No they aren't, but it is an example of relative scale of investment. Especially when much of that market cap growth has come just within the last 5-6 years or so. Money could have flowed to other ponds collecting off the river of investor cash flow instead of this one massive lake. This might have lead to a different growth trajectory in our economy and technological development than one so focused on the ROI of chip production in particular, to the exclusion of much else. The fact that much of that demand is brought up by circular investment is another aspect. Two lakes backfeeding into eachother eating more and more of the flow off cash flow river, drying up other ponds along the way. Much is lost with such unitary focus of investment.

No, it isn't measuring the velocity of incoming investment. But it goes to show just how outstandingly large the pile of money on one ticker in particular is, relative to other high tech industries that are even favored by investors for their 10x potential (maybe moreso historically than today albeit).

I will be honest, my personal opinion is keep the blood flowing until RAM prices return to Sept 2025 levels.

This whole saga has been a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. There's no compelling argument that points to these new innovations not otherwise happening if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.

Spot on

Guys going to start his own company. Surely?

> It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.

What type of person are you referring to?

> "We" don't.

> That's what humans focus on.

I struggle to understand what narrative you're correcting here. "We" in this context seems to collectively mean "humanity". Markets, media narratives, etc. are all run by humans. That's "us", whether or not you personally want any of the blame/credit.

This doesn't seem like the right question either. Can you provide a list of unique qualifications that make Jensen irreplicable?

I cannot and that question is irrelevant to the situation. The dude is going to be getting investigated and spending the next couple of years doing interviews and legal stuff (there's already a securities lawsuit). He literally cannot run the company even if he wanted to. He's also no doubt going to be under congressional and DOJ and Department of Commerce investigation for sanctions violations.

It should not be a job - that's the whole point. Kings demonstrated how bonkers is having a single point of failure like this so it's insane people still don't get it today.

Jensen might be the best person to lead NVidia at the moment, but that doesn't mean that NVidia dominating the market and being able to demand gigantic margins is a good thing for the overall economy.

You and I and many of the commenters would be on there. People think these CEOs are wizards performing black secret magic we'd fail to understand.

No. They have the same 24 hour day as you and I. They think at the same speed and talk at the same speed. Their "workload" whatever it may be, is finite, evidently finite enough to juggle several romatic relationships at the same time, with much actual work and decisionmaking delegated and informed by domain experts who will be there no matter the CEO.

So yes, you or I could in fact be CEO of NVIDIA. It would be easy. Reports would be made for us by the worlds experts in the fields on what is going on. Departments would be ran by the best available talent on earth. My emails are being read and written by a dozen plus secretaries. Every presser I make I have an ivy league grad writing me the speech making me look like Hemingway out there. Every decision I'd make informed by a team of experts. Every plan thought of already by a hundred people smarter than me. All we'd have to do in the role as NVIDIA CEO is smile, waive, and read the lines handed to us on the sheet of paper by someone else. The ship runs itself even though we all pretend it's the CEO paddling 24/7 making it possible.

Really, that's all any of these guys are doing. Very similar to say the job of a pop star. Are you charismatic? Can you read lines? You'd make a great CEO then.

But by not having one, the CEO has a lot more leverage over the company.

good leaver vs bad

Huang was also well know in industry for awful decisions, which is why most companies that ever worked with Nvidia, worked with them once (with some exceptions tbf).

> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?

This is, frankly, an outlandish statement.

Huang is known to literally respond to low-level e-mails between ICs. The idea that a CFO can take his place is ridiculous. People need to be real.

> Highly successful businessman.

> Behaves like a fool, risks national security to get his dick wet, has unethical affair with subordinate.

> The problem is that people like this get held accountable for their misdeeds instead of being left to do what they want!

> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?

Respectfully, I don't engage with conspiracy theorists

It isn't like he is the one who did the research to lead to that decision though. That just isn't his job. He isn't an analyst. He is CEO, who reads reports or sat in presentations made by his analysts, whatever their specific position titles, who are really the ones who did the work weighing and making this decision. His role was to say yes to these people whose job it is to actually figure this out.

So indeed, if he was not CEO, likely whoever would have been would be given the same information as Jensen that lead to him saying yes on tensor cores. And in all likelihood, the same exact decision would have been made, or at least a coinflips odds chance if it really were a matter of "yes" or "no" with no clear winner.

I feel like it's worth repeating that he gets credit for the decisions he has made, while it's also true that someone else would also see this demand, maybe earlier maybe later, and that the economy and shareholders would benefit. The point I'm making, and I think the one you're responding to, is that he didnt do something so magical that wouldn't have been done otherwise. It's a counterpoint to "this guy did so much, we would be nothing without him" and using that as a way to excuse his bad decisions.

