Financial data emerging in the past few days paints a picture of the CEO of graphics chip maker Nvidia, Huang Renxun, becoming the richest man on Earth by early 2025. That’s if the surge in the firm’s stock price continues for a little longer.
It was just a week ago that Huang was ranked as the 17th richest human. But in the days since, he has moved up two spots, with a net worth exceeding US$100 billion for the first time.
Nvidia’s first quarter financial report for this year revealed a net profit of US$14.8 billion, a surge of 628 percent. Driven by such a performance, Nvidia’s stock price has exceeded US$1,000 per share, with a total market value as high as US$2.8 trillion, approaching Apple’s value of US$2.9 trillion.
Hence, the net worth of its founder Huang has soared too. According to the latest data from Forbes’ Real-time Rich List and Bloomberg’s Rich List, Huang’s net worth now stands at US$100.7 billion, making him 15th on the global rich list.
To put that another way, Huang is worth 10 billion US dollars more now than he was a week ago.
And since Nvidia’s financial report was released on 22 May, the firms’s stock price has risen by 20 percent, while for the year as a whole so far it has soared by 130 percent. Over the longer term, Nvidia’s stock price has risen nearly 30 times in the past 5 years, as dsb.cn reported today, 31 May.
But we can find plenty of naysayers to predict the trend simply cannot continue. New York Magazine pointed out on 25 May that “lots of people seem to think it’s gotten way overvalued”.
Nvidia’s hyper-fast chips were once mainly employed for video gaming, but now they are proving themselves as essential for the kind of computational power required by AI.
Huang is a US naturalised, Taipei, Taiwan-born Chinese who attended Oregon State University to later receive a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
