Andrew Lee | |
---|---|
Crown Prince of Korea (disputed) | |
Reign | October 2018 – present |
Born | Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |
Spouse | Princess Nana Lee |
House | House of Yi |
Andrew Lee (born December 1983)[1] is a Korean-American entrepreneur. He is the founder of the VPN service Private Internet Access, which started in 2010.[2] He is the heir to Yi Seok, who in turn is claimed by some to be the heir of the former Korean monarchy.[3][4]
Andrew Lee | |
Hangul | 리 앤드류 |
---|---|
Revised Romanization | Ri Aendeuryu |
McCune–Reischauer | Ri Aendŭryu |
In 2009, Lee founded London Trust Media (LTM), a private holdings company. In 2010, he founded Private Internet Access (PIA), a virtual private network service for anonymizing Internet traffic.[5] He claimed to have started PIA because of his interest in Internet Relay Chat (IRC), whose users' IP addresses could be easily revealed, but only after the Freenode purchase.[6] Lee and co-owner Steve DeProspero sold LTM (and its subsidiary PIA) to Israeli company Kape Technologies for US$95.5 million in November 2019.[7][8] Lee co-founded Mt. Gox Live, a bitcoin price tracker that was later acquired by the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox.[9]
In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer, then the head of staff at Freenode, incorporated and transferred ownership of Freenode Limited to Lee;[10] Dahlskjaer and Lee said the company was solely for funding the network and running the Freenode #live conferences.[11][12] According to staff, they were not informed of the contents of the deal and were told that it would not affect Freenode's day-to-day operations, as the company only managed the conference and nothing else.[12][13] A dispute over changes Lee imposed in 2021 resulted in all of Freenode's 20 to 30 staff members resigning.[11][12] This team went on to form a new network called Libera Chat.[11]
Andrew Lee was born in Indianapolis and raised in Carmel, a city in the Indianapolis metro area.[14][3] He enrolled in Purdue University and transferred to the University at Buffalo, but later dropped out to start working.[3]
In October 2018, Yi Seok, a member of the House of Yi and one of the pretenders to the defunct imperial throne of Korea, declared Lee the crown prince of Korea at a ceremony in Los Angeles, attended by Bermuda premier David Burt, and city officials from Los Angeles and Jeonju.[3][15]
In 2020, Lee and his family moved to a mansion in Hidden Valley, Ventura County, California.[14][16]
In the afternoon of November 18, 2022, J-Money, driving a Rolls-Royce Phantom registered to Andrew Lee, was shot and robbed by 2 men in Koreatown, Los Angeles.[17][18] As of February 2023, the perpetrators have not been identified.[19] Andrew Lee, under the rapper name KingLee, appeared on J-Money's album titled "Dun It All".[20]