Nvidia’s historic stock market gains Thursday made the Silicon Valley titan’s billionaire CEO Jensen Huang a much richer man.
Jensen Huang, front, waves at a December panel in Malaysia.
Huang, who owns about 3.5% of shares in the company he cofounded in 1993, became $8.9 billion richer Thursday as Nvidia’s stock soared by 15% following bumper earnings.
The 61-year-old Huang was by far the biggest winner Thursday of any billionaire on Forbes’ real-time rankings of the world’s richest people, becoming the 21st-wealthiest person with a $68.7 billion fortune.
Huang’s net worth has taken off as Nvidia stock skyrocketed amid the artificial intelligence boom; Huang’s fortune Thursday was 17 times higher than it was as of Forbes’ 2019 billionaires list, when it sat at a comparatively paltry $3.8 billion.
Nvidia’s second- and third-largest individual shareholders, long-time board members Tench Coxe and Mark Stevens, also enjoyed pretty paper gains Thursday, as Coxe’s net worth jumped by $440 million to $4.1 billion and Stevens’ fortune rose by $235 million to $6.2 billion.
$1.92 trillion. That was Nvidia’s market capitalization as of late morning, making it the third-most valuable American company, trailing only Apple and Microsoft. Nvidia’s market value exploded by about $250 billion Thursday, which would be the largest single-day gain in history.
Nvidia’s valuation has exploded by roughly 20,000% over the past decade and more than 500% just over the past 18 months. Nvidia, which designs the graphics processing units (GPUs) powering technology like video games and most famously generative AI, rode the recent surging interest in AI to astonishing earnings growth. Nvidia raked in $35 billion of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in its fiscal year ending last month, more than three times higher than the year prior. Analysts project Nvidia’s EBITDA to grow to about $65 billion during the current fiscal year, according to FactSet data, a particularly impressive figure considering Nvidia just said it expects first-quarter profit margins to come in over 75%.
“Building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be,” Huang told the “Acquired” podcast in October. Huang added the “superpower of an entrepreneur” lies in the ability to look past the “pain and suffering” associated with building a company from the ground up and press forward.
Nvidia’s cofounder and first chief technology officer took a far different path than Huang. Curtis Priem, who left Nvidia two decades ago and sold off his stake in the company by 2006, when Nvidia’s stock traded at a split-adjusted level of below $7, was worth about $30 million as of November, forgoing what would be worth about $70 billion had he held onto his stake in Nvidia.