Huang eschewed drama and led by example, driving himself hard, refraining from gossip, and carefully apportioning credit for good work. If a product was going to be late or if LSI couldn’t deliver on some promised function, Huang would immediately provide a detailed description of what had gone wrong, who was responsible, and what he was doing to fix it.

“When he said he was going to do something, there was a reasonable likelihood that he would actually do it, y’know?” Malachowsky said. Malachowsky struggled to think of other Silicon Valley product managers who fit that description.

If Huang had a flaw, it was that he embraced candor in the extreme, sometimes crossing into the territory of insult. The bluntness was part of his charm, of course, but it could leave people’s feelings hurt. He didn’t have much patience for people who disagreed with him, and he also seemed genuinely surprised that there were people working in his industry who didn’t want to spend fourteen hours a day fiddling with the circuit simulator. Of course, for quarrelsome workaholics like Priem and Malachowsky, these traits were only further evidence of Jensen’s managerial fitness.

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.

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.

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.

TWENTY-ONE: Jensen

“Jensen contradicted himself frequently, sometimes offering opposing viewpoints within the same interview. He wasn’t playing devil’s advocate, exactly—he just liked to attack ideas from both sides. “He’s not trying to be a politician,” Horstmann said. “He’s not trying to stay on message. He’s trying to process real-time input, and he’s willing to entertain a contradictory thought for a while.” What might appear to be a definitive pronouncement was often just Jensen thinking out loud. Only once he started to repeat himself was it time to pay attention. When an idea really struck Jensen, it slowly built up steam over a period of days or even weeks. It cycled into his vocabulary and was repeated at every meeting. Concepts like the “zero-billion-dollar market” or the “speed of light” hadn’t come to Jensen in a flash; they’d arrived as polished nuggets of wisdom after spending months being tossed in the rock tumbler of his mind. Having arrived, they were then drilled so thoroughly into his employees that his staff sometimes sounded like characters from The Manchurian Candidate, repeating Jensen’s catchphrases verbatim with a glassy look in their eyes. Even employees who hadn’t worked at Nvidia for years could still recite the catechism from memory.