname is a little ridiculous, a little menacing, and almost perfectly accurate about the job. A hitman fulfills a contract. He doesn't sign his name to the work, and he needs no audience beyond the client. Bang went on producing or composing for an enormous range of Korean pop: the veteran singer Im Chang-jung, the R&B singer Baek Ji-young, Park Ji-yoon, Rain, Wonder Girls, 2AM, Teen Top. The credits would eventually be collected into an album under his own alias, Homme by Hitman Bang, released in 2011. A hitman with a discography.
Park's ambition ran east to west. In 2004 he went to the United States and became, by his own industry's reckoning, the first Asian producer to cross over, writing and producing for Will Smith, Mase, and Cassie. In October 2009, with Wonder Girls' "Nobody," he and his co-writer became the first Korean songwriters on the Billboard Hot 100, debuting at No. 76. American success was the goal, and he went to America in person to chase it.
Bang left before any of that, nearly four years after JYP's founding. Big Hit Entertainment's corporate registration dates to February 2005. The two men did not part as enemies. For years afterward their companies co-managed acts, traded artists, and shared credits. But the departure set a pattern that recurs through every chapter of what follows, with the regularity of a chorus: the apprentice learns inside a house, and then he leaves to build his own.
In K-pop that wish has a name. People call it independence, and almost everyone who achieves anything in the industry eventually wants it.
Without a Heart
Big Hit's first release came out on June 10, 2005. It was a full-length album by the R&B singer Lim Jeong-hee, and it was called Music Is My Life. Even allowing for the conventions of mid-2000s Korean R&B, the title reads now like a statement of company purpose, an earlier and more personal draft of the three words HYBE would one day keep only for internal use.
The early catalog is not glamorous. K.Will's debut, Left Heart, released in March 2007 and co-managed with JYP. A vocal trio called 8Eight, signed in 2007, whose first album was titled, without irony, The First. Drama soundtracks, the bread and butter of Korean ballad labels: "Belief" for The Rain, "Don't Swallow" for Dream Comes True. The company trafficked in heartbreak at the pace a small label could afford.
In 2007 Big Hit had four employees and was close to bankruptcy.
The detail deserves to sit for a moment, because the later mythology of the company, the platforms and acquisitions and design awards and stock-exchange gongs, depends on forgetting it. The man who would become the sixth-richest person in South Korea spent the second half of the 2000s running a four-person ballad shop that could have folded at any point. What kept it open, according to the company's own history as later reported by Bloomberg, was the local success in 2009 of an 8Eight song called "Without a Heart."
You could not invent that title. A song about being without a heart kept the heart of the enterprise beating, and the company survived on melancholy.
Big Hit also survived on the umbilical cord to JYP. In 2010 the two companies signed a joint management contract for 2AM, a ballad boy group whose members had already been recording under Big Hit's banner since 2008. Their "I Was Wrong" came out in March 2010, and Saint o'Clock, which Bang produced, in October. That year the Melon Music Awards created a songwriter category and gave its first trophy, for 2009, to Hitman Bang. He would win it again seven years later, for a very different kind of song.
The small-label years carried their own humiliations. In 2012 Big Hit and Source Music jointly formed a girl group called Glam. In 2014 one of its members, Kim Da-hee, was implicated in a scheme to blackmail the actor Lee Byung-hun and was later sentenced to prison, and the group was dissolved. When the joint contract with JYP over 2AM ended in April 2014, three of the four members went back to JYP. Only Lee Chang-min stayed, to continue as a soloist and as half of the duo Homme. 8Eight broke up the same year when two members' contracts ended. In May 2015 Lim Jeong-hee, the voice of the label's very first album, left when her three-year contract expired. That same month a KOSDAQ-listed firm called Signal Entertainment Group took a stake in Big Hit through a ₩6 billion convertible bond, about $5.2 million, the kind of money a company accepts when it needs breathing room more than it needs dignity. Big Hit settled the bonds in full and ended the relationship in early 2016.
On paper, 2014 and 2015 look like a company bleeding out. Ballad acts were leaving, a scandal had closed its girl group, and it had sold a convertible bond to stay liquid. The paper was misleading. Since June 2013, Big Hit had also been releasing records by seven young men whose first single was called "No More Dream."
The Fifteen-Year-Old and the Complete Idol
In 2010, the same year Big Hit and JYP signed the 2AM contract, Bang signed a fifteen-year-old rapper named Kim Nam-joon, who would later perform as RM. He was the first member of a group that did not yet exist, and he was signed first, before any of the others. Bang then launched nationwide auditions to find the people who would surround him.
The sequence matters. The standard idol factory of the era worked like a casting agency, assembling looks, voices, and dance skills into a marketable configuration. Bang started with a teenager who wrote his own verses and built outward. The future group's center of gravity was a person with something to say, and the choreography and styling came after.
He was also talking about what he was building, in the oblique way of producers who want credit in advance without being held to anything. On April 28, 2011, he gave a lecture at Seoul National University, his alma mater, and the entertainment press came away with one sentence.
— Bang Si-hyuk, lecture at Seoul National University, April 2011 (as reported by OSEN)A complete idol will emerge.
Earlier that month he had told Yonhap that the essential quality in a singer was mastery of the stage: a performer who dominates it, not one who merely occupies it. A year before that, in a 2010 interview, the hit maker admitted he had been "shocked" watching miss A, a girl group from his old partner's house. He was paying very close attention to what JYP was doing and to what he himself was not yet doing.
