Every week, The Lemur’s editors-in-chief handpick a few things worth holding on to. Consider this your quick break from the incessant pull of Instagram Reels.

Tolstoy once wrote that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He did not anticipate the AI memory-chip boom. South Korean billionaire Chey Tae-won’s 27-year marriage ended in a letter he sent to newspapers in 2015; the accounting took another decade, and by the time the divorce was settled, the AI trade had multiplied the assets faster than the court could divide them. On July 24, the Seoul High Court ordered Chey to pay ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong US$644 million—a third less than the record she won in 2024. It valued the marriage as of 2024 and the fortune as of now, and gave her only the former. We used this WSJ article as our launchpad.

Korean media christened Chey Tae-won and Roh Soh-yeong’s split “the divorce of the century.” What are the ethics of watching this saga like a K-drama? Korean media christened Chey Tae-won and Roh Soh-yeong’s split “the divorce of the century.” What are the ethics of watching this saga like a K-drama? Does Chey’s US$5 billion net worth justify our fascination? What are we actually consuming when we consume a billionaire’s marriage falling apart?

CE: It’s hard to conceive at first, but these people have so much money; a good chunk of it is basically disposable. It’s fun to see this much money thrown around. In concrete terms, the best-case scenario is something like Jeff Bezos’ divorce, in which ex-wife MacKenzie Scott continues to give billions from her fortune to charity. But that’s not as thrilling as Chey and Roh’s messy split, which has yielded nothing but nastiness and titillating drama. The mistress herself, Kim Hee-young, feels like a K-drama writer’s dream: she’s a socialite whose job, by all reports, is helping run a charity Chey established and making public appearances alongside him. All the while Chey has been married to Roh. We like to root for the wife; we malign the husband and mistress, usually, and this is a pattern that is familiar and easy to latch onto, like a formulaic romdram. Root for whoever you want. It doesn’t matter tangibly. Kim herself is fifty, so it’s nice at least to reckon with a mistress character who isn’t barely legal. 

As much fun as we’re having, whether Roh gets her money or not is just one droplet of water in an overflowing bucket of class inequality. I’ll end with the reminder that so many people could have access to life-saving healthcare if these personal sagas didn’t so occupy billionaires, and it’s our responsibility to see through bread and circuses when we can. There are other lingering questions here too, like what constitutes a fair and equitable divorce, and what role philandering and humiliation should play in a settlement. There’s a rich well of politics and philosophy if we don’t reduce this story to “a billionaire’s marriage falling apart.” One must take such entertainment and view it through a broader lens. The thrill of drama can offer a unique access point into a world of unanswered questions and possibilities. One must wear these two hats at once.

AND: From my perspective, the unraveling of such a riveting and titillating divorce provides intrigue and much outrage. A semiconductor powerhouse powering ⅓ of the South Korean stock market, a husband’s infidelity hiding in plain sight, and a vengeful wife—Netflix screenwriters are salivating to turn this into a K-Drama already. Will Roh ultimately pull the Joker from the bottom of Chey’s financial house of cards, or will she catalyze discussion of a much more persistent social ill? Now, I am not too keen on saying this is merely a “capitalist” or “Western” issue (these are just the only ones we know of); I believe it is indicative of a nation whose cultural and social pedigree outlasts most empires in our history, being catapulted into an era of globalism.

Now I believe this warrants a longer essay, so I’ll hold my musings close to my chest. But the tl;dr: if the history of Korea is long and old, bringing its culturally embedded, millennia-old customs into the new world of globalization and Western capitalism, there will inevitably be conflict in an avant-garde world that is constantly changing in its social and cultural expectations. It is as much a question of character as it is. But among the list of lingering questions, if we set aside the editorialized “a billionaire’s marriage falling apart,” we see that our fixation on economic success, our public obsession with elitist politics, and our interconnectedness have indirectly led to such headlines. It is as much an individual failure on Chey’s part as it is a symptom of a broader societal debate about the role of individual character in a world that is keen on reducing it to social and economic identities.

Chey didn’t build his billionaire status so much as hold through it while the AI boom made SK Group’s memory chips indispensable and caused shares to rise roughly fivefold. Roh wanted the assets at June 2026 prices; Chey wanted April 2024 prices —before Chey’s windfall. The court chose his date, consistent with a line of Supreme Court rulings holding that gains arriving after a marriage has broken down aren’t shared. Is that just? Does a claim on a windfall depend on when the money appeared, or on the circumstances of the marriage?

CE: I’m trying and failing to find a fatal flaw in the court’s reasoning and failing, and yet it still doesn’t sit right. As Roh is the daughter of one of South Korea’s most politically powerful men, Chey’s conglomerate greatly benefited from this union. I don’t know, I think I’m rooting for her. To an extent. As much as you can when examining an absurd late-stage capitalist divorce. In a forum, Chey said, “holding onto the shares rather than buying and selling them frequently is a good way to preserve your wealth.” And here he is exchanging wives and mistresses—hard guy to root for.

The Supreme Court threw out Roh’s claim by ruling that the slush fund her father allegedly funneled to SK couldn’t count as her contribution, since it appeared to be bribe money. This gain was formally held too dirty to give Roh credit for. So while the money is too tainted to be hers, it’s not tainted enough to cease being his.

