Spectators were important to Huang—when he dressed down an employee, he usually did so in public so that others could learn from the experience. (“Failure must be shared,” Huang said.) If a project was delayed, Huang would command the person responsible to stand up and explain to the audience, in detail, every single thing that had gone wrong.

Huang would then deliver a withering analysis of their performance. Such corporate struggle sessions were not for everyone. “You can kind of see right away who is going to last here, and who is not,” Diercks said. “If someone starts getting defensive, you just know that person won’t be long at Nvidia.”

Diercks believed there was a method to it. “He would never just yell at somebody,” he said. “He would wait for a meeting, with a bunch of people around, so he could make it an educational opportunity for everyone.” But Huang’s criticisms weren’t always constructive—sometimes they were just verbal abuse. One former employee recalled a time when he bungled a minor assignment.

EIGHT: The Compulsion Loop

“The accounting scandal occurred during one of the worst bear markets in history. Suffering under the simultaneous bursting of the dot-com bubble, the 9/11 attacks, and the Enron bankruptcy, the S&P 500 lost nearly half its value. Coincident with these misfortunes, Nvidia started squabbling with Microsoft. The dispute was attributed to pricing and intellectual-property issues, but Nvidia’s growing sense of entitlement played a role. Nvidia employees were unabashedly elitist. They considered themselves the best—and they were—but their pride could sometimes sound like narcissism.

Huang’s anger, invisible to Romanosky, found increasing room to express itself at work. In early 2003, Nvidia shipped the infamous GeForce FX, prone to slow rendering speeds and known to gamers as “the dustbuster” for its faulty, overactive fan. The device was panned by reviewers and customers, including Huang’s thirteen-year-old son, Spencer. Jensen arrived home one evening to find a gaming magazine featuring a harsh review of the device waiting for him with a Post-it note attached. “Dad,” the note read, “I think you need to kick it up a notch.

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.