What a brutal way to go. It has been widely speculated that he has been in a vegetative state since 2014, kept on life support to give the company time to restructure its assets and consolidate power under Lee Kun-Hee's son, Lee Jae-yong, so that their family's power persists even in the wake of paying South Korea's enormous wealth taxes.

Samsung undoubtedly played a key role in South Korea's economic ascendance, but Lee Kun-Hee will leave behind a complicated legacy of industrialization mixed with corruption and hyper-crony capitalism.