Low-key Jensen Huang, high-profile NVIDIA

In less than 7 months in 2024, the chip giant NVIDIA (NVDA.US) saw its market value increase by about $2 trillion and just concluded its 2024 fiscal year annual shareholders meeting. Shareholders, who have made a fortune this year, unsurprisingly approved salary increases for executives. Can you guess how much CEO Jensen Huang received?

Just $34 million, even after a 60% raise.

According to the Securities Times, compared to other tech giants' CEOs, Jensen Huang's annual salary seems insignificant. It is significantly lower than Tesla CEO Elon Musk's staggering $60 billion salary and falls short of Amazon's (AMZN.US) new CEO Andy Jassy's total compensation of $212 million.

Perhaps it is this low-key and pragmatic style that has allowed Jensen Huang to stand out in the fiercely competitive tech industry. In 1993, Jensen Huang and two partners founded NVIDIA with the simple goal of introducing 3D graphics processing to the mass market. Today, over twenty years later, NVIDIA has become a leading company in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

Unlike most tech company CEOs, Jensen Huang does not often appear in the media spotlight. The only sensational news in recent years was when he signed a female fan's shirt and phone case at COMPUTEX 2024 in Taipei earlier this year.

In stark contrast to his low profile, his company NVIDIA has dominated almost all newspaper headlines this year. After the first-quarter financial report, NVIDIA completed a 10:1 stock split, reducing its stock price to around $100, giving more retail investors the opportunity to buy the stock and ride the wave of AI.

Many Americans jokingly say that in today's high inflation environment where even buying toilet paper requires calculation, the two main pillars supporting the U.S. economy are pop music queen Taylor Swift and the tech star company NVIDIA.

In fact, the S&P 500 index has risen nearly 15% year-to-date, with Apple (AAPL.US), NVIDIA, Microsoft (MSFT.US), Google (GOOGL.US, GOOG.US), and Amazon (AMZN.US) contributing 60% of this increase. NVIDIA alone has contributed 34% to the S&P 500's rally. It can be said with certainty that in the U.S. stock market, no stock has been as important as NVIDIA, and no stock has risen as fast. In comparison, a few years ago, the darling Tesla took about 11 months to increase its market value from $500 billion to $1 trillion, only to quickly fall back. Nowadays, no matter what Musk does, it seems that he cannot replicate his company's past glory in a short period, despite the continuous tabloid news.

Steve Eisman, a senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, who became famous for shorting the US real estate market before the subprime mortgage crisis, recently emphasized that buying NVIDIA does not need to worry about stock price or valuation. As long as you believe in the story told by the company, that it will continue to benefit from the booming demand for artificial intelligence. In any case, NVIDIA is a winner in this field