Hailed as a once-in-a-generation tech visionary, Jensen Huang, CEO of chip manufacturer Nvidia, can add a contemporary feather to his cap: He’s the Twenty fourth-richest man on this planet. It’s hard to miss the news about his company, the semiconductor manufacturer that has just leapfrogged Google in market cap.
The company’s stock has soared 409% since last yr. After its year-end earnings call on Wednesday, Nvidia’s value rose $250 billion in a single day, topping Meta’s $197 billion rise from earlier this month as an important such every day increase. On its year-end earnings call Wednesday, Nvidia crushed analyst expectations, setting off a frenzy amongst Wall Street investors and Silicon Valley analysts. Nvidia reported $22.1 billion revenue inside the fourth quarter of 2023, roughly $1.7 billion greater than expected.
Goldman Sachs just called Nvidia “crucial stock on planet earth.” But who’s the person leading the runaway trillion-dollar firm in his signature moto leather jacket?
The electrical engineer and former busboy
Huang, who turned 61 earlier this week, was born in Taiwan and, at age 9, was sent together along with his brother to live with an uncle in Tacoma. The subsequent yr, Huang moved another time, to rural Oneida, Ky., where he lived in an all-boys dorm on the Oneida Baptist Institute—a religious reform academy his uncle mistakenly believed was a boarding school.
Huang’s parents eventually joined him and his brother inside the U.S., and the family settled outside Portland, Ore., where Huang went to highschool, played competitive tennis, and graduated two years early—at age 16. According to a Latest Yorker profile from 2023, Huang briefly worked as a dishwasher at Denny’s. He earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University, after which a master’s within the similar field from Stanford.
After several years working in engineering, including as a microprocessor designer, Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 at one other roadside Denny’s in East San Jose—while eating, not serving. Huang was 30 on the time, and he and his cofounders, friends and fellow microchip designers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, had just $40,000 inside the bank between them, but they were armed with a keen sense of what was to can be found 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 concurrently probably essentially the most computationally difficult problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Those two conditions don’t occur fairly often. Video games were our killer app—a flywheel to attain large markets funding huge R&D to unravel massive computational problems.”
Nvidia quickly grabbed $20 million in VC funding, including from Sequoia Capital, and he’s the rare tech founder who’s remained on the helm of his company steadily since its inception. “I’ve been talking with regard to the identical story for 15 years,” Huang said in 2017, to reporter Andrew Nusca. “I’ve barely had to differ my slides.”
Leadership philosophy
Huang’s approachability and decency has probably added to his longevity at Nvidia. In 2010, Huang told the Latest York Times he defines good leaders 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 best way through which they think CEOs talk,” he said. “They don’t conduct their meetings and expect people to treat them like CEOs because that’s the best way through which they think CEOs are alleged to be treated. They’re only who they’re.”
Nvidia’s business has been turbocharged by the AI boom that’s taken over the worldwide tech industry. The company makes a lot of the critical chips that provide the computing power needed to run the models that underpin AI tools. Nvidia provides the constructing blocks for what some consider to be amongst essentially essentially the most significant developments inside the history of tech—and it joined the trillion-dollar club last June.
Nvidia’s historic stock rally might be the instance par excellence of the old investing adage that to turn into profitable in a gold rush one should sell shovels and pickaxes. Nvidia is especially lucky in that it has a seemingly insurmountable lead on the other proverbial shovel-makers.
Unique leadership style
Then there’s Huang himself. Per Fortune’s 2017 profile, the billionaire doesn’t even keep a desk—much less a corner office—opting as a substitute for roam around his constructing, working in any number of conference rooms he passes. He also has a giant arm tattoo resembling his company’s logo, which he got inside the mid-2000s on a dare from his staff once the company’s stock price hit $100. (Tattoos and leather jackets are welcome at Nvidia’s offices, where staff tenure is unusually long and bonds are tight-knit.)
Nvidia stock is inching closer to $800 today, but don’t expect one other tattoo on its formidable cofounder-CEO. As he told Fortune’s Nusca in 2017: Getting the company logo on his shoulder made him “cry like a baby.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com