Motor City Welcome
The Wolf of Wall Street “Welcome to Motor City Detroit. Chairman Yoo Jae-won and Lightning Bolt will never regret this choice.”
Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who had been waiting at Windsor International Airport—the sky gateway to Detroit—delivered an enthusiastic welcome as Yoo Jae-won stepped off his private jet after a safe landing.
“Ah, thank you for the warm reception, Mayor Kwame.”
Yoo Jae-won shook hands with the mayor, whose hands were as large as pot lids, and expressed his gratitude. At the same time, he felt a slight surprise inside. It was because of the mayor’s appearance. He had seen photos beforehand, but the real person gave a completely different impression. If he hadn’t been introduced as Detroit’s mayor first, he might have mistaken him for a gang leader. More precisely, he looked like someone who could be both a gang boss and a hip-hop artist. Moreover, the title of a Black mayor was nothing unusual in Detroit. Almost all of Detroit’s mayors throughout history had been Black. It spoke to how strong the influence of people of color was in this city. In fact, the Black music label Motown had begun its history right here in Detroit. The greatest star Motown ever produced was Michael Jackson. He was currently in a difficult situation due to various misunderstandings and rumors. Two child sexual abuse controversies—the 1993 Jordan Chandler case and the 2003 Arvizo case—had greatly diminished his standing. Beyond the controversies themselves, the media’s indiscriminate barrage of articles had made Michael Jackson’s life even more miserable. Since any article they published guaranteed clicks, they churned out rumors and even outright fake news without restraint. At least Nextcom filtered out so-called “urakai” articles—those that simply copied earlier reports word for word without any changes—before posting them on its news pages. However, later portal sites like Yahoo and Myway uploaded whatever the media outlets supplied without any filtering. Many netizens still believed whatever the media posted, so Michael Jackson’s position in online communities had significantly weakened.
‘I need to drop the bomb around Thanksgiving this year.’
Yoo Jae-won could not stand to watch Michael Jackson carry disgrace like this. Before his regression, he had merely admired the King of Pop from afar. Now, there was also a business relationship—Michael Jackson was a key partner of Next Music.
When the digital music market first emerged, some singers reacted with extreme nervousness. They believed that as digital music sales grew, CD and tape sales would decline. Michael Jackson, however, had been favorable toward digital music. Thanks to that, the music supply contract with Next Music had been concluded smoothly without any unreasonable demands. Incidentally, the artist with whom Next Music had signed the most disadvantageous supply contract was the Beatles. Most of the Beatles’ music rights were held by EMI. Because the Beatles were practically the only singers keeping the crumbling EMI afloat, EMI had wanted to maintain exclusive control over its cash cow. However, with the popularization of smartphones, music consumption had rapidly shifted from CD players to streaming. EMI’s decision to deliberately delay its entry into the streaming market only worsened its financial difficulties, and eventually it surrendered. EMI signed a contract to supply not only the Beatles’ music but also the songs for which it held exclusive rights to Next Music for an advance payment of approximately fifty million dollars. While the expenditure was substantial, securing the Beatles’ music exclusively for Next Music carried great significance. It was tantamount to a decisive victory declaration against latecomers like iTunes who had been aggressively chasing Next Music. The Beatles still commanded a broad fanbase ranging from people in their twenties to seniors in their sixties and beyond. In particular, the silver generation in their fifties and sixties had been vulnerable to smartphones and streaming services. Now that Next Music had become the easiest way to enjoy the Beatles, new user influx had increased dramatically.
“Was your journey comfortable?” Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick asked cautiously.
Yoo Jae-won’s thoughts had wandered from the handshake to Motown, Michael Jackson, fake news, and then to the Beatles. Fortunately, the speed at which thoughts raced through Yoo Jae-won’s mind was lightning fast, so the actual time his expression had hardened was brief. Even so, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sensitive enough that the brief moment of Yoo Jae-won’s face stiffening made his heart skip a beat. It couldn’t be helped—there were currently no companies coming to invest in Detroit. Lightning Bolt, which would instantly create thousands of high-quality jobs, was truly a precious catalyst. Moreover, Lightning Bolt’s popularity was only just beginning. Right now orders numbered only in the hundreds of thousands, but if it completely triumphed over internal combustion engine vehicles, annual production in the tens of millions could be dreamed of. Then the dying city of Detroit would be gloriously revived. All that glory would become Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s own achievement. If that happened, advancing to Washington D.C.—the heart of world politics, every politician’s dream—would no longer be a fantasy.