Again, credit for putting yourself in the position to capitalize. Credit for executing. But it's pretty likely that the world would not be substantially different if Nvidia has been another company and Jensen was some guy working at MS.

Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? Your comment would be fine without the "Bruh", "You are making it sound as if", and "This is ridiculous" bits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>> Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created

>That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?

I can assure you that the people you are targeting the question at, have never/rarely done any of the things you asked. I call them the socialists. They sit in judgment of people who do things while they lead their petty lives and all they look forward is the next Superbowl game, or next Netflix series.

(p.s you might like the writings of author by name Ayn Rand, Disclaimer: I'm no worshiper of Rand)

This is hilarious because Jensen’s idea of leadership is petty authoritarianism. I’m not sure if this is just HN being emotionally bought in to great man theory or financially bought in to NVDA, but most of their value creation is on the back of gamer chips being useful for crypto and later AI.

The children yearn for a tyrant I guess.

> HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation

Not sure about HR TBH

> That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?

Yup, all of it. And at no point have I considered myself as 10,000x more valuable than any of the team members I led. Yet that's exactly what is done to billionaire CEOs.

You'll notice I did not say Jensen didn't create ANY value.

You think he hired everyone personally?

CEOs in large companies do not play a role like that.

This tendency to credit an entire technological breakthrough to the top of an org chart is such a bizarre cliche from a systems perspective. Breakthroughs are not conceived from whole cloth within the corner offices of isolated autocracies; they are the product of horizontal networks of social capital as engineers continually circulate across firms.

Besides, individual contributors aren't incentivized to innovate insofar as we're not structurally positioned to capture a windfall.

I recognize the narrative that an army of world-class engineers is essentially inert until an executive visionary breathes purpose into them, but that's a structural property of the firm. It's a choice to route all surplus through the board and major shareholders, and to starve out any innovation that happens outside of those venues.

> Those employees didn’t create it when a huge number of them worked at AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, or TI.

I agree: we must do everything we possibly can to aggrandize the already wealthy and powerful. The glory must accumulate in their account, and the less that goes to their subordinates, the better.

lol

They should fall first to AI replacement as they're the least useful people in a company and most susceptible to ruining the company's reputation by screwing a Chinese spy and a hot local chic.

But what do you hate about it? They can stick up for themselves surely? They don't need you to protect them do they?

Sure it might be hard to run a company - it wasn't like he actually did most of that though was it?

The Roof was an invention the allowed us to delay the rotting of all our harvests. Pretty good.

>> everything you have in your life is thanks to the economy and "shareholder value".

No it's not, shareholder value as understood as owning a piece of a publicly traded company doesn't produce anything on its own and it's definitely independent of the economy of a society. Could even be argued that the wealth stuck in the shareholder value is reducing the investments that could be being made in the interest of the rest of the economy.

I can easily make something and sell it to you without creating shareholder value.

It's just that "Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth", to many people, sounds a bit like "McDonalds has created more calories than nearly every company on earth". Sure, you need calories to survive, but that's not exactly the issue people are having here.

The more people who exist that witch-hunt for no actual reason the worse our society is.

Well, he might very well end up in jail.

Don't even engage with these types of people. They think CEOs provide no value and anyone can do the job

Ha, I was wondering if someone would bring that up! Pretty funny. How much of the shareholder value of NVidia is represented by his share of the NV1 and the earliest GeForces?

A is a reddit meme-argument. It assumes that the labor-theory-of-value is a fact and implies that only fungible IC's add value, whereas irreplaceable great men who organize multi-trillion-dollar companies from scratch contribute nothing. It's a way for them to advance for their silly worldview while obscuring its absurd foundational assumptions.

Almost every bubble ever had its detractors. Yet they still happened because those who actually had decision power and market shaping power didn't care about any downsides from popping a larger bubble so they just wanted to make money.

If a single person was keeping the market from a recession, then that itself is the issue, not the removal of that person.

We need better markets and recessions are the cost of cleaning markets up, unfortunately.

I never said there wouldn't be consequences to the economy. I said it's crazy to put up with such bad behavior to spare the economy.

Welcome to HackerNews!

Hero worshippers.

Par for the course on HN, unfortunately. I once thought the stereotypes about "tech bros" were overblown, but HN users seem dedicated to proving them right. Something's gone wrong if you're making comments complaining about how ethics don't matter at all in life and money is the only thing to ever be considered.

If anything Jensen Huang is the exact embodiment of the hacker spirit. An engineer who singlehandedly created one of the most valuable companies on earth by creating the chips that AI runs on.

I dont get how you can talk about the "hacker spirit" but then talk about "late-stage capitalism" (essentially the flat-earthism of economy) and tech founders.

The thing to remember every time you see the orange, so you don't forget, is that you are posting on the promotional website of a multibillion-dollar private equity firm.

How is it going to get cut by 30%? NVDA is only 6% of SP500.