Seoul Court Rules on SK Group Chairman's Divorce as SK Hynix Stock Soars

A Seoul appeals court on Friday brought an end to a nine-year legal battle between SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and his ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong, ordering him to pay 944 billion won, or roughly $644 million. South Korean and international media have dubbed the case the "divorce of the century," and its conclusion drew attention well beyond tabloid headlines, since the dispute hinges on the value of SK Hynix shares, a company that the AI boom has transformed from a regional memory maker into one of the hottest players in the global tech market.

A decade of dispute

Chey Tae-won and Roh Soh-yeong, daughter of former South Korean president Roh Tae-woo, married in 1988 at the Blue House presidential residence, in a ceremony the press at the time called the "wedding of the century." The couple effectively separated more than a decade ago, and in 2015 Chey took the unprecedented step of announcing the end of the marriage in a letter published in Korean media, in which he also acknowledged having a daughter with another woman.

Since then, Roh Soh-yeong has fought through successive court instances for a larger share of her former husband's fortune, arguing that capital her father invested in the conglomerate's early days also helped fuel SK Group's growth. A first-instance court awarded her just 66.5 billion won, but in 2024 a second-instance court raised that figure to 1.38 trillion won, adding 2 billion won in alimony.

That favorable ruling for Roh did not last long, though. In October 2024, the Supreme Court overturned it and sent the case back for retrial, finding that her father's financial contribution to the company should not factor into the valuation of the couple's shared assets.

The ruling and its reasoning

Friday's ruling from the Seoul appeals court upheld the principle that the SK Group shares held by Chey Tae-won constitute marital property, even though they were formally acquired in his name alone. The court split the assets two-thirds to Chey and one-third to Roh, ordering a cash payment of 944 billion won plus 5 percent annual interest on the principal.

The shares held by Chairman Chey were assets acquired in his name during the marriage, and both Chairman Chey and Director Roh contributed to their creation as well as to maintaining and growing their value - from the Seoul appeals court's ruling

The decisive factor for the final amount was that the court based its share valuation on a reference date of April 16, 2024, rather than SK Hynix's current, far higher market value. That is why the awarded sum falls well short of what Roh Soh-yeong had sought, based on the company's valuation this year, driven by the AI boom.

SK Hynix and the AI memory boom

SK Hynix, the world's second-largest memory chipmaker after Samsung Electronics, has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global AI investment boom as a leading supplier of HBM memory, a key component in the graphics chips used to train and run large AI models in data centers. The company posted a record net profit of 40.34 trillion won, or roughly $26.6 billion, in the first quarter of 2026.

On July 10, 2026, SK Hynix listed on the Nasdaq in New York, selling American depositary receipts at $149 apiece and raising $26.5 billion in the process. It is the largest public offering by a foreign company in US market history, surpassing even Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's 2014 debut. Demand during bookbuilding was seven times the number of shares on offer, and the stock quickly climbed above $169.

SK Hynix shares, worth about 33,000 won, or just under $30, in 2015 when Chey Tae-won announced the divorce, propelled the company to a market valuation of roughly $1 trillion by May 2026. That gap between the share price at the time of the actual separation and at the time of the ruling became the crux of the dispute over which date should be used to calculate the couple's shared assets.

What comes next

The case shows how the AI boom has spilled over into areas far removed from technology itself, including family law and asset disputes, as tech company valuations can multiply dozens of times over within a decade. South Korean media note that although the case is now formally closed at the appellate level, both sides retain the right to pursue further legal action, though after two Supreme Court rulings the odds of the amount changing again are limited.

For readers following the AI market, the case is a reminder that behind every valuation of an AI chipmaker lie real, dramatic shifts in wealth, ones that, in SK Hynix's case, directly affected one of South Korea's wealthiest business families. The company's New York listing and record HBM memory profits also show that demand for AI infrastructure is still driving semiconductor valuations faster than courts and lawyers can keep up.