On November 26, 2024, at the Hwagok Mountain Villa Hotel in Seoul's Gwangjin-gu district, the 50th-anniversary ceremony of a South Korean higher education foundation. As the venue lights dimmed, an AI image appeared on the screen. The image was of Chey Jong-hyun, the second-generation chairman of the SK Group and the founder of this foundation.
He passed away suddenly in Los Angeles in 1998, 26 years ago. In the AI image, he spoke again, addressing the young people who had received foundation scholarships to study abroad: "Plant the seed in your heart, hoping that you will dream of becoming a tall tree; we are willing to wait for the seed you plant to grow into a tree."
Sitting at the central table below the stage were his son, Chey Tae-won, the current chairman of the SK Group, the head of South Korea's second-largest conglomerate, and the two children he brought to witness this scene, his eldest daughter Chey Yoon-jung and eldest son Chey In-geon. Chey Tae-won later explained to the media why he brought them: "This is our legacy, so they need to undergo training. They need to see what their grandfather and father have done." He said it was a "mandatory requirement for them to participate." At the event, he also mentioned "gratitude": when drinking water, one should think about where the water comes from, and the beneficiaries should remember the person who originally dug the well.
Over the past year, SK Hynix has risen by 700%, with a market value just exceeding 100 trillion Korean Won, surpassing its old rival Samsung Electronics, making it the most valuable asset in South Korean conglomerate history. As the AI era has pushed Hynix to the forefront of the South Korean capital market, when the outside world looked for the heir of this company, they found that the third generation of SK did not follow the traditional chaebol narrative. The eldest daughter was the first to enter the group's senior executive narrative, the second daughter had the deepest connections to Hynix, Washington, and the U.S. military network, and the eldest son, who seemed most like the heir, turned out to be the quietest one.
After Hynix Soared, the Old Script of Korean Conglomerate Heirs Fell Through
Korean conglomerate succession has historically revolved around four key terms: eldest son, equity, marital ties, and paternal approval. Samsung, Hyundai, and Hanhwa have all repeated this script.
In October 2022, Lee Jae-yong, the third generation of the Samsung Group, was officially appointed as chairman, completing Samsung's intergenerational transition. His eldest son, Lee Ji-ho, recently enrolled in the South Korean Naval Academy to prepare in advance for military service, a move that itself signifies the new generation of Korean chaebol "succession training." Hyundai Motor Group followed slightly behind Samsung, with Yoo Euisun, the third generation, taking over in 2020. Hanhwa Group, on the other hand, in 2025, saw Chairman Kim Seung-youn transfer half of the holding company's shares to his three sons, effectively handing over the empire to the current Vice Chairman Kim Dong-kwon, a 42-year-old whose status as the eldest son has never been questioned by the outside world.
The core of this script is to "let the public and the market recognize the crown prince in advance." From Lee Jae-yong to Yoo Euisun and now Kim Dong-kwon, regardless of differences in personality, abilities, or paths, they have all been collectively designated as the "successor" by their fathers, families, and the media, gradually moving towards that seat through shares, military service, education, and professional training.
SK is different. Chey Tae-won has three children with his ex-wife Roh Soo-young: eldest daughter Chey Yoon-jung (born in 1989), second daughter Chey Min-jung (born in 1991), and eldest son Chey In-geon (born in 1995). All three children are currently involved with the group's future, but none of them can fit into the "crown prince" position.
Chey Yoon-jung was early on dubbed by the Korean financial media as the "most obvious successor candidate," but she is working not in semiconductors but in SK Biopharmaceuticals. Chey Min-jung had worked in the international trade and policy response at SK Hynix's U.S. branch, but in 2022, she left Hynix to pursue medical entrepreneurship in San Francisco. Chey In-geon, most resembling a traditional male heir, left SK E&S in July 2025 to join McKinsey's Seoul office. Following the usual practice of Korea's chaebol third generation, consultancy firms serve as a path of "external training," rather than a direct succession mandate.
