Jensen Huang is on a rocket ship to overtake Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, thanks to the explosive stock price of Nvidia, the computer chip manufacturer he founded and is CEO of.
The Silicon Valley company makes the advanced chips that power artificial intelligence, making it the world’s most popular commodity and contributing to the exponential growth in Huang’s net worth.
Mr. Huang, 61, is currently worth $68.6 billion. According to Forbesmore than double what he was worth last February, and 25 times what he was worth in 2017, the first time he was recorded as a billionaire.
This impressive growth has led to comparisons with Mr. Musk, in part because he relies on Nvidia chips to power his artificial intelligence projects. Like Twitter and his SpaceX owner, Huang is an immigrant, not to mention a fan of Tesla, whose technology company has the potential to change our lives. But Nvidia is worth three times as much as Tesla.
But his true role model may be another Silicon Valley titan, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Like Jobs, Mr. Huang wears a signature rock-star-style leather jacket and black pants every day, and his company has a distinctive campus. Santa’s 1.2 million square foot headquarters in Clara is modeled after the Star Trek starship Voyager.
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And like Jobs, he lives to work. “He didn’t do anything other than Apple,” a Silicon Valley source said. “The same goes for Mr. Huang.”
But his rise is even more astonishing than that of other tech billionaires. Mr. Huang was sent to the United States by his parents because he could not speak English at just nine years old, worked at Denny’s during the summer, and it took eight years to earn his master’s degree.
A source who has known Mr. Hwang for decades said the “grit and resilience” that made him one of the world’s richest men in his 60s came from his experience as an immigrant.
Fan was born in Taiwan as Jeng Shun (anglicized as Jensen) and spent his childhood in Thailand.
However, his father fell in love with America during a trip to New York, and his parents, “determined to raise a family in this great country,” sent him and his older brother to live with his uncle and aunt. he said. Before they came, in Tacoma, Washington.
Wanting to provide an education for their nephew, they enrolled him in what they believed to be a prestigious boarding school, Oneida Baptist Institute.
In fact, it was a school in Kentucky that focused on troubled youth. Huang scrubbed the toilet and confronted the bullies with a pocket knife, he said in an interview with Wired.
But he “loved it” and it was a “lucky vacation” to be there, he said. He told the Class of 2020: At the opening ceremony speech.
His parents arrived in the Pacific Northwest and settled outside of Portland, Oregon, where he got his first job washing dishes at a Denny’s at the age of 15 and worked there every summer for many years. Ta. “It’s a great career choice. I highly recommend starting your first job in the restaurant industry. The restaurant industry teaches you humility and hard work.”
Huang chose Oregon State University in part because of its low in-state tuition, and was paired with Lori Mills, one of the only female students in the electrical engineering department. He called it his “second big chance in life.” They have been married for over 30 years.
He started working at a semiconductor company immediately after graduation, but by his own admission, it wasn’t a fast track to the top. He spent eight years part-time earning his master’s degree at Stanford University.
Then, on Thanksgiving 1993, he and two colleagues, Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem, met at a Denny’s in the South Bay.He is ate super birdHe called it a “great sandwich…bacon is the best” and they sketched plans for their chip company on napkins.
They founded Nvidia with $40,000 and worked out of an apartment building in Fremont.
After going public in 1999 at $4 a share, Hwang became wealthy, but he didn’t become a billionaire right away. Mr. Priem sold nearly all of his shares before going off-grid in 2003. Mr. Malakowski is involved in Nvidia as a “fellow” and is also a billionaire thanks to his small stock holdings.
The chip was originally developed for computer graphics, and it put the company at the forefront of developing ultra-powerful processors.
But Huang announced his ambitions to offer AI chips in 2014, saying the company was focused on machine learning chips, the technology that trains AI.
That same year, Huang revealed that he had gotten a tattoo of the NVIDIA logo on his shoulder to commemorate the company’s stock price reaching $100 per share.
He owns 3.5% of the company, and his wealth has grown as Nvidia’s stock has soared. In just the last month, he has earned $10 billion as his price has risen to new highs.
The former Denny’s busboy has so far avoided the big purchases made by flashy billionaires, but he’s still on San Francisco’s Billionaires Row: Mr. Ellison, oil tycoon Gordon Getty, He lives in a $44 million, 11,400-square-foot home next door to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
And he followed in the footsteps of other tech billionaires and bought a Hawaiian vacation home, a $33 million property on the Maui coast.Until recently he drove himself (he has a garage full of Teslas), but these days hired a private driver For security reasons.
His own children, Madison and Spencer, both currently work for him. Daughter Madison is her manager in marketing, graduated from the New York Culinary School, worked at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami, and earned a degree in wine, gastronomy and management from the Cordon Blue Institute in London. Son Spencer graduated from New York University with his MBA in 2022 and currently serves as his product manager.
His billions of dollars won’t alleviate Huang’s hunger. He still wakes up “anxious and concerned” about the company’s future, and remains obsessed with what AI will create next and, more importantly, whether he will be the one driving its creation. Officials said.
Those concerns led Mr. Huang to invest in both rival chipmakers and artificial intelligence companies through Nvidia as a way to diversify.
Last year, Ben-Zion Benkhin, CEO of Wombo.ai, which can create deepfakes of people singing, was invited to speak with Huang at Nvidia headquarters about a potential investment.
“He’s probably the busiest person on the planet, and he makes time to meet with founders and invest,” said a person involved in the meeting. “He’s not slowing down.”
Employees have seen the billionaire walking around campus and talking to junior employees, and even seen him eating his own lunch in the cafeteria and sitting with rank-and-file employees. That’s what it means.
But the pressure led to some rifts — in December he told the employee Anyone who acts like they’re “semi-retired” and gets checked out is going to have to work a “damn job.”
one of his favorite book “Only the Paranoid Survive”. That paranoia may be justified: Analysts have questioned whether the company’s $2 trillion valuation is realistic, with Apollo’s chief economist saying: AI warns of bubble Worse than the dot-com bust of 2000.
“People are buying up chips right now,” said a person who worked with Mr. Huang. “However, this type of demand will not last for long as GPUs are, as Musk has said, ‘harder to get than drugs.’
He is also more aligned with Jobs than with Musk, and he has not made any political moves. Neither he nor his wife are listed in the federal donor database and provide no commentary on X.
But they have a $1 billion family foundation and have donated $50 million to Oregon State University and $30 million to Stanford.
Heartbroken, he donated $2 million to the Kentucky boarding school where he had been cleaning toilets to help build a new girls’ dormitory, returned to open the dormitory, and brought together his old school friends. I met
Thanks to the school, he and his brother “made our father’s dream come true,” he said.
