Chi Fung Cheng
Source of wealth: Semiconductors
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Modules
Biography
Chi Fung "Lawrence" Cheng cofounded semiconductor firm Credo Technology in 2008. He owns a 4% stake in the company and serves as its chief technology officer.
The Cayman Islands-based company went public on the Nasdaq in 2022.
Prior to cofounding Credo, Cheng worked as an engineering director at semiconductor giant Marvell Technology.
Marvell's cofounder Pantas Sutardja was an early investor in Credo Technology and now owns 3% of the company.
Cheng received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Chi Fung Cheng
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Chi Fung Cheng, linked to Technology and 'Semiconductors', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 14 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 0.9 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.