Chey Tae-won himself was clear in a 2021 interview with BBC Korean Service, stating, "Nothing has been decided yet. My children also need to work hard to seize opportunities. My son is still young, he will live his own life, and I will not force him." When asked if board approval is required for children to participate in management, he answered, "Yes."
This declaration has transformed succession from a family matter into a public legitimacy test. The three children must each prove themselves, and what they can present to prove themselves is no longer about equity, marital ties, or eldest son status.
Chey Yoon-jung: "The Most Obvious Heiress," From the Lab to the Boardroom
On June 28, 2024, at the SKMS Research Institute in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, SK Group held a Business Strategy Meeting. The attendees included the CEOs of major subsidiaries such as SK, SK Innovation, SK Telecom, SK hynix, as well as key family members of the group, totaling more than 30 people. Choi Tae-won was on a business trip in the United States at the time and participated via video conference. The meeting, described by the Korean media as an intensive discussion with a sense of crisis, was scheduled for a 2-day stay with the first day having "no predetermined end time" until a direction was established.
Choi Yoon-jung sat at the meeting table. She was the only child of Choi Tae-won to attend the meeting and the youngest executive within the SK Group. The media explained her "sudden appearance" at the meeting as part of her business training.
To understand why she was able to sit at that table, we need to go back and look at her upbringing. Choi Yoon-jung was born in August 1989 at Seoul National University Hospital while her grandfather, Roh Tae-woo, was serving as the President of South Korea. She spent her childhood and high school years in Beijing at an international school, pursued her undergraduate studies in Biology at the University of Chicago, the same university where her parents studied abroad. During her undergraduate years, she spent two years as a researcher at the Chicago Institute for Brain Research and had research experience at Harvard's Department of Physical Chemistry. After graduating, she joined Bain & Company as a consulting associate. This is the training pattern for the third generation of South Korean chaebol heirs.
In 2017, she joined SK Biopharmaceuticals as the Head of Strategic Investments. However, in 2019, she made a decision that was not quite typical of an heiress: she temporarily left SK to pursue a Master's in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford. The focus was on computational biology, not traditional biology. Two years later, she returned to SK to continue her strategic role while simultaneously pursuing a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at Seoul National University, with a major in Genetics and Developmental Biology.
In January 2024, she was promoted to the Head of Business Development Division at SK Biopharmaceuticals (Vice President level), leading the introduction of Radioisotope Therapy (RPT) and Radioisotope Supply Contracts. This is the core pipeline for SK Biopharmaceuticals' transition from traditional neuroscience drugs to the AI era of precision medicine. At the end of the same year, Choi Tae-won established a new "Growth Support Division" at SK Inc., the group's holding company, responsible for medium to long-term planning, portfolio management, global expansion, and new business assessments, directly reporting to her.
Her marriage also deviated from the old chaebol script. In October 2017, she married her Bain colleague Yoon Do-yeon. Yoon Do-yeon graduated from Seoul National University's Business School and later served as a Co-CEO at the Korean AI infrastructure startup, More. The company focuses on AI model training and computational parallelization software platforms, received a strategic investment from KT in 2021, and was valued at approximately 350 billion Korean won by 2025. This was not a traditional chaebol union, nor was it what the Chinese media often refer to as "marrying an ordinary employee." It was a new form of elite network alliance: the chaebol heiress married a tech entrepreneur in the AI era.
In the narrative of female succession in conglomerates like Samsung and CJ over the past few decades, daughters have often been seen through the lenses of art museums, hotels, charity foundations, luxury retail, or children's dowries. Choi Yun-jin's position is different. She has taken a seat at the SK Group's decision-making table for the future. Her visibility is not defined by marriage, art, or image-building, but by a combination of scientific training, consulting training, a doctoral thesis, strategic investments, and corporate executive positions.
The way conglomerate daughters are seen is changing. However, Choi Yun-jin herself rarely speaks publicly. She has been discussed by the South Korean media as the "most likely successor," yet her personal story remains quiet in public reports.