BTS debuted on June 13, 2013, with 2 Cool 4 Skool, co-produced by Bang and Pdogg, the in-house producer who would sit beside him on nearly every BTS record for the next decade. The press of the time was not kind and not especially interested. Big Hit was a small company in an industry that a handful of large ones controlled, and its new boy group had no special access to television slots, distribution, or the gatekeepers who decided which idols the public would meet. The commonplace account says BTS succeeded despite that. A Korea JoongAng Daily headline from November 2016 suggested something closer to the reverse: "Independence is key to K-pop success: Once overlooked, BTS are a global hit." Being left alone was part of the advantage.
What followed has been narrated so often that it has hardened into scripture, and an entire explanatory shelf has grown up around it, with titles like Burn the Stage: The Rise of BTS and Korean Boy Bands trying to account for something its own industry failed to predict. The discography is the cleaner record. Skool Luv Affair, Dark & Wild, and the two halves of The Most Beautiful Moment in Life ran across 2014 and 2015, while Japanese singles went out in parallel. In 2016 came Wings, for which Bang co-wrote six songs. It earned him Best Producer at the Mnet Asian Music Awards and the Melon Songwriter Award, the trophy he had first won with ballads in 2009.
On January 14, 2017, at the Golden Disc Awards, the Best Producer prize went to Bang Si-hyuk, and RM, by then twenty-two, accepted it on his behalf. Seven years earlier Bang had signed a fifteen-year-old as the first piece of an unbuilt group. Now the boy stood on stage holding the man's trophy, and the line of authorship had quietly reversed.
That March the Korea Herald ran a profile under the headline "Bang Si-hyuk: from 'hitman' to 'motivator.'" In December 2017 the government gave him a Presidential Commendation at the Korea Content Awards. Respectability was arriving, by official envelope.
A Record Label That Behaved Like Software
When Big Hit's earnings were published for the first time, in March 2018, the numbers were startling for a company that had been worried about payroll eleven years earlier: ₩92.4 billion in revenue for 2017 and ₩32.5 billion in operating profit. The 2018 figures, released the following March, showed sales up 132 percent to ₩214.2 billion and operating profit up 97 percent to ₩64.1 billion.
Capital came running. In 2018 Netmarble, the Korean mobile-game company, paid a reported ₩201.4 billion for 25.71 percent of Big Hit and became its second-largest shareholder. In October the private investment firm STIC Investments put in roughly ₩104 billion. In December the Korea VC Awards named Big Hit Best Investment Company of the Year. That autumn BTS renewed their contracts for another seven years, through 2026. In April 2019 Bloomberg estimated Bang's net worth at $770 million.
The analysts who tried to explain all this kept reaching for the same comparison: Big Hit was run less like an entertainment company than like an IT company. Social media was used to capture attention and turn it into sales, and the artists generated a constant stream of multimedia content around themselves. Fan energy was treated less as a marketing channel than as a raw material.
The clearest expression of that idea was a piece of software. A subsidiary called beNX built two apps: Weverse, a community platform where artists and fans talked to each other, and a commerce app first called Weply and renamed Weverse Shop on March 9, 2020. The next day Fast Company ranked Big Hit the fourth most innovative company in the world, and the magazine's headline put the point with some admiration: "Millions of BTS fans use these 2 apps to connect and shop. No tech startups needed." A label had built the platform itself instead of renting one.
The point became a business case within months, because the pandemic closed the concert halls. Concert revenue fell in 2020. Merchandise revenue rose 53 percent, content 71 percent, and fan club revenue 66 percent. The company's revenue for the year grew 35.6 percent to ₩796.3 billion, and operating profit grew 44.3 percent to ₩142.4 billion. With every stadium dark, the fans kept gathering, on a platform the label owned.
In March 2019 Bang appointed his chief business officer, Lenzo Yoon, as co-CEO. The division of labor was announced explicitly: Yoon would handle the business, and Bang would focus on creative production. It was the first of several attempts to separate the hitman from the operator, and it would not be the last. Meanwhile the operator was buying. In July 2019 Big Hit acquired Source Music, its old partner on the ill-fated Glam. That year it also bought a music-game company called Superb, and Bang said, with the blandness of a man signing a check, that the deal would "bring positive value." In May 2020 Big Hit became majority shareholder of Pledis Entertainment, home of Seventeen and NU'EST, and promised that Pledis would keep its independence. In November it bought KOZ Entertainment, the label founded by the rapper Zico.
On May 21, 2020, the company applied to the Korea Exchange for the pre-listing consultation that Korean law requires before an IPO, and a week later it filed for preliminary review. On October 15, 2020, Big Hit listed on the KOSPI. The shares opened at ₩270,000, roughly double the offering price. At the listing the company pledged to become "a company loved around the world." It was the largest Korean IPO in three years, and it made Bang a billionaire, worth $2.8 billion and ranked as the sixth-richest person in South Korea, the only billionaire the country's entertainment industry had ever produced.
Hold onto that date. Four years later, a government agency would start asking what happened in the year before it.
A Name Without a Hit in It
On March 19, 2021, Big Hit Entertainment announced that it would henceforth be called HYBE.
The renaming deserves more attention than corporate rebrands usually get. For sixteen years the company had carried its founder's identity in its name. Big Hit is the hitman's company, named for the thing he made. HYBE names a structure, a hive, a platform, and the person who started it has been taken out of the name. The recording and management business that had been the whole company was spun off as a subsidiary called BigHit Music, a wholly owned label among several, overseen like the others by the parent's executives. The founder's workshop became one label in a portfolio. On March 22 the company moved into new headquarters in the Yongsan Trade Center. The rebrand took effect on March 31, and that autumn its new corporate identity won a Red Dot Design Award.
