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The Netflix show 3 Body Problem is a big hit, and it looks like the streamer’s struck gold once again. It’s an adaption of the first book in a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past, written by Chinese author Liu Cixin and adapted for TV by the makers of the Game of Thrones show on Max. However, the novel’s path to the screen has been a wild one, involving murder, jealousy and revenge.
Lin Qi, a billionaire who acquired the rights to the project, was murdered by poison by a man named Xu Yao, who Lin hired as CEO to handle business operations. Lin reportedly demoted Yao after he was unhappy with his work performance, which led to the murder, but oh, there’s so much more to this. Let’s take a look at what happened.
Who is Lin Qi?
Lin Qi, who died at 39 on Dec. 25 of 2020, was sometimes referred to by his nickname: “The Billionaire Millennial.” He made his money by catching the wave of mobile games just as they were taking off globally. He represented a younger generation of Chinese entrepreneurs who saw potential to expand business outside of China and help the country’s entertainment influence around the world.
Before he got involved with the 3 Body Problem, he grew his fortune in the 2010s by making a slew of mobile multiplayer games, including Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming, based on the popular TV show. His company, Yoozoo, made obscene amounts of money and made him one of the youngest billionaires in the country. He loved video games, tea, racing cars, soccer and Chinese-based calligraphy. He was famously fearless with his fortune, and in an appearance on a TV show called Boss Town, he said his entrepreneurial instincts started when he was just a kid in school making an allowance.
“If you keep going forward, there will always be opportunity lying ahead,” he said on the show. “I am not afraid of failure. I can just start over again.”
Lin made it his life’s work to bring the 3 Body Problem to a worldwide audience. He envisioned the series as potentially being China’s answer to Star Wars. Lin started acquiring the rights to the property in 2014, and it’s estimated that he paid a total of $150 million all together. He envisioned a franchise that would be known across the globe and have all the trappings of a worldwide hit, including video games, movies, TV shows, anime and more.
Lin’s family owned a coal mining business in a coastal city named Wenzhou, and even when he moved away to Shanghai to break into video games, he stayed close to his roots as the executive chair of a Wenzhou business association. After he died, his company Yoozoo released a statement about his passing.
“Goodbye youth,” it said. “We will be together, continue to be kind, continue to believe in goodness, and continue the fight against all that is bad.”
Who Is Xu Yao and Why Did He Murder Lin Qi Over the ‘3 Body Problem’?
The news of Lin Qi death was huge in China, but it didn’t get much attention elsewhere, until now that is. Now that the 3 Body Problem is such a hit, people are curious as to how everything went down, especially since murderer Xu Yao was sentenced to death around the same time the show premiered. The best summary we have of what happened comes from an X account from someone who goes by the name Rui Ma.
Rui wrote a long post about the whole thing titled “Crazy story of the week.” “The tragic incident surrounding the Netflix adaptation of the “Three Body Problem” series is not widely known among its fans,” the message reads. Rui goes on to explain that when Lin started the process of “creating various products” from the rights to the show, he hired “distinguished lawyer” Xu Yao to act as CEO of the endeavor, a job that came with an almost $3 million salary.
That meant that Xu was responsible for nailing down the Netflix deal, as well as various other business operations. Lin was reportedly not happy with Xu’s performance beyond securing the Netflix agreement, so Lin decided to demote Xu, reduce his salary to to $750k “and bring in additional executives to enhance business operations.” This made Xu incredibly angry, and the fact that he wouldn’t get credit as producer (and Lin would) on the show added gasoline to that fire.
That’s when he decided to kill Lin. Things really go off the rails from here. Xu prepared meticulously not only for the murder but for the aftermath of it as well. He was inspired by the show Breaking Bad to use poison to kill Lin and his associates, and he planned on getting off by using a defense of insanity. Xu established a laboratory in Shanghai to experiment with more than 100 toxins, which he tested on animals. He would eventually land on “puffer fish poison and mercury and at least three other poisons,” which he gave to Lin and his co workers disguised as “an advanced probiotic.”
He bought 160 phones and even started a company in Japan to get his hand on the chemicals. Lin ate the poison and was hospitalized, “where it was immediately apparent he had been poisoned, although they didn’t know with what.” Had Xu told doctors what was in the poison, he could have saved Lin’s life, but he chose not to do so.
As for his plan after Lin’s death, he hired a team of lawyers to help him get off but also “prepared extensively for a psychiatric evaluation to use [a plea of insanity] to avoid legal punishment.” He bought books about psychiatric evaluations and “searched online for papers and materials, inquiring into domestic and foreign cases where punishment was avoided due to psychiatric evaluation.”
Xu was sentenced to death on Friday, March 22, one day after the show premiered on Netflix. The show debuted as the number 2 show on the streamer with 11 million views for the week of Mar. 18-24. It’s getting more and more attention as more people discover it. If there’s one silver lining, it’s that Lin is posthumously listed as an executive producer.