Choi Min-jin: Heiress to Warships, Washington, and Lockheed's Globalization
On October 13, 2024, also at SK Group's own Walkerhill Hotel, Choi Tae-won's second daughter, Choi Min-jin, and Chinese-American entrepreneur Kevin Hwang held their extravagant wedding.
The wedding was attended by about 500 guests, including Lee Jae-yong, Koo Kwang-mo, Kim Dong-kwan, and other SK family members. Choi Tae-won and Roh Soo-young appeared in the same space for the first time after the ₩13.8 trillion divorce lawsuit, sitting side by side in the bride's parents' section. Next to them were dogs co-raised by Choi Min-jin and Kevin Hwang.
As the groom entered, Choi Min-jin walked into the venue alone, without being escorted by her father. There was no officiant throughout the ceremony. Her sister, Choi Yun-jin, gave a congratulatory speech, and the groom's younger brother made a speech in English. Before the ceremony began, a moment of silence was held for fallen Korean War and American comrades. A table was set up on one side of the venue with medals, dog tags, roses, and lemons, following the American military tradition of the Missing Man Table to honor missing and fallen soldiers.
Born in 1991, Choi Min-jin attended high school at Renmin University of China High School and pursued a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration at Peking University Guanghua School of Management. Among the third generation of South Korean conglomerates, very few go to China for their undergraduate studies; others either go to the Ivy League schools or stay in prestigious South Korean universities. While studying in Beijing, she reportedly supported herself through scholarships, part-time jobs at convenience stores, and income from teaching at an academy, almost without financial support from her parents. This "independent path" is an extremely rare badge among South Korean conglomerate children.
In 2014, she made a decision that baffled all South Korean media: to apply for the 117th class of the South Korean Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps. Military service is mandatory for South Korean men, but entirely voluntary for women, marking the first time a woman from a South Korean conglomerate family volunteered for service. During her 11-week training before commissioning, she often told her visiting family and friends the same thing: "I am proud to be the daughter of the Republic of Korea. After the training period, I am even prouder."
She was assigned to the Chungmugong Yi Sun-sin-class destroyer (DDH-975) as a Combat Information Officer. In December 2015, she was deployed with the Cheonghae Unit to the Gulf of Aden near Somalia to carry out anti-piracy escort missions. Before retiring, she served as the Combat Information Center Officer at the Battle Watch Captain Headquarters of the Second Fleet Command in the West Sea, retiring on November 30, 2017, with the rank of Navy Lieutenant.
After retiring, she returned to China and worked in a private equity firm for about a year, then pursued a Master's in International Business and Policy at Georgetown University in the United States. In August 2019, she joined SK Hynix's INTRA, overseeing international cooperation, focusing on international trade and policy responses, commuting between Washington D.C. and Seoul. This was her direct connection to SK Hynix. However, she was not an engineer, product manager, or involved in factory operations. She worked on policy matters and later moved to SK Hynix's U.S. strategic division, focusing on mergers and acquisitions.
It was during this time that she met her husband, Kevin Hwang. In the Dupont Circle area of Washington D.C., they were neighbors.
Kevin Hwang, born in Indiana, USA, is an alumnus of Harvard with an MBA from Stanford. In 2016, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps as an officer, and from October 2020, he worked in South Korea for about 9 months as a U.S. Forces Korea Logistical Officer. Both have a military background, with Korean media describing their relationship as deepened through shared military experiences.
In February 2022, Minjung Choi took a leave of absence from SK Hynix and joined a telemedicine startup company, Done Global, in San Francisco as an unpaid advisor, later revealed by Korean media to have actually served as the CFO. A year later, she co-founded Integral Health with a scholar from the Yale School of Medicine in the field of psychiatry, where she serves as CEO, focusing on AI-driven collaborative care and behavioral health integration.
Her current LinkedIn self-introduction reads, "Founder of Integral Health | Investor in Healthcare & AI | Veteran | 2x Exits." The "Veteran" label still prominently displayed.
