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Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).

I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.

Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.

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What's the downside of that for the economy? It seems like it would be the market becoming more efficient, cutting down on margins and so on. Bringing Nvidia back to earth might open up cheaper hardware for other companies to work with and accelerate AI anyway.
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Doesn't this situation demonstrate how bonkers it is to pin the fortunes of the stock market and potentially the entire economy on the behavior of one person?
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This could've been said of Cisco in the telecom bubble days. Or Nortel. Or a handful of other key players who were all inflating that bubble and playing games with their financials that made the bursting of the bubble worse.

Pumping billions of dollars, the source of which is obscured, into it looks like a cut out, is not just a national security problem. It undermines confidence in the numbers that you claim are the basis of shareholder value.

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what kind of argument is this?

the stock value just represents what people think the company is (or will be) worth, them selling products at 50% margin is what brings the money, the stock value doesn't give NVIDIA extra cash (unless they're selling or leveraging their own stock reserves to get even more cash?). And definitely shareholder value is not the economy.

and also, how is the efficiency bad now? surely that allows for innovation and other companies and people to get cheaper hardware (assuming they somehow have to lower their margins because Jensen left, still don't get that argument)

NVDA losing 90% would bankrupt the entire AI sector and plunge US into a deep recession.

It's not just a chip company. Those trillions of value represent bets across the entire economy. When the casino goes bankrupt, all bets are off.

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Giving Jensen credit for creating literally all of the value from Nvidia seems really over the top. He happened to be running the biggest GPU company during the biggest GPU boom ever. Sure he had an impact on the numbers and the timing, but if Jensen had never been born someone else would be heading a giant chip company around this period of time that saw it's stock take off like a rocket ship. This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.
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> Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.

Nonsense. Nvidia's employees created that value, not Jensen. Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created, just like in every other company. CEO worship is absurd.

Like it's an extremely common sentiment when working for a large company to look at the SVP or CEO and go "that person is a dumbass, everyone in charge is a dumbass". Yet when looking at other companies somehow we forget about that and put the companies success on the CEO or top level execs. Instead of remembering "no, it's probably the small army below them figuring out how to manage upwards to prevent the idiot in charge from tanking everything"

> Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created

That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?

A lot of people play crucial roles in a company. HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation.

If you've ever been in a company with poor leadership and one with great leadership, you'd see the impact of it on everyone working there and on the value being created.

>> Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created

>That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?

I can assure you that the people you are targeting the question at, have never/rarely done any of the things you asked. I call them the socialists. They sit in judgment of people who do things while they lead their petty lives and all they look forward is the next Superbowl game, or next Netflix series.

(p.s you might like the writings of author by name Ayn Rand, Disclaimer: I'm no worshiper of Rand)

This is hilarious because Jensen’s idea of leadership is petty authoritarianism. I’m not sure if this is just HN being emotionally bought in to great man theory or financially bought in to NVDA, but most of their value creation is on the back of gamer chips being useful for crypto and later AI.

The children yearn for a tyrant I guess.

> HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation

Not sure about HR TBH

> That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?

Yup, all of it. And at no point have I considered myself as 10,000x more valuable than any of the team members I led. Yet that's exactly what is done to billionaire CEOs.

You'll notice I did not say Jensen didn't create ANY value.

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Those employees didn’t create it when a huge number of them worked at AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, or TI.

It took the corporate structure and top-down direction decision ATTRIBUTABLE TO JENSEN to allow them to work so productively together.

Leadership matters. Labor Talent is only able to operate at 10% effectiveness with shitty leaders in place.

You think he hired everyone personally?

CEOs in large companies do not play a role like that.

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This tendency to credit an entire technological breakthrough to the top of an org chart is such a bizarre cliche from a systems perspective. Breakthroughs are not conceived from whole cloth within the corner offices of isolated autocracies; they are the product of horizontal networks of social capital as engineers continually circulate across firms.

Besides, individual contributors aren't incentivized to innovate insofar as we're not structurally positioned to capture a windfall.

