NVIDIA Just Hit An All-Time High Market Cap Of $5 Trillion. So How Rich Is Co-Founder/CEO Jensen Huang?
ByJoseph Gibsonon October 29, 2025inArticles›Billionaire News
NVIDIA’s market cap crossed $1 trillion for the first time in May 2023. Eight months earlier, the company’s market cap was $300 billion. 180 days after hitting $1 trillion, NVIDIA’s market cap crossed $2 trillion. Sixty-six days later, NVIDIA’s market cap hit $3 trillion. On June 18, 2024, Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable company for the first time when its market cap hit $3.34 trillion, topping Microsoft’s $3.32 trillion market cap. Today (October 29, 2025), NVIDIA’s market cap hit an all-time high of $5 trillion.
What’s extra remarkable about NVIDIA, especially when compared to other enormous public companies, is that for its entire 30+ year history, NVIDIA has had one CEO.
NVIDIA was founded in 1993. It went public in 1999. From 1993 to the present, the company’s co-founder, Jensen Huang , has been CEO.
But let’s get back to Jensen and NVIDIA.
What have all of these enormous leaps in value done for the net worth of Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s longtime CEO and co-founder?
How Rich is Jensen Huang?
Jensen Huang directly owns 3.5% of NVIDIA’s equity. He also has 3 million vested options. At the company’s lowest point in the last five years, in February 2019, Jensen was worth around $3.5 billion.
At the $1 trillion market cap level, Jensen Huang was worth $35 billion . At the $2 trillion mark, he was worth $70 billion . At today’s $5 trillion valuation, Jensen is worth $175 billion . He is now the 8th richest person in the world . That’s a far cry from the $2.65 per hour Jensen earned as an immigrant teenager working at a Denny’s restaurant.
Oh, and just for comparison: When Microsoft went public, Bill Gates owned 45% of the company. After decades of diversification-driven stock sales, today Bill owns around 1.4% of MSFT. Had Bill been a little less aggressive with his stock sales over the years and today still owned 35% of Microsoft, he would be a trillionaire .
Jensen was born in Taiwan in 1963. He spent his early years in Thailand, where his father worked for the Air Conditioner company Carrier. After the father spent a work trip visiting Carrier’s factories in the United States, he vowed to send his two sons to school there.
When Jensen was just nine years old, he and his brother traveled unaccompanied to America to live with an aunt and uncle. In a bizarre twist of events, the aunt and uncle enrolled the two brothers in a Baptist boarding school in Kentucky, erroneously thinking it was a non-religious, prestigious prep school. The brothers ended up thriving at the Oneida Baptist Institute, and Jensen has since donated millions of dollars to the school.
Jensen went on to study electrical engineering at Oregon State, graduating in 1984, the year Apple released its first Macintosh computer. After stints at tech companies LSI and AMD, in 1993, Jensen co-founded NVIDIA. In a fitting twist of fate, he pitched his future co-founders on what became NVIDIA during a lunch brainstorm at a local Denny’s. And 31 years later, he’s one of the ten richest people in the world.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
The Rise and Fall and Rise of NVIDIA
NVIDIA makes semiconductors. That’s a fancy way of saying computer chips. Those chips power phones, computers, data centers, gaming consoles, televisions, and even cars. More importantly, in recent times, NVIDIA’s chips power crypto and Artificial Intelligence computers/servers.
Back in 2016, when most of the world had not yet heard of Bitcoin and crypto, NVIDIA’s market cap was $16 billion. By the end of 2018, a year when crypto broke through to the mainstream, NVIDIA’s market cap was $170 billion.
That’s roughly where its market cap stood in late 2019 before the world had heard of COVID, stimulus checks, web3, or NFTs.
By the end of 2021, thanks to the hype-fueled boom of NFTs and cryptocurrency, NVIDIA’s market cap ended the year at $750 billion.
Over the next ten months, from January 2022 to October 2022, as the crypto bubble burst and the world entered a high inflation/recession period, NVIDIA’s market cap dropped all the way back down to $300 billion. A 60% decline. But that wasn’t the end of the story.
