For most people, net worth is broadly a function of cash (primarily from work-related income) and relatively stable assets (such as retirement accounts and home ownership). This makes assessing your personal net worth relatively easy, if somewhat imprecise.

For the truly wealthy, net worth is more complicated. Billionaires tend not to operate in cash, and some even avoid owning much property at all. Instead they hold much of their net worth in securities and other assets, borrowing against the market value of these assets to make their transactions. As a result, the net worth of a billionaire can change frequently from moment to moment based on the market.

This is the case with NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang. At time of writing, the best estimate of Huang’s net worth is around $102 billion. This is per Forbes’ real-time tracker and is consistent with estimates made by other outlets. However, Huang’s net worth is particularly volatile, and has swung widely in recent months and years. This is chiefly because Huang’s fortune comes primarily from a single equity asset, which makes it particularly exposed to the market.

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Sources of Huang’s Wealth

Jensen Huang is an entrepreneur and businessman who works in technology hardware. He is one of the three co-founders of NVIDIA, along with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

Equity in NVIDIA is the primary source of Jensen Huang’s wealth. As one of the co-founders of the company, Huang reportedly owns approximately 3.5% of NVIDIA stock. This stake in the chipmaker has long made Huang a wealthy man. NVIDIA has been a successful company for most, if not all, of its time in operation. The company went public in 1999 at an IPO of $19, and has done well since then, with strong enough share performance to justify four stock splits in the first 10 years of public trading alone.

For years, this made Huang quietly wealthy. Eventually it made him a billionaire. However, Huang’s rise to one of the richest men in the world came only recently. This is due to the recent, explosive rise in NVIDIA’s stock price.

$NVDA share price growth over the last five years as of 10/1/2024. Credit: Google.

In and around 2020, several tech stocks experienced what’s called a “hockey stick” event. This is when long-stable prices suddenly shoot upward, forming a graph that looks something like a hockey stick. This has been industry-wide, with firms such as Apple, Amazon, Tesla and several others watching their share prices leap by two, five, and sometimes 10 times in the span of just a couple of years.

NVIDIA was no different. From 2014 to 2020, NVIDIA’s share price climbed from around $20 per share to around $800 per share. A 4x stock split brought share prices back down to around $200 per share, only for them to climb back up to around $1,100 per share in May 2024. A 10x stock split has brought share prices back down to the low $120 range.

This price growth has taken Huang’s fortune with it. With a market capitalization at time of writing of around $2.86 trillion, Huang’s 3.5% stake in NVIDIA is worth around $100 billion.

Consider using SmartAsset’s free tool to match with a financial advisor to discuss your own investment strategy and evaluate companies like NVIDIA.

Uncertainty and Instability

Evaluating the net worth of a billionaire always comes with several areas of uncertainty and instability. This is because extremely high net-worth individuals tend to hold most (if not all) of their wealth in market assets (such as stocks, bonds, and private investments) rather than cash or cash-equivalents. Many will even avoid owning high-value property such as real estate altogether, instead operating through loans and leveraged borrowing secured against their assets.

By operating through secured lending, billionaires can avoid selling their assets. This, in turn, allows them to avoid paying taxes on this wealth, since loans (and purchases made with a loan) are not considered taxable transfers. It’s a practice called “Buy, Borrow, Die.” While it is very tax-advantaged, it also means that billionaires tend to keep their money in volatile publicly marketed assets and obscure privately marketed assets.

In the case of Huang, the picture is more clear than usual. Rather than holding his wealth in a number of different companies, the overwhelming majority of Huang’s wealth comes from the single, publicly traded asset of NVIDIA shares.

As noted above, NVIDIA’s share price has experienced two periods of explosive growth in the past 10 years, first between 2014 and 2020 and then an accelerated period between 2020 and time of writing. This meteoric rise is due to several different factors, but two forces in particular.

The first is systematic. Share prices for the tech industry have grown by orders of magnitude in recent years, so much so that just five stocks account for 63% of all S&P 500 returns in 2024.

The second factor is NVIDIA’s specific market position. Huang’s company makes specialty processors designed to handle individual, extremely large tasks. This is as opposed to the standard processors at the core of a computer (the CPU) that are designed to handle many distributed tasks all at once. Historically, the most common use for NVIDIA’s technology was graphics processing, typically for video games (which is why these chips are called graphics cards). This created a very specific niche for NVIDIA. It served a relatively small market, which limited opportunities for competition, but it also served a very demanding customer base. As a result, by the 2010’s, NVIDIA was effectively the only mass manufacturer of graphics cards and its product was generally regarded as excellent.

Then the market changed. In recent years, new industries have emerged that need this kind of focused processing. They range from cloud computing to data distribution and artificial intelligence. These are high-value industries with an enormous amount of money behind them and NVIDIA is one of, if not the only, company in the world capable of producing high-quality specialty processors in volume. This has led directly to NVIDIA’s, and Huang’s, soaring fortune.

However it also makes Huang’s wealth extremely volatile, since it is hitched almost entirely to a single equity. His wealth has doubled in the past year alone, while also periodically falling and rising by anywhere from 10% to 20% within a span of weeks. While that kind of growth is unusual, this otherwise reflects the typically volatile pricing of an individual stock and makes Huang’s specific net worth difficult to track at any given moment.

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The Bottom Line

Jensen Huang is one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, worth more than $100 billion at time of writing. Almost all of his fortune comes from his ownership share of the chip maker NVIDIA.

Tips On Growing Your Own Net Worth

One of the first steps to growing your net worth is to understand it. For example, what is your liquid net worth? And why is that figure so important?
A financial advisor can help you build a comprehensive retirement plan. Finding a financial advisor doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s free tool matches you with up to three vetted financial advisors who serve your area, and you can have a free introductory call with your advisor matches to decide which one you feel is right for you. If you’re ready to find an advisor who can help you achieve your financial goals, get started now.
Keep an emergency fund on hand in case you run into unexpected expenses. An emergency fund should be liquid — in an account that isn’t at risk of significant fluctuation like the stock market. The tradeoff is that the value of liquid cash can be eroded by inflation. But a high-interest account allows you to earn compound interest. Compare savings accounts from these banks.
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