The spectacular rise and fall of their marriage has played out like the best of K-dramas.
When they wed, they personified the infamous collusion between politics and big business that long plagued South Korea’s economy. By last year, they were officially exes, their split branded by local media as the “divorce of the century. On Friday, a Seoul court ruled on their bitter, yearslong war over the ex-husband’s personal assets — a fortune that has ballooned, supercharged by the global artificial intelligence boom.
He is Chey Tae-won, the billionaire chairman of the dynastic SK Group, South Korea’s second-largest conglomerate, and its crown jewel, the memory chipmaker SK Hynix. Sitting atop a massive A.I.-fueled gold mine, President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea hailed him as a “national hero.”
His ex-wife is Roh Soh-yeong, a low-profile art museum director with an explosive lineage of her own: Her father was Roh Tae-woo, South Korea’s last military-backed president.
On Friday, the Seoul appeals court ordered Mr. Chey to pay Ms. Roh 944 billion won, or $644 million. While much lower than her original demand — she had sought nearly half of her ex-husband’s wealth, estimated at $5.3 billion by Forbes — the amount is one of the largest divorce settlements in South Korean history.
It was unclear whether the ruling on Friday would end the dispute. Both sides retain the right to file one final Supreme Court appeal within a week.
“During the marriage, the value of the shares held by Chairman Chey increased significantly due to his business activities,” the court said on Friday. “But Ms. Roh contributed to this through household management, child-rearing, and external activities related to the SK Group.”
The Chey-Roh union captivated the public imagination from the day in 1988 when the president’s beloved daughter and the corporate prince exchanged vows inside the V.I.P. banquet hall of the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential residence. The guests were a who’s who of the country’s political and business elite.
But the fairy tale had a dark underside.
SK was one of the chaebols — family-run conglomerates — that have long been accused of facilitating their fast expansion through corrupt, incestuous ties to political elites. Politicians cleared the path with business-friendly laws, antilabor crackdowns and massive subsidies; in return, tycoons funneled back millions in illicit political slush funds. SK’s growth exploded after the marriage, absorbing the entity that later became SK Telecom, the nation’s top mobile carrier. In 2012, Mr. Chey snatched up the bankrupt Hynix. The A.I. race triggered an insatiable demand for computer memory chips, turning the once-pariah company into a gold mine.
But Ms. Roh’s family fortune crumbled with the demise of military rule. Her father, a former army general who ruled from 1988 to 1993, was later sentenced to 17 years in prison for his role in a 1979 military coup and for accepting bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mr. Chey himself served prison time for embezzlement and other corruption. In 2015, fresh off a presidential pardon, he announced that he was leaving his wife for Kim Hee-young — a woman 15 years his junior with whom he had already fathered a child.
“Though I tried to mend our relationship — even turning to religion — every attempt only proved that a life together was impossible,” he wrote. “I met someone who offered me true emotional solace.”
Now both 65 with three adult children, the pair launched into a ferocious legal battle in 2017. Though the divorce was finalized last year, a dispute raged over Mr. Chey’s wealth, most of which is tied up in shares in SK Corporation, the group’s holding company, which have skyrocketed in value because of A.I. windfalls.
“Though I cannot reclaim my lost time and life,” Ms. Roh said in 2024, “I hope my case serves as an opportunity to uphold the value of family and social justice.”
South Korea’s sordid past loomed heavily over the courtroom. The battle hinged on a key question: Did the 30-billion-won ($22 million) political slush fund that Ms. Roh’s father had been accused of handing over to SK decades ago count as her personal contribution to the empire’s growth? The answer could influence how much of Mr. Chey’s stock belonged to her.
The legal pendulum swung wildly, with lower courts awarding Ms. Roh sums ranging from $45 million to nearly $1 billion. In October, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the appellate court for a retrial. The top court ruled that because the former president’s slush fund was illegal, its alleged contribution should not be included in a divorce settlement.
On Friday, the appeals court said that Ms. Roh still had the right to one-third of Mr. Chey’s assets. But in calculating her payout, it used the stock valuation of April 2024, when it made a ruling that was later overturned by the Supreme Court. Since then, shares in SK companies have surged in value, with SK Hynix stock soaring more than ninefold in Seoul.
