Meet the most ruthless CEO in the trillion-dollar tech club

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. THE BOSSES of America’s trillion-dollar technology giants represent two CEO archetypes. First, the eccentric visionary founder: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of Tesla and Jensen Huang of Nvidia are obsessed with their products; wield untrammelled power thanks to the strength of their will, the size of their shareholding, or both; and make questionable sartorial choices.

Second, the caretaker: Tim Cook of Apple, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Andy Jassy of Amazon and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, are low-key, sensibly attired hired guns who mostly take great existing products and turn them into fabulous businesses. Hock Tan of Broadcom, which joined the trillion-dollar club on December 13th, does not fit neatly into either category. The company’s market value surged by 40% in a week owing to brighter-than-expected prospects for its line in designing custom artificial-intelligence (AI) microprocessors for clients such as Google and Meta.

This immediately drew comparisons to Mr Huang and Nvidia, whose own AI chips have propelled its market capitalisation to $3.4trn over the past couple of years. Yet Broadcom is, true to its name, much broader than that. And Mr Tan cuts a distinct figure in the world of big tech.

Besides the sexy AI processors, Broadcom sells everything from worthy but dull wireless-networking chips to equally worthy and duller “virtualisation" software for managing company IT systems across in-house servers and the computing cloud. Whereas most other tech titans play up the links between their various units, Broadcom is a proudly disjointed conglomerate. Asked in an interview in 2023 whether he had an overarching strategy for its 23 divisions, Mr