The most famous person in the world

Have you ever wondered who the most famous person in the world is?

If you had to put together a list, you’d probably include Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI, Chinese President Hu Jianto, or Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

How about Park Jae-sang?

Say what?

His name may not be familiar to you, but you already know who he is. His “stage name” is PSY, and he actually IS one of the best known people in the world.

He’s a musician, and his official video “Gangnam Style” has the distinction of being the first video EVER to achieve over 1 BILLION views on YouTube. That’s a pretty remarkable feat in itself, but what’s even MORE amazing is the fact that the music is performed in Korean, a language that is not widely spoken outside the Korean peninsula. Even in Korea, there are only about 78,000,00 people that speak the language.

To create a popular song, it’s not actually necessary to produce something where the words can be understood, and at least some of the “heavy metal” music that’s been produced is evidence of that. One of the most popular foreign language songs released in my lifetime was a French song titled “Dominique”, released in 1963, and performed by “the singing nun”:

To date, it’s had over 600,000 views on YouTube.

Park Jae-sang is a 35 year old man from South Korea. Although he briefly studied business administration at Boston University in the late 1990’s, he quickly lost interest in that field, and returned to Korea to pursue a musical career. One of the strongest influence on his career was the song “Hungarian Rhapsody”, by the English group Queen.

In spite of his HUGE popularity on YouTube, he actually hasn’t made a pile of money from that venue, although TV commercials and YouTube ads pushed his earnings to over $8,000,000 in 2012.

(In case you're wondering, the founders of YouTube have done pretty well for themselves. The company was started by three former employees of PayPal in February of 2005. On October 9, 2006, the company was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion. At the time of the purchase, the OLDEST of the three founders was 29 years old, and his net worth increased IMMEDIATELY - to $395 million. The website is the third most visited website on the internet (after Google and Facebook) and 75% of its contents comes from outside the United States.)

His popularity also gave him the chance to rub shoulders with some other very well known people. He met with UN secretary General Ban Ki-moon in October, performed with MC Hammer at Times Square on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Years Eve, and his Christmas in Washington charity concert in Washington D.C. was attended by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

Is he actually the most famous person in the world? Maybe not, but let me ask you this:

How many people know who Lee Myung-bak is ?