Choi Taeyon Divorce Case: Unveiling the hidden succession network behind SK Hynix’s trillion-dollar empire

Author: BlockBeats

Today, the Seoul High Court in South Korea has retried the divorce property case between SK Group chairman Choi Tae-won and Lu Soo-young, ruling that Choi Tae-won must pay his ex-wife 944.0 billion won (about $640 million). Compared with the previous second-instance ruling that set a record for the largest divorce payout in South Korea, the amount has been reduced by roughly one-third. Both sides can still appeal. The significance of this divorce of a wealthy elite has long gone beyond the allocation of money itself. As SK Hynix has become the most watched asset in South Korea’s capital markets thanks to the AI chip wave, the succession path for the third generation of the Choi family is also drifting away from the traditional chaebol drama script. The future inheritance of SK is no longer just a question of equity and bloodline, but a test of industrial judgment and the ability to adapt to the times. This article was first published on May 12, 2026. The following is the original text:

On November 26, 2024, at the Walkerhill Hotel in the Gwangjin District of Seoul, South Korea, a 50th-anniversary celebration ceremony of a Korean higher-education foundation was held. As the venue lights dimmed, an AI video appeared on the screens. In the footage was Choi Jong-hyun, the second-generation chairman of SK Group and the founder of this foundation.

He died suddenly in Los Angeles in 1998—now 26 years ago. In the AI video, he speaks again to those young people who went abroad at the time with the foundation scholarships: “Plant a seed in your heart, and hope you have dreams of it growing into a great tree. We are willing to wait until the seed you planted grows into a tree.”

At the central table in the audience sat his son Choi Tae-won, the current chairman of SK Group, the leader of South Korea’s second-largest chaebol, along with his two children whom he brought to witness the moment: his eldest daughter Choi Yoon-jung and eldest son Choi In-keun. Later, Choi Tae-won explained to the media why he brought them: “This is our legacy, so they need to receive training. They need to see what grandfather did, what father did.” He said it was “obligatorily required” for them to attend. He also mentioned “never forget the source” during the event: when you drink water, you should think of where it came from, and beneficiaries should also remember the person who first dug the well.

SK Hynix has surged 700% over the past year. Its market cap has just crossed 100 trillion won, surpassing longtime rival Samsung Electronics—by far the most valuable asset among Korean chaebols ever. When the AI cycle pushed Hynix to the most prominent position in Korea’s capital markets, outsiders went looking for the company’s successor and found that SK’s third generation did not “sit in” the traditional chaebol script.

The eldest daughter entered the group’s executive narrative earliest. The younger daughter is most deeply connected to SK Hynix, Washington, and the U.S. military network. And the eldest son, who looks most like the heir, is actually the quietest one.

After Hynix’s blowout surge, the old chaebol heir script failed

In the past, there were roughly four key words for chaebol succession in South Korea: eldest son, equity, marital ties, and the father’s recognition. Samsung, Hyundai, and Hanwha have all repeated this script.

In October 2022, Samsung Group’s third-generation Lee Jae-yong was officially appointed chairman, completing the generational handover. His eldest son, Lee Ji-hao, has recently enrolled in the Republic of Korea Naval Officer Candidate School, preparing in advance for military service—already a “succession training move” for the new generation of Korean chaebols. Hyundai Motor Group was slightly later than Samsung. In 2020, the third generation, Chung Eui-sun, took over. Hanwha Group, meanwhile, in 2025, had the chairman, Kim Seung-yun, transfer half the shares of the holding company to three sons—effectively handing the empire to the current vice chairman, Kim Dong-gwan, who is 42 this year, and whose status as the eldest son has never been questioned publicly.

The core of this script is “so that the public and the market can recognize who the crown prince is in advance.” From Lee Jae-yong to Chung Eui-sun to Kim Dong-gwan, no matter how different their personalities, abilities, or paths were, they were jointly written by their fathers, families, and the media into the position of “successor,” and gradually moved toward that seat through equity, military service, education, and career training.

SK is different. Choi Tae-won and his ex-wife Lu Soo-young have three children: eldest daughter Choi Yoon-jung (born 1989), second daughter Choi Min-jung (born 1991), and eldest son Choi In-keun (born 1995). All three are currently related to the group’s future, but none can fit into the “crown prince” position.

