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The World's Most Extreme Business Trip

Maximillion Cooper, the British founder of the Gumball 3000, looks back on his latest adventure, which brought his infamous band of speed-pushing misfits to North Korea's doorstep.

Maximillion Cooper knows the far-flung. The British founder of the Gumball 3000, an annual celebrity-laden rally celebrating its 10th year, has blazed a trail across the globe from the United States to Europe to Thailand in his Lamborghini. With the Gumball brand extending to fashion and film, Cooper now has eight companies that pulled in combined revenue of over $55 million last year. The 36-year-old mogul's success and notoriety, for better or worse, has launched him onto the world's stage, in front of some of the least likely people in the least likely places. Which brings me to the 2008 Gumball 3000 that just wrapped up in August -- when Cooper led over 50 rally participants (paying nearly $120,000 each) on a weeklong, 3,000-mile adrenaline-pumping adventure from San Francisco to Beijing, with a detour through Kim Jong Il's personal Eden. Pyongyang, North Korea, a Communist state once tossed together with Iraq and Iran to make up President Bush's Axis of evil, has been closed off from the rest of the world for decades and has gone completely untouched by popular culture. On the heels of his most ambitious business trip yet, Inc.com caught up with Cooper about how he got Kim Jong Il to allow the world's richest misfits to paint a gray city red.

How did you get the idea to take Gumball to North Korea?

About three years ago while I was in China I happened to meet the North Korean ambassador to the United Kingdom. He later invited us to go to Pyongyang on holiday and we were blown away by the place. It's stuck in this 1950s time warp. During a dinner a few months later, the North Korean ambassador asked if we'd be interested in taking the Gumball race to North Korea.

What did it mean to you to have North Korea show interest in Gumball?

For two and half years I went back and forth with North Korea to see if it was possible to incorporate a route for the actual rally. On one trip to Pyongyang, I had this very powerful meeting with the whole of the North Korean cabinet and they presented us with this document that invited the Gumball rally to come to North Korea. The letter also invited us to exit North Korea via the demilitarized zone into South Korea, a border no one has crossed since 1953. It was really a powerful gesture and the most powerful invitation I've ever received. I left that meeting jumping hoops from the air, thinking I'd united Korea. [laughs]

Did you face any challenges planning the route?

It was an interesting two years of planning. I looked into bringing a rally stop into North Korea but that became less and less feasible. Taking all these super expensive cars to North Korea seemed like a bad idea. I certainly wouldn't be able to get insurance for any of these cars. The country is very small, of course, and we would have had to fly the cars in. Crossing the demilitarized zone is such a big feat, which I'd love to be the first to do, but I'd only really do it if I'd got complete support from everyone involved. It's such a big step that governments have to be ready for it in many ways. So [after our U.S. leg of the rally] we shipped the cars from Las Vegas to China, and while the cars were being shipped, we were able to spend 16 hours in North Korea.

Was it worth the two years of planning?

I'm pleased that we did this. I'm actually really glad that we didn't try and fly the cars there and have a rally. The real experience was dealing with governments. For the three years since I got this document from Kim Jong Il, you'd think the governments of the world would help us, but no one really did anything. It was just me and my own taking on the idea of unifying Korea. [laughs] I didn't have that as my mission in life but I found myself in a really unique opportunity. You'd expect the governments involved with bringing peace to the region would have taken the baton from me, but they haven't.

Why did the North Koreans reach out to Gumball? What was it about your brand and company that allowed you access to North Korea?

North Korean people have no idea about the Gumball brand. They've never heard of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or McDonalds or Coca-Cola. It's such a closed country. The North Korean diplomats' bases abroad had heard of us, though. They've watched the DVDs and seen us on TV. Their position [before this], which I talked very openly about with them, was that they [North Korea] have no social relationships with anybody outside their country. Any talks with any country or any outside party are purely political. What I tried to do through this was just open up their doors a little bit.

What was your itinerary like in North Korea?

We did go to the Mass Games, an annual event in North Korea that featured 100,000 people performing in one of the largest stadiums in the world. It was an amazing site. We had a small tour of the city on the bus and we were taken back to our hotel, where we had this very formal dinner with the ministry of culture. After dinner, we explored the city a little bit. We were free to do what we wanted, really. We went out skateboarding in the middle of the night. Of course, no one in North Korea had ever seen a skateboard. Bam Margera and Adam Dunn were filming parts of the new Jackass movie there. We had 35 nationalities in attendance, obviously none of which had been there before, all of which are very influential and famous people. (This year's rally participants included the likes of PayPal cofounder Ken Howery, Russian billionaire Dmitry Zelenov, Saudi real estate magnate Amro Kayal, Kuwaiti prince Faisal Al-Sabah, models Nicole Dahm and Tyson Beckford.) So I think that was a huge step. It's probably through sports or popular culture that the doors are going to continue to open. A South Korean newspaper referred to it as "Skateboard diplomacy."

Did you get any sense of the basic economy in North Korea?

It's no different than all the bits of news that you hear and read. It's a full-on closed country. It's a completely Communist regime; there are no shops, there is a market in Pyongyang where locals do trade. The only shops for Westerners are probably in the hotels.

I hear you ended up in a karaoke Bar?

Yes, some of us ended up at a karaoke bar. It was actually no different than a karaoke bar in Japan or South Korea really. Amazingly, it did have a few Western songs, including a few Sex Pistols songs. I have no idea how those ended up on a North Korean jukebox.

Was there any sign that North Korea is any closer to becoming an open economy?

In the last three years, through my interactions with North Korean diplomats and my visits, I've had countless entrepreneurial opportunities offered to me in North Korea, things like mining and farming. I'm just not interested in any of them. But I've spoken to them about bringing the first popular [Western] music concert there, and that's something I'm possibly interested in doing. All we've done is push their doors open a little bit and opened up their society to Western ideas.