A Korean tech billionaire who publicly confessed to loving a woman other than his wife and fathering a child with her could be ordered to pay his ex-spouse nearly $1 billion as South Korea’s “divorce of the century” nears a decisive ruling.
Chey Tae-won, the 65-year-old chairman of South Korea’s SK Group and a major beneficiary of the AI-chip boom, stunned the country in 2015 with a three-page newspaper letter saying his marriage was beyond repair and that he wanted a “clean end.”
Now, as shares of SK Hynix — the memory-chip supplier whose chips help power Nvidia’s AI systems — have skyrocketed roughly tenfold since the start of 2025, the fortune at the center of the country’s so-called “divorce of the century” has ballooned, too.
His ex-wife, Roh Soh-yeong, the daughter of former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo, is demanding half of Chey’s assets. She’s asked an appeals court to value them at today’s sky-high prices — a move that legal experts say could boost her payout to nearly $1 billion and potentially loosen Chey’s grip on one of South Korea’s biggest business empires.
A ruling is expected Friday.
The case has gripped South Korea for years — blending a love triangle, a former presidential family, alleged slush-fund money and a battle over control of a major technology conglomerate.
In publicly announcing his desire for a “clean end” to the marriage, Chey quoted the celebrated opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s epic about adultery, “Anna Karenina:” “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The stunning admission by Chey, who’s also 65, ended a marriage that had once been hailed as South Korea’s “wedding of the century.”
Chey and Roh married in 1988 at the presidential Blue House, months after her father took office.
Roh initially refused to grant him a divorce, saying she intended to protect the family. She later changed course, writing that it might be right to let her husband pursue the “happiness” he wanted.
The other woman in the love triangle, Kim Hee-young, is now Chey’s longtime partner. Kim, who goes by the English name Chloe, leads a charitable foundation the couple established and has appeared in public alongside the billionaire. She’s 50 years old, according to corporate filings cited by the Wall Street Journal.
Roh later sued Kim over the affair and won damages worth roughly $1.5 million after a court found the relationship and the child born outside the marriage had inflicted emotional harm and helped destroy the couple’s trust.
The feud soon widened into a high-stakes battle over the origins of the SK fortune.
Roh’s lawyers produced a handwritten note apparently kept by her mother that listed “Sunkyong” — SK’s former name — beside “30 billion won,” or about $23 million.
They argued the note supported claims that Roh’s father secretly provided money to Chey’s father that helped the family expand its business empire. Chey’s attorneys have denied that SK received the alleged funds.
An appeals court previously ordered Chey to give Roh 35% of his assets, worth close to $1 billion at the time.
South Korea’s Supreme Court later upheld the divorce, but sent the property settlement back to a lower court after rejecting the use of allegedly illegal presidential money as the basis for Roh’s claim.
At the heart of the retrial is one deceptively simple question: How should Chey’s fortune be valued?
Chey argues that judges should use an earlier valuation, before the AI boom sent the value of his holdings soaring. Roh wants the court to use the much higher present-day figure.
That dispute has become especially costly as SK Hynix has emerged as a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory used in Nvidia’s artificial-intelligence systems.
The chipmaker’s shares have risen roughly tenfold since the beginning of 2025, helping more than double Chey’s fortune to about $5 billion.
Roh, meanwhile, has been packing up the home where she raised the couple’s three children and lived for 37 years.
In one social-media post, she shared photographs of her wedding dress and a childhood poster made her children showing their parents surrounded by hearts and stars.
One message on the poster read: “True love.”
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