Nvidia was 30 days from bankruptcy in 1996

Transcript

In 1996, this company was 30 days from bankruptcy. It had just fired half its staff. Today, roughly three out of every four people who work there are millionaires, and one in three is worth more than $20 million. Nobody plans that. It happens because of a decision one man made in the worst month of his life. In Vidya had started three years earlier, at a denys in San Jose, with $40,000 and a founder named Jensen Huang, who as a teenager had washed dishes at a different denys in Oregon. By 1996, its first chip had failed, because it was built around a rendering method the whole industry had just abandoned. Its second was a console chip for Sega that could not be made to work. So Huang flew to Tokyo and told Sega's chief executive, the truth, we cannot deliver your chip, and we still need your money, or we are finished. Shouichi-dou Idi-majidi gave him $5 million anyway, not as a strategy, because he decided to trust him. Then Huang cut the company from around 100 people to 40 and bet all of it on one chip. There was no money to test it in Silicon, so they simulated the entire design on a rented machine, manufactured it exactly once and waited. The Riva 128 shipped in 1997 and sold a million units in four months, and then he did the thing a survivor is not supposed to do. He refused to play safe. In 2006, he spent years and billions on software called CUDA, so that gaming chips could do maths for scientists. Wall Street hated it, the stock went nowhere. For six years, the most valuable software on Earth had almost no customers. In 2012, two researchers in Toronto trained a neural network on two of his gaming carts and modern AI began. In 2016, he hand-delivered the first AI supercomputer to a small nonprofit called OpenAI and signed the box. In June 2023, Nvidia passed a trillion dollars. In July 2025, it became the first company in history worth four trillion. Around 90% of the chips that train AI are his, and he is now the largest investor in the industry he armed. With a hundred billion pledged to OpenAI and billions more into Anthropic, XAI, and Intel. But the decision that made the employees rich was quieter than any of that. From the near bankruptcy onward, every person hired at Nvidia received shares, not executives, everyone. Turnover there is under three percent a year in an industry where it runs close to 20. People simply do not leave. So the company that nearly died did not just survive. It made certain that the people who stayed through the 30 days would never have to worry about money again.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.