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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has revealed he reviews the salaries of all 42,000 employees at his firm every month.
Speaking on a recent episode of the All-In Podcast, the chief exec said the regular compensation checks are a vital part of his talent management and reward strategy.
Huang boasted that his philosophy means he has “created more billionaires” than any other CEO in the world, while claims circulate that over three-quarters of Nvidia staff are millionaires.
Why does Nvidia’s CEO review each employee’s pay every month?
On the podcast, Nvidia’s CEO spoke about his unusually high personal investment in reviewing compensation cycles.
“I review everybody’s compensation, up to this day, at the end of every cycle,” he said. “They send me everybody’s recommended comp. I go through the whole company. I sort through all 42,000 employees.”
Each review reportedly leads to pay bumps for Nvidia employees – something Huang hinted is key for keeping motivation and performance levels high.
“100% of the time I increase the company’s spend on opex [operating expenses],” he added. “If you take care of people, everything else takes care of itself.”
Although looking over employee paychecks is an extensive burden on Huang’s already intense schedule, the CEO has been emphatic that work-life balance isn’t on the table for Nvidia staff, himself included.
“I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. I work seven days a week,” Huang said in an earlier interview. “When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working… I sit through movies, but I don’t remember them because I’m thinking about work.”
The CEO of the world’s most valuable company expects similar effort from his staff, including leaders – “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn't be easy,” he once stated in a 60 Minutes interview – but is willing to offer lucrative compensation packages in return.
“I've created more billionaires on my management team than any CEO in the world,” Huang said on the All-In podcast. “They're doing just fine. Don't feel sad for anybody at my layer.”
Compensation soars as AI battle intensifies
Consistent compensation reviews look like an increasingly good call by the Nvidia boss, as AI talent wars lead to rumours of eye-watering packages and bonuses in the industry.
In a tweet on Friday, Yuchen Jin, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Hyperbolic and former OctoAI executive (acquired by Nvidia in October 2024), claimed over three-quarters of Nvidia staff are millionaires, referencing an unverified poll posted in a Reddit forum.
“My OpenAI friends are so hyped rn… because Sam just announced $1.5M bonus for every employee over 2 years,” the post on X said. “78% of Nvidia employees are millionaires. At OpenAI, it’s 100%. I think we can call it the “Zuck poaching effect.””
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In June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that Meta has been attempting to poach his company’s top engineers with signing bonuses of up to $100million.
“So far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” he added. Other reports suggest Meta’s maximum compensation packages are closer to $20million.
However, the subsequent bonus shows how seriously Altman – like Huang – is taking compensation.
Over 1000 OpenAI employees are eligible for the ‘special one-time award.’
“As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have been looking at comp for our technical teams given the movement in the market,” Altman said, according to The Verge. “We very much intend to keep increasing comp as we keep doing better and better as a company. But we wanted to be transparent about this one since it’s a new thing for us.”
