The Stock Price Of NVIDIA Surged, Making Jansen Huang Richer Than Phil Nikkety And Key.

(CTN News) – No company has seen its stock price rise more than Nvidia during the great artificial intelligence investment craze of 2023 – and that has made the chipmaker’s CEO Jensen Huang an extraordinarily wealthy individual.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after a meal at Denny’s 30 years ago, the Taiwanese-born 60-year-old co-founded the semiconductor giant and he has seen his net worth balloon from $13.8 billion to $43.5 billion over the past three years.

He has achieved these gains mainly because he owns a 3.6% stake in Nvidia, which rode the wave of interest in artificial intelligence to become one of the “Magnificent Seven” group of Big Tech companies that have become trillion-dollar companies.

During the past year, shares of the company have risen by nearly 250%, with investors flocking to the stock due to its dominance of the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), which drives AI products such as ChatGPT that run on GPUs.

Despite the fact that these two companies enjoyed strong years of their own, Nvidia’s massive gains have made it the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 of 2023, comfortably outperforming Meta Platforms and Tesla.

It might not be quite as rich or well-known as Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk just yet, but Huang has shot up the list of the world’s wealthiest people, and he is currently ranked 27th on Bloomberg’s list of the 500 richest people as of Thursday’s closing bell.

Thus, his fortune now exceeds the fortunes of Nike founder Phil Knight, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, and Blackstone boss Stephen Schwarzman, who is one of the world’s richest men.

Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963 and spent the majority of his childhood both there as well as in Thailand. In 1973, his parents sent him to the US to live with relatives of theirs.

He too attended high school in Oregon, where he became a national-ranked junior table tennis champion shortly after graduating from high school.

He founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in an East San Jose Denny’s back in 1993, and he has been the company’s CEO for the past 24 years.

At the age of 60, he is likely to be the only tech billionaire older than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos when they left the day-to-day operations of their companies at 52 and 57, respectively. Even so, there seems to be little evidence that he will be stepping away from Nvidia anytime in the near future.

I think there is nothing more fulfilling for me than having the opportunity to build a once-in-a-lifetime company with all of my friends here,” Huang told Business Insider back in April 2021. This is what I would like to do for the rest of my life, and I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

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