Jensen Huang, the CEO and founder of Nvidia, is suddenly in the spotlight—and so is his leather jacket.
Huang has spent more than 20 years building his company into one of the world’s most successful tech firms. On the back of the AI boom, Nvidia is suddenly on course to become the first semiconductor company valued at $1 trillion.
But Huang has also spent almost half that time cultivating a personal brand based on one signature style. Since at least 2013, Huang is almost always pictured wearing one of many similar-but-different leather jackets—and the internet has taken note.
Huang’s success in creating a personal look—which has inspired retailers to sell “Jensen Huang” jackets, Reddit users to speculate about where he buys them, and Time magazine to feature a jacket on its cover (with Huang inside it)—seems to hinge on a mix of persistence and self-awareness. In June 2016, Huang introduced himself for an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on the social media platform Reddit. “I am Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA,” he wrote, “You may know me better as ‘the guy in the leather jacket who repeats things three times.’ ha ha ha.” (The subreddit that hosted the AMA is called Nvidiots, which Huang said he appreciated.)
And the Jacket is ubiquitous. Loading Nvidia’s site in the UK today (May 30), the first image is of a leather-clad Huang:
Every image of Huang in the Reuters photo database shows him wearing a jacket, dating as far back as 2013. Only in 2010 and 2009 are there a couple of pictures in which he wears something else: a black collared T-Shirt. Reddit users have also resurfaced a video of Huang in 2011, visiting Stanford 18 years after graduating from the university—and not long after donating $30 million to build a new engineering building, which he said left him “broke.” (Ha ha ha.) He wears blue jeans and a black polo shirt. The jacket is yet to come.
“The next Steve Jobs?”
Is it possible that Huang’s decision to stick to just one style of jacket-based attire was inspired by Steve Jobs, the co-founder and CEO of Apple? Jobs was en route to a special kind of tech stardom even as Huang was founding his company in 1997. Time has a picture of Jobs wearing a turtleneck back in 1976, so it may well be that he started wearing them when everyone else did, and simply never stopped. But in any case, in the years between Nvidia’s founding in 1997 and Jobs’s death in 2011, Jobs almost always wore blue jeans, white trainers, and a black turtleneck. The intent, he said, was to never have to think about what to wear.
If the turtleneck inspired Huang, he wasn’t alone. It quickly became something of a cliché in terms of tech “looks.” Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, who reports to prison today for defrauding investors, was compared to Jobs multiple times, in part because of her wardrobe. After Theranos’s tech was found to be a scam and the company lost most of its value overnight, fashion retailers sold out of Elizabeth Holmes-style turtleneck tops just before Halloween.
Most of the conversations around Nvidia focus, at the moment, on its technology. Huang invented the graphics processing unit used in most gaming systems, and Nvidia is now a giant in both semiconductors and artificial intelligence. But whether those also talking about Huang’s outerwear choices are mocking him or commenting that he looks pretty slick, he certainly seems to have succeeded in making himself recognisable.
Should you wish to own one, Huang-style jackets are available for those looking to emulate the CEO’s look, if not his net worth. They cost $145, or $1,200, or probably almost anything below, above, or in between those amounts. It’s hard to put a price on the look of success.