By Preston Fore
Publication Date: 2026-02-23 16:14:00
In 1993, Jensen Huang met two of his engineering friends at a Denny’s in Silicon Valley. Over pancakes and coffee, Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem kicked around an idea that sounded ambitious at the time: building chips that could deliver realistic 3D graphics on personal computers.
Within months, the idea became Nvidia—the company that would eventually power the AI boom and become the most valuable business in history, with a market cap topping $4.6 trillion.
For Huang, the journey from earning a few dollars an hour as a Denny’s dishwasher to a net worth of about $157 billion, thanks to a 3% company ownership, is likely bittersweet to look back on.
But Nvidia’s lesser-known third cofounder took a very different financial path.
Priem owned about 12.8% of Nvidia at the time of the company’s 1999 IPO, when the chipmaker was valued at roughly $1.1 billion. Not long after the listing, he began transferring much of his stake to a charitable foundation. By 2006, he had sold all of his shares.
If the baby boomer had held on, that original stake—not accounting for any stock dilution—would be worth more than $597 billion today. That’s enough to make Priem the second-richest person in the world, just behind Elon Musk.
Even with a private jet and mansion, Nvidia’s third cofounder has some regrets about selling out early
Priem graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a technology-focused university in upstate New York, in 1982….
