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Germany. The pre-internet bulletin board networks were home to those for whom personal computers fit like a limb they had always known was missing. Kim’s focused on American telephone exchanges, the lowest hanging fruit in those early online days. He gravitated towards boards filled with hackers — those who made the most of this disruptive technology which allowed them to tinker with the world. It was on these boards he met Mathias Ortmann, one of the three others who would be arrested with him in New Zealand in years to come. They were teenagers — about 15 years old when they first met online. Kim was called Kimble and Ortmann was known as SCSI (Scuzzy), named after a set of standards for transferring data between computers and peripheral components.

PUTTING TOGETHER THE A-TEAM I — MATHIAS ORTMANN

“Mathias is an absolute genius. I would be nothing without him,” says Dotcom. “He has one skill and that is the coding. He doesn’t have social skills, he doesn’t have business skills. But he is the best at writing code. He is efficient, he thinks very analytically, the things he puts together in code are art. He is an artist in software development.

“What’s unique about him is that he thinks in complex layers. His code is like a chess game. Most programmers will only think two moves ahead. But in his code, when he writes, he’s like eight moves ahead. It’s much more analytical and extremely sophisticated code. In my whole career, working with some of the best developers, I’ve really only met three people that can match his skill. I’ve always looked out for the guy. I’ve always made sure he’s okay.”

IN 1990, KIM was running pay-per-minute phone chat lines. The vogue was party lines, and the profits grew as the number of callers into the line grew. He later estimated it earned around $200,000. His ambition then, he said, was to buy a better computer, better modem and better software. But the business fell apart when he was arrested, at the age of 18, and charged with using stolen calling card numbers to pimp up his call totals — the higher the number of callers, the higher the profit he could claim on the lines. He was considered a minor when arrested but still spent a month in jail until given a suspended sentence on multiple charges of computer fraud. While in prison, he began to appreciate how valuable his knowledge was — he could tell because so many telecoms companies trooped into jail to ask him about it.

Something else happened to Kim about this time; something that

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