HYEON-JOO PARK

Park was born in Gwangju in 1958 and studied at Korea University. He started out as a broker and became a star salesman known for pulling in clients.

In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, he did something risky. He quit and founded his own firm, Mirae Asset.

A year later he launched Korea's first mutual fund. It was a hard sell in a country that trusted bank deposits and property.

But Park believed ordinary Koreans should own stocks. Mirae Asset grew into a full financial group with brokerage, insurance, and global investment arms.

Mirae Asset is the empire. It is a financial group that runs mutual funds, ETFs, a brokerage, and insurance across Asia and beyond.

In 2016 Park bought Daewoo Securities and merged it in, creating Korea's largest brokerage. In 2018 Mirae Asset bought Global X, a New York ETF company, for around $488 million.

That deal gave Park a real foothold in the American market. Mirae Asset now manages hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, a long way from one mutual fund in 1998.

Park thinks long term and global. His core belief is that you grow wealth by owning good companies for years, not by trading in and out.

That is why the Warren Buffett comparison sticks. He also pushed Mirae Asset abroad early, investing in emerging markets and buying foreign firms while most Korean money stayed home.

He likes structural growth, betting on big shifts like the rise of Asian consumers and, more recently, technology and ETFs. Patience plus a global map is the whole style.

Building Mirae Asset from nothing into Korea's largest asset manager. When Park launched his first mutual fund in 1998, the idea barely existed in Korea.

Today Mirae Asset manages hundreds of billions of dollars and operates in over a dozen countries. The 2018 purchase of Global X in the US turned a Korean firm into a real player in the booming global ETF market.

He did not inherit a bank or get handed a franchise. He built the whole thing on the argument that Koreans should own stocks.

Park's aggressive global expansion has not always been smooth. In 2019 Mirae Asset agreed to buy 15 luxury US hotels for about $5.8 billion.

The deal fell apart in 2020 in a courtroom fight, with a disputed $580 million deposit at stake. Pushing into so many countries and asset types at once brought complexity and losses in places.

The lesson is that the same ambition that built the empire can overreach. Expanding fast is thrilling until a downturn tests every bet at once.

Own good companies and wait. Park has said for years that time in the market beats timing the market.

He built Mirae Asset on the belief that ordinary people should invest in stocks for the long run rather than sit in cash. He also believes in going where growth is, even if that means leaving your home country.

His philosophy is basically Buffett with a passport. Buy quality, hold it, and do not be afraid to look overseas.

Park keeps his personal life low-key. His public identity is tied to his foundation and its scholarships more than to his family.

He is known for a frugal, work-focused reputation rather than a jet-set lifestyle. In a Korean business world full of family-run conglomerates and inheritance dramas, Park stands out as a self-made founder whose legacy project is education, not a dynasty.

Park studied at Korea University, one of the country's top schools, focusing on business. But his real education was on the trading floor.

He started as a broker and learned the business by selling to clients directly. That ground-level experience shaped his conviction that ordinary people, not just institutions, should be investing in the market.

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