NVIDIA's market cap crossed $1 trillion for the first time in May 2023. Eight months earlier, the company's market cap was $300 billion. A year after hitting $1 trillion, NVIDIA's market cap hit $2 trillion. A year later, NVIDIA's market cap hit $3 trillion. On June 18, 2024, Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company for the first time when its market cap hit $3.34 trillion, topped Microsoft's $3.32 trillion market cap. Today (October 15, 2024), NVIDIA's market cap hit an all-time high of $3.4 trillion. It's no longer the most valuable company in the world, Apple edges them out by about $100 billion.
What's extra remarkable about NVIDIA, especially when compared to other enormous public companies, is that for its entire 30+ year history, NVIDIA has had one CEO. NVIDIA was founded in 1993. It went public in 1999. From 1993 to the present, the company's co-founder, Jensen Huang, has been CEO. By comparison, Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft for 25 years (1975 – 2000). Microsoft has since had two other CEOs. Jeff Bezos was CEO of Amazon for 26 years (1995 – 2021). Tim Cook has been CEO of Apple since 2011. Elon Musk is not actually a founder of Tesla. He first became involved with the company in 2004, a year after it was founded. Elon didn't become CEO until 2008. Mark Zuckerberg has been CEO of Facebook for 20 years (2004 – present).
What have all of these enormous leaps in value done for the net worth of Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's longtime CEO and co-founder?
How Rich is Jensen Huang?
Jensen Huang directly owns 3.5% of NVIDIA's equity. He also has 3 million vested options. At the company's lowest point in the last five years, February 2019, Jensen was worth around $3.5 billion.
At the $1 trillion market cap level, Jensen Huang was worth $35 billion. At the $2 trillion mark, he was worth $70 billion. At today's $3.4 trillion valuation, Jensen is worth $120 billion. He is now the 11th richest person in the world today. That's a far cry from the $2.65 per hour Jensen earned as an immigrant teenager working at a Denny's restaurant.
Oh, and just for comparison: When Microsoft went public, Bill Gates owned 45% of the company. After decades of diversification-driven stock sales, today Bill owns around 1.4% of MSFT. Had Bill been a little less aggressive with his stock sales over the years and today still owned 35% of Microsoft, he would be a trillionaire.
Jensen was born in Taiwan in 1963. He spent his early years in Thailand, where his father worked for the Air Conditioner company Carrier. After the father spent a work trip visiting Carrier's factories in the United States, he vowed to send his two sons to school there.
When Jensen was just nine years old, he and his brother traveled unaccompanied to America to live with an aunt and uncle. In a bizarre twist of events, the aunt and uncle enrolled the two brothers in a Baptist boarding school in Kentucky, erroneously thinking it was a non-religious, prestigious prep school. The brothers ended up thriving at the Oneida Baptist Institute, and Jensen has since donated millions of dollars to the school.
Jensen went on to study electrical engineering at Oregon State, graduating in 1984, the year Apple released its first Macintosh computer. After stints at tech companies LSI and AMD, in 1993, Jensen co-founded NVIDIA. In a fitting twist of fate, he pitched his future co-founders on what became NVIDIA during a lunch brainstorm at a local Dennys. And 31 years later, he's one of the ten richest people in the world.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
The Rise and Fall and Rise of NVIDIA
NVIDIA makes semiconductors. That's a fancy way of saying computer chips. Those chips power phones, computers, data centers, gaming consoles, televisions, and even cars. More importantly, in recent times, NVIDIA's chips power crypto and Artificial Intelligence computers/servers.
Back in 2016, when most of the world had not yet heard of Bitcoin and crypto, NVIDIA's market cap was $16 billion. By the end of 2018, a year when crypto broke through to the mainstream, NVIDIA's market cap was $170 billion.
That's roughly where its market cap stood in late 2019 before the world had heard of COVID, stimulus checks, web3, or NFTs.
By the end of 2021, thanks to the hype-fueled boom of NFTs and cryptocurrency, NVIDIA's market cap ended the year at $750 billion.
Over the next ten months, from January 2022 to October 2022, as the crypto bubble burst and the world entered a high inflation/recession period, NVIDIA's market cap dropped all the way back down to $300 billion. A 60% decline.
And now, thanks to a wave of new hype from Artificial Intelligence, NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world.
