I found Huang to be an elusive subject, in some ways the most difficult I’ve ever reported on. He hates talking about himself and once responded to one of my questions by physically running away. Before this book was commissioned, I had written a magazine profile of Huang for The New Yorker. Huang told me he hadn’t read it, and had no intention of ever doing so. Informed that I was writing a biography of him, he responded, “I hope I die before it comes out.”

Still, Huang offered me access to a great number of people to report this book. I spoke with almost two hundred people, including his employees, his cofounders, his rivals, and several of his oldest friends. The beloved and even somewhat goofy family man who emerged from these interviews bore little resemblance to the unapologetically carnivorous executive who made Nvidia succeed, but it is these same attachments that spur Huang’s ambition: he spoke frankly with me of his insecurities, his fear of letting his employees down, his fear of bringing shame to the family name. Some executives speak of profit as “keeping score,” but not Huang; for him, the money is only temporary insurance against some future calamity. There was something a little touching about hearing a man worth a hundred billion dollars talk in this way.

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.

THIRTEEN: Superintelligence

“It took a sharper eye to spot the differences. There was the vision question, with Musk moving backward from fantasy and Huang moving forward from reality. There was also the topic of loyalty. Musk did not value it; he often fired people arbitrarily and without warning, in one case canning the entire Starlink engineering team almost at random on a Sunday

afternoon. Huang almost never fired anyone, and when he did, it was only after multiple cautions and the offer of a performance-improvement plan. It took truly egregious behavior to get kicked out of Nvidia, and many employees worked there for decades, including boomerang hires like Catanzaro and Aarts. Even when operating economics forced Huang to shutter a division, he reassigned employees to other useful tasks. In 2019 Curtis Priem returned to Nvidia’s offices for the first time in sixteen years to join Huang and Malachowsky for a reunion of the company’s founders. “I was astounded at how many people were still there,” he said. “Jeff Fisher, his kids were working for Nvidia.

SIXTEEN: Hyperscale

“Nvidia had grown too large for Huang to really understand everything that was going on, but it was not his style to delegate. To maintain resonance, he needed to keep communication open with the frontline employees. Sometime around 2020, Huang asked everyone at the company to submit a weekly list of the five most important things they were working on. Every Friday from that day forward, he received twenty thousand emails. Brevity was encouraged; Huang would randomly sample from this pool of correspondence late into the night. In turn, he communicated to his staff by writing hundreds of emails per day, often only a few words long. (One executive compared the emails to haiku. Another compared them to ransom notes.) His responsiveness was superhuman. “You’d email him at 2 a.m. and receive a reply at 2:05 a.m.,” Dally said. “Then you’d email him again at 6 a.m. and receive a reply at 6:05 a.m.

SEVENTEEN: Money

“Like many firms, Nvidia allowed employees to purchase stock at a discount to market prices. What set Nvidia’s program apart was that employees were allowed to purchase stock at a discount to the lowest price at any point in the last two years. These purchases were capped at a certain dollar amount, but as the stock went vertical, the program basically turned into free money, and those who maxed out their contributions each year made the trade of a lifetime. With the windfall extending deep into middle management, some newer employees expressed concerns that the nouveau-riche veterans were entering a state of “semiretirement.” Executives disputed this characterization. Jeff Fisher, who ran the company’s gaming side, had been among the first thirty employees. “Many of us are financial volunteers at this point,” he said, “but we believe in the mission.”

The lure of developing this revolutionary technology offered purpose beyond what money could buy. This was especially true of the old guard, who’d spent years explaining to baffled peers why they were working for a gaming company and who constantly had to correct the pronunciation of the firm’s name. AI had not been a consideration for these veterans, and they were as surprised to be working on it as anybody. “There was no way me, or anybody else, could have dreamed at the time that this stuff that science fiction writers might come up with has become a reality,” said Jay Puri, Nvidia’s head of sales, who started work at the company in 2005. The value of Puri’s shares exceeded $700 million by 2024, but he felt that the interesting work at Nvidia was only beginning. “Maybe I’m biased, but I think it really is the most important technology company of our time,” he said.