He was worth an estimated four billion dollars ranked number 546 richest on Forbes's world billionaires list Just over a year ago.

He was worth 21 billion dollars ranked number 76 in the world Now with NVIDIA's market capitalization surpassing 3.2 trillion dollars He's the number 12 richest person on earth worth 115 billion dollars mostly thanks to his nearly 4% stake in the company While Huang is the best-known shareholder of NVIDIA.

There are plenty of others who have personally benefited from the rising stock Among the biggest gainers are five other top executives including chief financial officer Colette Kress and general counsel Tim Teeter Plus four independent board members who together own more than 10 billion dollars worth of stock One of those board members is billionaire Mark Stevens who first got involved with NVIDIA in 1993 the same year the fledgling chip company was founded He was a newish partner at Sequoia when the firm's founder Don Valentine got a call from LSI logic founder Wilfred Wilf Corrigan According to Stevens Corrigan told Valentine quote, there's this kid who works at LSI and I'm sorry to see him go You guys should look at him Valentine and Stevens met with Huang who pitched them on the idea of a company designing 3d graphics chips for PC games Steven says quote and we thought intriguing Sequoia put 1 million dollars into the company part of an investment that valued the firm at just 7 million dollars according to pitch book Stevens who had worked at Intel and was Sequoia's young semiconductor expert joined the NVIDIA board He left in 2006 at a time when Sequoia partners were stepping off public company boards to focus on private companies In 2008 Stevens began to wind down at Sequoia and Huang invited him to rejoin the board Largely because of Sequoia's early investment Stevens now owns five billion dollars worth of NVIDIA shares Current venture capitalist and former tech executive Brooke Sewell was convinced by another tech executive Harvey Jones to join NVIDIA's board in 1997 the two men got to know each other while Sewell was senior vice president of finance and operations at Synopsys where Jones was CEO Sewell recalls that NVIDIA quote was in the graphics semiconductor space Which was a hyper competitive space and the CEO was barely over 30 He hadn't even been a VP before he founded the company.

I looked at it and said boy, this doesn't seem likely however Jones who joined the board in 1993 was persuasive and NVIDIA was in search of someone with expertise in finance and taking a company public Which Sewell had done at Synopsys?

Sewell now owns 700 million dollars of its shares Early on it wasn't so obvious that NVIDIA would end up doing so well NVIDIA's first chip released in 1995 had failed Partway through developing its second chip Huang and the team decided the architecture was all wrong And they stopped work on it according to a podcast from the VC firm Sequoia Board member Stevens says quote between 1993 and 1997.

We almost went bankrupt three times NVIDIA turned things around and its third chip was a success in the early 2000s Developed the world's first graphics processing unit or GPU which became hugely popular for rendering images in video games in the past decade or so NVIDIA found that AI researchers in both the corporate and academic worlds were using its GPUs to run neural networks a foundation of AI and to create homegrown supercomputers That helped fuel the decision to bet on AI computing before there was a demonstrated market That bet has paid off in spades For full coverage and to see our list of the 10 current NVIDIA directors and executives Who have gotten the richest from their holdings and share sales, which are up a cumulative 36 billion dollars in the past month Check out Phoebe Lu and Carrie a Dolan's piece on Forbes.com This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.

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