Become the Protagonist of a Conspiracy Theory! (3)
Han Juhyeong opened the portal news site.
"Tch. I got bumped down."
Every trending topic was about the "entrusted asset managers."
He tapped the one with the highest click count.
After Hanyeong Auto reaped roughly three trillion won in currency gains through external management, the financial world has been ablaze with one question: which firm made the god-tier move?
This outlet spoke with multiple sources across the investment industry and confirmed a shortlist of strong candidates spanning asset managers, hedge funds, and family offices.
The seven names most frequently cited by the industry are as follows:
Seoseong Asset Management (asset manager; possible affiliate linkage)
Trust Partners (hedge fund; quant-focused)
VIG Partners (private equity; FX-hedge specialty)
Makers (family office; global network)
Alpha Strategy (asset manager; derivatives expertise)
NB Asset Management (asset manager; possible affiliate linkage)
(Money News — Cho Miyeon)
Han Juhyeong tilted his head.
"Why even guess? It's obviously Makers."
The moment he scrolled into the comments, confusion hit. No one was getting it right—they were locked in pure argument.
Seriously? They don't know?
Clicking his tongue, Han Juhyeong couldn't hold back and dropped a comment of his own.
Replies landed instantly.
"These bastards!"
He fought viciously in the comment section… and lost.
It's Makers, damn it! I'm the one who entrusted them!
Exploding with temper, Han Juhyeong hurled his phone onto the bed. It bounced straight off and hit the floor.
"Ah, shit…"
Then he exhaled a long sigh and closed his eyes.
Hold it. Hold it. I'm on the Xenon Project now.
And as practical operations lead, no less.
Practical operations lead meant third in the chain of command. Project owner: the chairman. Strategy and planning lead: the vice president. Then him—the man who would run the field.
Full operational control rested in his hands.
The title of "successor" was finally growing real power.
Most decisive of all was the money he had brought with him.
A full three trillion won. The entire currency windfall Hanyeong Auto had earned, poured straight into the Xenon Project.
He had secured the budget.
Which meant he had bought himself a seat at the table and a voice that mattered.
I never expected it to go this well.
Honestly, half of it felt like he had simply followed Lee Jaseung's instructions and somehow ended up here.
Maybe that was why the thought suddenly struck him.
Should I get him a gift? But what? The guy is ridiculously picky…
…Ah!
He had it. A perfect idea.
"Heh heh heh. I know exactly what he likes."
Humming under his breath, Han Juhyeong strode into Makers and confidently set the gift down with a solid thump.
"Picked it up on the way."
Lee Jaseung stared down at the small box with a dubious expression.
It was the size usually reserved for a necktie or a fountain pen.
He turned the box this way and that. A light, hollow thud-thud sounded from inside.
"What is it?"
"A rubber ball. You love these. Special-made by Spalding."
Lee Jaseung let out a disbelieving little laugh.
He opened the box. An actual rubber ball sat inside.
Deep crimson, with the "Makers" logo embossed on it.
He bounced it once experimentally against the floor.
65.5 mm diameter. 56.0 g weight.
Even the elasticity test was perfect.
Watching carefully for a reaction, Han Juhyeong asked cautiously,
"Well? Good?"
"Just right. I'll put it to good use."
Lee Jaseung smiled as he said it, clearly in a fine mood. Feeling oddly proud, Han Juhyeong was about to start preening—
—when Lee Jaseung cut straight to business with surgical precision.
"Did you bring the Xenon Project materials?"
"Ah, yeah. Got everything ready."
The Xenon Project was about to begin in earnest. Exactly as he had wanted, Lee Jaseung had been appointed strategy advisor.
Han Juhyeong pulled a thick file from his briefcase.
The second he heard he was being named practical operations lead, he had shaken his chief of staff down for every document and stayed up all night compiling them.
"We completely redesigned the body structure. Hanyeong Steel used a special process this time to achieve major weight reduction—same strength, fifteen percent lighter. Suspension tech transfer from Germany, too…"
The specs were excellent, yet something still felt lacking. Han Juhyeong seemed to know it; as he droned through the overview, his energy visibly wilted.
"Not feeling confident?"
Han Juhyeong sighed.
"Honestly? A little. Watching you run Makers taught me something."
Interest flickered across Lee Jaseung's face.
"What?"
"High barriers to entry, ruthless selection, and a special experience you can only get inside. That's the branding you built for Makers."
"True."
"There are dozens of family offices, but only one Makers. I want that for Xenon. Not just another luxury car—the one and only brand."
Lee Jaseung was mildly surprised.
Han Juhyeong had, against expectation, put his finger on the essence.
He's actually learning management, huh?
"That's the core of premium branding. But you're entering an already-established premium market as a latecomer."
"Yeah?"
Mercedes, BMW—the historic premium brands.
Their histories were woven into the history of the automobile itself, and they had carved ironclad images into consumers' minds.
"You think upgrading quality will make people choose Xenon over Mercedes?"
"…Probably not."
That was the power of brand.
An image that transcended design, quality, and pure technology.
"Exactly. No matter how excellent the quality, Xenon will struggle to escape the perception of 'a high-performance Korean car.' You said you want to make it the one and only. Building a good car isn't enough. You have to build a new car."
"How?"
