NVIDIA Is Approaching An All-Time High Market Cap Of $6 Trillion. So How Rich Is Co-Founder/CEO Jensen Huang?

NVIDIA's market cap crossed $1 trillion for the first time in May 2023. Eight months earlier, the company's market cap was $300 billion. 180 days after hitting $1 trillion, NVIDIA's market cap crossed $2 trillion. Sixty-six days later, NVIDIA's market cap hit $3 trillion. On June 18, 2024, Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company for the first time when its market cap hit $3.34 trillion, topping Microsoft's $3.32 trillion market cap. On October 29, 2025, NVIDIA's market cap hit $5 trillion. As I type this article, May 14, 2026, NVIDIA's market cap is $5.77 trillion. That's $500 billion more than it was a week ago. At its current pace, it seems almost inevitable that the company will hit $6 trillion.

What's extra remarkable about NVIDIA, especially when compared to other enormous public companies, is that for its entire 30+ year history, NVIDIA has had one CEO.

NVIDIA was founded in 1993. It went public in 1999. From 1993 to the present, the company's co-founder, Jensen Huang, has been CEO.

By comparison, Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft for 25 years (1975 – 2000). Microsoft has since had two other CEOs. Jeff Bezos was CEO of Amazon for 26 years (1995 – 2021). Tim Cook has been CEO of Apple since 2011. Elon Musk is not actually a founder of Tesla. He first became involved with the company in 2004, a year after it was founded. Elon didn't become CEO until 2008. Mark Zuckerberg has been CEO of Facebook for 21 years (2004 – present).

But let's get back to Jensen and NVIDIA.

What have all of these enormous leaps in value done for the net worth of Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's longtime CEO and co-founder?

How Rich is Jensen Huang?

Depending on how family trusts and vested options are counted, Huang controls roughly 3% to 3.5% of NVIDIA. However you calculate it, at the company's lowest point in the last five years, in February 2019, Jensen was worth around $3.5 billion.

At the $1 trillion market cap level, Jensen Huang was worth $35 billion. At the $2 trillion mark, he was worth $70 billion. At a $6 trillion valuation, Jensen will be worth $210 billion. That would make him the 7th richest person in the world. That's a far cry from the $2.65 per hour Jensen earned as an immigrant teenager working at a Denny's restaurant.

Oh, and just for comparison: When Microsoft went public, Bill Gates owned 45% of the company. After decades of diversification-driven stock sales, today Bill owns around 1.4% of MSFT. Had Bill been a little less aggressive with his stock sales over the years and today still owned 35% of Microsoft, he would easily be a trillionaire.

Jensen was born in Taiwan in 1963. He spent his early years in Thailand, where his father worked for the Air Conditioner company Carrier. After the father spent a work trip visiting Carrier's factories in the United States, he vowed to send his two sons to school there.

When Jensen was just nine years old, he and his brother traveled unaccompanied to America to live with an aunt and uncle. In a bizarre twist of events, the aunt and uncle enrolled the two brothers in a Baptist boarding school in Kentucky, erroneously thinking it was a non-religious, prestigious prep school. The brothers ended up thriving at the Oneida Baptist Institute, and Jensen has since donated millions of dollars to the school.

Jensen went on to study electrical engineering at Oregon State, graduating in 1984, the year Apple released its first Macintosh computer. After stints at tech companies LSI and AMD, in 1993, Jensen co-founded NVIDIA. In a fitting twist of fate, he pitched his future co-founders on what became NVIDIA during a lunch brainstorm at a local Denny's. And 31 years later, he's one of the ten richest people in the world.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

The Rise and Fall and Rise of NVIDIA

NVIDIA designs semiconductors, the advanced computer chips that help power everything from gaming consoles and laptops to data centers, cars, and artificial intelligence servers. For much of its history, the company was best known to consumers for graphics cards used by gamers. Then came crypto. Then came artificial intelligence. Each wave pushed NVIDIA into a new financial stratosphere.

Back in 2016, before most of the world was paying attention to Bitcoin, crypto mining, Web3, or NFTs, NVIDIA had a market cap of around $16 billion. By the end of 2018, after crypto had exploded into the mainstream and demand for graphics processing units surged, NVIDIA's market cap had climbed to roughly $170 billion.

That was already an extraordinary run. But it was only the warm-up.

By late 2019, NVIDIA was still worth roughly that same amount. Then came the pandemic-era tech boom, stimulus checks, retail trading mania, crypto speculation, and the NFT frenzy. NVIDIA's chips became essential hardware for miners, gamers, developers, and data centers. By the end of 2021, NVIDIA's market cap had ballooned to around $750 billion.

Then the air came out of the bubble.

As inflation surged, interest rates rose, and the crypto market collapsed, NVIDIA's stock was hammered. Between January and October 2022, the company's market cap plunged from roughly $750 billion all the way back to around $300 billion. In less than a year, hundreds of billions of dollars in paper value disappeared.

But that still wasn't the end of the story.

The next boom made the crypto and NFT waves look tiny by comparison. Artificial intelligence transformed NVIDIA from a chip company into the picks-and-shovels supplier for the most important technology arms race in the world. Its GPUs became the essential hardware behind the data centers training and running large AI models. Suddenly, every major tech company, cloud provider, startup, and government-backed AI project needed what NVIDIA was selling.

That demand launched one of the most astonishing valuation runs in stock market history. From a $300 billion low in 2022, NVIDIA rocketed past $1 trillion, then $2 trillion, then $3 trillion, then $5 trillion. Today, with its market cap approaching $6 trillion, NVIDIA is not merely the most valuable semiconductor company on Earth. It is the most valuable company on Earth, period.