Two weeks after the rebrand, HYBE did the most American thing a Korean entertainment company had ever done. Through its subsidiary HYBE America, it acquired Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings, with SB Projects and Big Machine Label Group, home to Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande's management and to Taylor Swift's former masters. It put $950 million into the American subsidiary to finance the deal and paid $1.05 billion to Ithaca's shareholders and bondholders. The Carlyle Group sold out. Braun joined HYBE's board, and Scott Borchetta stayed on as CEO of Big Machine. Bloomberg's headline in July had the crude clarity of a ticker: "K-Pop Billionaire Behind BTS Doubles Wealth on Adding Bieber." Bang was worth an estimated $3.2 billion. Park Jin-young had flown to America in 2004 to write songs for American stars. Seventeen years later his former partner bought the company that managed them.
On July 1, 2021, Bang resigned as CEO of HYBE, kept the chairmanship of the board, and announced that he was returning his focus to music production. The Korea Herald published an explainer that month: "Who are the key players at Hybe in the post-Bang Si-hyuk era?" The phrase post-Bang Si-hyuk era was premature. He held the largest stake in the company and the gavel on the board. But it told you what he wanted the public to believe about him, which was that he was a producer at heart.
The company kept expanding outward, sometimes into things that turned out to be fads. In February 2021 HYBE put ₩4 billion into Supertone, a startup that made hyper-realistic artificial voices. In November it swapped equity with Dunamu, the operator of a Korean cryptocurrency exchange, buying 2.6 percent of Dunamu for ₩500 billion while Dunamu took 5.6 percent of HYBE for ₩700 billion, with the aim of building an NFT business. In January 2022 it serialized BTS as characters in webtoon stories. The BTS comic, 7Fates: CHAKHO, drew more than fifteen million views in two days, the fastest any title on Webtoon had reached that mark. In March 2022 Fast Company ranked HYBE eleventh among the world's most innovative companies and first in media. Time named it to its 100 Most Influential Companies for a second year, called it "The Pop Powerhouse," and in April put Bang on its cover alongside BTS.
That same April, Seoul National University gave him an honorary doctorate in business. He was the first figure from the entertainment industry to receive one.
— Seoul National University, honorary doctorate citation, April 2022For his contribution to the development and innovation of the nation's cultural and entertainment industry, and his role in turning K-pop into a global pop music culture.
The aesthetics student from the welfare administrator's house had come back to the university that trained the Korean elite, and the university had given the ddanddara trade an academic robe. The honor was real, and so was what it signaled: popular music was no longer a vice tolerated on the margins of the national economy. It was now an export industry with a doctor of business administration at its head. In October 2022 Bang gave ₩5 billion to the Community Chest of Korea. In March 2025 he gave another ₩5 billion to Seoul National University to build a new cultural center.
Big companies attract big-company fights, though. In February 2023 HYBE bought the 14.8 percent stake held by Lee Soo-man, founder of SM Entertainment and the original architect of the idol system, for about ₩422.8 billion, and became SM's largest shareholder. The kakao conglomerate came in with a rival tender. On March 12, HYBE withdrew from the bidding war, saying that continuing could "damage shareholder value." It sold half its stake to Kakao at the end of the month, kept 8.81 percent, and in May 2025 sold the remainder to Tencent Music. It was a rare public retreat for Bang, and in hindsight one of the more disciplined decisions in the company's history. HYBE had wanted the oldest house in K-pop and settled for a profitable exit. In January 2025 the Korea Herald reported that HYBE had become the first Korean entertainment company designated a conglomerate, a status that brings disclosure obligations and closer government oversight.
So the industry finally had the respectability it had chased for decades. Within a year the regulators would begin examining the man who had brought it there.
All Doors, One Room
On November 12, 2021, HYBE announced a new label called ADOR. Even the name was an argument. It stood for All Doors, One Room, which is a fair description of the multi-label model itself: many independent entrances, each with its own sensibility, all opening onto the same corporate floor plan.
Its president was Min Hee-jin, HYBE's chief brand officer, a creative director who had built some of the most recognizable visual identities in K-pop at SM Entertainment before joining Big Hit. She was the person who had introduced HYBE's new corporate identity to the public at the March 2021 rebrand. Her new label's first girl group debuted in July 2022 as NewJeans with a song called "Attention." In a market saturated with spectacle, NewJeans made restraint, nostalgia, and ordinary teenage life feel radical. They became the most culturally talked-about debut of their generation, and Min became, for a time, the most celebrated producer in Korea not named Bang.
The multi-label promise had been made to every label HYBE acquired. Source Music would keep its independence, and Pledis would retain its independence while gaining greater financial support. Independence is the most valuable word in this story and the hardest to define. It describes what Bang took from JYP in 2005. It describes what Lee Chang-min took in 2018, when his Big Hit contract expired, Homme disbanded, and he left to set up his own one-man agency. It describes what the seven members of Got7 took in January 2021, when they collectively declined to renew with JYP.
One of those seven was a second Park Jin-young, born in 1994, unrelated to the founder of the house that trained him and stuck for a decade with his boss's name. He grew up in Jinhae, a navy town on the southern coast, and his family comes from Udo, a small island off it. As a sixth-grader he wanted to be on television. His mother, who disapproved, sent him to an SM audition on the condition that if he failed, he would give up. He reached the final preliminary round and won a popularity award. In 2009 he won first place in JYP's open audition, ahead of more than ten thousand applicants, and moved to Seoul alone in his first year of high school. Twelve years later he walked out with his bandmates, signed with an acting agency, and went on to win Best New Actor at the Baeksang Arts Awards. His trajectory is the standard K-pop arc in miniature: parental doubt, an audition, a move away from home, apprenticeship inside the system, success, and departure. It is Bang's arc too, minus the billions.
