Elon Musk on Sunday amplified Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s message on work ethic and leadership after sharing a clip of Huang’s March 2024 Stanford Graduate School of Business interview. Posting the video on X, the world's richest man wrote: “This is the way”, endorsing Huang’s philosophy that no task is beneath a leader.
The clip shows Huang recounting his early years working as a busboy, waiter, dishwasher and toilet cleaner. “To me, no task is beneath me because, remember, I used to be a dishwasher [and] I used to clean toilets… I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined,” Huang told the Stanford audience, using humour to emphasise humility and service‑oriented leadership.
Huang explained that he still approaches work the same way: “If you send me something and you want my input on it, and I can be of service to you… I’ve made a contribution.” Demonstrating how he reasons through problems, he said, empowers others to think clearly: “Strategy, how to forecast, how to break a problem down — you’re empowering people. That’s how I see it.”
Musk's post received more than seven million views.
Humble beginnings: The toilet-cleaning childhood that shaped Huang
Long before becoming the eighth richest person in the world and leading a $3.1‑trillion chip powerhouse, Jensen Huang spent two difficult years as a child in rural Kentucky. Sent from Taiwan to what his uncle mistakenly believed was a prestigious school, nine‑year‑old Huang instead found himself in a boarding institution for troubled youth. Too young to enrol there, he attended a nearby public school with children from tobacco‑farming families.
Hampered by poor English, Huang was bullied and assigned to clean toilets — a task he later described as both humiliating and transformative. Speaking to NPR, he recalled: “We worked really hard, we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough,” adding that, eventually, “I loved the time I was there.”
After reuniting with his parents in Oregon, Huang graduated from university at 20 and began his career designing chips at AMD and LSI Logic. His resilience, shaped by early adversity, laid the foundation for his break into entrepreneurship.
From diner meeting to chip giant: Nvidia's origin story
Huang co‑founded Nvidia in 1993 in a Silicon Valley diner with the goal of “solving problems normal computers can’t.” Nvidia introduced its first GPU in 1999 and later positioned itself at the crossroads of gaming, cloud computing, data centres and generative AI.
Today, Nvidia powers the global AI boom; its high‑end GPUs — selling for tens of thousands of dollars — are core to training systems like ChatGPT. With big tech’s demand fuelling a historic stock surge, Nvidia crossed a $4‑trillion valuation earlier this year. Huang’s personal fortune now stands at roughly $157 billion, driven by his 3.5 percent stake.
Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!
