TSMC's founder retired at 87, calling his dual-leadership design his most important gift

Morris Chang worked at Texas Instruments, headed Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute, and founded TSMC in 1987 at age 55, inventing the pure-play foundry model. Over three decades he built it into the world's biggest contract chipmaker — $29.4B of sales in 2016 and a key Apple supplier — earning the title 'godfather' of Taiwan's semiconductor industry.

In October 2017 Chang, then 86, announced he would retire after the June 2018 shareholders' meeting and hand the reins to a dual-leadership system: co-CEO Mark Liu would become chairman and co-CEO C.C. Wei would become chief executive. The two had run TSMC as co-CEOs since 2013. 'This is my last and probably the most important contribution to the company,' Chang told reporters, saying he had formed the dual-leadership decision gradually after deciding to retire at the start of that year.

The handover landed without market alarm: analysts noted TSMC had a clear roadmap focused on AI and high-performance computing, and the announcement came alongside continued expansion, including a $3B plant in Nanjing and a new advanced fab in southern Taiwan. Chang retired in June 2018, and the Liu-Wei pairing — designed to balance corporate governance against execution — carried the company through the pandemic-era capacity boom.

A founder exit with zero succession drama: Liu and Wei ran TSMC from 2018 through the pandemic boom, and in 2023 the board promoted Wei to add the chairman's seat.

Chang announced eight months before the annual shareholders' meeting, giving markets and staff time to absorb the change rather than waking up to a vacancy.

He had already run a six-year audition: Liu and Wei served as co-CEOs from 2013, so the 2018 split promoted two proven insiders instead of anointing a single favorite.

Splitting chairman and CEO between the two heirs avoided choosing between them, removing the rivalry that derails most founder successions.

Chang framed the structure as his final act of design — 'my last and probably the most important contribution' — signaling that the system, not any individual, was the plan.

An essentially unchanged board supervised the transition, as Chang had planned, keeping institutional memory and the founder's standards in place after his exit.

A founder's last product is the succession system itself. Chang split the crown between two able co-CEOs instead of picking one — six stable years proved the design before the board rebalanced it.

The dual structure held from June 2018 through the chip boom, with Liu handling board governance and Wei running the company through the pandemic capacity bet and record years. In December 2023 TSMC announced Liu would retire the following year and the board recommended Wei — by then CEO and vice-chairman — to succeed him as chairman, completing the consolidation into a single leader. Chang remained the senior statesman of Taiwan's chip industry after leaving office.