The brothers' 24% stake in the U.S.-listed company, together with proceeds from dividends and stock sales, has given them a combined net worth of $1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is valuing them for the first time.

In an interview with a Taiwanese media outlet in 2022, Jordan said Himax began investing in automotive display chips about two decades ago, when screens were uncommon in vehicles and the company had limited resources.

Today, "there are very few automakers that don't use our products in some form," he said, as quoted by Bloomberg. "Looking back, it was nothing short of a miracle."

The company says it holds a 40% share of the global automotive display chip market and counts Ferrari, Volkswagen and Porsche among its customers.

Jordan Wu, founder and CEO of Himax Technologies. Photo courtesy of Himax

Himax spokeswoman Karen Tiao said those early investments helped the company build a competitive advantage in the automotive display sector. She said the company's current focus on smart glasses, artificial intelligence and co-packaged optics follows the same long-term approach. Co-packaged optics is a technology designed to increase data-transfer capacity in data centers while reducing power consumption.

Biing-seng, 69, earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan in 1985. He later joined the Industrial Technology Research Institute, where he led Taiwan's early efforts to develop thin-film transistor liquid-crystal displays, or TFT-LCDs, a flat-panel display technology widely used in electronic devices. He also helped establish Taiwan's first manufacturing plant for the technology.

He later joined Chimei Optoelectronics and helped build it into one of Taiwan's leading display manufacturers.

Jordan, 66, earned an MBA from the University of Rochester, U.K, and worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch and Barclays before moving into the technology industry.

The brothers founded Himax in 2001 using their own capital before securing venture funding. Several former Chimei employees joined the startup, while Chimei became one of its earliest customers.

Jordan became CEO in 2005 and Biing-seng became chairman. Himax went public on the Nasdaq in 2006, raising $468 million.

In 2013, Alphabet, then known as Google, acquired a 6% stake in Himax Display, a subsidiary of Himax Technologies.

Today, Himax employs about 2,200 people, more than 90% of whom are engineers, according to the company. It operates offices in Taiwan, China, South Korea and the U.S. and follows a fabless business model, outsourcing chip production to external manufacturers.