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Henry Samueli
Status
Born in 1954 (age –). Living in California (Newport Beach).
Criminal status: Pleaded guilty in June 2008 to lying to the SEC during its investigation of Broadcom's stock options-backdating scheme. Ahead of sentencing, Samueli wrote a letter of apology to the judge taking full responsibility. The trial judge rejected the plea in September 2008, and in December 2009 dismissed the case entirely, finding Samueli had not made a material misstatement to the SEC.
Summary
Henry Samueli co-founded Broadcom Corporation in 1991 with his UCLA doctoral student Henry Nicholas, building the company into a leading semiconductor supplier before its 2016 acquisition by Avago Technologies, which took the Broadcom name. He served as Chairman of the Board of the combined company from December 2018 until stepping down in June 2026, and remains a director.
Samueli and his wife Susan bought the NHL's Anaheim Ducks (then the Mighty Ducks) from the Walt Disney Company in 2005; the team won the Stanley Cup in 2007. He is a named inventor on more than 75 US patents and received the 2025 IEEE Medal of Honor for his pioneering work in broadband communications technology.
Ownership
Samueli holds roughly 2% of Broadcom Inc.'s outstanding stock, according to Forbes, and has continued selling shares under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, including a $250 million sale in June 2026. He chaired Broadcom's board from December 2018 to June 2026, presiding over the board that unanimously approved the company's $61 billion acquisition of VMware in 2022. That deal has since drawn an EU antitrust complaint from European cloud providers and a UK High Court lawsuit from Tesco alleging price increases of up to 350% on products covered by a 2021 perpetual-license contract.
Family & Heirs
Samueli is married to Susan Samueli, a former IBM systems engineer who later trained in integrative and homeopathic medicine; the couple have three children and co-own the Anaheim Ducks and direct the Samueli Foundation together.
Evidence
2008-05-14 - 😈 - SEC charges Samueli, along with Broadcom's CEO, CFO, and general counsel, with participating in a five-year scheme to secretly backdate stock options
2011-12-01 - 😇 - Henry and Susan Samueli sign the Giving Pledge, committing to give away the majority of their wealth
2017-03-24 - 😇 - Samueli Foundation gives $20 million to UCLA's engineering school to fund scholarships and internships expanding diversity among undergraduates
2023-04-27 - 😇 - Broadcom Foundation grant funds a Wikipedia project spotlighting underrepresented women and scientists of color in STEM
2023-06-05 - 😇 - Susan and Henry Samueli give $50 million to UC Irvine to establish three Engineering+ research institutes spanning health, society, and environment
2025-05-08 - 😇 - Samueli donates his $2 million IEEE Medal of Honor prize to fund a permanent endowment for IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu student leadership development
2026-07-09 - 😇 - Samueli Foundation awards $15 million to 89 Orange County nonprofits in the second year of its Breakaway and Build OC Funds
Analysis
Samueli's most severe personal legal exposure, a 2008 guilty plea for lying to the SEC about Broadcom's options-backdating scheme, did not hold up: the trial judge rejected the plea and later dismissed the case outright, finding no material misstatement had been made. Even so, he personally forfeited $24.3 million in stock options and paid $2.3 million into the Broadcom Foundation in a related 2011 shareholder settlement over the same backdating scheme, a real financial consequence independent of the vacated criminal case. Ahead of that sentencing, he had also personally written to the judge accepting full responsibility for lying to the SEC.
As Broadcom's board chairman from 2018 to 2026, Samueli presided over both an FTC monopolization complaint over exclusive-dealing chip contracts and the board's approval of the $61 billion VMware acquisition, which was followed by price increases of 2x to 12x for enterprise customers and a documented drop in customer engagement at the company's own user conference. That fallout has escalated into an EU antitrust complaint over Broadcom's termination of most VMware cloud-provider partnerships in Europe and a UK High Court suit from Tesco alleging Broadcom demanded price increases of up to 350% in breach of a 2021 contract. Against this, Samueli and his wife are Giving Pledge signatories who have directed nine-figure sums to engineering and health-sciences education at UCLA and UC Irvine, funded STEM-diversity programs through the Broadcom Foundation, redirected personal recognition such as his $2 million IEEE Medal of Honor prize into further education funding, in 2026 doubled down with a $50 million follow-on gift to an Israeli cancer research institute they first funded in 2023, and through the Samueli Foundation awarded $15 million to 89 Orange County nonprofits in 2026.
Questions
Samueli's guilty plea being thrown out by a federal judge who found he committed no crime raises the question of how much weight a vacated criminal admission should carry against the separate, undisputed financial forfeiture he made in the related civil settlement. Separately, the FTC monopolization case, the VMware price increases, and the resulting EU complaint and Tesco lawsuit were company-level actions taken under CEO Hock Tan's operational leadership, though Samueli chaired the board that approved the underlying acquisition and benefited materially as a large shareholder until stepping down as chairman in June 2026.