Min Hee-jin's version of that departure was not amicable, and it became the most public corporate war in the history of the industry.
On April 22, 2024, HYBE announced an audit of ADOR's management amid allegations that Min was trying to take the label independent. Within hours she counter-accused HYBE of tolerating the similarities between NewJeans and Illit, a girl group that had debuted the previous month at another HYBE label, Belift Lab, and of treating her and her group unfairly. HYBE's share price fell 8.03 percent that day. On April 25, HYBE reported her to police for breach of trust and released messages it said showed her discussing ways to take control of ADOR. Seven hours later she held an emergency press conference. She cried and swore, and she produced text messages between herself, Bang, and HYBE's then-CEO Park Ji-won. She accused Bang of trying to control all of HYBE's labels and erase what made them distinct, and she said she had offered to talk with Bang or Park and that neither had agreed. HYBE replied that her press conference was "not worth answering."
The courts produced a split decision, as courts often do when two parties are each partly right. On May 30, 2024, a judge granted Min's injunction barring HYBE from using its voting power to dismiss her, while noting in the ruling that she had sought to weaken HYBE's control over ADOR. A later ruling dismissed the plagiarism claims against Illit. HYBE replaced her as CEO in August. She resigned from all her positions on November 20, 2024. In July 2025 police cleared her of breach of trust, and HYBE said it would appeal. On February 12, 2026, a court ruled for Min in her suit over the put option in her shareholder agreement. Once that right is confirmed, HYBE will owe her ₩25.5 billion, about $17.7 million.
Then there was the paper trail. On October 24, 2024, during a National Assembly audit, a lawmaker questioned HYBE's chief operating officer about an internal document called the Weekly Music Industry Report, a compilation reported to run to roughly 18,000 pages, containing harsh commentary, rumors, and disparaging remarks about idols, many of them at rival companies. Portions leaked. On October 29, HYBE's CEO, Lee Jae-sang, apologized publicly and called the content "highly inappropriate and unacceptable." The company had kept a running file of the industry's gossip for its executives, and now the industry had read it.
All doors, one room. HYBE had designed the rooms to feel separate, and in practice the walls were thin.
Thirty Percent
In December 2024, South Korea's Financial Supervisory Service opened an investigation into the period before the IPO.
The allegations, as reported and as later laid out by police, go roughly as follows. In 2019, while Big Hit was telling early investors it had no near-term plans to list, it was preparing to do exactly that. During that period private equity funds bought shares from early investors who sold without knowing a listing was coming. Bang had entered into shareholder agreements with three of those funds that, according to reports, entitled him to 30 percent of their profits once they sold after the IPO, and those arrangements were not disclosed to the market. The funds sold, and the founder received his share. One British trade publication put a figure in its headline: $285 million.
HYBE denied any violation. It said the shareholder agreement in question had been provided to the IPO underwriters during the listing process and judged not mandatory to disclose, and that the transactions had been carried out lawfully and with legal oversight.
Then the machinery of the state, slow and procedural, began moving all at once. In May 2025 the financial regulator was reported to have decided on a criminal referral. On May 29 prosecutors raided HYBE's headquarters in a separate case, in which a former executive was accused of making about ₩240 million by buying YG Plus shares before HYBE's investment in that company was made public. On July 16 the Financial Services Commission formally referred Bang and three other executives to prosecutors on suspicion of unfair trading. On July 22, three former employees of HYBE affiliates received suspended prison sentences for selling shares before the June 14, 2022 announcement that BTS would take a hiatus. On July 24 police raided HYBE's headquarters. On July 29 investigators from the National Tax Service's 4th Investigation Bureau searched the same building, as part of a probe into twenty-seven companies.
Netmarble, the game company whose 2018 purchase had marked Big Hit's arrival as an investable business, had been preparing to raise about ₩250 billion in exchangeable bonds backed by part of its HYBE stake. By August it had dropped the plan. The Korean financial press blamed the decline in HYBE's share price on owner risk. The founder, once the company's chief asset, had become its chief liability.
Bang had been abroad. In August 2025 he came back to South Korea to cooperate with investigators, and reports said police were seeking to analyze his phone. On August 6 he sent a message to the whole company, which leaked almost immediately. He expressed regret for the concern he had caused and said he had already given the regulator a comprehensive explanation.
— Bang Si-hyuk, company-wide message to HYBE employees, August 6, 2025I am temporarily putting aside urgent work and business meetings in order to prioritize cooperating with the authorities' investigation process.
He was questioned by police in September. In November police asked the court to freeze his assets, and in December the Seoul Southern District Court approved the provisional seizure of his HYBE shares, valued at ₩156.8 billion, about $118 million. On December 18 the financial regulator's special judicial police searched his home and offices. In April 2026 police sought the arrest warrant that prosecutors declined to pursue. In September 2026, having obtained a court order freezing ₩263 billion, about $193 million, of what they described as profits from the scheme, police sent the case to the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors' Office.
