Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
When Lisa Su became CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) A decade ago, it hardly resembled a multibillion-dollar company.
AMD stock was languishing around $3 a share. The company had cut around 25% of its workforce, according to the Time. But under Su’s leadership, the chipmaker has thrived: today, AMD has a market capitalization of 205.95 billion dollars and its stock trades at about $127 per share.
Su was named Time’s CEO of the year for 2024 on Tuesday, and the 55-year-old’s net worth has soared alongside AMD’s success, to $1.3 billion. Dear Forbes in April By comparison, Su received a base salary of $1 million and a performance-based bonus of $1.2 million in 2014 when he took over as CEO, the Seattle Times reported in 2020.
Born in Taiwan, Su immigrated to the United States with her parents at age 3 so her father, a mathematician, could attend graduate school in New York. Growing up, “my dad would ask me questions with math tables on the dining room table,” she said Forbes last year “That’s how I first got into math.”
Su was initially not interested in following in her father’s footsteps into a STEM career. As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming a concert musician, she said: “I wasn’t good enough to do it, so I became an engineer.”
DON’T MISS: The Ultimate Guide to Earning Passive Income Online
He earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and spent his early career working in various roles at Texas Instruments and IBM in the 1990s, both major technology companies at the time. .
“I was very lucky early in my career,” Su told Time. “Every couple of years, I did something different.”
In 2012, Su was hired at AMD as senior vice president and general manager of the company’s global business units, according to your LinkedIn profile. Two years later, she was promoted to CEO, becoming the first woman to lead AMD since the company was founded in 1969.
“I felt like I was training for the opportunity to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry,” he said. “And AMD was my chance.”
Playing the long game
Su is one of the few Fortune 500 CEOs with a Ph.D. Her engineering background helped her lead some of the technological innovations, including a new, faster CPU chip for computers, that fueled AMD’s recent success.
Friends and colleagues describe her as a “shrewd strategist,” and sometimes she hold meetings on weekends and expect employees to work past midnightreported the weather. Their high expectations may make it difficult for people to survive AMD in the long term, Patrick Moorhead, a technology industry analyst and former AMD executive, told the magazine.
That could be by design: “I don’t think leaders are born. I think leaders are made,” Su said.
Upon becoming CEO, Su promoted a three-pronged plan to help AMD compete with its rivals Intel i NvidiaInformed time: sell only high-quality products, deepen customer trust and simplify business operations. The long-term plan took time to pay dividends, but by 2022, AMD surpassed Intel in both market value and annual revenue.
Nvidia, on the other hand, isn’t just the world’s largest chipmaker, it is recently surpassed Apple as the most valuable public company in the world. But Su measures success in decades, not quarters, he said.
“When you invest in a new area, it’s a five- to 10-year arc to really build all the different pieces,” Su said. “The thing about our business is that everything takes time.”
Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to earn passive income online to learn about common passive income streams, tips for getting started, and real-life success stories.
In addition, sign up for the CNBC Make It newsletter for tips and tricks to succeed at work, with money and in life.
