It's the kind of K-drama that rivets millions of viewers - bitter boardroom battles, expensive lawyers, hostile takeover claims and high-stakes shareholder meetings.
Except this is playing out in real life as the godfather of K-pop fights his nephew for control of the music company he founded.
It features HYBE, the agency behind the smash-hit group BTS, and tech giant Kakao in an A-list battle that could determine the billion-dollar industry's future.
And it was triggered largely by one man: South Korean activist investor Lee Chang Hwan.
Lee's fund, Align Partners, bought a one-percent stake early last year in SM Entertainment, one of South Korea's leading music companies that helped bring K-pop to the world. That included managing early hit groups such as boy bands Super Junior and SHINee.
He used that stake to argue for corporate reform, saying SM founder Lee Soo Man - the so-called Godfather of K-pop - was, in effect, siphoning off millions of dollars every year in bogus consulting fees.
"It didn't make sense," contends Lee Chang Hwan, who points to the money - equivalent to six percent of publicly listed SM Entertainment's sales every year - being paid to a private entity called Like Planning, which was entirely owned and controlled by Lee Soo Man.
The 36-year-old self-made investor, raised by a single mother and who first shot to public attention by winning a popular TV quiz show, started asking uncomfortable questions.
Lee Soo Man's pet company had raked in "nearly 160 billion won [HK$933 million] over the past 20 years," he says, with SM risking major financial and reputational damage due to the behavior of its founder.
Lee Soo Man not only created individual K-pop bands in the 1990s such as HOT and SES, whose success arguably laid the groundwork for the stratospheric rise of groups like BTS and Blackpink, he came up with the industry's whole modus operandi.
He pioneered an obsessive level of training and micro-management of "idols" - trained K-pop performers - and his idea of combining strong visual performances and aggressive overseas marketing helped make SM Entertainment an industry behemoth.
He founded the company in 1989 and took it public in 2000, so he was predictably outraged last year when SM Entertainment's management, including his nephew, agreed with activist investor Lee Chang Hwan's assessment and moved to terminate the "unfair" deal with Like Planning.
In an apparent fit of revenge, Lee Soo Man sold the majority of his stake in SM - 14.8 percent of the company - to one-time rival HYBE, the agency that manages BTS, for US$2.52 billion (HK$19.6 billion).
The move made HYBE the single largest shareholder in SM Entertainment. And it prompted protests from SM's management that it was a hostile takeover that would create an HYBE monopoly and damage the K-pop industry's potential.
In a bid to wrest back control, SM's management brought in Kakao, a sprawling cash-rich tech conglomerate that owns the country's most popular messaging app. Kakao is now seeking to buy a controlling share of the company to block HYBE.
The feud has unleashed a family succession drama, with founder Lee's nephew, Lee Sung Su, who is the company's CEO, taking to YouTube to air the dirty laundry. Accusing his uncle of tax fraud using overseas companies, he demanded the elder Lee "kneel down and apologize" for his crimes.
"Sir, please stop now," he said in a video posted online. "It is the only way to save you from the Valley of Death."
Lee Soo Man has not responded, but the Yonhap news agency reported him saying Sung Su is a "good nephew" and that his own heart "aches" due to the feud.
Experts say the drama is an illustration of a perennial problem in South Korea's dynastic chaebols: founding families exerting control through a complex web of crossholdings despite not holding controlling shares.
The chairman of giant Samsung Electronics, also the heir of the founding family, was convicted and imprisoned in 2017 over corruption, though he was given a presidential pardon last year.
Align Partners' Lee Chang Hwan says the SM Entertainment case is similar, an example of a person "who runs the company as if it's his private entity."
Lee Chang Hwan also opposes HYBE's bid for control, saying its efforts to create a monopoly bode ill for the market.
"We thought there was great potential for further K-pop growth," he says, adding he first started looking at investing in the industry in early 2021.
"BTS was already a huge success and we witnessed the formation of a real K-pop fan base in North America and Europe," he adds. And SM Entertainment was "undervalued" due to its management woes and seemed a good target.