Choi Yoon-jung was labeled early by Korean business media as “the most obvious heir candidate,” but what she does is not chips—it is SK Biopharmaceuticals. Choi Min-jung handled international trade and policy responses at SK Hynix’s U.S. branch, but in 2022 she left Hynix and went to San Francisco to do healthcare entrepreneurship. Choi In-keun is the most like a traditional male heir, but in July 2025 he left SK E&S and joined the McKinsey Seoul office. According to the conventions of a third-generation Korean chaebol, a consulting firm is an “external training” route, not a succession instruction manual.

Choi Tae-won himself said plainly in a 2021 BBC Korean interview: “Things that haven’t been decided yet. My children also have to work hard to get opportunities. My son is still young—he will live his own life, and I won’t force him.” When asked whether the children’s involvement in running the business requires the board’s approval, he answered, “Yes.”

This kind of statement turns succession from family affairs into a public test of legal legitimacy. All three children must prove themselves, and what they can present as proof is no longer equity, marital ties, or the identity of eldest son.

Choi Yoon-jung: “the most obvious heir,” from the lab to the boardroom

On June 28, 2024, at the SKMS Research Institute in Icheon, Gyeonggi-do, SK Group’s executive strategy meeting was held. Attendees included the CEOs of major subsidiaries such as SK, SK Innovation, SK Telecom, and SK Hynix, plus key family members from the group—more than 30 people in total. At the time, Choi Tae-won was on a business trip in the U.S. and joined via video. Korean media described the meeting as a dense discussion with a sense of crisis: a 1-night, 2-day schedule, with the first day having no predetermined end time until a direction was formed.

Choi Yoon-jung sat at the conference table. She was the only participant who attended in her capacity as Choi Tae-won’s child, and also the youngest executive inside SK Group. Media explained her “sudden appearance” as part of the management curriculum.

To understand why she could sit at that table, you have to rewind and look at her training. In August 1989, Choi Yoon-jung was born at a military hospital in Seoul. At the time, her maternal grandfather, Lu Tae-woo, was the incumbent president of South Korea. She attended international schools in Beijing during childhood and middle school. For her undergraduate degree, she went to the University of Chicago to study biology—the same university her parents had attended while studying abroad. During her undergraduate years, she also worked for two years as a researcher at the Chicago Neuroscience Institute. She had research experience at Harvard’s physics and physical chemistry institute as well. After graduating, she joined Bain & Company as a consultant for two years. This was the standard training package for a third-generation Korean chaebol.

Choi Yoon-jung (left) with Choi Tae-won (middle) and Choi Min-jung (right)

In 2017, she joined SK Biopharmaceuticals as head of strategic investments. But in 2019 she made a decision that did not look like a typical heir move: she temporarily left SK and returned to Stanford for a master’s degree in biomedical informatics. This was computational biology, not ordinary biology. After two years, she returned to SK to work in strategy, and at the same time went to Seoul National University to pursue a PhD in biological sciences. She is still in her PhD program now, majoring in genetics and development.

In January 2024, she was promoted to chief of business development at SK Biopharmaceuticals (a level equivalent to vice president), leading the introduction of radiopharmaceutical therapy (RPT) and radiopharmaceutical isotope supply contracts. This is a core pipeline for SK Biopharmaceuticals to transform from traditional neurology system drugs to precise healthcare in the AI era. Later that same year, Choi Tae-won at the top holding company of SK Group, newly established SK Inc.’s “Growth Support Department,” responsible for mid- and long-term planning, portfolio management, global expansion, and new business assessment—directly under her.

Her marriage also did not fit the old chaebol script. In October 2017, she married Yin Do-yeon, a Bain colleague. Yin Do-yeon graduated from the business administration department at Seoul National University. Later, he served as a co-CEO at More (모레), a Korean AI infrastructure startup. The company builds parallelized software platforms for AI model training and computation. In 2021, KT made a strategic investment in it, and in 2025 its valuation was about 350 billion won. This is not the kind of traditional chaebol marriage, but it’s also not what Chinese media often calls “marrying an ordinary office worker.” It is a form of a new elite network pairing: the eldest daughter of a chaebol married a tech entrepreneur of the AI era.

In female succession narratives from decades past—like those at Samsung and CJ—daughters were often made visible through art museums, hotels, charitable foundations, luxury retail, or children’s wedding dowries. Choi Yoon-jung’s position is different. She sits at the table where SK decides its future direction. Her visibility is not shaped by marriage, art, or image, but jointly established by scientific training, consulting training, a PhD thesis, strategic investments, and a senior executive post in the group.

