The third Kim to rule North Korea. A basketball-mad teenager at a Swiss state school, a leader at 27 - and now the man with his finger on the nuclear button. Here is what is actually known about him.
He spent much of his teens in Bern - under a fake name, as the "son of an embassy driver".
Kim Jong Un was born to Kim Jong Il and his consort Ko Yong Hui, a former dancer. He has an older brother, Kim Jong Chol, and a younger sister, Kim Yo Jong. All three were sent to Switzerland.
From August 1998 to autumn 2000 he attended the state-run Liebefeld-Steinhölzli school in Köniz, near Bern, registered as "Pak-un", the son of a North Korean embassy employee. Before that, he is reported to have been at the private International School of Berne.
Back home he studied physics at Kim Il Sung University and trained as an army officer at Kim Il Sung Military University. In 2018 Reuters revealed he had once used a forged Brazilian passport in the name "Josef Pwag".
The well-known class photos of the teenage Kim are owned by news agencies, so we can't show them here. A 2012 forensic study by the University of Lyon found a 95% match between a 1999 school photo and Kim as leader.
Almost everything about his family comes from South Korean intelligence and a few foreign visitors - not from Pyongyang.
Ri Sol Ju is believed to have been born between 1985 and 1989, reportedly in Chongjin, into an elite family. She is widely identified as a former singer with the Unhasu Orchestra, and is said to have visited South Korea in 2005 as a member of North Korea's cheerleading squad.
The couple reportedly married in 2009, but North Korea only revealed the marriage in July 2012. In 2018 she was given the title "Respected First Lady" - the first time it had been used since 1974.
He is reported to have around 17 palaces across the country. Two matter most.
Ryongsong Residence, also called Residence No. 55, is his main home - about 12 km north-east of Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang. The whole leadership complex covers roughly 12 square kilometres. According to defectors and satellite analysts it has:
Wonsan, on the east coast, is the family's seaside retreat - he is reported to have a private compound there with its own airstrip, and is said to spend time there in summer. He made the nearby Kalma beach resort, opened in 2025, one of his flagship projects.
There are no public photos of Ryongsong's interior - only satellite images and defector accounts.
How the world's most guarded man gets around.
That was his father. Kim Jong Il was famously afraid of flying and made almost all his foreign trips by armoured train - he even died on it, according to state media. Kim Jong Un does fly: in 2018 he became the first North Korean leader since 1986 to travel abroad by air. But for most big trips - Hanoi, Russia, Beijing - he still takes the family train, for security and for show.
A heavily armoured train inherited from his father that tops out around 60 km/h. The 2019 trip to the Hanoi summit took about two and a half days; it also carried him to Russia in 2023 and to Beijing in 2025. Under his father, a second train ran ahead checking the line and a third carried security.
A refitted Soviet Ilyushin Il-62, named after the goshawk, North Korea's national bird. It seats about 200, but it is old - for the 2018 Singapore summit with Trump he borrowed a Chinese plane instead, reportedly over safety worries.
Kim is reported to own a fleet of around 100 mostly European luxury cars, plus a 30-metre yacht and a private island that Dennis Rodman compared to "Hawaii, Ibiza or Aruba".
Because there is no named successor of age, his health is watched like a market indicator.
After years of isolation, 2018-19 brought a burst of summitry - then a turn towards Moscow.
His father, grandfather, sister, executed uncle and murdered half-brother.