Search for Chey Tae-won this week and you will find a man worth roughly $5.7 billion — his wealth more than doubled in two months as SK Hynix's stock surged on the back of the AI chip boom and then again on this week's Nasdaq debut. You will find the chairman of SK Group, South Korea's second-largest conglomerate, with 186 subsidiaries spanning semiconductors, telecommunications, energy, and pharmaceuticals. And somewhere in the middle of his Wikipedia page, if you scroll far enough, you will find a section noting that in January 2013 he was convicted of embezzling more than $40 million from SK affiliates — money he had taken to cover personal investment losses — and sentenced to four years in prison. He was pardoned in August 2015 and returned to his office in 2016. Most of the coverage this week does not mention it.
The reason it doesn't register is not that Korea has a short memory. It is that what happened to Chey Tae-won is not unusual enough to mention in the same breath as a record IPO. His conviction, his imprisonment, his pardon, his return to the chairmanship — these events followed a track that has been worn smooth by decades of repetition. Korea's largest companies are run, in most cases, by the families that founded them. Those families have, in many cases, been convicted of crimes. Those convictions have, in virtually every case, eventually ended in a presidential pardon, justified on the grounds that the national economy requires these specific people at the helm of these specific companies. The pattern is consistent enough that legal scholars describe it not as a failure of the system but as a feature of it.
To understand why the pattern persists, you have to understand the economic architecture that makes it feel, to many Koreans, like it cannot stop. South Korea's postwar recovery — the "Miracle on the Han River" that took per-capita income from roughly $100 in 1953 to over $35,000 today — was not built on open markets and distributed competition. It was built on a deliberate bet, made by the military government of Park Chung-hee in the 1960s and 1970s, that state-directed capital channeled into a small number of family-controlled conglomerates could industrialize a devastated country faster than any other mechanism available. The chaebols — Samsung, Hyundai, SK, LG and dozens of others — were the instrument of that bet. They received preferential loans, protected markets, and government backing in exchange for meeting export targets and building strategic industries.
The bet worked. It worked so completely that the instrument became the economy. Today, the four largest chaebol families control companies whose combined revenues equal roughly 40 percent of South Korea's entire GDP. The top thirty chaebols together represent nearly 77 percent. No other advanced economy has this degree of concentration in the hands of so few families. In the United States, Apple — the country's most valuable company — represents approximately 3 percent of GDP. In Korea, one family's companies are 20 percent. The practical consequence is that the Korean government is not merely reluctant to remove chaebol chairmen from power. It is genuinely uncertain, in a way that is not entirely irrational, whether the economy could absorb the disruption if it tried.
"If Samsung disappeared tomorrow, so would about a fifth of our exports. That is not a company that is too big to fail. That is a company that is too big to prosecute."
— Widely attributed to Korean economic analysts; the underlying arithmetic is not disputed
The cost of this arrangement is paid mostly by young Koreans, and it is very high. The chaebol system creates what economists describe as a dual labor market: a small ring of stable, well-compensated positions inside the major conglomerates, surrounded by a much larger precarious economy of contract workers, temporary employees, and small businesses that cannot compete with companies backed by state-adjacent capital. Getting into the inner ring requires navigating one of the most demanding meritocratic sorting processes in the world — standardized test scores, elite university admissions, years of accumulated credentials the Korean job market calls "spec" — followed by brutal rejection rates even at that level. Youth unemployment sits at 12.5 percent. Nearly 40 percent of Korean wage earners are classified as non-regular workers, meaning contract or temporary positions with limited protections and no path to the inner ring. The average apartment in Seoul costs 1.3 billion won — roughly $960,000, or more than thirteen times the median annual household income.
Somewhere in that arithmetic, a generation made a calculation. The Korean terms for it spread through the internet in the early 2010s. Sampo: giving up three things — dating, marriage, children — because the economic conditions for a conventional life felt unachievable. Then opo, giving up five, adding homeownership and social life. Then Hell Joseon, comparing contemporary Korea to the rigid hierarchy of the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), where birth determined fate and mobility was a fiction. The term went viral not because it was new but because it named something a generation already knew. South Korea's fertility rate in 2025 was 0.75 — the lowest ever recorded in any country, ever. The country where four families run 40 percent of the economy is also the country where young people have stopped having children at a rate without precedent in human demographic history.
One More Thing
There is a Korean term for the class position young Koreans are born into: heuk-sujeo, or "dirt spoon" — the bottom of a four-level hierarchy of silver, gold, diamond, and dirt spoons that describes inherited economic advantage. The children of chaebol families are diamond spoons. The majority of young Koreans are dirt spoons, and the term has spread because it captures something the official meritocracy narrative does not: in a country where 77 percent of the economy is controlled by 30 conglomerates, the spoon you were born with matters more than the spec you accumulated. Chey Tae-won was born into a diamond spoon family, convicted of embezzlement, pardoned, and this week became one of the wealthiest men in Asia. His Wikipedia page is thin. His story is not.
