According to the New York Post on February 29**, the stock price of Nvidia, a computer chip manufacturing company founded by Huang, skyrocketed recently, and Huang surpassed Elon Musk to become one of the richest people in the world.
Pictured: Screenshot from the New York Post.
Nvidia makes highly advanced chips that power artificial intelligence, which has become the hottest commodity in the world right now and has skyrocketed Huang's personal net worth. According to Forbes, Huang, 61, is now worth $68.6 billion, more than double what he was worth last February and 25 times what he was worth when he was first listed a billionaire in 2017.
Even Musk relies on Nvidia's chips to power his AI projects. Like Musk, Huang is also an immigrant, and Nvidia is now worth three times that of Tesla.
But Huang's first impression is similar to that of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Like Steve Jobs, Huang wears the same everyday outfit — rockstar-style leather jackets and black pants, and both men work for a living. "He didn't do anything but Apple," said a Silicon Valley source, "and so did Huang." ”
Picture: Screenshot of tomshardware news network.
But his rise is more surprising than that of other tech billionaires: Huang was sent to the United States by his non-English-speaking parents at the age of 9 and spent the summer holidays in Denny'It took 8 years to get a master's degree.
A source who has known Huang for decades said the "courage and resilience" that prompted him to become the richest man in the world was due to his immigration experience.
Huang was born in Taiwan as Jen-Hsun (which he translated into English as Jensen) and spent his childhood in Thailand.
But, he said, his father fell in love with the United States on a trip to New York, and his parents were "determined to raise a family in this incredible country," so they sent him and his older brother to his aunt and uncle who lived home in Tacoma, Washington.
In order to educate their nephew, they sent him to Oneida Baptist Institute, a boarding school they considered famous. In fact, it's a Kentucky school that focuses on troubled teens. Huang said in an interview with Wired that he had scrubbed toilets and confronted bullies with a knife.
But he "loved it" and it was a "lucky breakthrough" there," he told the Class of 2020 in his commencement address.
His parents arrived in the Pacific Northwest and settled outside Portland, Oregon. At the age of 15, he got his first job there, in Denny's washing dishes, one dry for several years. "Excellent career choice. I highly recommend starting your first job in the restaurant industry, it teaches you humility and hard work. ”
Huang chose Oregon State University, which has low tuition, and met his future wife, Lori Mills, an electrical engineering major, who he called "the second major breakthrough of my life." They have now been married for more than 30 years.
Picture: Screenshot of oregonlive news network.
Immediately after graduating, he started working in chip companies. But by his own admission, he did not quickly rise to the top. He spent 8 years working part-time at Stanford University for his master's degree.
On Thanksgiving Day 1993, he and two colleagues, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, were at a Denny in the South Bay's meet. When he eats a super bird (he calls it a "great sandwich......Bacon is the best part"), they sketched their own chip company on a napkin.
They then founded NVIDIA for $40,000 and worked in an apartment in Fremont, Bay Area.
The company went public in 1999 at $4 per share, but Huang was still some way from being a billionaire by then. In 2003, Priem left the company and sold almost all of his **. Malachowsky, who held fewer shares as a "researcher" at Nvidia, has now also become a billionaire.
The chips were originally developed for computer graphics, which put the company at the forefront of developing ultra-powerful processors. But Huang publicly expressed his ambition to provide chips for artificial intelligence in 2014, saying the company was shifting its focus to machine learning chips, the technology used to train artificial intelligence.
That same year, Huang tattooed the Nvidia logo on his shoulder to commemorate Nvidia** hitting $100 per share.
Picture: Screenshot of Business Insider.
He owns the company 35% of the shares, and as Nvidia's stock price soared, his fortune swelled with it. In the last month alone, he made $10 billion as the stock price hit a new high.
This former denny'Boy S now lives in San Francisco's "Billionaire District": an $44 million, 11,400-square-foot home next to Ellison, oil tycoon Gordon Getty and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
He also purchased a Hawaiian vacation home: a $33 million Maui waterfront property. Recently, he hired a private driver for "safety" reasons (his garage was full of Teslas).
His own children, Madison and Spencer, both now work for him. Daughter Madison is a marketing manager who graduated from the Culinary Institute of New York, worked at Mandarin Oriental Miami, and earned a diploma in wine, gastronomy and management from Le Cordon Bleu in London. Son Spencer received his MBA from New York University in 2022 and now works as a product manager.
Huang said he remains "worried" about the company's future and remains obsessed with what AI will create next, the sources said. That anxiety prompted Huang to diversify his business by investing in rival chipmakers and artificial intelligence companies through Nvidia.
Last year, womboBen-Zion Benkhin, CEO of AI, received an invitation to discuss an investment, Wombo., with Huang at NVIDIA headquartersAI can make deepfakes of people singing.
He's probably the busiest person on the planet, and he's taking time out to meet with the founders and make investments," said one of the sources involved in the conference, "and he's not slowing down." ”
Employees said they saw the billionaire walking around campus, talking to junior staff, and even seeing him prepare lunch for himself in the cafeteria and sit with rank-and-file staff.
One of his favorite books is Only Paranoia Survives. This paranoia may be justified: Analysts question whether the company's $2 trillion valuation is realistic. The chief economist at Apollo, a money management firm, warns that AI is a bubble worse than the dot-com bubble that collapsed in 2000.
People are now stockpiling chips," said a source who has worked with Huang, "but that demand won't last long, and as Musk said, GPUs are 'harder to buy than drugs.'" ”
Huang is more in tune with Steve Jobs than Musk, Huang has not made any political moves, and neither he nor his wife appear in the federal donor's database.
Picture: Screenshot of Fortune News.
But they have a billion-dollar family association and have donated $50 million to Oregon State University and $30 million to Stanford University.
Because of his school, Huang said, he and his brother "fulfilled their father's dream."