Social Network (1)
When I stepped out of JFK Airport, the cold air welcomed me like an old acquaintance.
By now, I had come and gone so often that New York felt less like a foreign city and more like the house next door.
I got into the car that had been waiting for me and headed to Continue Capital. The moment I walked in, everyone rose to their feet and applauded.
The room filled with a thunder of applause.
David greeted me with a bright smile.
“You must have had a rough trip getting here.”
“Have you been well?”
“Of course.”
I sat down in the conference room and listened to a report on everything that had happened while I was away.
“The staff has grown a lot.”
Even after excluding the people we had sent to Korea, the headcount had climbed to fifty.
“We’re still getting applications every day. It’s gotten to the point where we have to choose between them. Everyone wants to work at Continue Capital.”
As one of the most successful firms around, the best talent on Wall Street had started flocking to us.
I glanced through the personnel files one by one. Every résumé was absurdly impressive. A graduate of Seoul National University who had worked at a securities firm wouldn’t even get a business card in front of some of these people.
Thanks to the success of our investments, our cash holdings had reached about $48 billion.
There had been a time when even ten or twenty billion dollars would have left me scrambling, but we had grown into a company large enough to spend that kind of money without flinching.
After finishing the paperwork, I said, “You’re finally starting to look like a real investment firm. Good work.”
“What have I done to deserve the credit? This is all because of you, boss.”
This time, I told him about the situation with the Korea branch.
“Are you planning to hand the Korean branch over to this branch manager someday?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It feels like you’re trying to grow it separately from headquarters.”
It was only a matter of time before he found out anyway, so I admitted it freely.
“Yes. He’s worth giving that much to.”
“Still, for you to look after him that much...”
I watched his expression closely.
“You’re not feeling slighted, are you?”
“Haha, of course not. I’ve received something far bigger than that.”
“What is it?”
David smiled.
“I heard that LunaVax has entered Phase 1 of its lymphoma treatment trial.”
“Ah, that.”
I scratched my head.
“It’s only Phase 1. You know the odds are much higher that it’ll fail than succeed, right?”
Out of a hundred drugs that enter Phase 1, fewer than one makes it all the way through Phase 3.
David nodded.
“I know. But that’s still far better than waiting endlessly with nothing to go on. And I trust you, boss.”
“If it fails this time, it’ll still succeed within the next few years. Don’t worry too much.”
Well, the treatment was going to be developed eventually anyway.
“I should also thank Chairman Yoo Jae-ho.”
“If you contact him, he’ll be pleased.”
David asked me, “Since you’ve come to America, does that mean you’ve got a new investment plan?”
I nodded.
“I always have plans.”
The real question was how to turn them into the highest possible returns.
“I’m planning to acquire a company.”
“What kind of company?”
I handed over the materials I’d brought with me.
After studying them carefully, David shook his head.
“Isn’t this going to be a hard one?”
“When has anything ever been easy? We just have to make it work.”
At that, he didn’t argue any further.
“So what’s the plan?”
“First, let’s eat. Then we’ll think about it.”
I checked in at the Blackwood Hotel.
It was reassuring to have a place where I could stay for free no matter where I went.
It wasn’t even about the money. It was about being able to make a reservation with a single phone call, and getting rooms that normally wouldn’t have been offered through standard booking channels.
“Thank you for choosing our hotel, Han Miru. We’ll do everything we can to take care of you.”
Probably because the reservation had been made in advance, the manager himself had come down to the lobby to meet me.
He escorted me to my room.
I had booked a regular suite, but the room they led me to was a royal suite.
“This is big.”
“The chairman gave special instructions that you were to be treated with complete comfort. If you need anything at all, please let us know.”
Come to think of it, once you considered how much the stock had risen thanks to me, this probably wasn’t even that expensive for them.
I unpacked a little, washed up, and headed back out for dinner.
I took the hotel car to the meeting place. Even in the chilly weather, the streets were packed with New Yorkers.
