American billionaire Michael Dell helps SK chairman Chey Tae-won fund $711 million divorce

American billionaire Michael Dell is putting $410 million into South Korea's SK Group, buying shares from chairman Chey Tae-won as the tycoon raises cash to pay his former wife the largest divorce award in the country's history.

DFO Public Investments L.P., a Delaware fund tied to DFO Management, the Dell family's investment office, agreed to buy 972,493 shares of SK Inc., the group's holding company, a regulatory filing showed. The 1.34% stake is priced at 559,387 won ($421) a share, or 544 billion won ($410 million) in total. That is 11.6% above SK Inc.'s Oct. 13 closing price of 501,000 won ($377).

The purchase covers the bigger part of a 944 billion won ($711 million) share sale that Chey announced on Oct. 2 to fund the payout to Roh Soh-yeong, director of Seoul's Art Center Nabi and the daughter of former South Korean president Roh Tae-woo. At the time, SK described the buyer only as a strategic investor that had weighed the company's competitiveness and long-term growth prospects.

The rest of the money comes from a price return swap with Korea Investment & Securities, a Seoul brokerage, covering 681,431 shares, or 0.94% of SK Inc., for about 400 billion won ($301 million). The brokerage holds the shares, along with their voting and dividend rights, for three years at a reference price of 587,000 won. Chey keeps any gain in the share price over that period and absorbs any loss. Both transactions are due to settle on Nov. 2.

Dell's ties to SK

The buyer is the Dell family's fund, not Dell Technologies, the computer and server maker Dell founded in his college dorm room in 1984. The two groups already do business together. SK Hynix, SK Group's memory chip unit and the biggest maker of the high-bandwidth memory used in artificial intelligence systems, supplies chips for Dell's data center servers, which have been in heavy demand from AI companies this year.

Dell, 61, is worth about $241.3 billion, making him the world's fifth-richest person. His fortune has climbed with Dell Technologies' share price and his large stake in chipmaker Broadcom, which he received when he sold software company VMware to Broadcom in 2023.

The Korea Corporate Governance Forum, a shareholder advocacy group, said Chey and the buyers must report their stakes as joint holdings if they have agreed, even informally, to vote their shares the same way. Failing to do so would breach South Korea's capital markets law, the group said.

After the two sales, Chey's direct holding in SK Inc. falls to 11,321,548 shares from 12,975,472, cutting his stake to 15.5% from 17.8%. Together with relatives and affiliates, his stake drops to 22.9% from 25.2%, leaving his control of the group intact. His remaining shares are worth about $4.3 billion at the Oct. 13 close.

A nine-year court fight

Chey, 65, has led SK Group, South Korea's second-largest conglomerate, since his father, Chey Jong-hyon, died in 1998. The group controls SK Hynix, SK Telecom and SK Innovation. Chey and Roh married in 1988. He filed for divorce in 2017, two years after he publicly admitted to an extramarital relationship and a child.

The Seoul Family Court ordered him in December 2022 to pay Roh 66.5 billion won ($50 million) in property division and 100 million won in consolation money. The Seoul High Court raised the property award to 1.38 trillion won ($1.04 billion) in May 2024, along with 2 billion won ($1.5 million) in consolation money, after finding that 30 billion won from Roh Tae-woo had helped the group grow.

South Korea's Supreme Court threw out the property ruling in October 2025. It said the money from the former president, even if it had been given, appeared to come from bribes and could not count as Roh's contribution to the couple's assets. The top court upheld the 2 billion won consolation payment.

On retrial, the Seoul High Court on July 24 ordered Chey to pay 944 billion won in cash. It valued the divisible assets at 2.9 trillion won ($2.18 billion), including about 2 trillion won in SK shares, and split them two-thirds to Chey and one-third to Roh. Chey keeps his shares and pays her share in cash.

Chey appealed again in August and later narrowed his case, accepting 700 billion won ($527 million) of the award and contesting the remaining 244 billion won ($184 million). He argues that Roh's one-third share is too high once the former president's money is excluded, that the SK shares should not be valued using later price gains, and that a stake in wafer maker SK Siltron he bought in 2017 should not be divided because the marriage had already broken down. Roh did not file a counter-appeal before the Oct. 13 deadline.