None of this has been adjudicated. It may never resolve into anything as clean as guilt or innocence. Disclosure law is a gray, technical field, and the line between an aggressive private arrangement and a criminal one is exactly what lawyers will argue about for years. The corporate filings, though, show how the founder's fortune is now arranged. As of May 2026 he held 12,247,734 shares, 28.42 percent of HYBE. He had pledged 640,000 of them as collateral for loans from Nonghyup Bank at a weighted average interest rate of 3.8 percent, scheduled to run until March 31, 2027. Under voting agreements among Bang, Netmarble, and Dunamu, together with the Netmarble bonds, 43.55 percent of HYBE's equity was tied up in some form of contract. Netmarble and Dunamu had once been brought in as validating investors. Now they were bound to him in shareholder agreements while his own shares sat frozen.
And there were the gifts: 546,120 shares on March 31, 2026, and 192,126 on May 20, roughly ₩254 billion in all, handed back to the corporation to pay its people. A Korean business daily asked the obvious question in its headline: why was a man accused of unjust enrichment giving his shares away one tranche after another? The filings don't answer that. I would only point out that the gifts came to roughly the same order of magnitude as the alleged gains police would later freeze, and that I can't tell whether the resemblance is penance, strategy, coincidence, or something else.
The Method Travels; the Man Stays Home
While the case moved through Seoul's courts and prosecutors' offices, HYBE went on doing what it has done since 2020, which is to export the training method rather than its performers.
The idea had been stated plainly in 2021, when Lenzo Yoon became co-CEO of HYBE America with a mandate described in the company's own words as "the localization of Hybe's K-pop business model in the US." In February of that year Big Hit and Universal Music Group announced a joint venture with Geffen Records: a global audition, a Los Angeles label, with HYBE selecting and training the artists and Universal producing, distributing, and marketing them. The result was Katseye, a multinational girl group whose making was itself turned into a Netflix documentary, Pop Star Academy: Katseye. Bang holds production credits on their "My Way," on "Gnarly," and on "Pinky Up."
HYBE built a Japanese group, &Team, through an audition show, and a Japanese label, Jconic, in January 2026. In November 2023 it bought Exile Music and set up HYBE Latin America, with offices in Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Miami, an audition program for a Latin boy band called Santos Bravos, and a Telemundo competition to assemble a Regional Mexican group. HYBE China opened in Beijing on April 2, 2025. HYBE India opened in Mumbai on September 23, 2025, with a slogan that could stand as the motto of the whole enterprise: "Where Indian voices become global stories." In December 2025 HYBE partnered with the managers of the South African singer Tyla to develop African artists. By May 2026 the HYBE group counted 77 domestic and overseas affiliates in South Korea, Japan, China, the United States, Mexico, India, and Singapore.
The thing being exported is the system Bang learned at JYP and refined at Big Hit: audition, training, a group built around a center, a narrative world, and a platform where fans can be met directly. The talent can come from anywhere. The method is portable in a way no individual performer ever is.
Not everything traveled well. In May 2025 HYBE America sold Big Machine Rock, a Nashville imprint it had acquired with Ithaca. In July 2025 Scooter Braun stepped down as HYBE America's CEO, replaced by Isaac Lee, and by July 2026 he had left HYBE's board, staying on as an advisor. Supertone, the artificial-voice startup, was approved for dissolution at a shareholders' meeting on July 15, 2026, with some of its products moved to a new company and others discontinued; a Seoul business paper referred to HYBE's "M&A brutal history." The numbers by subsidiary are revealing. In 2025 BigHit Music, the house that BTS built, earned ₩47.9 billion in operating profit on ₩437.5 billion in revenue. Pledis, the acquired label, earned ₩69.7 billion on less revenue. Weverse, the platform that had been the company's proof of being more than a record label, brought in ₩299.7 billion in revenue and made only ₩2 billion in operating profit. The software that made Big Hit look like a tech company makes about as much money as a ballad label.
The board around the founder has become an American-style mixture: Kevin Mayer, the former TikTok chief executive; Isaac Lee; an economist, a law professor, a former vice minister. The CEO, Lee Jae-sang, the strategist who led the Ithaca deal, holds 32,040 shares, 0.07 percent of the company. A restricted stock program started in 2024 distributed 158,640 shares in 2025 to 2,122 employees and executives. Bang's two gifts in 2026 were each several times larger than that entire year's grant.
Meanwhile his old partner was going into government. On September 9, 2025, Park Jin-young was appointed co-chairman, at minister level, of the Popular Culture Exchange Committee, which reports directly to President Lee Jae Myung. Billboard noted that an active K-pop pioneer moving into government was without precedent. On March 10, 2026, Park announced he was leaving JYP's board to concentrate on the committee and on his own creative work. In July 2026, at fifty-four, he released a summer single called "Wet," the theme song for the Waterbomb festival.
The two hitmen from 1997, then, ended up in very different places. One was co-chairing a presidential committee and recording a festival theme. The other was making regular appearances in the documents of investigators in the same capital. The state that had given the ddanddara trade an honorary doctorate and a presidential commendation was now appointing one of its founders to government and examining the other's finances. Both responses come from the same fact: K-pop now matters to the country, and the state treats it accordingly.
A Moment of Stillness in the Thorns
Return to the spring of 2026, and the production credits.
The credits document a habit that runs unbroken from the Yoo Jae-ha contest in 1994 through g.o.d, 8Eight, and 2AM, through Wings, and into the present: Illit's "Magnetic" and "Tick Tack," Le Sserafim's "Crazy," "Spaghetti," and "Boompala," Enhypen's "Paranormal," Cortis's "What You Want," &Team's "Samidare" and "Aoarashi," TXT's "Over the Moon" and "Deja Vu" and "Bed of Thorns." He wrote and produced in years when his company was buying American label groups, in years when it was fighting its most famous producer in court, in years when the police were searching his house. Whatever else is true of Bang Si-hyuk, he never stopped writing songs.
