Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says humility is underrated: ‘You cannot show me a task that is beneath me’

The 62-year-old CEO of the world’s most valuable company said his humble roots as a dishwasher have, in fact, helped him learn to spurn no task. 

“You can’t show me a task that is beneath me,” he said in an interview with Stanford’s graduate school of business, which recently resurfaced on X.

Even in his most humble of jobs, the world’s ninth-richest man never shied away from the dirty work.

“I cleaned a lot of toilets. I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined, and some of them you just can’t unsee,” he said.

If someone approaches Huang with a call for help, he said he tries to at least contribute. That way, at least, the person with the problem can see a new way of thinking about the problem, he added. 

“If you send me something and you want my input on it, and I can be of service to you, and in my review of it, share with you how I reason through it, I’ve made a contribution to you,” Huang said. “I’ve made it possible for you to see how I reason through something, and by reasoning, as you know, how someone reasons through something empowers you.”

These values have been fundamental to Huang’s leadership style and are partly why he is worth $161.8 billion, according to Forbes. Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the U.S. at age 9 without his parents. As a teenager, he took a job as a dishwasher at Denny’s. 

It was actually at Denny’s where Nvidia, Huang’s future company, got its start, according to the Nvidia website. 

Years after he worked at the chain as a dishwasher, the Stanford graduate met with his future cofounders, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, to discuss the idea of a chip that would make 3D graphics possible on a PC. This idea sparked what would later become Nvidia, a chip empire that is now worth $4.5 trillion.

It wasn’t easy at first, according to Huang. When he presented the idea to his boss at LSI Logic, Wilfred Corrigan, he called it “one of the worst elevator pitches he’s ever heard.”

Still, Corrigan convinced Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital, to hear the pitch because of Huang’s strong work ethic.

Elon Musk, who actually played a role in Nvidia’s origin story, commented on the resurfaced Huang interview this week. 

“This is the way,” Musk wrote on X. When Nvidia introduced its first AI supercomputer, Musk was apparently the only one who reached out, saying he had a “a nonprofit AI lab” in need of such a product. Despite Huang’s skepticism that a nonprofit would buy a $300,000 computer, he personally delivered it to San Francisco to what he later realized was the OpenAI team behind ChatGPT. Musk left OpenAI in 2018.