Today, thanks to a wave of new hype from Artificial Intelligence, NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $5 trillion.
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Larry Ellison Just Leapfrogged Jeff Bezos To Become The World’s Third Richest Person. Next Stop, World’s First Trillionaire?
ByBrian Warneron June 13, 2025inArticles›Billionaire News
This week, Larry Ellison’s net worth increased by $34 billion in roughly 48 hours, thanks to a massive rally in Oracle’s stock price following a blowout earnings report and rising investor confidence in the company’s AI capabilities.
Shares of Oracle soared 13% on Thursday and another 7% on Friday, closing at a record high of approximately $215. The surge added over $100 billion to Oracle’s market capitalization and pushed Ellison’s personal fortune to $235 billion, up from around $201 billion earlier in the week.
That gain vaulted Ellison into the third spot among the world’s richest people, leapfrogging Jeff Bezos and now trailing only Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
Current Top 5 Richest People in the World :
- Elon Musk – $368 billion
- Mark Zuckerberg – $241 billion
- Larry Ellison – $235 billion
- Jeff Bezos – $234 billion
- Bill Gates – $180 billion
For Ellison, this marks not only a financial milestone but also a historic turning point in one of the tech world’s most iconic rivalries.
Larry and Bill (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
Oracle went public on March 12, 1986 — just one day before Microsoft’s IPO . From that moment forward, Ellison and Bill Gates were locked in a decades-long battle for software dominance. While Oracle specialized in enterprise databases and cloud infrastructure, Microsoft exploded into consumer and enterprise software, capturing a far larger share of the market, and for most of their careers, Gates dramatically outpaced Ellison in terms of wealth.
As you probably know, Bill Gates was the richest person on the planet, with only a few brief interruptions, from 1997 until 2017. During those years, Larry was largely out of the spotlight in terms of wealth rankings.
Even a decade ago, Ellison’s net worth hovered around $30–40 billion, while Gates stood at roughly $80 billion.
Much of the difference comes down to how the two men managed their equity. Gates, who owned 45% of Microsoft at IPO, gradually sold off nearly all of it over the decades. His current stake in Microsoft is down to around 1.4% , and while that was a wise move in terms of diversification and philanthropy, it limited his exposure to the company’s staggering growth. With Microsoft now worth $3.5 trillion, a hypothetical 30% stake would be worth $1.05 trillion — enough to make Gates the world’s first trillionaire .
Ellison, by contrast, never let go of the wheel. Four decades after the IPO, he still owns roughly 41% of Oracle. As Oracle’s market cap climbed to $600 billion for the first time this week, Ellison’s patience and concentration have paid off in dramatic fashion.
What Would It Take to Top Marky Mark & The Zucky Bunch?
To surpass Mark Zuckerberg and become the world’s second-richest person (assuming Zuckerberg’s net worth holds steady at $241 billion), Larry Ellison would need Oracle’s stock to climb from $215 to around $220 per share, or its market cap to increase by roughly $15 billion. A 2.5% increase in Oracle’s stock would do the trick. Very possible — maybe even by Monday.
Could Larry Ellison Become a Trillionaire?
Believe it or not, that’s not entirely out of the question. At a 41% ownership stake, Ellison’s net worth rises roughly $41 billion for every $100 billion added to Oracle’s market cap. To reach $1 trillion, Ellison would need his Oracle shares alone to be worth that amount — which would require the company’s market cap to hit about $2.44 trillion.
That’s more than four times its current size — but not unthinkable. Oracle’s market cap was just $60 billion in 2005 and $180 billion in 2015. On Friday, Oracle’s market cap ended at $600 billion for the first time. As further evidence, Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia have already crossed the $3 trillion threshold, and Oracle is aggressively positioning itself as a key player in AI infrastructure, a sector that could see exponential growth in the coming years.
For now, Ellison is the third richest person in the world, and perhaps the greatest living example of what patient, long-term ownership can achieve.
Disclosure: The author owns shares of Oracle Corporation in a retirement account. This article is for informational/entertainment purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice.
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