When I arrived at O'Connor Pub, I nearly froze in place. A line stretched so long it wrapped around the building.
Why is business this good here?
Am I going to have to wait too?
Just as that thought crossed my mind, I heard a voice behind me.
“Hey, Miru!”
I turned and saw a woman waving cheerfully at me.
Her name was Trish O'Connor.
Normally she dressed casually in a shirt, jeans, and sneakers, but today her hair was neatly tied back, and she wore a crisp women’s suit.
“What’s with the suit?”
“I just interviewed Terry Duncan, the chairman of UBS.”
UBS was a famous investment bank headquartered in Switzerland, and Terry Duncan was the man who had led that giant institution for fifteen years.
“You interviewed someone that important?”
“Yep. They reached out to us first and asked for the interview.”
“Wow. That’s amazing.”
“Amazing doesn’t even begin to cover it. I turned down requests from the WSJ and the NYT, and chose WST instead.”
“Not that they chose Trish?”
“Heh.”
Ever since the Thomas Motors scandal, she had been stacking up exclusive after exclusive, and now she was a well-known journalist. It looked like headhunters from all over the place were after her too.
“Come on in.”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me into O'Connor Pub.
Several people standing in line immediately protested.
“Hey! Can’t you see there’s a line?”
“Why are you cutting?”
“Go to the back.”
Trish answered with complete confidence.
“I’m the owner’s daughter.”
That shut them up.
O'Connor Pub was packed with people.
Trish shouted at the top of her lungs, “Dad! Miru’s here!”
At that, the bandit in the kitchen—no, Mr. O'Connor himself—came out.
“Well, well, look who it is!”
Before I could even dodge, Mr. O'Connor pulled me into a crushing hug.
“Welcome! Welcome!”
“Ghk...”
The smell of his skin, mixed with the familiar scent of hamburgers, hit me at once. The smell itself was one thing, but I also felt like I might be suffocated to death.
“All right, all right, you must be hungry. Sit over there.”
The place was packed, but they had kept a reserved table open in the corner. Trish and I sat down there.
There were also employees I hadn’t seen before.
“Business is booming.”
“Once people found out this was the original location, tourists started pouring in too.”
O'Connor Burger was expanding rapidly now.
They had opened the first store in Silicon Valley, followed by a second in San Francisco and a third in Los Angeles.
Unlike when it was just a food truck, they had started serving dark beer after opening the restaurants.
Even now it was enormously popular, and Hollywood stars were posting photos of it on Linsta on their own, helping promote the brand.
It was all thanks to Continue Capital’s investment.
No wonder Mr. O'Connor liked me.
Before long, an O'Connor Burger and a dark beer arrived.
I took a bite of the burger.
I’d missed this flavor.
Now it finally felt like I’d really come back to New York.
“What brings you here?”
“What else? I came to invest.”
Trish leaned back with her arms on the table, then bent forward.
“Invest in what? Tell me already.”
Her face was way too close.
“I’m not at the stage where I can say yet.”
Her journalist’s curiosity had clearly kicked in, and she looked painfully eager to know.
Trish barely held it in and nodded.
“Fine. If it turns into a scoop, you have to tell me first.”
“I promise.”
There were several financial firms on Wall Street that managed investments for Saudi Arabia’s PIF.
At one of them, I met the manager responsible for the Rush Fund.
After I sat in the conference room and waited for a moment, a striking beauty with an exotic air walked in.
She had brown hair that fell to her shoulders, sharp features, large dark eyes, and light coffee-colored skin.
Her name was Sarah Avery, and she looked like a model.
She was the head of the Rush Fund and led the PIF’s overseas investment team.
“It’s been a while.”
“Good to see you.”
“Did you have a good trip to Riyadh?”
“Yes. In the meantime, it sounds like something interesting happened in Korea too.”
She was talking about the GL Group scandal, no doubt.
I looked at her face and asked casually, “Are you okay?”
