How Could This Possibly Make Sense? (2)
Sung Yoon-ah couldn't hide her astonishment.
Yuseong Electronics had recently been on such an aggressive acquisition spree that people were saying its corporate strategy had changed. And now she was being told that Han Miru was behind it all?
“When Miru gets back to Korea, let’s have dinner together sometime. He said he’d treat us, so I suppose I’ll have to make him buy something expensive.”
“He said that?”
“Come to think of it, he’s still in the United States, isn’t he?”
“How did you know?”
“Because he got in touch.”
“R-Really?”
“Now that I think about it, he’s been doing something pretty interesting over in America.”
“Something interesting?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“No……”
There was no way she could have, not if she couldn’t even reach him.
“Then it’d be better to hear it directly.”
“It sounded like his phone was off.”
“Ah! Last time he contacted me from an American number. I’ll send you that number, so give it a call. He should pick up.”
“All right.”
When the call ended, Sung Yoon-ah sat in silence for a moment, thinking it over.
So Chairman Yoo had been keeping in touch with Miru all this time, but he hadn’t contacted me at all?
It wasn’t as if they had been in constant contact—he had only reached out when necessary—but she had no way of knowing that. The realization left her oddly betrayed.
It was a little like hearing that you’d introduced two close friends to each other, only to find out they’d started hanging out on their own without ever inviting you along.
After calming herself down, she called the number Chairman Yoo had given her. After a few rings, that familiar voice finally answered.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
“Ah! Yoon-ah. What’s up?”
Hearing his voice made all the worry she’d been carrying feel foolish.
“Why on earth haven’t you been answering your phone? Do you have any idea how much I’ve been worri—”
“Huh? How much what?”
Sung Yoon-ah quickly changed the subject.
“Anyway, why did you turn your phone off?”
“I’ve been so busy I probably forgot to charge it. I didn’t really have anyone calling me, either.”
“You weren’t keeping it off so you could hang out with blonde beauties, were you?”
“I wish.”
“What did you say?”
“I’m joking.”
Well, at least it seemed like nothing was wrong. That was a relief.
“Tch. You’re still in America?”
“Yes.”
“What on earth are you doing over there?”
“Just this and that. By the way, how did you get this number?”
“Chairman Yoo Jae-ho gave it to me.”
“Ah! I see.”
“He said you were doing something interesting in America.”
“He said that? It’s not that big a deal.”
“What kind of thing is it?”
“I’ll tell you next time.”
“What? You’re telling Chairman Yoo and not me? So you two really have gotten close without me.”
Han Miru sounded as though he had no choice but to give in.
“Actually, I started a company in America with someone I know.”
“What kind of company?”
“Just a small investment firm.”
“And the name?”
“Continue Capital.”
“Continue Capital……”
The name sounded strangely familiar. No, more than familiar—she knew it well.
After murmuring it to herself for a moment, her eyes widened.
“Wait! Continue Capital? Don’t tell me that’s the same Continue Capital that just blew up the Thomas Motors scandal?”
“That’s right.”
“What!?”
Sung Yoon-ah was stunned.
“W-Wait. So you were the one behind the Thomas Motors debacle?”
“That was Representative Lockhart. I just helped out a little from the side.”
“Either way, that means you were involved.”
“You could say that.”
The collapse of Thomas Motors had been a market-shaking event.
In some ways, it was incomparable to the Primus fiasco. In sheer scale alone, Primus had been only about one trillion won, while Thomas Motors had been worth over forty-five trillion. Yet because of Continue Capital’s report, roughly forty trillion of that vanished.
“Th-That’s insane. Continue Capital was a company you founded?”
“The co-CEO is David Lockhart. I’m just helping him out on the side.”
That didn’t sound like “just helping out” at all.
“I heard Continue Capital made a killing on the short side.”
“Not a killing. We just made a reasonable amount.”
“……”
What, exactly, counted as “reasonable”?
No matter how she looked at it, it had to be tens of billions of dollars.
“Ah! Keep it to yourself for a while, okay?”
“Oh. All right.”
Fair enough. If this got out, the whole country would explode.
“So when are you coming back?”
“Probably next week.”
“Still not done yet?”
“We’re almost there.”
Sung Yoon-ah pouted for no good reason. “Bring me a present when you come back.”
“Huh?”
“You didn’t seriously think you could go on a trip and not bring me something, did you?”
“Well, of course I was going to buy you something.”
That brightened her mood a little.
“I’ll be looking forward to it.”
“Yeah. I’ll call you when I’m back.”
The call ended.
Sung Yoon-ah still couldn’t wrap her head around it.
So Continue Capital was a company Miru started? And he was the one who brought down Thomas Motors? A man who had been a new hire not long ago?
After thinking it over for a long time, she found herself muttering under her breath.
“How could this possibly make sense?”
David asked, “It sounds like you got a call from Korea.”
“How did you know?”
David replied as if it were obvious. “You were speaking Korean.”
“I see.”
It had been a pointless question.
We had already finished the meeting about what to do tomorrow. It was late, but for some reason I felt a little unsatisfied just calling it a night.
Should I go get a drink?
