Billionaire Chey Tae-won sells $700M in SK stock to fund divorce

Chey Tae-won, the chairman of South Korea’s SK Group, will sell about 944 billion won, or roughly $700 million, of shares in the conglomerate’s holding company to pay for a court-ordered divorce settlement with his former wife.

SK Inc. said in a regulatory filing on Friday that Chey, its largest shareholder, will sell 1,653,924 shares, a 2.26% stake. The sale is scheduled to begin on Nov. 2.

The amount matches exactly what the Seoul High Court ordered Chey to pay his former wife, Roh Soh-yeong, in July as part of their property division. Roh is the director of the Art Center Nabi in Seoul and the daughter of former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo.

How the sale will work

The shares will be sold in two parts. Shares worth 544 billion won will go to a strategic investor, and the remaining 400 billion won worth will be used in price return swaps arranged with securities firms. The structure is designed to avoid dumping a large block of stock on the market at once.

SK did not name the strategic investor. The company said the investor chose to buy into SK Inc. after weighing its business competitiveness and long-term growth prospects, and described the sale as a way to raise money for Chey’s personal financial needs.

Chey will remain firmly in control after the sale. His personal holding will fall to 11,321,548 shares from 12,975,472, leaving him with 15.49% of SK Inc. The combined stake held by Chey and related parties will drop to 22.9% from 25.2%.

SK Inc. is the holding company at the top of SK Group, South Korea’s second-largest conglomerate. It controls SK Hynix, one of the world’s biggest makers of memory chips, as well as SK Telecom and energy group SK Innovation.

Korea’s most expensive divorce

The 944 billion won award is the largest cash payment ever ordered in a South Korean divorce. It is still well below the 1.38 trillion won an appeals court ordered Chey to pay in 2024, before the case was sent back for a retrial that produced the July ruling.

Chey appealed the July ruling to the Supreme Court in August. He later narrowed his appeal, accepting 700 billion won of the award and continuing to contest the remaining 244 billion won. The stake sale will nonetheless raise the full 944 billion won.

Analysts said when the ruling was issued that Chey would likely need to borrow, sell assets or dispose of shares to pay it. His wealth is concentrated mainly in his SK Inc. shares, which are also the source of his control over the group.

Riding the AI chip boom

The sale comes as Chey’s fortune has climbed with the global boom in artificial intelligence. SK Hynix is a leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI systems, including those built on Nvidia processors, and its shares in Seoul have risen more than 182% this year.

Forbes estimated Chey’s net worth at $4.7 billion in July.

Chey took over leadership of SK Group in 1998 after the death of his father, Chey Jong-hyon, who built the group into one of South Korea’s largest business empires. The divorce case has been closely followed in South Korea because of the size of the award, the prominence of both families and the risk it posed to Chey’s control of the group.