Throughout Choi Min-jung's life, one theme has recurred: the military. From Shackleton to the Gulf of Aden, from Washington SK hynix INTRA to marrying a former U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant. She didn't follow her sister's path to the SK executive suite or marry into a prominent Korean family as outlined in the traditional chaebol playbook, but she embodied the position SK hynix found itself in during this new era. Semiconductor companies are becoming more and more like geopolitical entities in the era of AI, having to navigate U.S. policy, trade controls, supply chain security, and capital mergers and acquisitions. Choi Min-jung's career happened to align perfectly with this trajectory.
Choi Eun-geon: The Most Heir-Like Figure, Why the Most Silent
Choi Eun-geon's story begins in a hospital room.
In 2003, the SK Group was embroiled in an accounting scandal, leading to Choi Tae-won's imprisonment. That same year, his and Roh Soo-young's youngest son, Choi Eun-geon, was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and told he would need lifelong insulin injections. Choi Eun-geon was 8 years old at the time.
During that period, Roh Soo-young, the daughter of a former South Korean president, took her child to live in a pediatric ward at Seoul National University Hospital. At night, as Choi Eun-geon lay in bed, she sat alone by his side. Roh Soo-young later recalled in an interview that when her son turned 17, he was still struggling with diabetes, but he was a very bright and sunny boy. He often served in the church choir near their home, performed special songs in beatbox during service, and even copied the Bible together with his elder sister Choi Min-jung at night.
Choi Eun-geon's educational path differed from that of his two sisters. He first attended a non-traditional high school in South Korea known for its innovative education, then transferred to Hawaii. His mother Roh Soo-young's educational philosophy was "not to be anxious about fitting children into the same university as others," but to explore a different, creative way of parenting. While Choi Eun-geon was in high school in Hawaii, Roh Soo-young lived there for over two years, accompanying him.
He later enrolled at Brown University in the U.S. to study physics, following in the footsteps of his predecessors. Choi Tae-won also majored in physics at Korea University, and Choi Tae-won's younger brother, SK Group Vice Chairman Choi Jae-yong, was also a Brown University physics graduate. This is the only clear academic continuity in this family. The relationship between Choi Eun-geon and Choi Tae-won was good; they communicated frequently, played tennis together, and were photographed conversing shoulder to shoulder outside a restaurant in Seoul.
After graduating, he interned at a Boston consulting group and joined the SK E&S strategic planning team in September 2020, working on natural gas market expansion. In 2025, he left SK to join the Seoul office of McKinsey. The Korean media interpreted this move as the standard path of "third-generation chaebol external training," but he himself has not made any public statements.
Following the old script of Korean chaebols, Choi In-geon should have been the heir apparent. As the eldest son, he also carried on the family's academic continuity. His trajectory from SK to McKinsey is similar to the training paths of Lee Jae-yong and Chung Eui-sun from years ago. However, he has not made any public statements that have been reported. The contents of the petition he submitted in his parents' divorce case have not been made public either. Currently, he does not hold any shares in the SK Group. He seems like someone whose position was predetermined by the old script but has refused to step into it.
Among the three children, Choi In-geon is the most heir-like and also the most silent.
The Family in Court
Even though the three children's resumes are independent, they could not avoid their parents' marriage. They have not spoken through interviews or social media but have entered their parents' marriage public narrative through legal documents.
Choi Tae-won and Roh Soo-young held their wedding at the Blue House in 1988, with the then-Prime Minister as the officiant. Roh Soo-young's father was the newly inaugurated President of South Korea that same year. In 2015, Choi Tae-won published the "Illegitimate Child Confession" in The South Korea Daily, openly admitting to having a daughter with his cohabitant Kim Hee-young and requested a divorce from Roh Soo-young, who refused. In 2017, Choi Tae-won applied for divorce mediation again, leading to litigation. In 2019, Roh Soo-young counter filed for divorce, seeking consolation money and property division corresponding to the SK Corporation shares.
