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.

Huang had managed to stay ahead of his competitors so far, but his asset-light “merchant” business was essentially just a collection of engineers sitting around a Silicon Valley office park. If those engineers weren’t constantly developing new, difficult-to-replicate technology,

manufacturers in Asia would start knocking off his chips, and Nvidia would cease to exist. “If we don’t reinvent computer graphics, if we don’t reinvent ourselves, and we don’t open the canvas for the things that we can do on this processor, we will be commoditized out of existence,” Huang later said. Not to gamble was the biggest risk of all.

Many people at Nvidia told me that Huang’s anger enforced a kind of discipline within the company, in the manner of a military general or a pro football coach. “I’m not sure he yells more than any other Fortune 500 CEO,” one employee said. “Look, it’s not really his job to be your friend. It’s his job to push you beyond where you think you could ever go.

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.

By 2012, the situation was becoming dire. Nvidia’s stock price had not appreciated in more than a decade, and although revenues and employment at the company had grown considerably, profits remained flat. Huang was bringing supercomputing to the masses, but the masses didn’t want it.