That year the company that had once been named after him rewrote its public mission in the language of platforms: universes, immersion, journeys. The phrase it kept back, for internal use, was the one a four-person ballad label could have printed on its first album, which in a sense it did. Music Is My Life, Lim Jeong-hee sang in June 2005, on a record by a company that would come close to failing two years later and was saved by a song called "Without a Heart."
In February 2019, before the IPO and before any of the investigations, a provincial newspaper in Jeonbuk interviewed Bang Geuk-yoon, the retired head of the national workers' compensation agency, whose son by then was being called the father of BTS. The father had once discouraged the boy from music. Asked what part he had played, he told the paper:
"The only thing I did was buy him a guitar."
Part IIThe Playbook
Bang Si-hyuk's career offers two playbooks at once. One belongs to a craftsman who turned a near-bankrupt ballad label into the most influential music company outside the American majors. The other is a cautionary record of what happens when that craftsman becomes the owner of an institution the state, the market, and his own creative partners have learned to scrutinize. The principles below draw on both. Some are meant to be emulated, and some are meant as warnings about what to avoid. Each is grounded in the record laid out above.
Twelve Principles
- 1.Apprentice inside a house, then leave before you become furniture.
- 2.Let the unglamorous catalog fund the moonshot.
- 3.Sign the center first and build the group around a voice.
- 4.Being overlooked is a form of freedom.
- 5.Own the room where the fans gather.
- 6.Separate the producer from the operator, but keep the pen.
- 7.Export the method, not the product.
- 8.Know which fights are worth losing.
- 9.Write the independence clause before anyone asks for it.
- 10.The disclosure you skip becomes the story you're known for.
- 11.Legitimacy is a loan, and the state collects with interest.
- 12.Stay in the studio.
Principle 1
Apprentice inside a house, then leave before you become furniture
Bang spent roughly four years as a co-founder and the in-house composer, arranger, and producer at JYP, long enough to absorb the whole idol-making process (casting, training, songwriting, the economics of a hit), and then he left to found Big Hit in 2005. The partnership survived the departure. The two companies co-managed K.Will, 2AM, and Lim Jeong-hee for years afterward, which means Bang kept JYP's distribution and goodwill even after leaving its payroll.
The pattern recurs throughout his story with almost mechanical regularity: Lee Chang-min leaving Big Hit in 2018 to start his own agency, Got7 leaving JYP in 2021, Min Hee-jin trying to take ADOR out of HYBE. The lesson cuts both ways. If you are the apprentice, the time to leave is when you have learned the whole system but before your identity has merged with the house's. If you are the house, expect every talented person you train to want what you wanted, and build the relationship so that their departure keeps them as an ally.
Tactic: Set a fixed window, three to five years, to master an institution end to end, and make your exit in a way that keeps it as a partner rather than a rival.
Principle 2
Let the unglamorous catalog fund the moonshot
The founding myth of HYBE is BTS. The founding fact is ballads. In 2007 Big Hit had four employees and was close to bankruptcy, and it survived because of an 8Eight song called "Without a Heart" in 2009, 2AM's records, drama soundtracks, and Lim Jeong-hee's R&B. Those unfashionable, steady products paid the bills while Bang signed a fifteen-year-old rapper in 2010 and spent three years building a group around him.
Founders tend to tell the story as though the breakthrough product were the whole company. In practice the breakthrough is usually subsidized by something duller that customers reliably pay for. Bang ran a ballad shop and a moonshot under the same roof, and the ballad shop kept the moonshot alive long enough to work.
Tactic: Before you bet on the product that will define you, identify the reliable, unglamorous revenue that will keep the lights on for the three years the bet needs.
Principle 3
Sign the center first and build the group around a voice
The industry norm was to assemble a group from parts. Bang signed RM first, alone, and only then ran national auditions to find the people who would surround him. By 2011 he was telling Seoul National University students that "a complete idol will emerge," and telling Yonhap that what mattered in a singer was the ability to dominate a stage. Six years later RM was accepting Bang's producer trophy for him at the Golden Disc Awards.
The structural choice shaped the cultural outcome. A group built around someone with a point of view produces material that sounds authored rather than manufactured, and audiences can tell. The same principle applies to any team: find the person whose judgment you would trust over your own, put them at the center, and hire to complement them.
Tactic: For any new team, make the first hire the person with the strongest point of view, and recruit everyone else to strengthen that voice rather than dilute it.
Principle 4
Being overlooked is a form of freedom
When BTS debuted in June 2013, Big Hit was a small label without the broadcast access and distribution power of the large houses. In 2016 the Korea JoongAng Daily framed BTS's success under the headline "Independence is key to K-pop success," the story of a group that had been overlooked and become a global hit. Being ignored meant nobody was guarding the conventions, and the company could communicate directly with fans online and build a story the incumbents weren't watching.
There is a real cost to small scale. Big Hit almost died. But obscurity is also a period of low scrutiny in which unorthodox methods can be tested without consequence. The danger, as the later chapters show, is that a company accustomed to that freedom may keep acting as though no one is watching after everyone is.
Tactic: While you are small, run the experiments incumbents can't afford to try, and set a firm date by which you'll start acting like a company that is being watched.
Principle 5
Own the room where the fans gather
Weverse and Weverse Shop took Big Hit from label to platform. When the pandemic shut down concerts in 2020, merchandise revenue rose 53 percent, content 71 percent, and fan club revenue 66 percent, and total revenue grew 35.6 percent. Fast Company ranked Big Hit the fourth most innovative company in the world, and its headline made the decisive point: no tech startups needed.
