This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of Korea’s Richest 2026. See the full list here.

Samsung Electronics executive chairman Jay Y. Lee reclaims the title of South Korea’s richest person after ceding it last year to private equity maven Michael Kim of MBK Partners. It’s a position that Lee’s late father, Lee Kun-hee, held for over a decade, until he died in 2020 at age 78. The biggest gainer in dollar terms this year, Lee nearly tripled his net worth to a record $21.6 billion.

The jump was partly due to a gold rush in Samsung’s once-struggling memory chip business amid a global semiconductor shortage. Last July, the company landed a $16.5 billion multiyear contract from Tesla to manufacture AI chips. After an initial hiccup, in February it began the mass production of the High Bandwidth Memory 4 (HBM4) chip, a key component of Nvidia’s next-generation AI accelerators.

The HBM4 breakthrough helped the company regain some ground in the AI memory chip race that it had yielded to domestic rival SK Hynix, though Samsung remains the world’s largest maker by capacity of non-HBM memory chips. For 2025, it posted a 31% increase in net profit to 45 trillion won ($30 billion) on an 11% rise in revenue to 334 trillion won.

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