Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang may run one of the most important companies in the world, but he can’t credit his success to the power of positive thinking.
“I think the most surprising thing about Jensen is that he’s almost totally driven by negative emotions,” said Stephen Witt, who spent hours interviewing the Nvidia co-founder for his book, “The Thinking Machine.”
“This is his fuel. This is his gasoline, [and it’s] what makes him go is this anxiety,” he told CNBC.
According to Witt, Huang fears Nvidia (NVDA), which is valued at more than $3.3 trillion, could fall apart at any time. Witt said he was surprised by how much negative emotions seem to motivate Huang, who “becomes very uncomfortable and nervous when things are going well.”
Huang does best when acting like Nvidia is “on the brink of failure at all times,” Witt said. “This is the narrative he generates around himself — that he could fail at any time and be disgraced. And this is what motivates him.”
Witt continued: “Jensen, of course, is an obvious, huge go-getter, but it’s all coming from this place of almost beating himself up for not working hard enough all the time. I didn’t expect to see that.”
While that mindset might sound exhausting, it has worked well for Huang, who according to Forbes, is the 16th richest person in the world in 2025.
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with two colleagues, and steered the company through an period where it almost had to close up shop just a few years later. Now, the chipmaker has never been more prolific. It reported $44.1 billion in revenue for the fiscal first quarter this year.
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