The ways chaebol daughters are “seen” are changing. But Choi Yoon-jung herself rarely speaks publicly. Korean media discusses her under the label of “the most like an heir candidate,” yet her personal story remains quiet in public reports.

Choi Min-jung: a globalized heir who connects warships, Washington, and Hynix

On October 13, 2024—again at the Walkerhill Hotel owned by SK Group—Choi Tae-won’s second daughter, Choi Min-jung, and Kevin Hwang, a U.S.-born entrepreneur of Korean heritage, held their special wedding.

About 500 guests attended, including Lee Jae-yong, Gu Kwang-mo, Kim Dong-gwan, and other members of the SK family. After Choi Tae-won and Lu Soo-young’s divorce lawsuit involving 1.38 trillion won, this was the first time they appeared in the same space. They sat side by side in the parents’ seats of the bride. Next to them were the two dogs co-raised by Choi Min-jung and Kevin Hwang.

Wedding venue scene of Choi Min-jung

After the groom entered, Choi Min-jung walked into the venue alone, with no handholding by her father. There was no master of ceremony. Her sister Choi Yoon-jung delivered the congratulatory speech. The groom’s younger brother gave a speech in English. Before the ceremony began, everyone in the venue observed a moment of silence for Korean and American war comrades. One side of the venue had an empty table set: on it were medals, a dog tag, roses, and lemons. This is an American military tradition to commemorate missing and fallen service members, called the Missing Man Table.

Choi Min-jung was born in 1991. She attended middle school at the attached school of Renmin University of China. For university, she entered Peking University Guanghua School of Management to study business administration. Among third-generation Korean chaebols, there is almost no one who goes to China for an undergraduate degree—others either go to the Ivy League or stay in South Korea at top universities. During her time studying in Beijing, it was reported that she funded her living expenses through scholarships, jobs at convenience stores, and income from being a lecturer for an admissions program institute—she almost did not receive financial support from her parents. This “self-reliance path” is an extremely rare marker among the children of Korean chaebol families.

In 2014, she made a decision that all Korean media couldn’t quite understand: she applied to the Republic of Korea Naval Officer Candidate Program, 117th intake. Military service for Korean men is mandatory, while for women it is completely voluntary—this was the first time a woman from a Korean chaebol family chose to serve voluntarily. During her interview, she said she was moved by the spirit and leadership challenge of Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer of 1915. During her 11 weeks of training before commissioning, she often told visiting family and friends the same line: “I’m proud to be a daughter of the Republic of Korea. After the period of training, I’ve gained even more pride.”

Photo of Choi Min-jung in uniform

She was assigned to the destroyer Seoul Admiral Yi Sun-sin (DDH-975), serving as a combat information assistant officer. In December 2015, she was dispatched with the Cheonghai Detachment’s 19th squadron to areas near the Gulf of Aden off Somalia to carry out anti-piracy escort missions. Before her retirement, she served as an officer in the command and control situation room in the Combat Team Headquarters at the West Sea Fleet Command Headquarters. She retired on November 30, 2017 with the rank of lieutenant in the Navy.

After retirement, she returned to China, worked at an investment company doing PE for about a year, and then went to the U.S. to earn a master’s degree in international business policy from Georgetown University. In August 2019, she joined SK Hynix’s INTRA department under External Cooperation General Management, working on international trade and policy response, with her base traveling between Washington and Seoul. This is her direct connection point to SK Hynix. But she was neither an engineer, nor a product manager, nor plant operations. What she did was policy. Later, she moved to SK Hynix’s U.S. legal entity’s strategic division, handling M&A and investments.

She and her husband Kevin Hwang also met around that time. In the DuPont Circle area of Washington, they were neighbors.

Kevin Hwang was born in Indiana, U.S. He has a BA from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford. In 2016, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps as a commissioned officer. Starting in October 2020, he worked in South Korea for about 9 months as a logistics planning officer in the U.S.-Korea combined forces. Both of them had military backgrounds, and Korean media described their relationship as deepening due to “their shared military experience.”

In February 2022, Choi Min-jung took a leave of absence from SK Hynix and went to Done Global, a remote telemedicine healthcare startup in San Francisco, as an unpaid advisor. Korean media later disclosed that she actually served as CFO. A year later, she co-founded Integral Health together with a scholar in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, serving as CEO and building AI-driven coordinated care and behavioral health integration.