AND: I believe the court suffers from a heavy sense of cognitive dissonance when it comes to this payment. While the rationale is covered with a stroke of an educated pedigree and the ink of legalese, I cannot help but feel that the payment fails to capture just how instrumental Roh has been to Chey’s financial conglomerate.

The article mentions the various instances of SK Hynix’s cronyist dalliances with the government. Starting as a nephew of the SK conglomerate’s founder, he has seen his ascent become almost cinematic. From the fishy 1992 issuance of a license to operate as the country’s second-largest mobile phone operator to the multiple pardons of white-collar crimes, Chey has been the country’s paragon of success, intrigue and downright mischief. Given all of this, I find it hard to believe that if it were not for his engagement with Roh, he would either be in jail or “a director within his uncle’s company,” as one WSJ commenter put it.  It is no wonder the South Korean CEO has developed a sense of entitlement over these past three decades—now the AI boom might provide him with a Daedalus-like complex.

Now one wonders: Will this divorce case be the Icarus moment for one of South Korea’s powerful CEOs?

Chey runs an inherited conglomerate; Roh is the daughter of a former president of South Korea. Both were born into the machinery this case is now dividing. Could this be read as a case of billionaire dynasties finally dropping off the radar, or is there something in their marriage pertinent to the common reader?

CE: It is worth looking at the larger chaebol (family-owned conglomerate) system that lays the groundwork for these proceedings. SK Group is the country’s second-biggest conglomerate after Samsung, and the very fact that these disgustingly rich companies operate within a family structure seems to strengthen Roh’s claim. When your family is your business, and your business is your family, the personal and professional operate with paper-thin boundaries. So yes, Roh deserves her cut, simply by virtue of the schema she inhabits. Roh herself is not a sob story; by all accounts, she is intelligent and crafty enough to exploit her husband’s intra-business philandering to walk away richer than ever. Their marriage could have been many things, but at its most basic level, it’s a business partnership, and Chey and Roh’s actions are downstream of that truth.

All of which is structurally interesting and almost useless to the average person. As I hinted, rich-person drama is a universal joy—look at the West’s fascination with Elon Musk and his 400 children, or the real-life Succession reject episode featuring the Murdoch children staking it out in a Nevada probate court. This is merely the Korean variant, featuring modern nobility in expensive clothes and flawless skin—but, more broadly, the West is bored of our own salacious scandals and is now turning elsewhere. We are so wrapped up in the allure of such untouchable dynasties that we forget the news items that affect us, where we stand, and it’s strange but almost predictable that a divorce with no bearing on anything here still has this much cultural pull.

I think some women feel they can relate to Roh’s plight, although Roh is in fact operating in a world that will remain unknown to most of us. Her money and family influence were key drivers of Chey’s success, and it’s tempting to relate this grandiose predicament to our own experiences with partners we feel we give everything to, only to end up slighted. We want her to win, to vindicate ourselves in a weird, impersonal way. We feel justified by the public backlash against Chey, as if it’s warpedly mirroring our own experiences. We share the drama and indulge our self-pitying tendencies with friends and sympathizers, and, parasocially, with online personalities like Stephanie Soo (who will certainly amass millions of views when she inevitably recounts this story on YouTube). It’s so easy to treat people like this as avatars for our projection, and so difficult to understand their inner thoughts and feelings. Even though they’re “dropping appearances,” there remains a world of nuance in these individuals and their world that we will never broach. Having a billion dollars doesn’t make you sacrosanct, but it does lend you a sort of impenetrability that will always separate them from us.

AND: I believe the point Cara makes about the separation between us lay people and the upper echelons of society when it comes to what seems like universal issues of heartbreak and fidelity is complicated. These very touching issues become tangled in webs of politics, money, and leverage over society. That’s why I sympathize with people like Stephanie Soo or others who so parasocially perch from the outside to gawk at the craziness and apparent idiocy of it all. 

Looking at the chaebol structure, the social and cultural dynamics function vastly differently than what we perceive to be true. There is an implicit set of codes, rules, customs, and unwritten rules that must be followed. Unlike the 18th-century scenes from Bridgerton I have been watching, the consequences of deviating from these established practices are more financial and economic than they are social. That being said, I agree with Cara that Chey and Roh’s matrimony, within the enclosure of money, business and power, functioned at times more like a business partnership than a loving relationship built on trust, kindness and, cough cough, fidelity.

However, I do disagree with Cara that this is “almost useless” to the average person. I hear the point, but I find it to be another case of how we, as humans, can learn vicariously from people who are seemingly so consumed by power. As people from Duke, we are immediately categorized as part of this “1 percent” coterie. Character in an age of acrimony, serial distrust, and contempt is so important. I believe that, despite this marriage and divorce being wrapped in all these elements, they all but show the fallibility of the human spirit in matters like marriage. In finance spaces, there is an adage that the person you marry will be the biggest investment you ever make in your life. While Chey took that advice too seriously—the emotional and personal stakes of avoiding the hubris and character of Chey in marriage can be of useful material to any eligible bachelor in the strained Western dating market.

There’s your Monday. Keep an open mind and let us (or, better yet, a friend!) know if anything resonates. No Lemur is an island. We’ll see you next week.