Lee Kun Hee (born January 9, 1942) is the chairman of Samsung Group. Lee has an Economics degree from Waseda University in Tokyo and an MBA from George Washington University in the United States. He speaks Korean, English, and Japanese. In 1996, Lee became a member of the International Olympic Committee. With an estimated net worth of $3.4 billion, he and his family rank among the Forbes richest people in the world. He is the third son of Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-chul.

In the early 1990s, believing that Samsung Group was overly focused on producing massive quantities of low-quality goods and that it was not prepared to compete in quality, Lee famously said "Change everything except your wife and kids". The shift is now widely considered a success. One of the group's subsidiaries, Samsung Electronics, is now one of the world's leading developer and producer of semiconductors, and was listed in Fortune magazine's list of the 100 largest corporations in the world in 2005.

In an interview, Lee expressed pride in the fact that Samsung, attracts the brightest minds in South Korea, but added that his new goal is to attract talent from all over the world to ensure that Samsung will remain one of the top companies in the world for years.

Some of Lee's well known statements are:

"One genius can feed millions of others. For the upcoming era where creativity will be the most important driver of business success, we need to hire the best. The economic value of one genius is more than $1 billion."

"The business world has changed significantly. It is becoming increasingly difficult to foresee what sectors will propser or opportunities will arise in the future. But if you hire the best and brightest, you will solve whatever issues arise in the future."

"It is difficult to understand the true dimensions of a problem or a situation when so many things seem to be happening on the surface. This is why I urge my employees to analyze a given situation from various perspectives. This way of thinking allows one to see the true aspects of a situation, which, in turn, allows one to respond wisely."

"Firing a CEO because his financial performance was poor is simply a bad decision. I've encountered several situations where a CEO once performed poorly in one sector then went on to perform much better elsewhere. This is one of the reasons Japanese corporations were able to compete successfully against US corporations."

His daughter Lee Yoon-Hyung, who studied at Ewha Womans University in Seoul and later at New York University, was found dead in her Manhattan apartment on the night of Friday, November 18, 2005, apparently having committed suicide.[1]

In late 2005, Lee spent time having tests at the MD Cancer Hospital in Houston, USA.