Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg — they're all household names in 2025 and all billionaires who are among the very richest people on the planet.
But there's a name missing from that list who is arguably every bit as powerful and influential — in fact, it could be his work that powers the next huge leap forward in technology in the same way that the creators of Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and Facebook did in the first 25 years of the 2000s.
Jensen Huang has been called "the most powerful tech entrepreneur you’ve never heard of". His company, Nvidia, makes the superfast computer chips that are powering the AI revolution and, last year, became the most valuable company in the world, worth more than £3 trillion (in reality, the title of "most valuable company" can change hands rapidly — for example, Apple now holds the title, having recently regained it from Microsoft, which took top spot when Apple's share price slumped thanks to Trump's tariffs. Nvidia is currently in third place, behind those two companies but ahead of Alphabet (owner of Google) and Amazon).
Nvidia's astonishing valuation means Huang himself has a personal fortune well into tens of billions of dollars — he has come a long way since he was bullied at school in Kentucky after his parents emigrated from Taiwan to the USA.
A new book by Stephen Witt details how Huang got good grades and landed a job at a tech company in California before he founded Nvidia in the 1990s to produce super-powered chips for computer games. It became the market leader and Huang became one of the youngest chief executives in the S&P 500 stock market index aged just 38.
Reporting on the new book for The Times, John Arlidge reveals how Huang's success "prompted him to make the biggest bet anyone has taken on the future of tech" 20 years ago and invest heavily in super-powered chips having foreseen how AI would grow in our lives, despite his peers describing it as a "suicide mission".
"Overall, Huang’s chips have been responsible for a ten-billion-fold increase in computing power in the past decade," says Arlidge.
The book details how Huang's drive made him tough on his staff: "If a project was delayed, he would 'command the person responsible to stand up and explain to an audience every single thing that had gone wrong'... and then 'explode in fury, berating them cruelly'."
He reportedly once asked an employee to return all the money Nvidia had ever paid him to atone for an error. But his "big bets" paid off so often that his employees put up with it because of how much they stood to gain financially when they did.
"You felt you couldn’t let him down. You just couldn’t," a former employee tells the book.
Nvidia is in the news regularly at the moment, especially as it is said to be "reeling from the Trump administration’s decision to further restrict its capacity to export graphics processing unit (GPU) chips to China", with its stock price down 25% from the start of 2025.
Apple — £2.2 trillion
Microsoft — £2 trillion
Nvidia — £1.9 trillion
Alphabet — £1.4 trillion
Amazon — £1.4 trillion
Saudi Aramco — £1.2 trillion
Meta — £956 billion
Berkshire Hathaway — £841 billion
Broadcom — £604 billion
TSMC — £592 billion
