Huang’s tirades inspired as much guilt as fear, and he often described, in detail, how in letting their customers down, Nvidia employees had let one another’s families down as well. (“I think I’m driven as much by guilt as anything else,” Huang told me.)

Nvidia conducted regular performance reviews of employees, and following the GeForce FX debacle, Clay feared that her next one would read RI: “Requires Improvement.” This, at Nvidia, was like being handed the Black Spot. For the GeForce FX, Clay had run four or five quality-control tests.

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.

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.