Just then, David spoke up. “I was about to go have a drink. If you don’t mind, would you like to come with me?”
I nodded.
“Sure.”
We changed, put on our jackets, and headed to a bar near the hotel.
We’d been traveling together the whole time, but this was the first time we were drinking just the two of us. We took a seat and ordered beers.
The pub had a great atmosphere. There was a pool table in the center, a dart machine off to one side, and even foosball. Everyone was drinking and having a good time.
Men and women of all different races were chatting away in a noisy, cheerful clamor. Most looked to be in their twenties or thirties, and there were more men than women.
We were in the middle of Silicon Valley, so most of them looked like startup people. Quite a few even looked younger than me.
At the next table over, a heated debate was underway over a startup idea. Everyone was buzzing with energy.
In the past, business had only been something people with money could do.
But the internet had changed the world. Now, if you had a good idea, the door to starting a company was open to anyone.
The monopolies of the IT giants were only getting stronger, and yet the number of startups being founded was still rising.
That was because the market itself kept growing.
Even now, countless young people were trying their hand at starting companies in Silicon Valley.
Even after my regression, I didn’t have every company and founder in the world memorized. And the future I knew only stretched ten years ahead.
For all I knew, someone sitting in this very bar might go on to build a giant company.
“I have no idea what I was doing at that age.”
“What were you doing?”
I thought for a moment before answering.
“Hm. Probably wasting time in the army.”
“Don’t Korean men usually say military service is a good experience?”
“That’s only because it’s hard to survive if you don’t rationalize it somehow. By that logic, even if you were forced into prison for no crime at all, would that be a good experience?”
Wouldn’t life have been a hundred times better if I hadn’t gone to the military?
Even the people who claimed their service had been a good experience would probably grab you by the collar if you told them to go through that “good experience” one more time.
“Ah! I saw you during yesterday’s negotiations, and you were impressive.”
At my words, he gave a faint smile.
“Sometimes intimidation is more effective than persuasion. If I’d left him alone, he would’ve kept hesitating and never made a decision.”
“So you helped him make a choice?”
“It was a matter of handing over a stake worth more than thirty billion dollars for a mere one billion. But if he chose not to sell, he’d have to face the lawsuits and public backlash, and I don’t think he could have handled that. Whatever he chose, he’d have regretted it, so it was probably easier for him to think he’d been forced into signing and had no choice.”
“When you put it that way, I can see it.”
“Still, I was angry, too. Up until the truth came out, I genuinely thought he was a genius and an outstanding developer.”
“But it turned out he was just a fame-obsessed fraud.”
David nodded. “No matter how I look at it, it’s strange.”
“You mean how obsessed he was with fame?”
“No. I mean how you saw through it so quickly. When you first said you were going to investigate him, I never imagined there’d actually be any truth to it.”
Everyone knew that Rolf loved attention and recognition, and that he had a powerful hunger for acclaim.
But even Alex didn’t know how deep that obsession ran. Maybe Rolf himself didn’t know.
If I hadn’t seen how ugly he had been in my first life, I might not have known either.
At first Rolf had insisted that he had developed it himself. Then, once the evidence was made public through the lawsuit, he changed his story and claimed he’d developed it jointly with Jason Kim.
When that, too, was exposed as a lie, he went even further and argued that Mimir had only been possible because he had offered Jason Kim advice here and there.
He kept insisting, over and over, that he had some connection to Mimir’s development. Of course, Syd dismissed those claims outright and treated him like a fool.
I looked around.
“Rolf probably had a time when he burned with that same kind of passion, too.”
David nodded.
“Maybe when he was first starting out, he really was just a hopeful young man.”
Money and success had a way of changing people.
Even if it had turned him into someone unpleasant, he had still succeeded in leaving his name in history. He had founded a company that would change the future of people all over the world.
David took a sip of his drink and asked, “Why did you choose me?”
That was simple enough. Because I knew he would become an exceptional investor in the future.
“I’d known about you for a while, David. I’d been thinking I really wanted to work with you someday. Then I heard Victory Investment had gone under, and figured it was perfect timing.”
David tilted his head. “Was I really that well known?”
I smiled.
“To me, you were.”
Actually, when he’d worked at Victory Investment, he had made a name for himself, but he hadn’t been that famous yet. He only became truly well known after moving to Shark Management.
The man I knew from my first life was one of the most famous investors in the world. In particular, he had earned a reputation as a master of M&A.
When people talked about M&A, they usually focused only on the acquisition itself. But in truth, what happened afterward mattered even more.
Whether a company’s value rose or fell depended on what you did after taking it over.
David had an uncanny ability to identify a target company’s weaknesses and buy it at the lowest possible price. Then, by using every method available—restructuring, selling off assets, mergers, spin-offs, and more—he would drive up its value and resell it for enormous profits.
The companies he acquired usually saw their value more than double within three years. It was no wonder investors came running with bags of money in hand.
But in the process, he had shown more than once that he could be utterly ruthless, and he had drawn plenty of criticism for it. A shareholder activist, if you wanted to be kind about it; a corporate raider, if you wanted to be harsh.
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