Jensen Huang’s “I made it” moment never translated to long weekends and a step back from day-to-day operations. Despite Nvidia becoming the world’s most valuable company, its CEO Huang just admitted he still operates on a mix of fear, anxiety, and even going bankrupt.
“You know the phrase ’30 days from going out of business,’ I’ve used for 33 years,” Huang said on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. “But the feeling doesn’t change. The sense of vulnerability, the sense of uncertainty, the sense of insecurity—it doesn’t leave you.”
Nvidia has made itself one of the clear leaders in the AI race. What started as a graphics card producer grew into a tech powerhouse, building chips, systems, and software that power most large AI models in cloud data centers around the world. Last month, Nvidia became the first public company to reach a market capitalization of $5 trillion. Yet Huang still can’t shake the feeling that the company could vanish overnight.
“It is exhausting,” he said, while adding that he’s “always in a state of anxiety.”
The veteran CEO revealed he still works seven days a week, every moment he is awake to ensure his nightmare doesn’t become—including checking his emails from 4 a.m.: “Every day. Every single day. Not one day missed. Including Thanksgiving, Christmas.”
Huang’s fear of failure is his main motivator
Huang recounted an incident of a near collapse in the mid-1990s, when the company realized its first graphics technology was flawed just as it was developing a chip for Sega’s next game console.
With money running out, he flew to Japan to tell Sega’s CEO the product wouldn’t work and that they should cancel the deal, yet he also admitted Nvidia needed the final $5 million payment to stay afloat. Sega converted the remaining funds into an investment, giving the struggling startup the lifeline it needed to stay alive.
“Suffering is part of the journey. You will appreciate it for these horrible feelings that you have when things are not going so well. You will appreciate it so much more when they do go well,” he added.
Huang previously wished Stanford students “ample doses of pain and suffering”. In his eyes, adversity is key to having resilience, low expectations and ultimately success.
Even now, the fear of failure is still Huang’s greatest motivator.
“I have a greater drive from not wanting to fail than the drive of wanting to succeed,” he said on the podcast. “Failure drives me more than greed or whatever it is.”
Both of his kids work every day too
Huang isn’t the only one to be born with the “work gene” in his family. Both of his kids work every day, too. Madison and Spencer, both in their 30s, started the company as interns in 2020 and 2022.
“My kids work every day. Both of my kids work at Nvidia. They work every day,” Huang said.
Before that, both didn’t show much interest in working for the company after high school. Madison attended the Culinary Institute of America, with her brother Spencer studying marketing in Chicago, then moving to Taiwan to study Mandarin, while doing so, he opened up a cocktail bar in Taipei.
“Now we have three people working every day and they want to work with me every day and so it’s a lot of work,” Huang said.
