Jensen Huang is on a rocket ship to eclipse Elon Musk as one of the world’s richest men thanks to the explosive share price of Nvidia, the computer chip-making company he founded and where he is CEO.
The Silicon Valley firm manufactures the highly-advanced chips which power artificial intelligence, making it the hottest commodity in the world, and giving Huang his exponential growth in net worth.
Huang, 61, is currently worth $68.6 billion, according to Forbes, more than double what he was worth last February and 25 times what he was worth in 2017, when it first recorded him as a billionaire.
The colossal growth has led to comparisons with Musk in part because Musk relies on Nvidia’s chips to fuel his artificial intelligence projects. Like the Twitter and SpaceX owner, Huang is an immigrant whose technology company has the potential to transform how we live, not to mention a Tesla fan. Nvidia, however, is worth three times Tesla.
But his real role model may well be another Silicon Valley titan: Steve Jobs, the late Apple CEO.
Like Jobs, Huang wears a signature outfit every day —a rock-star style leather jacket and black pants — and has a distinctive campus for his company: its 1.2 million square foot headquarters in Santa Clara is modeled on Star Trek’s Voyager spacecraft.
YouTube
And like Jobs, he lives to work. “He didn’t really do anything but Apple,” a Silicon Valley source. “Huang is the same way.”
But his rise is even more astonishing than that of the other tech billionaires: Huang was sent to the US by his parents aged just 9 speaking no English, worked summers in Denny’s and took 8 years to get his masters degree.
One source who has known Huang for decades said the “grit and resilience” that propelled him to become one of the world’s richest men in his 60s came from his experience as an immigrant.
Huang was born Jen-Hsun (he has Anglicized it to Jensen) in Taiwan and spent his early childhood in Thailand.
But, he has said, his father had fallen in love with America on a trip to New York and his parents were “determined to raise their family in this incredible country,” so sent him and his older brother to live with an aunt and uncle in Tacoma, Washington, before they could come themselves.
Seeking an education for their nephews, they enrolled him in what they believed was a prestigious boarding school, Oneida Baptist Institute.
In fact it was a school in Kentucky which focused on troubled youth. Huang scrubbed toilets and faced bullies with pocket knives, he told Wired in an interview.
But he “loved it” and that being there was a “lucky break,” he told its graduating class of 2020 in a commencement address.
His parents arrived in the Pacific Northwest and settled outside Portland, Oregon, where he got his first job aged 15 washing dishes at Denny’s, working there every summer for years to come. “Excellent career choice. I highly recommend everyone start your first job in the restaurant business, it teaches you humility, hard work.”
Huang chose Oregon State University partly for its low in-state tuition — and found himself paired with one of the only female electrical engineering students, Lori Mills, which he called “the second big break of my life”; they have now been married for more than 30 years.
He started working for chip companies immediately after graduating but by his own admission was not on a rapid path to the very top; he spent eight years part-time doing a masters at Stanford.
Then in Thanksgiving 1993 he and two colleagues, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem met at a Denny’s in South Bay. While he ate a Super Bird, which he has called a “great sandwich… bacon’s the best part,” they sketched their plan for their own chip company on a napkin.
They founded Nvidia with $40,000 and worked out of a condo in Fremont.
It went public in 1999, at $4 a share, making Huang wealthy, but hardly an instant billionaire. Priem sold almost all his stock before he left in 2003 to move off grid; Malachowsky is involved with Nvidia as a “fellow,” and is also a billionaire thanks to his smaller stock holding.
The chips were first developed for computer graphics, which put the company at the forefront of developing ultra-powerful processors.
But Huang went public with his ambition about providing the chips for AI in 2014, saying the company was turning its focus to chips for machine learning, the technology that trains AI.
That same year Huang revealed a tattoo of Nvidia’s logo on his shoulder in honor of the stock hitting $100 per share.
He owns 3.5% of the company, making his wealth balloon as Nvidia’s shares soar. In just the last month, he gained $10 billion as the price went up to new highs.
The one-time Denny’s bus boy has so far eschewed the biggest purchases of flashy billionaires but lives in a $44 million, 11,400 square foot home, on San Francisco’s “billionaires row” next to Ellison, oil scion Gordon Getty and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
And he has followed other tech billionaires by buying a Hawaii vacation home: $33 million of beachfront Maui property. Until recently he drove himself (he has a garage full of Teslas) but recently got a private driver for “security” reasons.
His own children, Madison and Spencer both now work for him. Daughter Madison is a marketing manager, having graduated from the Culinary Institute of New York, worked at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami, and received a diploma in wine, gastronomy and management” from the Cordon Bleu Institute in London. Son Spencer graduated with an MBA from NYU in 2022 is now a product manager.
His billions have not made Huang less hungry. He says he still wakes up “worried and concerned” about the company’s future and remains obsessed with what AI will create next — and more importantly, if he will be the one powering its creation, sources said.
That anxiety has pushed Huang to make investments through Nvidia both in rival chipmakers and in artificial intelligence companies as a way to diversify the business.
Last year Ben-Zion Benkhin the CEO Wombo.ai, which can make deepfakes of people singing, received an invitation to speak with Huang at Nvidia headquarters about a possible investment.
“Probably the busiest person on the planet and he’s making time to meet with founders and make investments,” a source involved with the meeting said. “He’s not slowing down.”
Employees say they see the multibillionaire walking around campus speaking with junior workers and have even spotted him in the cafeteria grabbing lunch for himself and sitting with the rank-and-file.
But the pressure has led to some cracks — in December he told employees that anyone who was checked out, acting like they were “semi-retired” needed to do their “damn job.”
One of his favorite books is “Only the Paranoid Survive.” That paranoia may be justified: analysts question whether the company’s $2 trillion valuation is realistic and the chief economist of money manager Apollo has warned AI is a bubble worse than the 2000 dotcom collapse.
“People are hoarding chips right now,” a source who has worked with Huang said. “But that kind of demand, where GPUs are ‘harder to get than drugs’ as Musk put it, isn’t going to last.”
Also more in step with Jobs than Musk, he has made no political moves: neither he nor his wife appear in federal donor databases, and he does not offer commentary on X.
But they have a $1 billion family foundation and have given Oregon State University $50 million and Stanford $30 million.
Poignantly he gave his Kentucky boarding school, where he cleaned the toilets, $2 million for a new girl’s dorm and returned to open it, meeting his old school friends.
Because of his school, he said, he and his brother had “realized our father’s dream.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
