Geoffrey Cain

So it is massive and so tied to the success or the failure of South Korea.

It's the company that's the nameplate brand of South Korea.

What Samsung does reflects on the country.

I was absolutely surprised because getting to this point has been a seemingly never-ending succession of scandals and jail sentences.

It's just been wild.

It's really stunning what Samsung has done.

A lot of people did not expect so much money to come so seemingly easily.

But one of the reasons why Samsung and other Korean companies have behaved this way in the past, resisting these payments, is exactly that reason.

They complain that they just have a sky-high inheritance tax rate, and it's unreasonable by the standards of most developed economies.

It was a reluctant payment.

It was something that they were trying to avoid for many decades.

They really wanted to lessen the burden of this inheritance tax.

But the bottom line is that Samsung has been through so many scandals over its history.

Jay Lee himself, the chairman,

has been through scandal after scandal, even as he has been rising to the chairmanship.

And so the bottom line is that if they fight this, there's going to be trouble for Samsung.

There's going to be trouble with the government, with regulators, with the population, with the citizens who are not always so happy about the outsized power of Samsung.

So they just have to bite the bullet and they have to pay it.

That's that.

It says a lot.