There’s a lot of advice out there about how to get rich. Start a company. Invest in crypto. Build a personal brand. Have multiple revenue streams.
But if you want to understand how generational wealth is actually created for tens of thousands of people at once, you need to study what’s happening at Nvidia right now.
It’s not just that Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company. It’s what that means for the 36,000 people who work there.
The Numbers Are Almost Incomprehensible
Let me just lay out what we’re looking at as of December 2025.
Nvidia’s market cap currently stands at approximately $4.3 trillion — making it the world’s most valuable company. In 2025, the company briefly touched a $5 trillion market cap and hit an all-time high of $212 in October before pulling back. Even after the recent correction, the stock is up over 31% year-to-date in 2025, following a 171% return in 2024 and 239% in 2023.
The 5-year total return for Nvidia stock is over 1,223% — meaning $1,000 invested five years ago would be worth more than $13,200 today.
Since ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, Nvidia’s stock is up roughly 900% and the company has gained about $3 trillion in market cap. A $1,000 investment that day would be worth approximately $10,700 today — nearly a 10x return in just three years.
The Employee Wealth Explosion: 75%+ at Nvidia Are Millionaires. And Almost Half Are Decamillionaires.
A survey of over 3,000 Nvidia employees revealed staggering wealth creation:
- 76-78% of Nvidia employees are now millionaires
- Nearly half have a net worth exceeding $25 million
- One in three employees is worth more than $20 million
If you extrapolate those percentages across Nvidia’s current workforce of 36,000 employees, you’re looking at:
- ~27,000+ millionaires working at the company today
- ~18,000 employees worth more than $25 million
- ~12,000 employees with net worths exceeding $20 million
And this doesn’t include the tens of thousands of former employees who built wealth during their tenure and have since moved on.
Jensen Huang put it bluntly in a July 2025 appearance on the All-In podcast: “I’ve created more billionaires on my management team than any CEO in the world. They’re doing just fine. Don’t feel sad for anybody at my layer.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. In 2025, two more Nvidia executives — CFO Colette Kress and EVP Jay Puri — joined the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, bringing the total number of known billionaires at Nvidia to at least six.
The Mechanics: Why This Happened
Nvidia has always compensated employees heavily with equity. RSUs (Restricted Stock Units) and stock options are a core part of compensation packages — not just for executives, but extending deep into engineering, product, sales, and support functions.
The company also offers an Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP) that allows employees to buy company stock at a 15% discount. For those who maxed it out and held, the results have been life-changing.
Consider a few real examples:
- A mid-level Nvidia employee (not an engineer) who maxed out the ESPP for 18 years and never sold a single share retired with $62 million.
- An employee who joined in 2019 and received $50,000 worth of stock options saw that investment grow to over $1.9 million by 2024.
- The average employee who started at the end of 2020, holding all their RSUs over four years, would have accumulated approximately $2.7 million by 2024.
The key multiplier was Nvidia’s stock performance. The stock has risen roughly 3,776% since 2019. Revenue has increased nearly five times since the quarter before ChatGPT launched.
The Philosophy: Take Care of People
What’s notable about Huang’s approach is that he personally reviews compensation for all employees.
“I review everybody’s compensation up to this day,” Huang said. “I sort through all 42,000 employees, and 100% of the time I increase the company’s spend on operating expenses. And the reason for that is because you take care of people, everything else takes care of itself.”
This isn’t just about generosity. It’s about retention. Nvidia’s turnover rate is just 2.7% — compared to an industry average of 17.7%. Those “golden handcuffs” — the unvested equity that keeps appreciating — make it extremely difficult to leave.
Current and former employees describe a “pressure cooker” environment with 7-day workweeks, 2 a.m. shifts, and intense meetings. But the equity makes people stay. As one former employee put it, she endured the culture for two years because of “the opportunity for even more wealth.”
The Historical Parallel: Google’s IPO
Nvidia’s wealth creation echoes what happened at Google two decades ago — but at an even larger scale.
When Google went public on August 19, 2004, the stock closed at $85 per share. That single day created 7 billionaires and approximately 900 instant millionaires from the early stockholders. More than half of those millionaires were worth more than $2 million immediately.
The stories became legend. Google’s company chef, Charlie Ayers (employee #56), had 40,000 shares worth $4 million at IPO. A masseuse named Bonnie Brown, who took a $450/week part-time job when Google had just 40 employees, became a “multi-multi-millionaire.”
Early employees who exercised 17.7 million shares in 2000 at an average price of 30 cents per share spent about $5.3 million collectively. By IPO day, those shares were worth $1.77 billion. Today, those same shares are worth tens of billions.
Three years after the IPO, 100 of Google’s first 300 employees had left — wealthy enough to do anything they wanted.
But Google’s IPO created millionaires in a single moment. Nvidia has been doing it continuously for years, at a scale that dwarfs what happened in Mountain View.
The Power of Going Long
The lesson from both Google and Nvidia is the same, but it’s counterintuitive in an era of job-hopping:
Wealth comes from going long on the right company.
The employees who got rich at Nvidia weren’t the ones who sold every time their RSUs vested. They weren’t the ones who hopped to the next hot startup after two years. They were the ones who:
- Joined a company with explosive potential
- Became excellent at what they did
- Got promoted and accumulated more equity with each level
- Held.
That last part is critical. The mid-level employee who retired with $62 million “never sold during tenure.” The Google employees who became multi-multi-millionaires held through volatility and uncertainty.
This requires conviction. It requires patience. And it requires being right about which company to bet on.
What This Means for Career Strategy
The traditional career advice is to maximize your cash compensation. Negotiate hard on salary. Take the highest-paying offer.
That advice is wrong — or at least incomplete.
Cash comp will never compound. A $300,000 salary is worth exactly $300,000 per year. But $100,000 in RSUs at a company that 10x’s is worth $1 million. $100,000 at a company that 30x’s — which is roughly what Nvidia has done since 2019 — is worth $3 million.
The practical implications:
- Optimize for trajectory over brand. Joining Google today won’t make you rich the way it did in 2001. You want to find the company where the best days are still ahead.
- Equity percentage matters more than paper value. Understand what you’re getting, not just what it’s worth today.
- Tenure compounds. Every year you stay, you get refresh grants. Every promotion, you get more. The employees who got really wealthy stayed 5, 10, 18 years.
- Be indispensable. Nvidia’s low turnover isn’t just about golden handcuffs — it’s about employees doing meaningful work in the most important market in technology.
The Largest Concentration of Employee Wealth in History
Nvidia has created what may be the largest concentration of employee wealth in corporate history. With 76-78% of its workforce now millionaires, nearly half worth more than $25 million, and at least six known billionaires among its leadership, the company stands as proof that going long on the right rocket ship can be more lucrative than founding your own company.
Google’s IPO created roughly 900 millionaires in a day.
Nvidia has created an estimated 27,000+ millionaires — with roughly half of them now worth more than $25 million.
As Jensen Huang said: “I’ve created more billionaires on my management team than any CEO in the world.”
The next Nvidia is out there right now. The question isn’t whether these opportunities exist. It’s whether you can identify them, get in, and have the conviction to stay.
