Hailed as a once-in-a-generation tech visionary, Jensen Huang, CEO of chip producer Nvidia, can add a brand new feather to his cap: He’s the 24th-richest man in the world. It’s laborious to overlook the information about his firm, the semiconductor producer that has simply leapfrogged Google in market cap.
The corporate’s inventory has soared 409% since final 12 months. After its 12 months finish earnings name on Wednesday, Nvidia’s worth rose $250 billion in a single day, topping Meta’s $197 billion rise from earlier this month as the most important such day by day improve. On its year-end earnings name Wednesday, Nvidia crushed analyst expectations, setting off a frenzy amongst Wall Avenue buyers and Silicon Valley analysts. Nvidia reported $22.1 billion revenue within the fourth quarter of 2023, roughly $1.7 billion greater than anticipated.
Goldman Sachs simply known as Nvidia “the most important stock on planet earth.” However who’s the person main the runaway trillion-dollar agency in his signature moto leather-based jacket?
{The electrical} engineer and former busboy
Huang, who turned 61 earlier this week, was born in Taiwan and, at age 9, was despatched along with his brother to dwell with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington. The next 12 months, Huang moved as soon as extra to rural Oneida, Kentucky, the place he lived in an all-boys dorm on the Oneida Baptist Institute—a non secular reform academy his uncle mistakenly believed was a boarding faculty.
Huang’s mother and father finally joined him and his brother within the U.S., and the household settled outdoors Portland, the place Huang went to highschool, performed aggressive tennis and graduated two years early—at age 16. In line with a New Yorker profile from 2023, Huang briefly labored as a dishwasher at Denny’s. He earned his undergraduate diploma in electrical engineering from Oregon State College, after which a grasp’s in the identical discipline from Stanford.
After a number of years working in engineering, together with as a microprocessor designer, Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 at one other roadside Denny’s in East San Jose—whereas consuming, not whereas serving. Huang was 30 on the time, and he and his cofounders, mates and fellow microchip designers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, had just $40,000 within the financial institution between them, however they had been armed with a prescient sense of what was to return in computing.
“We believed this model of computing could solve problems that general-purpose computing fundamentally couldn’t,” Huang told Fortune in 2017. “We also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Those two conditions don’t happen very often. Video games were our killer app—a flywheel to reach large markets funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems.”
Nvidia shortly grabbed $20 million in VC funding, together with from Sequoia Capital, and he’s the uncommon tech founder who’s remained on the helm of his firm steadily since its inception. “I’ve been talking about the same story for 15 years,” Huang stated in 2017, to reporter Andrew Nusca. “I’ve barely had to change my slides.”
Management philosophy
Huang’s approachability and decency has most likely added to his longevity at Nvidia. In 2010, Huang informed the New York Times he defines good leaders primarily based on authenticity. “They don’t dress like a CEO because they think that’s what CEOs dress like. They don’t talk like CEOs because that’s the way they think CEOs talk,” he stated. “They don’t conduct their meetings and expect people to treat them like CEOs because that’s the way they think CEOs are supposed to be treated. They are just who they are.”
Nvidia’s enterprise has been turbocharged by the AI growth that’s taken over the worldwide tech business. The corporate makes lots of the essential chips that present the computing energy wanted to run the fashions that underpin AI instruments. Nvidia offers the constructing blocks for what some take into account to be among the many most vital developments within the historical past of tech—and it joined the trillion-dollar club final June.
Nvidia’s historic inventory rally is probably the instance par excellence of the outdated investing adage that to become profitable in a gold rush one ought to promote shovels and pickaxes. Nvidia is very fortunate that it has a seemingly insurmountable lead on the opposite proverbial shovel-makers.
Distinctive management type
Then there’s Huang himself. Per Fortune’s 2017 profile, the billionaire doesn’t even hold a desk—a lot much less a nook workplace—opting as a substitute to roam round his constructing, working in any variety of convention rooms he passes. He additionally has a big arm tattoo resembling his firm’s emblem, which he received within the mid-2000s on a dare from his workers as soon as the corporate’s inventory worth hit $100. (Tattoos and leather-based jackets are welcome at Nvidia’s places of work, the place workers tenure is unusually lengthy and bonds are tight-knit.)
The inventory is inching nearer to $800 nowadays, however don’t count on one other tattoo on its formidable founder-CEO. As he informed Nusca in 2017, getting the corporate emblem shoulder tattoo made him “cry like a baby.”
