A Seoul court just handed down Korea’s largest divorce settlement. How it structured the payout reveals the way chaebol founders defend control, and why the AI boom made the bill so big.
On July 24, a Seoul appeals court ordered SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won to pay ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong 944 billion won, about $644 million, the largest divorce settlement in Korean history. The court ruled his SK shares are marital property but made him pay in cash, so he keeps full control of the group.
Chey Tae-won spent the last 18 months getting spectacularly richer. His net worth climbed from roughly $1 billion at the start of 2025 to $5.3 billion today, carried up by SK Hynix, the memory-chip maker whose HBM chips sit inside Nvidia’s AI servers. Last month he was buying whiskey for a fried-chicken restaurant full of strangers alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. On Friday, a court told him to write his ex-wife the biggest divorce check the country has ever seen. Both facts have the same cause, and that is the part worth understanding.
What Happened
The Seoul High Court’s family division ruled on July 24 that Chey must pay Roh 944 billion won, roughly $644 million, to divide their marital assets. Judge Lee Sang-joo set the contribution split at one-third for Roh and two-thirds for Chey, applied to the pool of divisible assets. The figure is Korea’s largest-ever divorce settlement, though it landed about a third below the 1.38 trillion won (near $940 million) a court awarded in 2024 before the Supreme Court threw that ruling out.
Two details matter more than the headline number. First, the court again counted Chey’s stake in SK’s holding company as marital property, rejecting his argument that his ex-wife played no role in the group’s success. Second, and this is the pivot, it ordered him to pay the entire sum in cash rather than shares. The court noted plainly that his stake underpins his control of the companies he runs. Roh gets no ownership of SK Group. Chey keeps every share he holds.
Markets still flinched. SK Inc., the holding company, fell 3.82% on Friday. SK Hynix dropped 8.34% in Seoul and slid about 4% in US premarket trading.
The Backstory
The marriage was Korean corporate royalty. Chey and Roh wed in 1988 at the presidential Blue House, months after Roh’s father, Roh Tae-woo, became president. Newspapers called it the wedding of the century. It unraveled in public in 2015, when Chey announced in a newspaper letter that he loved another woman and had a child with her. He filed for divorce mediation in 2017.
The legal fight has run nearly a decade. A 2024 ruling handed Roh about $940 million, partly by counting an alleged 30 billion won her father funneled toward SK’s rise as her contribution to the marriage. The Supreme Court overturned that in October 2025, finding the slush-fund logic could not stand, and sent the asset split back for a redo. Friday’s ruling is that redo.
The Plan
Chey’s legal strategy was never really about the money. It was about the shares. His entire grip on the SK conglomerate, South Korea’s second-largest, runs through a 17.9% stake in SK Inc., the holding company at the top of the pyramid. Control a big enough slice of the holding company, and you control everything beneath it. Dilute that slice, and the whole structure gets shaky.
So Chey fought on two fronts. He argued the divisible estate should be valued before the AI boom inflated his shares, and he fought to pay in anything other than equity. He lost the valuation argument. He won the one that mattered.
The Business Model Angle
This is a case study in how founder control actually works, and where it breaks.
Chaebols, like many founder-led empires, run on leverage of a very specific kind: a modest direct stake at the top of a holding-company pyramid controls a sprawling group many times its size. It is efficient and it is fragile. The fragility rarely comes from competitors or activists. It comes from the founder’s own life. Death, inheritance, and divorce are the events that force shares to move, and moving shares is the one thing a pyramid cannot absorb.
That is why the cash ruling is the real story. By ordering $644 million in cash instead of stock, the court protected the control structure at the group’s core. Roh walks away with a record payout and zero corporate influence. It is the same outcome that let Jeff Bezos keep voting control of Amazon after his divorce, while MacKenzie Scott took a fortune in stock but ceded the votes.
But cash has a catch. Chey’s wealth is not liquid. It is locked in shares. To produce $644 million in cash, he has to borrow against that stock, sell some of it, or pull unusual dividends up through the group. Each option quietly pressures the very stake the cash payment was designed to protect. The court closed the front door on dilution and left a window open.
And the boom cuts both ways. The AI-driven memory supercycle that roughly doubled Korea’s stock market quintupled Chey’s fortune, which is the good news. It also inflated the marital estate the court had to divide, which is why the bill is a national record. The thing that made him rich is the thing that made him pay.
The Risk
Three risks sit under Friday’s ruling.
The first is that it is not final. Either side can appeal to the Supreme Court again, which means the number could move a third time. Roh may push for more; Chey may fight the valuation once more.
The second is liquidity. Raising $644 million in cash against an illiquid, control-critical shareholding is not trivial, and how Chey funds it will tell you whether the control structure is as safe as the cash ruling implies.
The third is precedent. This is now the template for how Korean courts treat founder shares in a divorce: marital property in principle, cash in practice. Every chaebol family and every founder with concentrated control just watched their own succession-and-divorce math get rewritten.
Quick Questions
How much did Chey Tae-won have to pay? 944 billion won, about $644 million, plus an earlier 2 billion won (roughly $1.3 million) for emotional distress. It is the largest divorce settlement in South Korean history.
Does his ex-wife get part of SK Group? No. The court ruled his shares are marital property but ordered the payment in cash, so Roh receives money, not ownership. Chey keeps every share and his control of the group.
Why is the settlement so large? Chey’s wealth is concentrated in SK shares, and the AI-driven memory-chip boom sent those shares soaring. His net worth rose from about $1 billion in early 2025 to $5.3 billion. A bigger estate meant a bigger divisible pool.
Is the ruling final? Not necessarily. Either party can appeal to the Supreme Court, which has already overturned one earlier settlement in this case.
The Business Model Analyst Take
The tabloids will sell you the romance. The business lesson is colder and more useful: concentrated founder control is both a company’s greatest moat and its single largest point of failure, and the failure almost never arrives through the market. It arrives through the founder’s personal life.
Chey built an unusually clean version of the chaebol control model, a small stake at the top steering a giant group. That design survived two prison terms and a decade-long divorce. It survived because a court decided the shares were too important to move. Founders who prize control should read that carefully. The structure held, but it held at the mercy of a judge’s discretion, not by design. If your entire empire depends on a single block of stock never being touched, you do not really own a moat. You own a liability that has not been triggered yet.
