Lisa Su
Source of wealth: Semiconductors
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Modules
Biography
Lisa Su, the CEO of semiconductor firm Advanced Micro Devices, has led one of the greatest recent turnarounds in the technology sector.
In 2025 the company announced a partnership with OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT), highlighting the use of AMD chips for computing power.
Next, she's preparing for battle against Nvidia in the AI revolution, and expects to keep winning; Nvidia is run by her distant relative Jensen Huang.
The daughter of a mathematician and a bookkeeper turned entrepreneur, Su was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969, and immigrated to New York City at age 3.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Su went to MIT, where she earned a bachelor's (and later a Ph.D.) in electrical engineering because it seemed to be the most difficult major.
She did stints at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale, then joined AMD in 2012 and became CEO two years later.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Lisa Su
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 Lisa Su, 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 21 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 1.3 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.