Caviar, Cognac and Kim: Inside the Secret Lives of North Korea's Hidden Billionaires

On a bitterly cold January morning in 2019, a convoy of black Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedans rolled through the empty boulevards of Pyongyang's Ryomyong Street — a district so new, so gleaming, that satellite analysts at 38 North had only just begun mapping it. Inside one of those vehicles, according to a former Ministry of State Security official who defected to Seoul in late 2022, sat Ri Jong-ho, a senior donju — a 'new money' merchant prince — returning from a private dinner at which imported Hennessy Paradis cognac had flowed freely and a kilogram of Russian beluga caviar had been served on silver dishes. Outside, less than three kilometres away, families in the Rakrang district were rationing corn porridge. This is the story of North Korea's ultra-wealthy elite: a class the regime officially denies exists, living lives of almost incomprehensible excess behind the heaviest information blackout on Earth.

Kim Il Sung Square, Pyongyang
Kim Il Sung Square, Pyongyang — Wikimedia Commons

The Donju: A Class Born from Collapse

The word donju — literally 'masters of money' — entered North Korean vocabulary during the catastrophic famine of the 1990s, when the state distribution system disintegrated and ordinary citizens were forced to trade to survive. But by the mid-2000s, a small number of these market entrepreneurs had accumulated capital on a scale that would be remarkable anywhere in the world. By 2015, South Korea's National Intelligence Service estimated that between 1,000 and 3,000 donju families controlled assets equivalent to hundreds of millions of US dollars, much of it laundered through front companies registered in China, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Park Jimin — not her real name — worked as a personal assistant to a senior donju family in Pyongyang's prestigious Moranbong district before escaping to China in March 2021. Speaking exclusively to North Korea Untold from a safe house in Seoul, she described a household that bore no resemblance to the austere socialist ideal projected on state television. "The wife had a walk-in wardrobe filled with French handbags — Chanel, Louis Vuitton — brought in through the Dandong border corridor by brokers," she said. "There was a home cinema room. The children studied with private tutors who had been educated abroad. They ate imported beef from Australia almost every night."

The Architecture of Privilege

The physical landscape of elite Pyongyang has been systematically rebuilt over the past decade to accommodate this new aristocracy. The Changjon Street high-rises, completed in April 2012 to coincide with the centenary of Kim Il-sung's birth, were publicly framed as housing for scientists and academics. Defector testimonies collected by Seoul-based NGO Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) between 2018 and 2023 tell a different story. Former residents describe top-floor apartments equipped with underfloor heating systems, imported South Korean Samsung appliances smuggled through third countries, and private fibre-optic internet connections — a technology legally restricted to the innermost ring of the Kim family itself.

Lee Hyun-seung, a former Pyongyang construction supervisor who defected in 2020 and now lives in Incheon, told this reporter that workers on the Ryomyong Street project — unveiled by Kim Jong-un in April 2017 — were explicitly instructed that certain buildings were not standard residential blocks. "We were told the finishing materials were different. Italian marble for the lobbies. The electrical specifications were different — much higher capacity. We understood without being told who these apartments were for." He paused before adding: "None of us who built them could ever have afforded to live within five blocks of them."

Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang
Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang — Wikimedia Commons

The Symbiosis: Wealth and the Kim Regime

What makes North Korea's elite class categorically different from billionaires elsewhere is the nature of its relationship with state power. These are not independent oligarchs. They are, in the words of Dr. Andrei Lankov, professor of Korean Studies at Kookmin University in Seoul and one of the world's foremost authorities on North Korean society, "essentially licensed by the regime to be wealthy, and that licence can be revoked at any moment." The arrangement functions as a form of parasitic symbiosis: the donju provide the regime with hard currency, logistics networks and economic momentum it cannot generate through its own bureaucratic structures; in return, they receive protection, access and impunity.

That impunity has a price. Multiple sources, including a former mid-ranking Workers' Party of Korea official who defected via Laos in 2021, describe a system of mandatory 'loyalty payments' — effectively taxation without receipt — paid directly to offices connected to Organisation and Guidance Department, the opaque body that sits at the apex of the Kim family's control architecture. "Every major donju in Pyongyang knew that around the Supreme Leader's birthday in January, and the founding of the republic in September, a contribution was expected," the source told this reporter, speaking on condition of strict anonymity. "Failure to contribute was not an option. People had disappeared for less."

Luxury Under Sanctions: The Supply Chain of Desire

United Nations Panel of Experts reports from 2020, 2021 and 2022 have meticulously documented the mechanisms through which luxury goods reach Pyongyang despite international sanctions prohibiting their export to North Korea. The routes are circuitous and ingenious: Swiss watches and French wines enter via Chinese intermediaries in Shenyang and Dalian; high-end electronics are transshipped through Malaysia and Vietnam; even private yacht components have been tracked moving through Russian far-eastern ports.

A 2022 UN report specifically named Liaoning Hongxiang Industrial Co. as a node in a broader network facilitating the movement of sanctioned goods, part of a web of entities that investigators described as 'sanctions evasion infrastructure.' The North Korean embassy in Beijing, according to testimony gathered by Human Rights Watch, has at various times operated as a direct procurement channel for luxury items destined for senior party officials — a finding Pyongyang predictably rejects as fabrication.

The Women Left Out of the Story

In the telling of North Korean elite life, women are frequently rendered invisible — trophy wives, silent beneficiaries. The reality is more complex. Several defector accounts describe wealthy women operating their own parallel business ventures, sometimes outstripping their husbands in commercial acumen. Choi Seon-hwa — again, not her real name — ran a network of illegal money exchange operations across three provinces before fleeing to South Korea in 2019. She describes a world where elite women wielded genuine economic power while performing public deference. "In private, it was the women who managed the money, who knew which officials to bribe and how much," she said. "The men had the titles. The women had the ledgers."

A System on a Knife's Edge

Kim Jong-un's response to the COVID-19 pandemic — sealing the border with China from January 2020 with extraordinary totality — delivered a shock to this entire ecosystem that analysts are still attempting to measure. The supply chains that fed elite consumption collapsed virtually overnight. By mid-2021, sources inside Pyongyang reported to Radio Free Asia that even senior donju were struggling to source basic imported goods. Black market prices for Chinese-made consumer electronics tripled. The cognac ran out.

Whether this represents a temporary disruption or the beginning of a structural rupture in the relationship between the Kim regime and its merchant elite remains one of the most consequential and least understood questions in contemporary North Korea analysis. What is not in question is the human obscenity at the heart of it: a system in which a few thousand individuals drink cognac and sleep beneath imported duvets while twenty-five million of their compatriots are forbidden from knowing they exist. The lights in Ryomyong Street burn bright. The rest of Pyongyang, as any satellite image taken after midnight will confirm, sits in darkness.

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