Jensen Huang added roughly $12 billion to his fortune on Wednesday (Jul 31), matching Nvidia’s record day.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, it was Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO’s largest one-day US dollar gain, surpassing the US$9.6 billion he earned on February 22 when the chipmaker’s shares surged following solid earnings. It also propelled him back past the $100 billion mark for the first time in a week, raising his total net worth to $102.8 billion.
Nvidia has been on a wild ride recently as investors abruptly exited high-flying technology companies ahead of an expected Federal Reserve rate decrease in September. That changed on Wednesday, when competitor Advanced Micro Devices provided an encouraging revenue projection, citing high demand for artificial intelligence. Nvidia shares rose 13% and added a record US$329 billion in value, increasing the year-to-date gain to 136%.
Huang, 61, ranks as the world’s 14th richest person, after only Michael Dell. He has been steadily profiting from Nvidia’s outperformance, dumping stock as part of a 10b5-1 trading strategy. He sold shares for roughly US$169 million in June, the most he’d ever made in a single month, as insatiable demand for the chips used to power AI propelled the stock to new highs and is expected to exceed that level in July.
He isn’t the only insider selling. Company executives and directors sold more than $700 million in shares in the first half of this year, a figure that surpasses any other period in the company’s history.