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For the first time, four members of the Samsung family occupy the top four wealthiest positions in South Korea, according to Forbes. The ranking includes Samsung Electronics chief executive Lee Jae-yong, his two sisters, and their mother, Hong Ra-hee.
Forbes’ richest person in Korea is Lee Jae-yong, who owns assets worth $34 billion, up $12.4 billion from the end of March.
Lee Boo-jin and Lee Seo-hyun, Lee Jae-yong’s sisters, rank second and third with net worth of $12.4 billion and $12 billion, respectively.
Hong Ra-hee, the mother of the three siblings and wife of the late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee, holds assets worth $11.2 billion. She previously ran the Samsung Museum of Art Leeum and the Ho-Am Museum before resigning in 2017.
Most of the Lee family’s wealth is tied to holdings in Samsung Electronics. Forbes notes that the company’s stock price has risen fivefold over the past year.
Samsung Electronics’ market capitalization also surpassed $1 trillion last week, making it the second Asian company to join the trillion-dollar club after TSMC.
Samsung is the world’s largest memory-chip producer by revenue. Its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) line is used for AI chips from Nvidia, AMD, and Alphabet.
Demand for Samsung’s mainstream memory chips has also increased. The article cites NAND flash—used in SSDs—being deployed in data centers.
Samsung Electronics reported record Q1 results driven by its chip division. Revenue rose 69% year over year to 133.900 trillion won ($89.96 billion), while operating profit increased 756% to 57.200 trillion won ($38.44 billion).
Jeongku Choi, a research analyst at Counterpoint Research, said: “Thanks to the boom in memory-chip prices, we expect the next quarter to be more favorable than Q1, and 2026 to be Samsung's best year ever.”
Barclays analysts also forecast that Samsung’s HBM revenue could triple this year, citing ongoing supply-demand imbalances in the memory-chip market and continued demand from AI data centers.
Samsung was founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-chull, the grandfather of chairman Lee Jae-yong, originally as a trading company before expanding into a multi-industry group spanning food, textiles, and electronics.
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