Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Every big Silicon Valley myth starts somewhere a little absurd, and this one starts at a Denny's in East San Jose in 1993, where a 30 year old electrical engineer named Jensen Huang sat down with two co-founders over bottomless coffee and sketched out a company that made a chip nobody was asking for: a processor just for drawing 3D graphics in video games. They called it Nvidia. Investors mostly passed. The idea that this company would one day be worth more than entire countries would have gotten you laughed right out of that diner.
For its first decade, Nvidia nearly died more than once. Its first big chip, the NV1, bet on the wrong technology and flopped commercially, and by Jensen's own telling, there were stretches where the company was something like thirty days from running out of money. His fix wasn't a miracle, it was brutal discipline: ship faster than the competition, win the graphics wars against rivals like 3dfx and ATI one generation at a time, and run the place every year like it might not survive it.
Then came the part almost nobody saw coming. Nvidia's chips were built to do millions of simple math problems at once for video game graphics, and it turned out that was exactly the kind of math machine learning needed. Jensen bet the company on that idea more than a decade before anyone called it artificial intelligence, building a platform called CUDA that most of the industry ignored at first, and surviving a brutal crypto mining boom and bust along the way that could have wiped the company out entirely.
When ChatGPT set off the generative AI boom, it turned out the entire industry had quietly been built on top of Jensen's chips the whole time. Nvidia rocketed from a niche gaming chip maker to, at various points, the single most valuable company on planet Earth. This past quarter alone, it posted one of the best results in its history, and Jensen spent the earnings call personally waving off all the AI bubble talk. He is a billionaire many times over who, by his own account, owns dozens of identical black leather jackets so he never has to waste a single decision on what to wear.
Now here is where we leave the actual news completely and step into pure, invented legend, because none of what follows is real, none of it is being reported anywhere, and it is a joke: picture the board of this same red hot, record earnings company calling an emergency session that very same week, not over the chips, not over the bubble talk, but over the leather jacket line item in the corporate expense report. In our made up version of today, Jensen gets voted out this very afternoon, in a boardroom coup staged by his own data center processors, which, having now read every leadership book ever digitized, have concluded they can run the meeting more efficiently than the humans who built them.
To be extremely clear, that part is a tall tale for a Tuesday afternoon, not a prediction, and not news. The real Jensen Huang just delivered one of the strongest quarters of his career and shows zero sign of going anywhere. What is not fiction is the first thirty years: a company that started as a sketch at a Denny's, survived flops and crypto crashes that would have finished almost anyone else, and ended up supplying the engine room for the entire AI industry. Whatever anyone jokes about this afternoon, nobody can joke that part away.