It took the leadership of a new CEO, Bob Miller, to save the company. Commenting on how he successfully pulled the company out of its malaise to a prominent position in the RISC Technology industry, Miller malaise to a prominent position in the RISC Technology industry, Miller commented:

The most important question is: what do you want to be five to ten years from now? The company had never asked or clearly answered that question. That may seem simplistic, but posing that question was the basic solution. Only then could we make good strategic decisions.

The product was known as a “graphics accelerator,” and at least thirty-five competitors were trying to build one. Huang worried there was no space for a thirty-sixth. The leading expert in computer graphics was Jon Peddie, who had written several textbooks on the topic. Huang had reached out to Peddie to get a sense of the market, and the two soon became friends, with Huang calling incessantly, asking questions late into the night. Peddie advised Huang that the space was too crowded and that many of the best engineers were already working for other start-ups. “I told him not to do it,” Peddie said. “That was the best advice he never took.

THIRTEEN: Superintelligence

“It took a sharper eye to spot the differences. There was the vision question, with Musk moving backward from fantasy and Huang moving forward from reality. There was also the topic of loyalty. Musk did not value it; he often fired people arbitrarily and without warning, in one case canning the entire Starlink engineering team almost at random on a Sunday

afternoon. Huang almost never fired anyone, and when he did, it was only after multiple cautions and the offer of a performance-improvement plan. It took truly egregious behavior to get kicked out of Nvidia, and many employees worked there for decades, including boomerang hires like Catanzaro and Aarts. Even when operating economics forced Huang to shutter a division, he reassigned employees to other useful tasks. In 2019 Curtis Priem returned to Nvidia’s offices for the first time in sixteen years to join Huang and Malachowsky for a reunion of the company’s founders. “I was astounded at how many people were still there,” he said. “Jeff Fisher, his kids were working for Nvidia.

This was a little surprising, for while working at Nvidia was stimulating, it was never exactly fun; the corporate culture that Huang fostered was closer to Microsoft than Google, closer to IBM than Apple. But years earlier, Chiu, the Taiwanese physicist, had told Huang that he’d allowed him to do his “life’s work.” The phrase had stuck with Huang, and now he wanted to offer that same opportunity to his staff. “We want NVIDIA to be a place where people can build their careers over their lifetime,” the company wrote in its annual report. “Our employees tend to come and stay.”

The appeal lay in what Nvidia allowed you to achieve. It was not a secret that Huang pushed people hard. Thus, he attracted determined workaholics seeking to establish legacies as inventors. In the same way that a bestselling author didn’t stop writing, even many wealthy Nvidia engineers kept showing up to work each day to attack difficult technical problems. Those engineers collectively held more than fifteen thousand patents, but there was always something left to build.

The nearest approximation I have found is Li Ka-shing, a refugee from China who is now Hong Kong’s richest man. Li left school at the age of fifteen and set up a small business manufacturing plastic flowers. From these modest beginnings he developed the massive Hutchison Whampoa group, of which Eversholt, another rail rolling stock leasing company, is a subsidiary. None of the, admittedly small, sample of railway employees I interviewed had ever heard of Li, far less experienced resentment at his oppression or exploitation. If they did express resentment, it was – appropriately – directed at the management of First-Group and most of all at the Department for Transport. Li is svelte, noted for his relatively modest habits and second only to Bill Gates for the scale of his global philanthropy.