Elon Musk is a fan of Jensen Huang’s work ethic.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is known for his tireless work ethic, which has helped turn the chip giant into one of the world’s most valuable companies.
So it’s perhaps no surprise that Mr Huang’s client and fellow billionaire, Elon Musk, is a fan of his management style.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (left) and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Photo: AFP
“Absolutely the right attitude,” Musk said in an X post on Sunday (June 30). “During the toilet paper shortage due to Covid-19, I also made sure our factories and offices had enough toilet paper.”
The Tesla CEO was responding to a clip of an interview Mr. Huang did in March of this year with Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he talked about his experience working at the breakfast restaurant chain Denny’s.
“For me, no job is lowly because remember, I used to wash dishes. I used to scrub toilets. I scrubbed a lot of toilets. I scrubbed more toilets than all of you combined,” Mr. Huang said in the interview.
The Nvidia CEO said this experience helped shape his working style — getting directly involved in problem solving with employees.
“No job is too small for me,” Huang says. “If you send me something and want me to help review it, I will do my best. And I will show you how I do it.”
For his part, Musk is not shy about working directly with employees. He once said that he slept at Tesla’s electric car factory to personally inspect the cars that were being produced.
“The reason I slept on the factory floor wasn’t because I couldn’t cross the street and stay in a hotel. It was because I wanted to make my situation worse than anyone else’s in the company,” Musk said in a 2018 interview. “Whenever they were having a hard time, I wanted to make mine worse.”
According to BI, Musk’s praise for Huang is not just because they share the same leadership style. He has not hesitated to provoke other billionaires who are also known for their crazy work ethic, such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or Shark Tank star Mark Cuban.
Musk’s friendly gestures may have more to do with how closely their fortunes are intertwined. After all, Musk’s AI ambitions—which include Tesla’s goal of building self-driving cars and OpenAI’s desire to become the world’s leading AI company—mean buying Nvidia’s chips has become a matter of survival.
What’s remarkable is that the admiration between Musk and Huang seems to be reciprocal.
“Tesla is so far ahead in self-driving cars. One day, every car will have it,” Huang said in an interview in May. Musk later responded on X: “Thanks Jensen.”