This lawsuit has gained continuous international media attention for three reasons: the division amount may set a record in Korean court history, the former president's family funds are implicated in SK Group's early capital structure, and Choi Tae-won's actual control over SK holdings may be jeopardized due to the massive division.
In the first instance in 2022, the Seoul Family Court ruled for Choi Tae-won to divide ₩665 billion with Roh Soo-young and give her around 310,000 shares of SK Holdings, elevating her from a 0.01% shareholder to the company's fourth-largest shareholder. The second instance in May 2024 escalated the division amount to ₩1.38 trillion, marking the highest single divorce property division in Asian legal history. In October 2025, the South Korean Supreme Court overturned part of the property division from the second instance and remanded it for a retrial.
In May 2023, the three legitimate children submitted petitions to the Seoul High Court Family Division 2 for the second trial of their parents' divorce case for three consecutive days. The second daughter, Choi Min-jin, submitted on the 15th, the eldest son, Choi In-geon, on the 16th, and the eldest daughter, Choi Yoon-jin, on the 17th. The three children collectively appeared in their parents' divorce records through legal documents, but what they wrote and whose side they are on has not been disclosed to this day.
At Minjung Choi's wedding in 2024, Taeyuan Choi and Sooyoung Lu appeared together in the same space for the first time amid a $1.38 trillion divorce lawsuit background, sitting side by side in the bride's parents' seat. After the ceremony, the two families greeted the guests together by circling the tables. This brief ceremonial coexistence was the final family picture the three children could arrange for their parents after the structural failure of their marriage.
Like most chaebol families, the SK third-generation inheritance has never been just about one company or one shareholding.
When Samsung becomes a geopolitical asset, inheritance is no longer a family matter
Let's go back to that commemorative event in 2024.
Grandfather Jonghyun Choi returned to the scene in AI form, speaking to the grandchildren, while father Taeyuan Choi told the children that this was the family legacy, and they must undergo training. Among the children sitting in the audience, eldest daughter Yoonjung Choi will continue to lead SK Inc.'s Growth Support Division the following year, while eldest son Reingen Choi will leave SK to join McKinsey in the same summer. Second daughter Minjung Choi was not present that day. She would return to the same hotel as the founder of her own AI healthcare company more than ten months later to hold her wedding, observing a moment of silence for the fallen Korean-American soldiers before the ceremony.
The more Samsung becomes a global geopolitical asset, the less the SK heirs look like traditional inheritors.
Yoonjung Choi's visibility no longer comes from marriage or family portraits but from whether she can present SK's next growth story beyond chips; Minjung Choi's position is not in SK Hynix's factories or headquarters, but among Washington policy circles, neighbors of the Pentagon, spouse of a US Marine, and AI healthcare entrepreneurship. She personifies the industrial attributes of this company, which have been reevaluated in the AI era. Reingen Choi should have been the default successor according to the old script, but his silence indicates that merely being the eldest son and having family academic continuity is no longer sufficient to automatically generate succession legitimacy.
The marriage connections of Korean chaebol families have not disappeared but have shifted from the Presidential Blue House and the domestic chaebol circle to Silicon Valley AI infrastructure startups and Washington's US Marine Corps Reserve officers. Yoonjung Choi marries More's co-representative Dooyeon Yoon, while Minjung Choi marries Kevin Hwang, a former Pentagon resident. It is still an elite marriage, but the elites are no longer on the same map.
At the 50th-anniversary commemorative event, Taeyuan Choi told the children, "When you drink water, think of its source." For the SK family heirs, inheritance is not a key, not a shareholding table, but being brought to the "water source," seeing how the previous generation drew water, and then being asked to redig the well in their own era.
It is no longer their grandfather's era of serving the country through industry, nor their father's era of government-business marriage and corporate expansion. At the same time that SK Hynix is propelled into the global supply chain center stage of the AI era, the three children of the Choi family have also been sent to the cutting-edge AI lab, the Washington social circle, and the Wall Street conference table. What they inherit is a whole set of challenges in the global AI industry game, rather than any simple answer.
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