Zhang finds another beacon in the writings of Immanuel Kant, the nineteenth-century German philosopher whose “categorical imperative” holds that we must never regard human beings as mere tools. In a long-ago meeting with the authors, Zhang echoed this belief when he laid out his aspirations for Haier: “We want to encourage employees to become entrepreneurs because people are not a means to an end but an end in themselves. Our goal is to let everyone become their own CEO.

With a near-monopoly on the hardware, Huang is arguably the most powerful person in AI. Certainly, he’s made more money from it than anyone else. In the strike-it-rich tradition, he most closely resembles California’s first millionaire, Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vendor of prospecting supplies who lived in San Francisco in 1849. Except rather than shovels, Huang sells $30,000 AI-training chips that contain one hundred billion transistors. The wait time to purchase his latest hardware is currently more than a year, and on the Chinese black market, his chips sell for double the price.

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.

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.

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.