Korea's Highest-Paid Chaebol Chairmen, H1 2026: ₩45.5 Billion in Six Months — and Lee Jae-yong Made Zero

August in South Korea is an odd season. Every listed company files its semi-annual report at once, and suddenly a number the public never gets to see is laid bare for the whole country: how much each person got paid in six months. And this year, that number was unusually large.

Why did Doosan land the No. 1 spot in H1 2026?

Park Jeong-won, Doosan’s chairman, sits at No. 1 with ₩45.58 billion — for six months of work. Run the math at 40 hours a week across 26 weeks and it works out to ₩43.83 million an hour, or roughly ₩250 million a day.

But reading that number as “Doosan gave its chairman a raise” would be completely wrong. Tear it apart and you get ₩1.82 billion in base salary and ₩6.17 billion in short-term bonuses — ₩7.99 billion in actual cash. The remaining ₩37.59 billion is RSUs, restricted stock units.

An RSU is a long-term incentive that says, in effect, “here’s your stock — come collect it a few years from now.” The 32,266 Doosan Corp. shares Park received in 2023 were worth ₩88,016 apiece at grant, or ₩2.84 billion in total. By the time they actually vested this February, Doosan’s share price had reached ₩1,164,000.

Who are Nos. 2 through 5?

The top ranks share one trait: they got there through stock or by holding multiple posts — not through salary.

Hanwha chairman Kim Seung-youn’s pay statement is Korean chaebol structure in miniature: ₩2.52 billion from Hanwha Corp., ₩2.52 billion from Hanwha Aerospace, ₩2.52 billion from Hanwha Systems, ₩2.34 billion from Hanwha Vision, and ₩1.68 billion from Hanwha Solutions. One man drawing a paycheck from five companies at the same time — the detail foreigners tend to find hardest to wrap their heads around.

🏆 Top chaebol chairman pay, H1 2026 (listed affiliates' semi-annual reports, combined)

Why do the Big Four chairmen sit at the bottom?

This is the most counterintuitive part of the list. Samsung, SK, Hyundai Motor, and LG — the four groups that define the Korean economy — have their chairmen sitting at 8th, 9th, 10th, and off the list entirely.

Koo Kwang-mo of LG took ₩4.83 billion, Chung Euisun of Hyundai ₩4.5 billion, Chey Tae-won of SK about ₩1.75 billion, and Samsung’s Lee Jae-yong ₩0. Add all four together and you get ₩11.08 billion — still short of No. 4 Shin Dong-bin on his own.

The reason is simple: these men hold their wealth in equity, not salary. The bigger the company, the easier a chairman’s pay becomes a target for public anger and parliamentary audits — so they’ve moved to keep it low. Lee Jae-yong, in particular, has stuck with no-pay management ever since the 2017 influence-peddling scandal.

And the highest-paid hired executive? A ₩26.1 billion salaryman

Among the professional managers hired by their companies — the ones who aren’t chaebol owners — the top earner is Kwak Noh-jung, CEO of SK hynix, with ₩26.1 billion for the half. Slot him into the owners’ ranking and he lands right behind Park Jeong-won.

The breakdown is the fun part. His base salary is ₩1.25 billion — the company set his annual pay at ₩2.5 billion, roughly ₩208 million a month. So far, that’s within the normal bounds of “big-company CEO money.” But then came a ₩20.47 billion bonus and ₩4.38 billion in stock-option exercise gains. It’s the one-time settlement of stock appreciation rights granted in 2022 and performance stock units from 2023, cashing out right as the HBM boom peaked.

📊 SK hynix's top five earners, H1 2026 — ₩78.9 billion from a single company

Just how much money is ₩45.58 billion?

After enough digits with a hundred million attached, your sense of scale goes numb. Let’s switch to different yardsticks.

South Korea’s minimum wage in 2026 is ₩10,320 an hour. Working a full 209 hours a month including the weekly holiday allowance, that’s ₩25.88 million a year. Earning Park Jeong-won’s six months of pay at that rate would take 1,761 years — you’d have to collect minimum wage without a single day off since the Unified Silla era, long before the Joseon dynasty was even founded in 1392.

In dollars, that’s about US$32.9 million (at ₩1,385). For context, the next four chairmen combined take ₩46.7 billion — just ₩1.1 billion more than Park on his own. You have to add up Nos. 6 through 10 (₩29.4 billion) just to clear half of his figure.

The real question this year's ranking leaves behind

The point of the H1 2026 disclosures isn’t who came first. It’s that performance pay has shifted from cash to stock.

Park Jeong-won (₩37.59 billion in RSUs), Koo Ja-eun (₩7.36 billion in stock-linked cash), Kwak Noh-jung (₩24.84 billion across SARs, PSUs, and options) — the three biggest earners all got their money from long-term stock plans designed years ago that detonated when they met today’s share prices. That ties executives’ fortunes to shareholders’, since both win when the stock rises. But whether that rise came from management performance, a hot industry cycle, or asset revaluation is impossible to tell from the headline figure alone.

What matters more than the ranking, then, is how much gets disclosed about the original performance conditions, service requirements, post-payout disposal restrictions, and the board compensation committee’s review. This year’s filings simply wrote that question in big, bold letters — in the amount of ₩45.58 billion.