The strategic value of owning the relationship is clear. The financial value is more complicated. In 2025 Weverse Company brought in ₩299.7 billion in revenue and only ₩2 billion in operating profit. Owning the room gave HYBE resilience, data, and leverage, enough that Naver paid ₩354.8 billion for 49 percent of the platform's predecessor, but it has not been the profit engine that the label business is. Own the room because it makes everything else possible, and don't expect the room itself to produce most of the profit.
Tactic: Build or buy the direct channel to your most devoted customers, and judge it by the revenue it makes possible elsewhere rather than by its own margin.
H
From Ballad Shop to Conglomerate
Key inflection points in Big Hit and HYBE's history.
2005
Big Hit founded; first release is Lim Jeong-hee's Music Is My Life (June 10).
2007
Four employees, near bankruptcy.
2009
8Eight's "Without a Heart" keeps the company afloat.
2010
RM signed at 15 as the first member of BTS.
2013
BTS debut with 2 Cool 4 Skool (June 13).
2018
Netmarble buys 25.71% for ₩201.4B; STIC invests ₩104B.
2019
Lenzo Yoon named co-CEO; Source Music acquired; TXT debut.
2020
Weverse ecosystem; Pledis and KOZ acquired; KOSPI listing (Oct. 15).
2021
Renamed HYBE; Ithaca Holdings bought for $1.05B; Bang steps down as CEO.
2023
SM bid abandoned; Belift Lab fully acquired; HYBE Latin America formed.
2024
ADOR dispute; FSS opens pre-IPO investigation.
2025
Referral to prosecutors; HQ raids; HYBE China and HYBE India launched.
2026
Arrest warrant sought; ₩263B frozen; "We believe in Music" kept for internal use.
Principle 6
Separate the producer from the operator, but keep the pen
Bang tried to split his roles twice. In March 2019 Lenzo Yoon became co-CEO to run the business while Bang focused on creative production. In July 2021 Bang resigned as HYBE's CEO entirely, kept the chairmanship, and said he was going back to music. His production credits from 2021 to 2026 show he meant it, with work spread across Enhypen, TXT, Le Sserafim, Illit, Katseye, and Cortis.
The split was only partial, and the partial split is what got him into trouble. A chairman with 28 percent of the shares is not simply a producer, and the events now under investigation date from 2019, the very year he handed day-to-day business to someone else. Handing off operations does not hand off accountability for the capital structure. If you separate creative from commercial roles, decide explicitly who owns the decisions about money, and make sure that person isn't you in an unofficial capacity.
Tactic: When you delegate the business, write down which financial decisions remain yours and subject those decisions to the same disclosure rules as the company's.
Principle 7
Export the method, not the product
HYBE's global expansion has relied far less on exporting Korean performers than on exporting the process that produces them: auditions, training, a story world, and direct fan engagement. Katseye was built with Geffen on that template. &Team in Japan, Santos Bravos in Latin America, and HYBE India's stated goal of turning "Indian voices" into "global stories" are versions of the same strategy. In 2021 the company's own job description for HYBE America called it "the localization of Hybe's K-pop business model."
Products are tied to a particular culture and time. A method can be reused anywhere. A company that can teach its process to local talent in Mexico City, Mumbai, and Tokyo has built something a single hit can't match. But a method still needs local operators who understand the market, and HYBE's American experience, from the sale of Big Machine Rock to Braun's exit, shows how expensive it is when the method is bought rather than built.
Tactic: Write down the repeatable process behind your best product clearly enough that a local team in a new market could run it without you.
Principle 8
Know which fights are worth losing
In February 2023 HYBE bought Lee Soo-man's 14.8 percent of SM Entertainment for about ₩422.8 billion and became its largest shareholder. A month later, faced with a bidding war against Kakao, it walked away, saying the contest could "damage shareholder value," and sold down to 8.81 percent before exiting entirely to Tencent Music in 2025. For a founder whose company had always grown by acquisition, it was an unusually disciplined retreat.
Compare that with the deals HYBE kept or doubled down on, and with the ones that later unraveled. The table below sorts the record.
M
The Acquisition Ledger
How HYBE's major deals have fared, by outcome category.
| Deal | Year | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Pledis Entertainment (majority stake) | 2020 | Scale ₩69.7B operating profit in 2025, more than BigHit Music |
| Belift Lab (from JV to 100%) | 2018 / 2023 | Scale Enhypen, Illit; ₩49.9B operating profit in 2025 |
| Ithaca Holdings | 2021 | Try $1.05B; Big Machine Rock sold 2025; Braun exits 2025–26 |
| SM Entertainment stake | 2023 | Scan Bidding war abandoned; stake sold to Kakao and Tencent |
| Dunamu equity swap (NFTs) | 2021 | Try Dunamu remains a 5.34% holder bound by voting agreement |
| Supertone (AI voice) | 2021 | Risk Approved for dissolution, July 2026 |
The best results came from buying Korean labels with proven creative teams and leaving them alone. The worst came from buying fashionable technology. The smartest move was the deal HYBE refused to finish.
Tactic: Before any acquisition, set a walk-away price and a walk-away condition in writing, and treat honoring them as a success rather than a defeat.