Her current LinkedIn self-introduction is: “Founder of Integral Health | Investor in Healthcare & AI | Veteran | 2x Exits.” The “veteran” label still sits front and center.

A recurring theme in Choi Min-jung’s life is the military. From Shackleton to the Gulf of Aden, from Washington’s SK Hynix INTRA to marrying a former U.S. Navy Marine Corps lieutenant. She did not move into SK’s internal management layer like her sister, and she also did not marry into a top Korean family according to the traditional chaebol script. But she has concretized the position of SK Hynix in that new era. In the AI cycle, semiconductor companies have become increasingly similar to geopolitical companies: they have to handle U.S. policy, trade controls, supply chain security, and capital M&A battles. Choi Min-jung’s resume fits that line perfectly.

Choi In-keun: the most like an heir—and why he’s the quietest

Choi In-keun’s story has to start in a hospital ward.

In 2003, SK Group broke out a scandal involving falsified accounting, leading Choi Tae-won to go to prison. In the same year, Choi In-keun, the younger son of Choi Tae-won and Lu Soo-young, was diagnosed with pediatric diabetes, with doctors saying he would need lifelong insulin injections. Choi In-keun was 8 years old that year.

During that period, Lu Soo-young—daughter of a former South Korean president—brought up the children and moved herself into the pediatric ward at Seoul National University Hospital. At night, when Choi In-keun slept on the bed, she would sit alone watching by his side. Later, in interviews, Lu Soo-young recalled that even when her son turned 17, he was still struggling hard with diabetes, but he was a very bright, sunny boy. He often served in the choir at a church near their home, and he would also perform a song with beatboxing at worship. At night, he would also copy the Bible together with his second sister Choi Min-jung.

Choi In-keun’s education path was different from those of his two sisters. He first attended a non-traditional secondary school in Korea known for innovation education, and later transferred to Hawaii. His mother Lu Soo-young’s approach to education was “there’s no need to be anxious about trying to cram the child into a college like everyone else.” She believed the child should explore parenting methods different from others and more creative. During the years he studied in Hawaii high school, Lu Soo-young lived in Hawaii with him for more than two years.

Later, he entered Brown University in the U.S. to study physics, following in his father’s footsteps. Choi Tae-won also had majored in physics at Korea University. Choi Tae-won’s brother—Choi Jae-won, the vice chairman of SK Group—also came from a physics background at Brown University. This was the only clear academic continuity line in the family. Choi In-keun and Choi Tae-won’s father-son relationship was good; they communicated frequently, often played tennis together, and have been photographed shoulder-to-shoulder talking in a restaurant outside central Seoul.

Choi In-keun (left) with his father Choi Tae-won (right)

After graduation, he interned for a while at the Boston Consulting Group, and in September 2020 joined SK E&S’s strategy planning team to work on natural gas market expansion. In 2025, he left SK and joined McKinsey’s Seoul office. Korean media interpreted this action as a standard route for “external training of the third generation of the chaebol,” but he himself has made no public statements.

Under the old chaebol script, Choi In-keun should basically have been the default successor. He is the eldest son, and he inherited the family’s academic continuity. His trajectory—from SK to McKinsey—resembles the training paths taken by Lee Jae-yong and Chung Eui-sun. Yet there have been no reports of him making any public statements. The contents of his petition submitted in his parents’ divorce case have also not been made public. He currently holds no shares in SK Group.

He is like a person whose seat in the old script has been prepared, but who refuses to step onto it.

Choi In-keun is the one among the three children who is most like an heir—and also the most silent.

The family in court

No matter how independent the three children’s resumes are, they cannot bypass their parents’ marriage. They did not speak via interviews or social media; instead, they entered the public narrative of their parents’ marriage through legal documents.

Choi Tae-won and Lu Soo-young had their wedding in 1988 at Cheongwadae, with the then prime minister as the officiant. Lu Soo-young’s father was Lu Tae-woo, newly elected president of South Korea that same year. In 2015, Choi Tae-won published a “confession letter of being illegitimate” in The Korea Herald (South Korea Daily) admitting that he had a daughter with his cohabiting partner, Kim Hee-ying, requesting a divorce from Lu Soo-young—who refused. In 2017, Choi Tae-won again applied for divorce mediation and entered into litigation. In 2019, Lu Soo-young filed a counterclaim for divorce, seeking consolation money and a property split including assets corresponding to SK Inc. shares.