“Do I not look okay?”
“A little.”
She looked so drained she seemed almost pale.
After Rashid launched his coup, she had rushed straight to Riyadh.
The most important thing in a coup was securing the military. After that came the administrative machinery and the money supply.
Once those three were locked down, you could consider the coup essentially complete.
“Things in Riyadh have been more or less settled.”
“That’s a relief.”
Even if Prince Rashid was the king’s son and the true holder of power, a coup was still a coup.
If it went badly, it could have led to national chaos. But it had ended cleanly, without much noise.
It was so clean, in fact, that there were barely any articles about it overseas.
If you stopped some random American on the street and asked whether they knew a coup had happened in Saudi Arabia, most would probably say no.
Maybe even most Saudis would think, “Oh, the crown prince changed? Nothing to worry about.”
But for the Saudi royal family, it had been nothing short of a disaster.
Because they’d been stripped to the bone.
I asked her, “How much did he end up taking?”
“Officially, about $300 billion.”
“Wow...”
I already knew, but hearing it directly was still shocking.
The money I had earned through all that suffering in Korea came to roughly $20 billion, and Rashid had shaken more than $300 billion out of corrupt politicians and business leaders.
If that was the official number, then the unofficial one had to be even larger.
So this was what oil-country class looked like.
Still, given that he was sweeping away corruption that had been built up over decades, maybe numbers like that weren’t so surprising after all.
“His Royal Highness has begun his national reform drive. The problem is the opposition from the clerics. And even among ordinary people, there are still many who have negative views about women taking part in the economy.”
“That can’t really be helped.”
It wasn’t as if a mindset and way of life people had carried for decades could be changed overnight.
Some argued that they needed to create social councils to persuade people through discussion and dialogue, but... what was the point of gathering opinions from the opposition in the first place?
In the end, the only way was to crush resistance with force.
This was one of those times when a dictatorship came in handy.
“So I’m planning to increase the size of the Rush Fund.”
“By how much?”
“Double what it is now.”
“That would make it $100 billion, then.”
The Rush Fund was already posting astonishing returns.
Nextrogen, which we had acquired a 51 percent stake in, had unveiled a hydrogen truck that was actually capable of driving, sending its value soaring to $20 billion. Blackwood, which I had practically forced on them, was also continuing to perform well.
The lodging-sharing business aimed at the rich market had become an overnight sensation, and even Blackwood Hotel’s guest count had risen sharply.
The wealthy were happy to trust Blackwood’s reputation and hand over their homes and private jets, and the customer data they collected was used to improve the service.
As a result, Blackwood’s market cap had increased by more than fifty percent compared to before the ransomware incident.
Seeing that, later entrants such as Dalton Hotels had rushed into lodging-sharing too, but they never achieved Blackwood’s level of success.
“Do you agree with increasing the fund?”
“Of course.”
The more money, the better.
For long-term investments, I would leave things to the Rush Fund, and Continue Capital would focus on short-term plays by acquiring the future’s key companies, just as we always had.
I handed Sarah the materials I’d brought from Continue Capital.
“Let’s prioritize buying these names.”
They were the companies David had selected, narrowed down once more by me.
Sarah scanned the list and said, “Most of these are tech stocks.”
“Yes. They should keep running for a while.”
“But the largest-cap names are missing.”
“Those are in direct competition with us.”
“So the cloud big three—NS, AMZ, and Guble—are competitors to Snow Crash, I suppose... but what about Enple?”
“We’re planning to go head-to-head with them over app store fees.”
Sarah’s eyes widened.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think you can win?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?”
We were talking about the world’s biggest company.
At some point, I was going to have to deal with them anyway.
The real question was when. To beat an opponent like that, I needed a meticulous strategy.
“What about Facenote?”
“That one has nothing left to do but fall.”
Sarah looked puzzled.
“Why do you say that?”
I smiled.
“Because I’m going to make it happen.”
