A Korean tech billionaire who publicly admitted to loving a woman other than his wife and fathering a child with her could be ordered to stand trial. He paid his ex-wife nearly $1 billion As the “divorce of the century” in South Korea approaches the decisive ruling.
Chi 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 press release in which he said his marriage was beyond repair and that he wanted a “clean ending.”
Now, with shares of SK Hynix — the memory chip supplier whose chips help power Nvidia’s artificial intelligence systems — rising nearly tenfold since the start of 2025, the wealth at the center of the country’s so-called “divorce of the century” has also swelled.
His ex-wife, Roh Suh-yong, daughter of former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo, is demanding half of Chi’s assets. It has asked an appeals court to value it at today’s higher prices — a move legal experts say could increase its payout to nearly $1 billion and potentially loosen Xi’s grip on one of South Korea’s largest business empires.
The ruling is expected on Friday.
The case has gripped South Korea for years — mixing a love triangle, a former presidential family, alleged slush money, and a battle for control of a major technology conglomerate.
In publicly declaring his desire for a “clean end” to the marriage, Che quoted the famous opening line from Leo Tolstoy’s adultery epic, Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The stunning confession from Chi, also 65, ended a marriage once seen as the “wedding of the century” in South Korea.
Che 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 Chi’s long-time partner. Kim, who goes by the English name Chloe, leads a charity set up by the couple and has appeared in public alongside the billionaire. She is 50 years old, according to company filings Quoted from the Wall Street Journal.
Roh later sued Kim over the issue and was awarded damages worth about $1.5 million after the court found that the relationship and the child born out of marriage had caused emotional harm and helped destroy the couple’s trust.
The dispute soon expanded into a high-stakes battle over the origins of SK’s fortune.
Roh’s lawyers presented a handwritten note, apparently kept by her mother, that listed “Sunkyung” — SK’s former name — next to “30 billion won,” or about $23 million.
They argued that the memo supports allegations that Roh’s father secretly provided money to Qi’s father which helped the family expand their business empire. Chi’s lawyers denied SK received the alleged money.
The appeals court had previously ordered Chi to give Roh 35% of his assets, which were worth close to $1 billion at the time.
South Korea’s Supreme Court later upheld the divorce, but returned the property settlement to a lower court after rejecting the use of alleged illegal presidential funds as the basis for Roh’s claim.
At the heart of the retrial is a deceptively simple question: How should Che’s wealth be valued?
Chi says judges should use an early assessment, before the AI boom causes the value of his property to rise. Roh wants the court to use the much higher current figure.
This dispute has become particularly costly with the emergence of SK Hynix as a major supplier of high-bandwidth memory used in Nvidia’s AI systems.
The chipmaker’s shares have risen nearly tenfold since the start of 2025, helping to double Qi’s wealth to about $5 billion.
Meanwhile, Roh was packing up the home where she raised the couple’s three children and lived in for 37 years.
In one of her social media posts, she shared photos of her wedding dress, and a childhood poster of her children showed their parents surrounded by hearts and stars.
One of the messages on the poster read: “True love.”