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Becoming a Billionaire

2010 South Korean television series

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 29, 2025
Entity authorityQ493633 ↗
Source-derived summary

Becoming a Billionaire (Korean: 부자의 탄생; Hanja: 富者의 誕生; RR: Bujaui tansaeng; lit. 'Birth of a Rich Person') is a 2010 South Korean television series starring Ji Hyun-woo, Lee Bo-young, Lee Si-young and Namkoong Min. It aired on KBS2 from March 1 to May 4, 2010, on Mondays and Tuesdays at 21:55 for 20 episodes.

Plot

Choi Seok-bong believes he is the son of a billionaire that had a one-night stand with his mother. While working as a bellboy at a luxury hotel, Seok-bong practices the qualities he thinks a billionaire's heir would have; all these efforts are for the day he meets his birth father. But one day, Seok-bong is diagnosed with breast cancer, which only has a 50 percent survival rate. Seok-bong doesn't have enough money for treatments, and finds it absolutely ridiculous that a billionaire's heir would die because he has no money. Finding his biological father may be Seok-bong's only hope, so he turns to Lee Shin-mi, the heiress of Ohsung Group and a notorious penny-pincher, for help.

Cast

Main characters

Ji Hyun-woo as Choi Seok-bong

Park Gun-woo as teenage Choi Seok-bong

A bell boy at Ohsung Hotel in the first few episodes.

Lee Bo-young as Lee Shin-mi

Kim So-hyun as young Lee Shin-mi

The heiress of Ohsung Group, and a strict and frugal person.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Becoming a Billionaire” as 2010 South Korean television series. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Becoming, Billionaire and South.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2010—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Becoming, Billionaire and South providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Becoming a Billionaire”, the useful work is to connect “2010 South Korean television series” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q493633. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

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  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Becoming a Billionaire”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Becoming a Billionaire primary sources, Becoming a Billionaire archive and Becoming research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Becoming a Billionaire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.