I truly believe that reading this text will add a lot to your perspective, just as researching this topic once added a lot to mine. It was through this journey that I found my answer to the question: who really runs the world? Let’s begin.
While working on IoT, I came across this company’s name somewhere. After that, I started seeing it everywhere. The company is called TSMC. Its story runs through the very path that made today’s billionaires billionaires.
When people hear the word “technology,” the same names usually come to mind: Musk, Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg.
All of them were on stage. All of them were in the spotlight.
But very few people know who actually built the stage itself.
Almost all critical technologies in the world pass through a single company: TSMC.
iPhones, AI servers, data centers, supercomputers, even military technologies — at some point, they all depend on this company.
And behind this system stands one man: Morris Chang.
He didn’t launch rockets.
He didn’t smash his own car window with a metal ball on stage.
He didn’t share daily motivational quotes.
He simply thought quietly and saw the future of the industry before everyone else.
In the 1980s, the chip industry believed in one rule: design it yourself, manufacture it yourself.
Morris Chang said the opposite: let others design, we will focus solely on being perfect at manufacturing.
At the time, this idea wasn’t taken seriously.
Today, it is the core model of the entire semiconductor industry. Do you know what a semiconductor is? It’s the chip — the brain of the device you’re using to read this text: CPU, GPU, NAND, and more.
Without this model, Jensen Huang and NVIDIA would not play such a dominant role in today’s AI revolution.
Jensen Huang is on stage, and he fully deserves it.
But the concrete foundation beneath that stage is Morris Chang’s idea.
What surprised me the most, however, is something else.
Morris Chang didn’t just build a company. He created an invisible yet extremely powerful protection mechanism for Taiwan.
Today, what protects Taiwan is not its army, not its weapons, not even its wealth.
What protects Taiwan is the world’s dependence on it.
Touching TSMC means touching the global economy, global technology, and the balance of security itself.
That is one of the smartest forms of defense imaginable.
Elon Musk amazes the world with products.
Steve Jobs wrote history with vision.
Jeff Bezos changed the rules of commerce.
Mark Zuckerberg reshaped how people communicate.
But for all these ideas to function in the real world, a foundation was needed.
That foundation was TSMC.
For me, the ideal businessperson is not the loudest or the most visible one.
It’s the person who stands at the most critical point and keeps the system alive.
Personally, I consider Morris Chang greater than all the “flashy tech billionaires.”
Because he didn’t play the game. He wrote the rules of the game.
While writing this, I realized something important: the issue is not thinking about tomorrow, next month, or next year. That’s not true foresight — that’s self-deception.
Real foresight is creating the ground on which the path itself can be built.