Choi Tae-won and Lu Soo-young in their younger years

This lawsuit kept attracting sustained international media attention for three reasons: the split amount might set a historic record for South Korea’s courts; funds from the family of a former president were involved in SK Group’s early capital structure; and Choi Tae-won’s actual control of SK’s holding company might be shaken due to the massive split.

In the first-instance ruling at the Seoul Family Court in 2022, Choi Tae-won was ordered to split 66.5 billion won of property to Lu Soo-young, and was also ordered to give her about 310k shares of SK’s holding company stock—making her from an edge shareholder holding 0.01% become the company’s fourth-largest shareholder. In May 2024, the second-instance ruling changed the decision again, jumping the split amount to 1.38 trillion won—also the highest single divorce property split in Asian legal history. In October 2025, South Korea’s Supreme Court overturned part of the second-instance property split and sent it back for retrial.

In May 2023, the three legitimate children submitted petitions in succession for three consecutive days to Family Division 2 of the Seoul High Court, which was handling the parents’ divorce case at the second instance. On the 15th, the second daughter Choi Min-jung submitted first. On the 16th, it was the eldest son Choi In-keun. On the 17th, it was the eldest daughter Choi Yoon-jung. The three children collectively appeared in their parents’ divorce case file in the form of legal documents, but what exactly they wrote—and which side they stood with—has not been disclosed to this day.

At Choi Min-jung’s 2024 wedding, against the background of the 1.38 trillion won divorce lawsuit, Choi Tae-won and Lu Soo-young first appeared in the same space and sat side by side in the parents’ seats of the bride. After the ceremony ended, the relatives of both families went around the table together to greet the guests. This brief, ceremonial co-presence—after the marriage structurally failed—was the last family image the three children could arrange for their parents.

Like most chaebol families, the third generation succession at SK has never been only about a company or a share chart.

When Hynix becomes a geopolitical asset, succession is no longer family business

Back to that memorial venue in 2024.

Grandfather Choi Jong-hyun returned to the scene in the form of an AI video, speaking to his grandchildren. His father Choi Tae-won told the children this was the family legacy and that they needed to receive training. Among the children sitting in the audience, the eldest daughter Choi Yoon-jung would continue to oversee the Growth Support Department of SK Inc. the following year. The eldest son Choi In-keun would leave SK in that same summer and join McKinsey. The younger daughter Choi Min-jung was not there that day. More than ten months later, she would return to the same hotel as the founder of an AI healthcare company she created herself, holding a wedding there, and observing a moment of silence for Korean and American comrades before the ceremony began.

As SK Hynix becomes more like a global geopolitical asset, SK’s heirs become less like successors in the traditional sense.

Choi Yoon-jung’s visibility no longer comes from marriage or family portraiture, but from whether she can come up with the next growth story for SK beyond chips. Choi Min-jung’s position is not in SK Hynix’s factory or headquarters, but in the policy circles of Washington, the neighbor of the Pentagon, her husband in the U.S. Marine Corps, and the AI healthcare startup world. In a sense, her personal profile is the image of an industry figure whose company’s valuation has been re-priced in the AI era. Choi In-keun should have been the default successor in this old script, but his silence shows that simply being the eldest son and inheriting the family’s academic continuity is no longer enough to automatically generate succession legitimacy.

Even chaebol marital ties have not disappeared; they have simply moved—from Cheongwadae and domestic chaebol circles to Silicon Valley AI infrastructure startups and the U.S. Marine Corps reserve officers in Washington. Choi Yoon-jung married Yin Do-yeon, the co-CEO of More. Choi Min-jung married Kevin Hwang, who previously served at the Pentagon. This is still elite matchmaking, but the elites are no longer on the same map.

At the 50th-anniversary event, Choi Tae-won told the children “never forget the source” (when you drink water, remember where it came from). For the heirs of the SK family, succession is not a key, not a share ledger. It is being brought to the “water source,” seeing how the previous generation dug the water, and then being required to dig a well again in your own era.

The era that belongs to them is no longer the era of the grandfather’s industrial patriotism, nor the era of the father’s political-business matchmaking and group expansion. At the same moment when SK Hynix was pushed to the center of the global supply chain by the AI cycle, the three Choi children were also sent to the front line of AI labs, Washington’s diplomatic circles, and boardroom tables on Wall Street. What they inherit is an entire set of questions in the global AI industry power struggle, not any one simple answer.