"By redefining the category. The way the A-phone opened the smartphone market. Once you become the original, every other brand naturally becomes a copycat."
"…Easy for you to say. You're talking about technological innovation."
"If it feels too hard, just stay a high-performance Korean car."
"Damn it. Still, that path is so vague. Calling it the A-phone is one thing—if it were easy, everyone would innovate. The auto industry is especially conservative. New attempts mean safety issues, regulatory issues, production issues… there are mountains to climb."
Han Juhyeong kept grumbling.
Lee Jaseung slowly rotated the ball in his hand. Irritation rose, but the new ball bought him patience.
"Han Juhyeong. This is the opportunity."
"Again? You always say that."
Lee Jaseung squeezed the ball hard. He would endure twice.
"When else is Hanyeong Auto going to get another chance to launch a premium brand? When you launch, you have to stamp the image in hard. And if you successfully reframe the image this time, the mass-market lines below will enjoy the trickle-down too."
"True enough."
Every word was correct.
In branding, first impressions were decisive.
How people perceived Xenon would determine its brand value for the next ten, twenty years.
If we're launching a premium brand anyway, better to do it right the first time. And this time Jaseung is in as advisor from the start. Starting together… we can make anything work, right?
More than anything else—
If I push any harder, Jaseung is going to snap.
After clashing with Lee Jaseung enough times, Han Juhyeong had learned the exact location of the threshold.
Just before Lee Jaseung's paper-thin patience bottomed out, Han Juhyeong put on a serious face.
"So what should the new category be? EV? Hydrogen? Hybrid? Autonomous?"
Every major company was pouring money into those fields, yet none of them had produced clear winners.
But a single thread ran through them all.
"More precisely—software."
Han Juhyeong had acquired Yuseong Steel to strengthen the hardware.
But steel alone would never be enough.
The future would be decided in silicon.
Which meant—
"The new category should be the thing you always wanted to do."
Han Juhyeong looked puzzled and asked back,
"The thing I always wanted? What's that?"
Lee Jaseung thought back to their university days.
Specifically, the time they had nearly come to blows over a startup investment.
Back then Han Juhyeong had been obsessed with "digital," poured money in, and crashed spectacularly.
That had been ten years ago. The era had changed.
I have DeepMind. Perfect timing to fuse AI technology with the automobile.
He had drawn the entire picture in his head before arriving at this moment.
"Digital transformation."
"!"
Return rate: 900 percent.
Total fund profit: 20.5699 trillion won.
So how much, exactly, had Lee Jaseung taken home?
Right before launching the yen short strategy, Makers' remaining equity capital had been a mere 100 billion won.
And now?
5.1438 trillion won
Equity profit sat around one trillion, with another four trillion layered on top from management fees.
Looking at that beautiful final P&L statement, Lee Jaseung uttered exactly one sentence.
"We cleared five trillion."
…That dry?
"Can't you show a little more emotion?"
Seo Minjae grumbled and decided to supply the emotion himself.
He had always thought Lee Jaseung just spent money like water. Now he realized: when this guy actually decided to make money, this was the scale he operated on.
Walking embodiment of capitalism, this bastard.
One hundred billion had moved two trillion. Leverage on that two trillion had spun a hundred trillion. A hundred-trillion-won war chest had moved the foreign-exchange market itself.
The result: a 5,000 percent return.
Goosebumps.
And the even more chilling fact:
"It's all money that's going to disappear anyway. What's the point of getting emotional?"
…Right. The entire five trillion was money destined to vanish.
Five trillion manufactured by turning Korea into a butterfly and flipping Japanese policy. That colossal uproar had been nothing more than the warm-up to buy a single company.
"What the hell are you planning to buy?"
"I need to invest in Nvidia."
Seo Minjae cocked his head. Lee Jaseung's investments were always unexpected, but this one felt especially random.
"Nvidia? Weren't you interested in AI? Why Nvidia? They make gaming graphics cards."
And five years from now, Nvidia will dominate AI hardware.
Of course, everything after that was uncertain.
Google's quantum-computing chips might seize the market, or Apple's Neural Engine might find a breakthrough.
When that day comes, we can always rotate into something else.
That was a problem for later.
Right now the only question that mattered was how to get Nvidia into their hands.
"What's Nvidia's recent situation? Do you have the intel?"
Seo Minjae's face still screamed why Nvidia right now?, but as an expert who lived and breathed industry currents, he had the latest data at his fingertips.
"Of course I do. Nvidia's not in great shape right now. Patent litigation with Intel hammered their PC business, and the mobile processor they just launched tanked."
"Market cap?"
"Hang on. They got hit by short-sellers recently so the stock should be down… let's see…"
Seo Minjae skimmed the analysis report at speed and continued.
"Yeah, it's dropped hard. Market cap is seven billion dollars. Stock's bouncing between eleven and twelve. You're putting money in here?"
"No."
Lee Jaseung shook his head.
If you were going to own something, you needed complete control.
Holding only a partial stake in a listed company left far too many variables on the board.
"Then what?"
"I'm going to take it private."
"…Come again?"
This work is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, place names, and events appearing within are entirely fictitious and bear no relation to any real-world counterparts. Specialized knowledge presented in the narrative has likewise been reconstructed and dramatized to fit the story and may differ from actual information.