Lisa Su, the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, has built one of the world’s most valuable companies and made investors billions — but is barely a billionaire herself.
She has delivered a 70-fold increase in her company’s stock price during her 11 years in charge, including a 41% surge this week to fresh highs thanks to its OpenAI partnership. The chipmaker’s market value has soared to $378 billion, surpassing Home Depot, Bank of America, and Procter & Gamble.
Yet Su doesn’t rank among the world’s 500 richest people, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Forbes puts her net worth at $1.5 billion — less than 1% of the $167 billion fortune of her rival and distant cousin, Jensen Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia.
There is one big difference: Huang cofounded Nvidia, while AMD was established in 1969 by a group of engineers who had left Fairchild Semiconductor. One of them, Jerry Sanders, served as CEO until 2002.
AMD filings show Su has amassed about 4.7 million shares or a 0.3% stake, worth about $1.1 billion based on the company’s stock price ahead of Friday’s market open. Her compensation, including salary, bonuses, and stock options, totaled around $31 million last year, per the filings.
Su’s small ownership stake is the main reason she’s not worth more.
For comparison, Huang still owns close to a 4% stake in Nvidia, which is worth upward of $160 billion despite significant dilution over the years. Nvidia is also about 12 times larger than AMD, with an unmatched $4.7 trillion market capitalization.
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Oracle’s $847 billion market value is a little over double AMD’s figure, but cofounder Larry Ellison owns nearly 41% of the enterprise-software giant — a roughly $350 billion stake that makes him the world’s second-wealthiest man after Elon Musk on both Bloomberg and Forbes’ rich lists.
The difference in size between Su’s fortune and theirs underscores that founding a company, and retaining a large stake in it, is the most common path to enormous wealth.
Seven of the top 10 people on Bloomberg’s list are founders, and two, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett, shaped their companies, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway, in their respective images as much as any founder.
Steve Ballmer, who joined Microsoft as Bill Gates’ assistant in 1980 and later became CEO, is a rare exception because he parlayed a quirk in his contract into a sizable equity stake.
AMD stock has almost doubled this year as investors buy into Su’s vision of building an AI hardware, software, and services ecosystem.
Su isn’t likely to crack the top 10 of the rich list soon, but if her shares keep soaring, she could be worth billions more.