Principle 9
Write the independence clause before anyone asks for it
HYBE's multi-label model promised every acquired or newly founded label creative independence. ADOR's name, All Doors, One Room, built that promise into its identity. When Min Hee-jin tried to turn creative independence into ownership independence, the result was an audit, police complaints in both directions, an 8.03 percent one-day drop in HYBE's share price, an injunction attaching a ₩20 billion penalty to her dismissal, and, in February 2026, a ruling that HYBE owed her ₩25.5 billion under her put option.
The lesson is not that Min was right or that HYBE was. It is that the conditions under which a creative partner can leave, and on what terms, were apparently never settled clearly enough to prevent a public war. Every talented operator in this story eventually wanted out: Bang from JYP, Changmin from Big Hit, Got7 from JYP, Min from HYBE. A sophisticated organization assumes that will happen and prices it in from the start.
Tactic: For every key creative partner, negotiate the terms of a friendly exit, including valuation, IP, and talent, on the day you sign them, while everyone still likes each other.
Principle 10
The disclosure you skip becomes the story you're known for
HYBE's position is that the shareholder agreements at the center of the investigation were reviewed by the IPO underwriters and judged not mandatory to disclose. That may turn out to be legally sufficient. Strategically it has already failed. Because the agreements weren't public, investors who sold in 2019 now believe they were misled. The founder's identity as a producer has been displaced in headlines by "owner risk." Netmarble dropped a ₩250 billion financing plan. And the man who said he had gone back to the studio found himself, by his own message, setting aside "urgent work and business meetings" to deal with investigators.
The technical test for disclosure is whether the law requires it. The strategic test is whether the people affected would feel deceived when they found out. A founder who passes the first test and fails the second has merely postponed the reckoning.
Tactic: For any arrangement that benefits you personally around a financing event, ask whether you'd be comfortable seeing it on a front page, and if not, disclose it voluntarily or don't do it.
Principle 11
Legitimacy is a loan, and the state collects with interest
Within five years Bang received a Presidential Commendation (2017), the first honorary doctorate Seoul National University ever gave an entertainment figure (2022), a Time cover, and an Asia Society Game Changer Award (2024). HYBE became the first Korean entertainment company designated a conglomerate. Each honor made the industry more respectable, and each also made it more visible to regulators, tax authorities, and lawmakers. In 2025 the same apparatus that had honored him referred him to prosecutors, raided his offices, and searched his home.
A trade that becomes a national institution gets the scrutiny that comes with being one. Founders who build in disreputable or overlooked industries should understand that their success will eventually invite oversight, and that the habits formed during the scrappy years, informal side deals and loose disclosure, will be judged by the standards of the institution the company has become.
B
Two Eras, Two Rulebooks
How the operating assumptions changed as Big Hit became HYBE.
| The small-label era | The conglomerate era |
|---|---|
| Nobody is watching; experiment freely. | Everyone is watching; every arrangement is discoverable. |
| Founder's judgment is the company's main asset. | Founder's exposure is the market's "owner risk." |
| Independence is something you take. | Independence is something partners try to take from you. |
| Survive on ballads and goodwill. | Survive on governance and disclosure. |
| Honors validate the trade. | Honors invite the auditors. |
Tactic: Every time your company reaches a new level of public recognition, audit your old informal arrangements against the standard of the institution you have just become.
Principle 12
Stay in the studio
Through the BTS years, the acquisitions, the ADOR war, and the investigation, Bang never stopped producing. His credits from 2024 to 2026 run to dozens of songs across seven groups. When HYBE rewrote its public mission in May 2026 around immersion and universes, it kept "We believe in Music" as its internal principle. Whatever the legal outcome, the craft has been the one constant in a career that otherwise kept changing shape.
That is not a moral alibi. Writing songs doesn't answer disclosure questions. It is, however, the source of what made Bang valuable in the first place, the judgment that let him hear what a fifteen-year-old rapper might become. Founders who give up their craft entirely for capital allocation lose the thing that originally justified their authority. Keeping a hand in the work keeps that judgment sharp and the purpose clear.
Tactic: However large your organization grows, protect a fixed portion of your week for the hands-on craft that made you good in the first place.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Bang Si-hyuk, on the essential quality of a singer, Yonhap, April 2011Someone who dominates the stage.
— Bang Si-hyuk, accepting the Frontier Award at the Edaily Culture Awards, January 2018It will be a great force for K-pop globalization and global advancement.
— Big Hit Entertainment, at its KOSPI listing, October 15, 2020 (as reported by OSEN)We will become a company loved around the world.
— Bang Si-hyuk, on Big Hit's acquisition of the music-game company SuperbIt will bring positive value.
— HYBE's founding principle, retained for internal use in the May 2026 rebrandWe believe in Music.
Maxims
- Learn the whole house, then leave it. Master an institution end to end, then exit while you can still keep it as an ally.
- Ballads pay for moonshots. The dull, reliable product is what buys the breakthrough enough time to work.
- Sign the center first. Build teams around the person with the strongest point of view, not around a checklist of parts.
- Obscurity is a lab. Use the years when no one is watching to try what incumbents can't, and stop acting unwatched once you're not.
- Own the room, not just the song. A direct channel to your most devoted fans gives you resilience, though it rarely provides most of the profit.
- Export the process. A method that can be taught to local talent anywhere is worth more than any single hit.
- The best deal is sometimes the one you abandon. Walking away from a bidding war is discipline, not defeat.
- Price the exit on day one. Every talented partner will eventually want independence, so agree on the terms while everyone is still friendly.
- Disclose to the front-page standard. The test is whether people would feel deceived when they found out, not merely what the law required.
- Keep the pen. Whatever you own, keep doing the work that made you worth listening to.
