Workers divulge what it’s really like working for Bay Area billionaire

Nvidia’s employees may be getting obscenely rich, but a new report on the Santa Clara company shows there are odd side effects to working for a billionaire who is reportedly quick-tempered.

Jensen Huang and his Bay Area tech giant were profiled in the New Yorker on Monday, in a story that charts Nvidia’s run from a microchip startup to the artificial intelligence boom’s preeminent “arms dealer,” as one quoted analyst put it. The outlet also got ahold of several of Huang’s friends, peers and employees, who shared stories of his demanding presence and odd management tactics.

Rather than run a stiff corporate hierarchy or even organize workers into fixed divisions, Huang has employees submit lists of the five most important things they’re working on each week that he reads deep into the night, the New Yorker reported. He reportedly sends hundreds of emails a day to staff (one executive compared them to “ransom notes,” the New Yorker said, because sometimes they are just a few words) and shows up suddenly at junior engineers’ desks “and quizzes them on their work.”

The New Yorker reported that after a 1996 scare, in which Huang staked Nvidia’s future on a single product launch, he started meetings with the unofficial corporate motto, “Our company is 30 days from going out of business.” Per the New Yorker, Huang has encouraged a culture where employees take public blame for their failures. He admitted to the outlet that he can come across as angry when his words and thoughts don’t line up.

“Jensen is not an easy person to get along with all of the time,” Bryan Catanzaro, a longtime AI researcher at Nvidia, told the New Yorker. “I’ve been afraid of Jensen sometimes, but I also know that he loves me.”

Another employee told the outlet, “Interacting with him is kind of like sticking your finger in the electric socket.”

Inside Nvidia’s huge Santa Clara headquarters, video cameras linked to algorithms watch employees eat at conference tables, then send janitors to promptly clean up the messes, the outlet reported. The New Yorker called the spaceship-esque buildings that make up the Nvidia campus “filled with light, but eerie,” and reported that despite the office’s later critical acclaim, Huang spent his first tour complaining to the architect that the water fountains were next to the bathrooms.

“I’m never satisfied,” Huang told the New Yorker. “No matter what it is, I only see imperfections.”

According to the New Yorker, most of the workers in the office (majority male, and largely East Asian, South Asian or white, according to the outlet’s estimate) seemed happy. It makes sense: They’ve seen a year with little precedent in Silicon Valley history. Nvidia has climbed in value to a $1.19 trillion market cap, up 237% since Jan. 1. Huang’s net worth, due to his ownership stake, has cruised past $40 billion, and workers are no doubt enjoying their own very, very valuable shares too.

Hear of anything happening at Nvidia or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.