This study explores answers to such questions as “Why has North Korea been so immune to regime change?” and “What are the leading causes of North Korea’s regime fragility?” It acknowledges that indicators of macroeconomic performance,although they are primary indicators of a successful state, are neither available nor reliable for the study of North Korea’s regime stability. Therefore, this study tries to specify factors affecting the leadership rather than looking at a broad matrix of indicators. This study assumes that it becomes increasingly important for the North Korean leadership to provide privileged benefits to rent-seeking elites for the regime maintenance and hence tries to analyze variables related to change of identity and interests of the North Korean power elites. First, it identifies key variables of North Korea’s stability by reclassifying indicators from the indicator clusters examined in the previous studies. Next, it analyzes factors directly related to the leader-follower relationship in North Korea such as ruling ideology, elite composition, rent-seeking behaviors and opportunity cost of choosing alternative options. Findings of this study reveal many paradoxes in North Korea and suggest that North Korean elites’ support for the Kim Jong Un regime depends on the young new leader’s ability to retain the mechanism of providing benefits to the elites and increasing the opportunity cost of elites’ defection.