“Let me tell you, my mother could never have imagined that one day, her son, would be here in the Oval Office in the White House, standing beside the president of the United States,” said Hock E. Tan, the chief executive officer of Broadcom, a Fortune 500 company employing more than 15,000 workers, half of them in the US.
As he spoke, Trump, holding Tan’s shoulders from behind, interrupted: “And my mother, too!”, drawing laughter from those present.
In his speech, the 65-year-old Tan, who was born in Penang, briefly recollected his days as a teenager in Malaysia before he received an offer to pursue his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“Back in 1971, I was just an 18-year-old skinny kid growing up in Malaysia, but who had just received an opportunity to enrol in the best engineering school in America, in fact in the world, MIT,” he said.
Tan said he was lucky to have gone through the American education system.
“My parents could not have afforded to send me to college, much less MIT. It’s really amazing even today, that this American educational institution took a chance on me, and gave me a scholarship to pursue the American dream,” said Tan.
Tan said by moving Broadcom’s headquarters back to the US, it was his way of giving “back to this country which I have received so much from”.
“Today we are announcing that we are making America home again,” he added.
In 2015, Tan who headed Singapore-based Avago Technologies Ltd, bought Broadcom Corp for US$37 billion, making it the largest tech acquisition in history, dwarfing even the Whatsapp-Facebook deal worth US$22 billion.
Broadcom makes chips for modems, television set-top boxes, Wifi, and data centre switches.
The company is a major supplier to Apple Inc., and has its origins from Hewlett-Packard.
According to Bloomberg, Tan’s desire to seek more deals could face hindrance from US regulators.