“Not at all.”
On the other hand, Yoo Jae-won kept a certain distance from the visibly excited Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Though it was obvious the mayor was already counting his chickens before they hatched, Yoo Jae-won had known from the start that the mayor had a serious problem. There was no need to even enter the Memory Palace and search the biographical dictionary under the name Kwame Kilpatrick. ID Group’s excellent intelligence team had already identified that Mayor Kwame was having a serious affair with his beautiful secretary and had reported it. While America might seem like a place where every field of society was free and unrestrained, that was absolutely not the case. For a politician, an affair was a fatal flaw. Moreover, this was no ordinary affair—the mayor had resorted to extreme measures to hide it. To conduct an affair, he should have at least ensured proper security, but he had shown no such caution. After carrying on a fiery romantic affair, he had been tailed by a reporter. According to the report, he was currently bribing the reporter to prevent the story from being published. Even worse, the bribe money hadn’t come from his own pocket but from the city’s finances. It wasn’t a small amount either—nearly a million dollars. Detroit already had meager tax revenue due to urban slumification, yet the mayor had siphoned city funds to suppress news of his own affair. There was no way Yoo Jae-won could look upon him favorably. For this very reason, before his regression, Mayor Kwame had been impeached and fallen from power before even completing his original term.
“Ahem! Let me escort you to the event venue first!”
Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was inwardly flustered when he didn’t receive the favorable reaction he had expected from Yoo Jae-won, but as a politician he didn’t show it on the surface. Instead, he adopted an even more exaggerated demeanor and led Yoo Jae-won and his entourage to the prepared venue.
“The Lightning Bolt production base will be built in Detroit’s southern Fair Play area. Right now it’s an empty field, but by next summer, a state-of-the-art automobile factory capable of producing one million vehicles annually will stand there. Cutting-edge self-driving electric vehicles built by Detroit’s skilled engineers will roll off the line and head straight to the waiting customers.”
Bolt, president of Lightning Bolt, was raising his voice from the podium set up in the center of the prepared venue. Yoo Jae-won and his attendants had moved with Mayor Kwame, but they hadn’t needed to travel far. The south side of Windsor International Airport was precisely the site chosen for Lightning Bolt’s production plant. Although most residential areas had become slums and were little more than vacant land, Lightning Bolt had deliberately selected the completely empty Fair Play area as its factory site. Even in slumified zones, people hadn’t completely left, and vagrants and gang members still frequented the abandoned houses. It was a place where law enforcement had completely collapsed—perfect for drug deals. The judgment was that building a factory on completely vacant land would be better than constructing one in such an area. Furthermore, since the land belonged to the City of Detroit, it had been decided to lease it to Lightning Bolt for one hundred years free of charge as a convenience.
President Bolt, true to his role as a member of ID Group, had prepared an enormous screen and was explaining Lightning Bolt’s factory construction plans while projecting blueprints directly using a laser projector. The factory consisted of three main buildings. Separate plants had been built for each model—Superfast, Vulcan, and Neuro. The Gunsan factory had also decided to construct separate plants for each model, but there it would be four buildings. An additional plant would be added for the fifteen-passenger minibus model. In terms of size, the Superfast production line was the smallest, while the Neuro production line was the largest. Actual orders were also highest for the Neuro and lowest for the Superfast, so this was only natural. After the announcement, the number of reservations completed with proper deposits barely exceeded six thousand units. However, in terms of revenue, it was by no means small. The Superfast was an electric vehicle priced at over one hundred million Korean won. Six thousand reservations already meant six hundred billion won in confirmed sales. Of course, Lightning Bolt’s killer item was the mid-size sedan Neuro, but when it came to profit margins, the Superfast was overwhelmingly superior. The SUV model Vulcan also had higher margins than the Neuro. In contrast, the Neuro’s profit margin was less than five percent. The Neuro had been designed from the ground up under extreme cost constraints to meet the twenty-five-thousand-dollar price point. Production likewise demanded perfect optimization with zero waste. That was why President Bolt had chosen to completely separate the plants by model. This ran counter to recent trends in the automobile industry. In fact, it was the complete opposite. After all, looking at GM across the river from Detroit, they were producing multiple vehicle types in a single factory through platform sharing. It was a desperate struggle for survival. As Korean cars, following those from Europe and Japan, exerted tremendous influence in the North American market, the competitiveness of traditional American brands like GM and Ford had significantly weakened. Platform sharing was a means to reduce costs such as production and R&D expenses. On the other hand, since Lightning Bolt’s electric vehicles were just entering the automobile industry, the highest priority was build quality. If problems arose in the initial production batch released from the factory, it would immediately cast a negative light on the perception of electric vehicles as a whole. The reason Detroit had been chosen was to easily secure skilled labor, and by separating the plants completely by model, they aimed to maximize that skill level.
