The Netflix Judge Who Became One of the World's Richest Chefs Overnight

A cameo on a Korean cooking show turned a franchise operator's IPO into a $61 million deal that briefly minted a $300 million celebrity fortune and revived an entire national stock exchange's appetite for new listings.

By Carry and Conquer Publications

On November 6, 2024, Paik Jong-won stood at the Korea Exchange in Seoul and rang the bell for Theborn Korea, the restaurant franchise company he founded three decades earlier. The stock opened at 46,350 won, more than 36 percent above its 34,000 won offer price, then spiked as high as 64,500 won in intraday trading before settling at a close of 51,400 won, up 51 percent on the day. Investors had bid the market capitalization from 491.8 billion won at the offer price to 743.6 billion won by the closing bell. More than 670,000 retail investors had signed up for the subscription. For a listing that raised only about 102 billion won, roughly $73.7 million, the frenzy was wildly out of proportion to the deal's size, and almost all of it traced back to one thing: Paik had just spent two months as a judge on Netflix's global hit "Culinary Class Wars."

A Bellwether for a Struggling Market

Theborn Korea's debut mattered well beyond the chef's personal balance sheet. South Korea's IPO market had been stuck in a multiyear slump, and just weeks before Paik's listing, K Bank had withdrawn a much larger offering, one that could have raised more than $700 million and would have been the country's biggest listing in years, after institutional investors refused to show up for its bookbuilding. K Bank cited weak demand and concerns over its valuation and its reliance on a cryptocurrency exchange for deposits. Against that backdrop, Theborn Korea priced its own offering at 34,000 won a share, 21 percent above the top of its marketed range of 23,000 to 28,000 won, and still found buyers lining up. Analysts pointed to Paik's listing as the clearest sign investor appetite for Korean new issues had not disappeared, it had simply been waiting for a name people recognized.

That name was inseparable from "Culinary Class Wars," a Netflix reality competition pitting 100 chefs against each other in elimination rounds, judged by Paik alongside Michelin three-star chef Anh Sung-jae. The show debuted in September 2024 and topped Netflix's global weekly chart for non-English television for three consecutive weeks, a first for a Korean entertainment series. Paik, long known in Korea as the host of budget cooking shows and mentor to struggling restaurant owners, suddenly had a global audience calling him Korea's answer to Gordon Ramsay.

From Ssambap Stall to 2,900 Storefronts

Paik's path to the listing ceremony started decades earlier and far from any television studio. Born in 1966 in Yesan County, he opened his first restaurant, Wonjo Ssambap, in Seoul's Gangnam district in 1993 while still at Yonsei University, after running up 1.7 billion won in debt on earlier construction investments. That single leaf wrap restaurant became the seed of what he incorporated as Theborn Korea in 1994. By the time of the IPO, the company operated roughly 2,900 outlets across 25 brands, including Bornga, Saemaeul Restaurant, Hanshin Pocha and the coffee chain Paik's Coffee, plus a hotel on Jeju Island. Paik became a nationwide television fixture starting in 2015 with the variety show "My Little Television," parlaying his easygoing, no-frills cooking persona into a decade of hit programs before Netflix gave that persona a worldwide stage.

At the IPO price, Paik's roughly 61 percent stake in the company was worth about 215 million dollars. By the time trading closed on debut day, with the stock up 51 percent, that same stake was worth close to 324 million dollars, instantly placing him among the wealthiest chefs anywhere in the world, according to Bloomberg. "Today is a meaningful day," Paik told reporters at the listing ceremony, framing the IPO as a step toward promoting Korean cuisine globally and expressing hope that "every Korean" would one day own a share of the company.

The Empire That Cracked

The stock's momentum did not last. Even on debut day there were warning signs: Theborn Korea's own employees had subscribed to only 35 percent of the shares set aside for them internally, a muted vote of confidence from the people who knew the business best. Within months, the cracks became public. In January 2025, Paik promoted a holiday gift set of pressed ham, dubbed Paik Ham, on his YouTube channel, only for consumers to discover it contained a lower share of pork, 85.4 percent, than the Spam it was compared to, at a higher price. The company's market capitalization fell for seven straight trading days, its first losing streak since listing.

Weeks later, allegations surfaced that a soybean paste product and an octopus dish sold under Theborn Korea brands used Chinese-grown ingredients despite domestic labeling. Old clips resurfaced of Paik using a pesticide sprayer on apple juice and construction tools as barbecue grills on his shows, and franchise data showed some of his smaller brands closing outlets at a rate above 36 percent in 2024 alone.

By May 2025, the stock had fallen to roughly 25,800 won, about half its IPO day close, and Paik announced he would pause all broadcast appearances to focus on the company, pledging 5 billion won in franchisee support. Academics who studied the collapse pointed to the structural problem underneath it: a company whose valuation depended so heavily on one man's television image that any damage to that image became a direct liability to shareholders. The stock kept sliding through 2026, with the company's market cap down roughly 67 percent from its debut close by late August, even as Paik quietly resumed his YouTube channel in June and the company's shares jumped as much as 37 percent over two trading sessions in August after he announced expansion plans into Canadian hotels and United States sauce production. The Netflix cameo had built a fortune in a single afternoon. Rebuilding it after Culinary Class Wars stopped being the whole story proved to be a much longer project.