Hock Tan, the Broadcom CEO who came from Penang on a scholarship, unwinds with John Wick and monster movies

Hock Tan has led Broadcom for 20 years, turning it into a company whose chips carry the Wi-Fi in your phone and move the data behind artificial intelligence. For much of his time as CEO the company was based in San Jose, and it still has three sites in the city.

Away from work, Tan is a self-made man with a sharp wit, a gift for gratitude and a soft spot for action movies. Asked in June what he watches to unwind, he said:  “What people would call junk or trash. I love to watch, for instance, John Wick.”

He also loves “great monster movies,” he told Capital Group’s Capital Ideas podcast, and he agreed with the host that he reads mostly fiction. The movies, he said with a laugh, let him “totally decompartmentalize.”

The skinny kid from Penang

Tan grew up in Penang, Malaysia. Looking back in June, he called his childhood “very, very stable and fulfilling,” with his extended family close by. It gave him, he said, “a good foundation to make that leap 10,000 miles to Boston.”

His parents could not afford college. In 1971 he won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He told that story in the Oval Office in November 2017, and he got a laugh. “My mother could never have imagined that one day her son will be here in the Oval Office,” Tan began. President Donald Trump cut in:  “And my mother too.” The room laughed, the White House transcript shows.

“Back in 1971, I was just an 18-year-old skinny kid, growing up in Malaysia,” Tan went on. “It’s really amazing to me, even today, that this great American educational institution took a chance on me, sight unseen.”

He made the most of that chance. He finished a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering in the same year, 1975, MIT says. He found a mentor and friend in engineering professor Nam P. Suh. Forty years later, in 2015, Tan gave MIT $4 million to create a professorship named for Suh. “Professor Suh was an inspiration to me, as well as a friend,” he said. He then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1979.

He could have taken a very different road. The podcast host noted that Tan once had a path to become a doctor. Tan’s advice to young people today is to skip chasing trends or the biggest paycheck:  “Figure out what you like to do and what you’re good at doing, and just do it.” When the host brought up the doctor path, Tan laughed. “I know. That’s why I say.”

A world tour of jobs

Tan’s early career zigzagged across the globe. He held finance jobs at General Motors and PepsiCo. He ran Hume Industries in Malaysia from 1983 to 1988 and then a venture capital fund in Singapore until 1992, according to Broadcom. Next came Commodore International, maker of the Commodore 64 home computer, where he was vice president of finance. In 1994 he joined Integrated Circuit Systems, a Pennsylvania chipmaker, and he became its CEO in 1999.

Along the way, he became a U.S. citizen, in 1990. In June, the Andrew Carnegie Foundation named him one of 25 “Great Immigrants, Great Americans” for the nation’s 250th year. Two other Bay Area tech leaders made the list:  Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks and Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare.

Focused, blunt and funny

People who meet Tan notice his discipline first. He showed up early for his podcast taping, the host pointed out. Tan put it his own way:  “You call it discipline, I call it intensely, maybe obsessively, focused.”

He is blunt, and he is funny about it. Asked who should take charge of folding a newly bought company into Broadcom, he answered his own question:  “Me.” Hiring consultants and forming committees for the job, he said, is “pure” nonsense, though the word he used was saltier.

His rule for picking fights is just as plain. Stick to markets where you already lead and keep investing, he said. Charge into a market where someone else already leads, he said with a laugh, and you waste money and get your rear end kicked, though again his word was saltier. “So just avoid distractions.”

Asked what advice he gives 25-year-olds, he seemed surprised by the question. “Not too many people ask me,” he said.

Giving to autism research

Tan’s biggest cause is helping people with autism and other brain disorders. With his former wife, Lisa Yang, a former investment banker and disability advocate, he gave MIT $20 million in 2017 to start the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research. In 2020 they gave MIT $28 million more for a center that develops precise, gene-based treatments for brain disorders. MIT said that brought their giving to the school to more than $72 million.

The couple also gave Harvard Medical School $20 million in 2019 for a sister autism center, and Cornell University $10 million in 2015 for an institute that helps people with disabilities find work. Work at the MIT autism center helped create a gene therapy for Phelan-McDermid syndrome, a severe form of autism. It is now being tested in children, the center says.

Broadcom’s San Jose roots

Broadcom’s story runs through North San Jose. In March 2006, Tan became CEO of Avago Technologies, the chip business that investors had just bought from Agilent Technologies, the Hewlett-Packard spinoff. Avago ran its U.S. operations from West Trimble Road in San Jose, and Tan signed its federal securities filings in the city, SEC records show.

Avago bought Broadcom Corp. in 2016 and took its name. When Tan announced at the White House in 2017 that Broadcom would move its legal home from Singapore to the United States, he called it “making America home again.” By 2018 the company’s headquarters was 1320 Ridder Park Drive in San Jose, where it had just finished building a campus, its annual report shows.

Broadcom now lists its headquarters on Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto. It still has three San Jose sites, on Ridder Park Drive, Fox Drive and Innovation Drive. It also has a site in Penang, Tan’s home state.

Why Broadcom matters

Most people use Broadcom’s work every day without knowing it. Its chips filter and boost the radio signals in smartphones, and its combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips connect phones, tablets and watches, its annual report says. Its chips run cable and satellite TV boxes and home internet gear. Its VMware software, which lets one server act like many computers, helps businesses run their own private clouds.

Its newest work is custom AI chips. Instead of selling the same chip to everyone, Broadcom designs each one with a single customer for that customer’s AI systems. Its networking chips tie together the huge data centers that train AI. In October, Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, lined up $63 billion in financing to lease Broadcom AI equipment. “The need for AI compute continues to grow at an extraordinary pace,” Tan said.

Broadcom’s board wants him to stay. A stock award his directors approved in 2025 was meant to “secure Mr. Tan’s continued leadership through fiscal 2030,” the company’s proxy statement says. He won the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s top leadership award in 2024, and he has served on the board of Meta Platforms, the Menlo Park parent of Facebook and Instagram, since 2024.

Still learning

Broadcom’s March proxy statement listed Tan’s age as 74, and he shows no sign of slowing down. As he signed the podcast’s guest book in June, he offered a motto:  “Learning and longevity matters.” Then he added one more piece of advice:  “Stick around.”

Source:  Capital Group, Capital Ideas podcast with Hock Tan (June 11, 2026); White House transcript, Nov. 2, 2017; Broadcom Inc. 2026 proxy statement, fiscal 2025 annual report, fiscal 2018 annual report, Anthropic financing release, executive biography and office locations; Avago Technologies SEC filing, 2013; Andrew Carnegie Foundation; MIT News, 2015, 2017 and 2020; MIT Yang Tan Collective; Harvard Gazette; Meta Platforms 2026 proxy statement; Wikipedia.