The rise in the share price of American chipmaker Nvidia allowed its CEO, Jensen Huang, to earn $9.6 billion in a single day. He is on the verge of becoming one of the 20 richest people in the world.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Jensen Huang’s fortune reached $69.2 billion on Wednesday, up from $59.6 billion the day before.
His fortune also rose two places, going from 23rd to 21st the day before. Today, Huang, 61, owns 3.5% of Nvidia.
Since the start of 2022, Nvidia’s stock price has increased fivefold
Jensen Huang is closely followed by Julia Koch ($69.1 billion), the widow of oil tycoon David Koch, who ranks 20th on the list.
Early last year, Jensen Huang was ranked 128th on the billionaires list, with a net worth of $13.5 billion. But as Nvidia’s stock price has steadily climbed in recent years, fueled by the artificial intelligence (AI) craze, Jensen Huang’s fortune has grown rapidly.
On the New York Stock Exchange, on the 22nd, Nvidia’s stock price jumped 16.40% to $785.38, after the announcement of last year’s fourth quarter results, bringing the market capitalization of Nvidia to approximately $277 billion in a single day, the largest single-day increase in its history.
For the fourth quarter of 2023, Nvidia just announced record revenue of $22.1 billion, up 22% from the third quarter and 265% from the previous year. Record annual revenue for 2023 is $60.9 billion, up 126%.
Since the start of 2022, Nvidia’s stock price has increased fivefold.
An incredible life
Jensen Huang’s life is nothing short of incredible. Born in 1963 in Taiwan, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 9 without his parents. He excelled in middle school and high school, entering the public university of Oregon for an engineering course.
At Denny’s, a California roadside restaurant, he founded Nvidia 31 years ago with two co-founders, a graphics card company. Their start-up innovates with the creation of GPUs (Graphic Processing Units), specialized chips allowing more sophisticated graphics in order to enhance the PC gaming experience. Although Jensen Huang is the youngest of the trio, his charismatic personality sets him apart. He rose to the position of CEO, a position he still holds 31 years later. It was through an email sent on a Friday, around the mid-2010s, that he decreed that Nvidia was no longer a graphics card group but a deep learning company, that is to say AI.
His obsession today is the “omniverse”, a virtual universe with graphic resolution so perfect that you can immerse yourself in it. He also believes that AI will be able to reason before long.
Source: “ZDNet Korea”