For years, Coupang Inc. founder Kim Beom-seok built the South Korean e-commerce giant on a mantra of radical customer focus, often saying the company’s goal was to become so essential that users would wonder how they ever lived without it.
Now, facing one of the largest data breaches in the country’s history, that same founder has gone conspicuously silent.
The breach, disclosed in late November, exposed names, addresses, phone numbers and partial order details of roughly 30.7 million users—the majority of Coupang’s customer base.
In the weeks since, Kim has made no public statement, declined to attend a National Assembly hearing on the incident, and left public communication to company representatives.
His absence is striking for a leader who has carefully shaped his public image as a Silicon Valley–influenced disruptor.
Kim, who studied at Harvard and worked in the U.S. before founding Coupang, has often framed the company as a global tech firm rather than a local retailer.
At the 2019 Milken Global Conference, he described South Korea as one of the world’s most demanding consumer markets and said Coupang’s internal benchmark was whether it could become indispensable to its users.
“The contrast between Kim’s past rhetoric and his current invisibility couldn’t be sharper,” said Park Ji-young, a corporate governance analyst in Seoul.
“When trust is breached, stakeholders expect accountability from the top—especially from a founder who built the brand on reliability.”
Coupang’s corporate structure adds another layer to the scrutiny. Though nearly all its customers are in South Korea, the company is incorporated in Delaware and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, where it raised $4.6 billion in its 2021 IPO.
Kim controls the company through a dual-class share structure, concentrating decision-making power even as public investors hold the majority of equity.
In recent years, Coupang has expanded its policy and government relations presence in Washington, D.C., opening an office there earlier this year.
Yet when South Korean lawmakers summoned Kim to explain the data breach, he did not appear. Company employees in Washington referred inquiries back to Seoul when asked about Kim’s whereabouts or his decision not to testify.
The breach has sparked regulatory investigations and class-action preparations in South Korea, where data protection laws carry heavy penalties for negligence.
It has also raised questions about whether Coupang’s famous operational speed—including same-day delivery—came at the cost of security maturity, a tension common in hypergrowth tech firms.
“Large-scale breaches are ultimate leadership tests,” said Lee Min-kyu, a professor of information security at Korea University.
“The response—or lack of one—sends a signal about corporate priorities and governance more clearly than any marketing slogan.” So far, Coupang has issued formal apologies through statements and promised to strengthen its security systems.
But in the absence of its founder’s voice, customers and investors are left weighing Kim’s once-frequent question—“How much more can you give customers?”—against a new and unsettling one: Who answers when things go wrong? Legal and branding experts say Kim’s continued silence could compound the reputational damage and influence regulatory outcomes, as officials in both Seoul and Washington monitor how a NYSE-listed company handles a crisis affecting millions of consumers.
