When Nvidia's stock price soared to $100, its co-founder, chairman and CEO, Jensen Huang, tattooed the company's logo on one of his arms.
It was a particular tribute to his origins and his personal journey, which goes from the stench of latrines to the perfume of glory.
In one of his magnificent stories, Manuel Vicent tells us that Cain could not be to blame for the death of his brother Abel. He had a good alibi. Just when the notorious crime took place, "he was in New York hugging a tenor sax."
Before being a saxophonist in Manhattan, this Cain held several trades, he was a famous engraver of daggers and, Vicent clarifies, "he also cleaned some toilets and that's not why he considered himself a scientist." This sentence is not even written with dedication to one of the fashion businessmen in the United States. Nvidia, a company created in 1993, made a name for itself as the maker of microchips for video game graphics. It was the only company in Silicon Valley dedicated to the work of producing circuits with the aim of creating images of extraordinary beauty and realism for games and movies like Avatar.
The company was on the verge of bankruptcy in the mid-1990s. But Huang's determination rescued her, the same one that allowed him to get out as a child admitted to a Kentucky school for difficult, delinquent or low-life boys, a place where he ended up by mistake.
Today, with the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, Nvidia designs virtually all of the chips for ChatGPT, its shares are trading at nearly $500 a unit, and Huang amasses a fortune of $43.8 billion, according to Forbes, owning $89.6 million. of titles, which represents 3.5% of the shares of the company with headquarters in Santa Clara. He is ranked 28th on the list of billionaires. Nvidia has reached a value of 1.2 trillion dollars.
Like Vincent's Cain, Huang, 60, also doesn't consider himself a scientist even though he has cleaned toilets. This circumstance differentiates him from the rest of billionaires. Jen-hsun Huang was born in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, in 1963. Due to social and political tensions, his parents moved to Thailand, where the conflicts turned out to be worse. The parents decided to keep their children safe in the United States, before undertaking the trip themselves. The children had uncles in Washington state who took them in. Due to a misunderstanding – they did not know English – the brothers were sent to study at a reform school, the Oneida Baptist Institute, believing it to be a religious school.
"There were very tough guys, they all had knives and their fights were not pleasant at all, they hurt each other," he confessed in an interview on NPR (US public radio).
All the students had to work in the center. Huang had to clean the sinks daily on all three dormitory floors. He claims that in juvie he developed a fanatical work ethic. “The end of the story is that I love my time there. I worked and studied hard, ”he adds.
Already in Oregon, where the family was reunited, his next key stage occurred at the university of that state. In addition to being a junior national champion in table tennis, he graduated in electrical engineering (he did his master's at Stanford) and opened up to the world. To pay for college, he went to work at Denny's, a fast food restaurant chain. He was an introverted guy, a very good student and crazy about video games. A nerd that is said. That job forced him to come out of his shell and he lost his fear of talking to people.
At Denny's he met in 1993 with two companions (Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky) to celebrate his 30th birthday. There they founded Nvidia and his commitment to offer the graphics that has given him fortune.
