They are hardly distantly related.
In terms of shared genes, it's surely less consequential than having a lineage deeply-rooted in the same city/region.
Jensen's grandfather - who he likely visited often given their culture - was Lisa Su's great grandfather (and she also likely visited her great grandfather). In an Asian family, it would be entirely normal for 3 generations to even live in the same house, so one might even grow up with the grandparents. I doubt this line of wealthy people needed to do that though.
According to the article, he had
12 kids. Unless you lived in a giant compound, that would be a madhouse to have all 3 generations there.
Jensen would be one of Su's mothers first cousins. I know all of my first cousins, met them many many times when I was younger.
My mom talks about her cousins, sometimes, though I sort of doubt she keeps in touch with all of them. I barely remember my dad ever mentioning his cousins. He has 5 siblings, though. Maybe, when you have more siblings, you don't focus so much on your cousins.
What I wonder is this:
if Jensen had 11 aunts and uncles, on his maternal side alone, how many cousins did he have?? Could you possibly even keep track of like 30 cousins, much less their kids??
I find it almost 100% certain that these two met each other at family events long before they became CEOs of the only two relevant GPU companies in the world (discounting Intel, for now).
Did you see the part of the article where their families moved to different states in the US, when they were little? How many family events do you think they were both at? Again, we're talking about their shared ancestor having 12 kids and the extended family being split across continents. Flying an entire family between US and Taiwan surely wasn't cheap!
So Lisa Su and Jensen Huang are quite closely related for them to occupy the positions they hold in 'competing' companies.
Yeah, it's an interesting coincidence. However, if you read their career histories, it really doesn't seem like any more than that. They both started as engineers. Lisa seemed to stay on that technical track much longer than Jensen.
I can't imagine AMD's board even
considering their relationship, when deciding to make her CEO. I'd be very surprised if they even knew, because probably almost nobody had even heard of her, before she got the job. So, it's not something probably anyone even looked into.
Greatness tends to run in families, for all sorts of reasons. When you find someone extremely accomplished in their field, they often have a couple high-performing siblings in other fields. That they happened to be in the same field isn't that surprising (for reasons I mentioned above), nor is the success they had.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram