Bang’s passion for music started at a young age. He was part of a band in middle school that performed songs he wrote, while a budding songwriting career began in his university years.
In 1997, Bang co-founded JYP Entertainment with singer-songwriter Park Jin-young. Like Hybe, JYP is today one of the “big four” K-pop conglomerates.
One of Bang’s and Park’s early successes was first-generation group g.o.d, which earned them a reputation as hit composers and gave Bang the nickname “Hitman Bang”.
In 2005, Bang left JYP to start his own venture, Big Hit Entertainment, known today as Hybe. He began creating a seven-member boy group in 2010, but it took a few years for BTS, as we know it today, to take shape.
The group was initially conceived as a hip-hop crew, but Bang decided to adopt a “K-pop idol model” after considering “the business context”, he told Time in an interview in 2019.
In the years since their launch, BTS has gone on to become among the most successful pop groups in history, including being the first Korean act to top Billboard’s Hot 100 and the first Asian group to surpass five billion streams on Spotify.
Shares in Big Hit Entertainment debuted in October 2020 at $235 a piece, more than doubling the initial public offering price of $110.
In 2019, Bloomberg put Bang’s net worth at about $770m – this has since skyrocketed to more than $2bn. As of last month, Bang held more than 13 million Hybe shares, valued at nearly 5 trillion won, according to the Korea CXO Research Institute, a Seoul-based corporate analysis firm.