I wrote that draft short assignment by short assignment, making each section, no matter how small or seemingly casual, as good as I could. I took out whole paragraphs that I loved, paragraphs I’d shoehorned into the book because I liked the writing or the image or the humor. I worked on it for eight or nine months, sending off the first third, which my editor was amazed by, and then the second section, which he loved. I finished the third section around the time I broke up with a man with whom I’d been involved for some time. I had a brainstorm: I would mail the third section off, borrow the money to fly to New York, and spend a week there, doing the line editing of the book with my editor and, at the same time, getting away from this man I was breaking up with. Also, I could collect the last third of the advance that Viking owed me and do a little retail therapy in New York City.

My agent, Peter Ginsberg, who has worked with me for nearly thirty years, brought his imaginative and open-minded approach to creating publishing partnerships that best serve the cause of the work. Kimberly Meilun at Penguin Random House artfully guided me through the process from final manuscript to finished book.

Looking back, I can see that Haggard and other popular writers, when it came to my continent, were penning from the same dictum: imperialism was normal, resistance to it immoral. Africa and its peoples were the background that enabled European self-realization, the same theme that ran through our history lessons. The fast pace, turns, twists, mystery, and denouement sucked me into those adventures, but soon even these elements could not blind me completely to the negative implications of certain images and groupings of characters. Even in fiction I was not going to escape the theme of empire building. But then I stumbled into the crime thriller and detective category, and I thought, just maybe, I might finally escape into the realm of pure, untainted fiction.

Introduction:

“First and foremost, thank you for opening this book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed living, learning, and gathering it.

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.