I recognize the narrative that an army of world-class engineers is essentially inert until an executive visionary breathes purpose into them, but that's a structural property of the firm. It's a choice to route all surplus through the board and major shareholders, and to starve out any innovation that happens outside of those venues.

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> Those employees didn’t create it when a huge number of them worked at AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, or TI.

I agree: we must do everything we possibly can to aggrandize the already wealthy and powerful. The glory must accumulate in their account, and the less that goes to their subordinates, the better.

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I agree that CEO worship is absurd but it’s a big stretch to say they are responsible for none of the value. Jensen AND the employees. And he probably created a disproportionate amount of that value compared to the average IC, I don’t think that’s in question. But is he responsible for most of it, or even 10% of it? Unlikely.
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So fire all CEOs, let employees run the company then. Blind CEO hatred is equally stupid.
They should fall first to AI replacement as they're the least useful people in a company and most susceptible to ruining the company's reputation by screwing a Chinese spy and a hot local chic.
If you think CEOs are useless, why dont you create a company without a CEO and simply outcompete Google and Amazon?
sure, lend me a million dollars
> as they're the least useful people in a company

Tell me you know nothing about running a company without telling me. Just because one CEO got caught screwing over a Chinese spy that doesn't mean all CEOs are useless people. That's just lazy generalization.

Edit: Guess I am arguing with a bot lol

At least you aren't arguing with a socialist...
This sort of empty bitterness is a very pernicious thing. It reads as knowledge / experience, but really it’s nothing more than angry drivel. It doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before a million times.
You're right, it takes a company to deliver a value. With that said, you are *seriously* underestimating how hard it is to organize and run a large company. Jensen is not perfect by any means, and I don't even particularly like him. I just hate this anti-billionaire narrative being thrown around a lot lately that leaders don't matter.
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Yes, this cult of personality I find completely insane. Mostly the egotists get in the way of the technical people making progress.
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If efficiency is a risk for the economy then the economy is of course. Hopefully the correction can be soft and not a catastrophic pop. Maybe a slight cooling of Nvidia, caused by isolated factors, can help without crashing the whole sector.
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surely the telegraph was the biggest value creator ever?
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I'm a normal person with a beating heart and conscience, so I don't give a damn about how much shareholder value someone has ever created, and I never will.
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And poof just like that the myth of the founder led company being untouchable has imploded. All other founder led CEOs will be watching this closely.

Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.

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I don't care about shareholder value. There is Schaudenfreude in seeing an AI/tech billionaire go down.
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What exactly have any of us regular people gotten from more Nvidia shareholder value? More expensive chips and AI slop?

  Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.
A) He never made a single product himself, and B) surely we can see in hindsight that this is a pretty goofy metric for success...? Like, "shareholder value" isn't exactly what we need at this pivotal moment in the terran story.

  I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. 
  ...
  But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were
Even if we accept capital as the most important thing, this seems pretty openly counterintuitive. You're lamenting the spectre of efficiency.
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What on earth are you talking about. The exponential growth in the 1990s, percentage wise, far outpaced the AI bubble. Go look at Intel, Microsoft, lucid, etc from the dot com boom. This is the problem with 20-somethings’ hot takes on the market: no history.
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This slavish devotion to shareholder value above all else is pretty gross.

He cheated, multiple times, he is scum for that.

He seems to have consorted with a spy and evaded export bans. He is a criminal for that.

Oh, but he made people a lot of money? All good! /s

Throwing all morals and ethics out the window because of the eCoNoMy is insane.

The cult of personality around CEOs is unhealthy.

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The comments in these threads are somewhat sickening. That so many commenters here see no problem with his behavior is troubling.
Welcome to HackerNews!
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And we get to buy GPUs again in normalized prices. How's that bad for the economy exactly?
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Nvidia stock price is now lower than it was a year ago. Has been declining for about 6 months, highly volatile, with a step sell off starting a month ago.

Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.

The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.

It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.

Nvidia makes a lot of CPUs, my dude. And network switches. They’re full stack.