“We will make Lightning Bolt the first name that comes to mind when people think of the world’s best electric vehicles.”
The goal was the Android operating system. President Bolt kept this resolve only in his heart. If he voiced it aloud, people would surely ask what an operating system had to do with cars. But the completeness of the Android operating system was enough to make even President Bolt shake his head in admiration. He had been using computers for a very long time. There had been many occasions when he brought unfinished work home from the company and worked on a PC. Each time a sudden error appeared and hours of work vanished in an instant, he had ground his teeth and blamed Microsoft. The DOS system he had used back then was never something one could expect stability from in the first place. But there had been no alternative. The Unix-based workstations used at the company were far beyond what an individual could afford. Afterward, whenever an error occurred on a PC, blaming Microsoft became the default reaction. Even if the error originated from an application program, people still blamed Microsoft as a matter of course. But once the Android operating system dominated PCs, everything reversed completely. Users of the Android operating system encountered fatal errors less than once a year. Even when errors did occur, they were usually caused by third-party hardware drivers, never by the kernel system at the core of the operating system. As a result, computer users now blamed application developers when errors appeared, not Android Corporation. President Bolt hoped the same phenomenon would occur with Lightning Bolt’s electric vehicles. He wanted to create cars that remained flawless no matter how roughly they were driven.
“That doesn’t mean we have any intention of making characterless electric vehicles. We will offer customers more diverse choices than any other company. Each factory will produce only one model, but no two cars will be the same.”
President Bolt could confidently say that no two cars would be identical because of the artificial intelligence assistant Gold. Gold would also be installed in Lightning Bolt’s vehicles, and Gold’s personalization could respond individually to each user. In addition, the range of options customers could choose when ordering a vehicle had been greatly expanded. Since Lightning Bolt didn’t even offer a base “stripper” model, even the twenty-five-thousand-dollar entry-level model offered better quality than most American cars. On top of that, President Bolt’s vision was to create an enormous selection of options for every interior and exterior component. In fact, Lightning Bolt’s website had opened a new menu alongside today’s groundbreaking ceremony: Custom Order. A vast array of options had been added, including seats, audio systems, dashboard and interior materials, tires and wheels, and vehicle colors. The number of possible combinations reached tens of thousands. If a customer selected only the most luxurious options in Custom Order, the option price could exceed the vehicle’s base price. Safety, however, was not optional—every vehicle provided a level exceeding current legal requirements.
Immediately after President Bolt’s presentation, the groundbreaking ceremony began. In Korea, groundbreaking ceremonies were usually held by turning the first shovel of dirt, but this was America. The scale was different, so the ceremony was different as well. Yoo Jae-won, Mayor Kwame, Detroit city council members, and Michigan state senators and representatives all pressed down together on a large tire-shaped button emblazoned with Lightning Bolt’s LV logo. Then one hundred excavators that had been standing by each took a large scoop of earth, and with that the groundbreaking ceremony concluded. That evening, the scene was prominently featured in news broadcasts across the United States and around the world. It was truly the moment when Lightning Bolt’s full-fledged history began. However, the news broadcast that evening did not contain only good news. Wall Street’s attacks had begun pouring down on ID Investment, which had made a tremendous impression just days earlier by purchasing put options worth billions of dollars.