Nvidia's rise propels CEO Jensen Huang to become world's 24th richest; here's everything about him

Nvidia's stock reached a new height on Thursday with a $277 billion boost to its market cap in a single day surpassing Meta. The chipmaker's shares jumped 16%, nearing a $2 trillion valuation.

This rally has now propelled its CEO Jensen Huang's wealth to $69.2 billion - $9.6 billion rise on Thursday putting him at the cusp of becoming one of the 20 richest people in the world. As recently as early last year Jensen Huang was ranked 128th with a net worth of $13.5 billion in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is now the 24th richest man in the world.

Who is Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang, the man leading the runaway trillion-dollar firm in his signature moto leather jacket was born in Taiwan and, at age 9, was sent with his brother to live with an uncle in Tacoma, US.

Huang’s parents eventually joined him and his brother in the U.S., and the family settled outside Portland, Ore., where Huang went to high school, played competitive tennis, and graduated two years early—at age 16.

Also Read: Nvidia surges over 15% after Q4 revenues soars, up 265% year on year

As per a New 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, and then a master’s in the same field from Stanford.

Before Nvidia, Huang had worked as an engineer, designing microprocessors. He was 30 when he co-founded Nvidia in 1993 along with fellow microchip designers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

These young entreprenuers had just $40,000 in the bank between them but had far-sight of how computing is going to evolve.

“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.”

Through a venture capital funding, Nvidia quickly grabbed $20 million including from Sequoia Capital.

Huang's Leadership

Jenson Huang is also one of the very few tech founders who’s remained at the helm of his company steadily since its inception. As per Fortune’s 2017 profile, the billionaire doesn’t even keep a desk—much less a corner office—opting instead to roam around his building, working in any number of conference rooms he passes. He also has a large arm tattoo resembling his company’s logo, which he got in the mid-2000s on a dare from his staff once the company’s stock price hit $100.

Huang also believes in authenticity for being good leaders. Its safe to say that Huang's approachability and decency has probably added to his longevity at Nvidia.

“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 said. “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”, Huang told the New York Times in 2010.

Over the years, big Tech companies such as Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have all increased their investment in AI computing. Nividia's leading chips, such as the H100, have become the industry standard for AI developers to crunch data for large language models