I also agree that he shouldn't be workshipped. Most billionaires are very flawed people. And Jensen also isn't 10,000x better than average.
Here's a list of decisions where Jensen most likely played a huge personal role in and put the company where it is today:
1. Co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem
2. Abandoning the first product’s architecture (1996–97). Nvidia’s first chip, the NV1, bet on a rendering approach the industry rejected. Huang scrapped it, laid off about half the staff, and put everything into the RIVA 128 with the company weeks from bankruptcy. It sold well and saved Nvidia.
3. GeForce and the “GPU” (1999): He launched the GeForce 256 and marketed it as the first “graphics processing unit”, defining the category. Nvidia went public the same year, then won the original Xbox contract and bought the assets of rival 3dfx.
4. CUDA (2006): Probably his most consequential bet. He put the hardware and software for general-purpose computing into every GPU, at large cost and with no clear market. Margins and the stock suffered for years, but it later locked in AI researchers.
5. Pivoting the company to AI (from about 2012): After the AlexNet breakthrough showed neural networks trained far faster on GPUs, he reoriented Nvidia around deep learning. In 2016 he hand-delivered the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAI.
6. Ray tracing (2018): He pushed RTX and the AI upscaling technology DLSS before games supported them, and both later became industry standards.
7. Buying Mellanox (2019, about $7B): This added data-centre networking and let Nvidia sell whole AI systems rather than just chips.
