SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won, whose fortune more than doubled during the AI boom, must hand over roughly a third of his wealth to the wife he left for a younger woman, and he may not be done paying.
A South Korean appeals court ruled Friday that Chey, the 65-year-old head of one of the country's largest conglomerates, owes his ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong approximately $645 million in cash. Roh had demanded nearly $1 billion, half of Chey's estimated $5 billion fortune, but the court settled on roughly one-third, valuing his holdings before shares in the group's chip-making arm soared on the back of surging demand for artificial intelligence hardware.
The ruling caps a legal fight that has stretched across a full decade, rooted in Chey's 2015 public admission that he had fathered a child with another woman and wanted out of his 27-year marriage. South Korean media have called the case the "divorce of the century." The price tag suggests the label fits.
Chey and Roh married in 1988 at the presidential Blue House, South Korea's equivalent of the White House, just months after Roh's father, Roh Tae-woo, took office as president. The union linked one of the country's most powerful industrial families to its political elite, and it was widely described at the time as the "marriage of the century."
That marriage held for 27 years before Chey published a three-page letter in a South Korean newspaper in 2015. In it, he announced he had fallen in love with a woman named Kim Hee-young, known by the English name Chloe, and had a child with her. He said he wanted what he called a "clean end" to the marriage.
Roh did not give him one.
She initially vowed to keep the family together and resist divorce. When she eventually changed course, she did not go quietly. Roh demanded half of Chey's fortune and separately sued Kim over the affair. A court found that the extramarital relationship and the child born outside the marriage contributed to the breakdown of the union, and it ordered Chey and Kim to jointly pay Roh approximately $1.5 million in damages.
The size of the settlement hinged on how to value Chey's stake in SK Group, and specifically in SK Hynix, the memory-chip giant that has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global AI boom. SK Hynix manufactures chips that serve as critical components in Nvidia's AI systems, and as demand for those systems exploded, the company's share price soared. Chey's net worth more than doubled as a result.
But the appeals court did not use that inflated figure. Judges valued Chey's holdings before the AI-driven run-up in SK Hynix shares, the New York Post reported. That methodology brought the final award to approximately $645 million, a massive sum, but hundreds of millions less than what Roh had sought.
Chey's lawyers said they were reviewing the ruling and did not rule out a further appeal to South Korea's Supreme Court.
The dispute over money ran deeper than the standard division of marital assets. Roh's legal team submitted a handwritten note they said was written by Roh's mother. The note listed "Sunkyong", the former name of what is now SK Group, alongside a figure of 30 billion won. Roh's lawyers argued the note supported their claim that former President Roh Tae-woo had secretly funneled money to Chey's father, helping to expand the family business that Chey eventually inherited and now chairs.
Chey's lawyers denied that SK ever received the alleged funds. The appeals court's ruling did not resolve that factual dispute publicly, and the specific methodology judges used to calculate the final award remains unclear beyond the decision to value holdings at pre-boom prices.
Several questions hang over the case. Roh has not responded publicly to Friday's ruling, at least not in available reporting. Whether Chey will follow through on the possibility of a Supreme Court appeal could determine whether the $645 million figure holds or shifts again. And the earlier $1.5 million damages order, a footnote next to the main settlement, but a separate legal finding that the affair contributed to the marriage's collapse, has no publicly confirmed payment status.
The case also leaves open the question of how courts should value fortunes built on industries whose stock prices swing wildly on technological trends. SK Hynix's rise tracked the AI boom almost exactly. Had the court used current share prices instead of pre-boom valuations, Roh's payout could have been dramatically larger.
A decade of litigation, a $645 million bill, and possibly one more round at the Supreme Court, all because a man with billions decided the rules of the commitment he made at the presidential residence no longer applied to him. The court disagreed.
