Broadcom CEO likens AI investors to casino gamblers after co-founder sells $750M

At a Monday event, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan described AI investors as gamblers acting “like they are in a casino,” but he made no mention of the fact that his firm’s own co-founder has sold about $750 million of AI stock to such investors this year.

Speaking in Singapore, Tan told attendees that people investing in AI are acting like gamblers who “set very extreme expectations only to find out that it’s almost like they are in a casino.”

He went on to liken AI spending to arcade tokens. “Your parents give you $10 of tokens, you finish it in 10 minutes and you haven’t learned anything,” he said.

Around the same time, Henry Samueli, a Broadcom co-founder and director who chaired the company’s board of directors until June 2026, has been selling stock worth roughly $750 million over the course of the year. If Tan’s casino analogy holds, Samueli has behaved like the house operator raking chips off the table.

This week, Tan was on a panel alongside Intel’s CEO at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference. At that event, he told the audience that many AI investors “have no clue what they are investing in,” according to Bloomberg.

It is lucky, then, that many of the supposedly clueless investors are snapping up AVGO, Broadcom’s Nasdaq-listed common stock, from his co-founder.

Henry Samueli, Broadcom co-founder, reaps gains from AI stock sales

Across 2026, Samueli has submitted three Form 4 filings, each worth approximately $250 million.

A March filing showed 781,967 shares sold at a weighted average price of $319.71 each. He sold 654,241 shares in June at $382.13, followed by 702,190 shares in September at $356.04.

That brings the total to 2,138,398 shares and roughly $750 million in proceeds.

Tan, too, has profited while comparing some of his investors to Las Vegas tourists. On January 6, he sold 70,000 shares personally for more than $24 million.

As Broadcom’s insiders have enriched themselves, ordinary shareholders have trailed their benchmarks.

Broadcom, an AI stock tied closely to AI capital spending, is down 11 percentage points versus the S&P 500 index so far this year and 18 points behind the Nasdaq 100 index.

In its third-quarter earnings report, the company acknowledged that AI semiconductor sales and AI data-center infrastructure accounted for the majority of its total revenue.