Morris Chang
Source of wealth: Semiconductors
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Modules
Biography
Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), one of the world's largest manufacturers of semiconductors. He retired from the chairman's post in 2018.
Chang worked for a quarter-century at Texas Instruments and then joined the Taiwan research body that spun off TSMC.
TSMC customers include Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm.
TSMC is building a $165 billion site with three chip plants in Phoenix, Arizona. The first plant began production in 2024 and the other two for more advanced chips will come onstream by 2028 and 2030.
In 2024, TSMC also broke ground on a factory in Dresden, Germany, its first in Europe. The company committed $3.8 billion for a 70% stake in the joint venture.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Morris Chang
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 Morris Chang, 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 70 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 4.4 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.