The Penang boy who built a RM6.7 trillion empire

There is a particular breed of corporate titans that the world loves to celebrate. The loud ones. The ones who tweet at midnight, pick fights with regulators and name their children after algebra. Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg. Jensen Huang.

Tan Hock Eng is not one of those people.

And yet, the boy from Penang who left Malaysia on a scholarship more than five decades ago now runs a company worth over RM6.7 trillion. That is more than three times Malaysia’s entire gross domestic product (GDP).

He is, by almost any measure, the most powerful Malaysian-born executive in the history of the technology industry.

And most Malaysians have never heard of him.

Tan, or Hock Tan as he is better known, was born in Penang in 1951. His upbringing was modest, a far cry from the gilded childhoods of many Silicon Valley chieftains.

Details about his early years are scarce, but what is known is that he was bright enough to earn a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in…