Do we like them?

Do we like Morris Chang?

Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up, but the record on how he treats people is thin, so this is a cautious middle-to-good score.

Morris Chang was born in Ningbo, China, in 1931. War kept the family on the move, and in 1948, in the middle of the Chinese Civil War, he left for the United States to study. He started at Harvard at 18, then moved to MIT for his bachelor's and master's degrees. He did not pass his doctoral exams.

He spent about 25 years in American chipmaking, mostly at Texas Instruments, where he rose to group vice president over its worldwide semiconductor business. Caixin reports he left in 1983 after a demotion as TI shifted toward consumer products. Not a bad bit of fuel for a second act.

That second act was in Taiwan. He ran the government's Industrial Technology Research Institute from 1985 and pitched a radical idea: a company that only makes chips for other firms. Major US chipmakers knocked it back, but TSMC was registered in 1987 with funding mainly from the Taiwan government and Philips. Intel's 1988 order proved the model, and TSMC held about 70 per cent of the global foundry market by mid-2025, per Caixin.

On the harm check, we found nothing: no quoted remarks against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or science, no conspiracy talk and no run of work with people who push harm. That comes with a caveat, because he is a famously private, business-focused figure and the English-language record of his personal views is thin. We are reporting what turned up, not claiming we know what he thinks.

The recent noise is about him rather than from him. When Trump told Fox News's Bret Baier that Taiwan “stole our chip industry”, commentators pointed out that TSMC was built by a Chinese-born US citizen with a quarter-century at Texas Instruments. Moneywise's piece carried no direct quotes from Chang, so we won't put words in his mouth.

On the good-person side we found no court losses, no accusations that stuck and no staff horror stories in what we could read, but also not much detail on charity or on how he treats people day to day. Caixin's profile mentions quality problems and a lost Apple contract, which are business bumps, not character flaws. We'd call that a clean-ish sheet with gaps.