Jensen Huang says he reviews salaries of all 42,000 Nvidia staffers: Here's how

Indian Express

3 days ago

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that he personally reviews the salaries of over 42,000 employees working at the AI chip giant as part of his hands-on management strategy.
When asked about rumours of a secret stock option pool for high performers at Nvidia, Huang reaffirmed his commitment to fair and competitive rewards. He noted that his strategy is to pay his workers handsomely, which has worked well with Nvidia leadership as well.
A recent survey found that over 78 per cent employees of the chipmaker are millionaires.
'I review everybody's compensation, up to this day, at the end of every cycle. They send me everybody's recommended comp. I go through the whole company. I sort through all 42,000 employees, and 100% of the time I increase the company's spend on opex (operating expenses),' Huang said.
'And the reason for that is because you take care of people, everything else takes care of itself,' he added.
'I've created more billionaires on my management team than any CEO in the world. They're doing just fine. Don't feel sad for anybody at my layer,' Huang further said.
Around 76-78 per cent Nvidia employees are millionaires, according to a recent survey shared by financial analyst Jesse Cohen. Based on the responses of 3,000 Nvidia employees, the survey found that they most benefitted from the employee stock purchase programme that allows them to buy Nvidia stocks at a discount of 15 per cent.
'Wild Stat of the Day: 76-78% of Nvidia employees are now millionaires, with approximately 50% having a net worth over $25 million,' Cohen wrote in a post on X that was accompanied by a purported screenshot of the survey.
Wild Stat of the Day: 76-78% of Nvidia employees are now millionaires, with approximately 50% having a net worth over $25 million. $NVDA pic.twitter.com/Mmt2EIjx57
— Jesse Cohen (@JesseCohenInv) August 9, 2025
Nvidia has emerged as the biggest winner of the generative AI boom. Its share price has surged by nearly 3,800 per cent since 2019. On July 9, 2025, it made history by becoming the first publicly traded company in the world to surpass $4 trillion in its market capitalisation.
The recent stock surge has also driven Huang into the list of top 10 billionaires in the world.
Nvidia started out in the tech industry by developing GPUs (graphics processing units) for video gaming and graphics-intensive applications. It became known for developing multiple series of cutting-edge graphics processors which, in turn, led to the company bagging a prized contract to develop the hardware for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console.
However, the company's recent surge in popularity stems from the rise of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's newly unveiled GPT-5 which reportedly runs on tens of thousands of GPUs.