If the founder’s credibility breaks, the whole company falls with it.

“One wrong statement can damage a company far more than a product failure.”

Xiaomi’s legal team has been all over the trending lists these past few days.

To avoid legal risk, they threw out a line claiming “the CEO doesn’t understand the tech.”

Short term, it looks like a clean stop-loss — no breach, no penalties.

But the long-term damage?

That’s the part people seriously underestimate.

In today’s world, a founder’s personal brand is a company’s strongest asset.

The trust Lei Jun has built over the years is essentially Xiaomi’s biggest competitive advantage.

A lot of buyers aren’t choosing a specific configuration —

they’re choosing their trust in the person behind the brand.

Once you break that trust,

every word that founder says afterward gets magnified, questioned, and misinterpreted.

Trust collapses, the stock tanks, and market confidence gets hit even harder.

And you can see how fast Lei Jun responded:

he shut down the entire legal team involved — immediately.

That’s not emotion.

That’s a founder who understands exactly what’s at stake.

A crack in the founder’s IP hurts far more than losing a few orders.

More and more companies are finally realizing:

a founder’s IP isn’t optional — it’s the front door of the entire brand.

In an era where all attention lives online,

the founder is the company’s “trust engine.”

Short-term problems can be solved with money.

But once a founder’s IP breaks, it’s incredibly hard to repair.