The experience was liberating for Huang. Desperation, not inspiration, was the mother of victory. Huang encouraged his employees to preserve the mindset they’d adopted during the Riva crunch, asking them to constantly behave as if the company was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy even when it was making massive profits. For years to come, Jensen opened staff presentations with the words “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.” Even today at Nvidia, this sentence remains the corporate mantra.

Huang was now a centimillionaire, but his newfound wealth did not distract from his objective of crushing and absorbing the competition until only his firm remained. Dwight Diercks recalled no parties, no champagne, no sense of relief, not even congratulations from the boss. He shared with me an email he had saved from Huang. “The TNT2 team needs to do whatever it takes to get over the finish line,” Huang had written. The email continued in a tone of panicked desperation, with Huang complaining about missed deadlines and fretting over ascendant competitors.

Garlick took the job and remained at Nvidia for the next seventeen years. “My theory is that Jensen is a good person at heart who had to be ruthless,” Garlick said. “As opposed to some other CEOs, who were ruthless at heart and trying to pretend to be good people.” Such were Huang’s charms that, out of the 120 employees he recruited, 106 joined the dark side.

With the new hires, Nvidia had more than six hundred employees, up from just thirty-five four years earlier. The company relocated to a new headquarters down the road in Santa Clara, leasing a complex of curved, multistory, glass-and-steel buildings joined by skyways, festooned with sculpture, surrounded by parking, adjacent to the expressway, and spread across eleven acres of land. The new offices didn’t smell like takeout food. They didn’t smell like anything. Modernist respectability, with its boring and predictable implications, had arrived.

Of more than a hundred former and current Nvidia employees I spoke with for this book, almost all had a tender story about Huang to relate. One employee—the same one whom Huang had humiliated in front of dozens of people, asking for a full refund of his salary—told me that when he was later diagnosed with a serious medical issue, Huang offered to pay in full, out of pocket, for his treatment. When Ben Garlick decided to leave Nvidia for a start-up, he was startled to receive an impassioned, personal plea from Huang to stay.