CHEY TAE-WON

Chey Tae-won was born in 1960 into Korean business royalty. His father, Chey Jong-hyun, built SK Group into a giant.

Tae-won studied economics at Korea University, then went to the University of Chicago for graduate work. He took over SK Group in 1998, after his father died.

What he inherited was mostly energy, chemicals, and telecom. What he built was a semiconductor empire.

The defining moment came in 2012, when he pushed SK to buy Hynix Semiconductor for roughly $3 billion. People thought he was crazy.

Memory chips were in a brutal slump and Hynix was bleeding money. He bought anyway.

It became the best decision of his career. Along the way he also served prison time, which makes his story a lot messier than a normal boardroom bio.

Chey sits atop SK Group, a sprawling conglomerate with 186 companies under it. The crown jewel is SK Hynix, one of the world's biggest makers of memory chips and a key supplier of the high-bandwidth memory that powers AI systems.

Then there is SK Telecom, South Korea's largest mobile carrier, and SK Innovation, the energy and electric-vehicle battery arm. He controls the whole thing through SK Inc, the holding company at the center of the empire.

He also chairs the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which makes him something like the unofficial voice of Korean big business.

Chey thinks in decades and in downturns. His signature move is buying into a brutal, cyclical industry when everyone else is running away.

Memory chips swing wildly. Prices crash, factories lose fortunes, then demand roars back and the survivors mint money.

He bought Hynix at the bottom of one of those crashes. That takes a strong stomach and a willingness to look foolish for years.

He also folds a bigger idea into how he runs things, which he calls deep change. The rough translation is simple.

Reinvent constantly or die. He pushes SK to keep tearing up its own playbook before a competitor does it for them.

SK Hynix. Full stop.

Chey bought the struggling chipmaker for about $3 billion in 2012, and Forbes later called it his terrible purchase, because that is how critics saw it at the time. Then memory prices turned.

By 2018 Hynix was generating around $14 billion in profit and the doubters went quiet. The real payoff came with AI.

SK Hynix makes high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips that sit next to AI processors and feed them data fast enough to work. As the AI boom exploded, SK Hynix became one of the most important companies on the planet.

A deal everyone mocked turned into one of the great contrarian bets in Asian business.

In January 2013, Chey was convicted of embezzlement. He had funneled around 45 billion won, roughly $40 million, of company money into personal investments.

A court sentenced him to four years in prison. He actually served time, around two and a half years, before President Park Geun-hye pardoned him in 2015.

For the chairman of one of Korea's proudest companies, it was a humiliating fall. It also fed a long-running criticism of the chaebol system, where powerful family bosses sometimes treat the corporate treasury as their own.

He got the pardon and his job back. The stain on the record is permanent.

Chey preaches something unusual for a chip tycoon. He argues companies should chase social value, not just profit, and that this obligation is not optional.

At Davos he said it flat out. Changing corporate goals from shareholders to stakeholders is an obligation, not a choice.

He even pushes SK to measure social impact with hard numbers, the same way it tracks earnings. Some see it as genuine conviction, others as good branding for a chaebol boss.

Either way, it sits alongside his other rule, deep change, which says a business that stops reinventing itself is already dying. Reinvent constantly and be useful to society.

That is his pitch.

Chey's personal life has become tabloid material in Korea, and not by his choice. In 1988 he married Roh Soh-yeong, the daughter of former South Korean president Roh Tae-woo.

Decades later the marriage collapsed into what local media called the divorce trial of the century. He acknowledged a relationship with another woman and a child outside the marriage.

In 2024 an appeals court ordered him to pay his ex-wife roughly $1 billion, the largest divorce settlement in Korean history, a ruling the Supreme Court later partly overturned. He comes from the SK dynasty founded by his father, and the family's grip on the empire is the backdrop to the whole saga.

Chey studied economics at Korea University, one of the country's top schools, then headed to the United States for graduate study in economics at the University of Chicago. That American training shaped how he talks about business, blending global ideas like stakeholder capitalism with the very Korean world of the family-run chaebol.

He returned home to eventually run the empire his father built.

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