2023-12-02 08:09:00
Her meteoric rise Nvidia in her time artificial intelligence has made its founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, one of the richest people on earth ($42.7 billion), while earning him the reputation of a rock star in tech circles. In contrast, Nvidia’s co-founder and first CTO, Curtis Primsaw fame and fortune slip through his hands.
At 64 today, Prim would be the 16th richest person in America if he had kept his Nvidia shares, estimates the Forbes, as the capitalization of the semiconductor giant amounts to 1.19 trillion. dollars. Instead, he sold his interest years ago and donated most of his fortune to his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Today, little is known about its history. According to Forbes, he is an inventor with nearly 200 patents to his credit who helped design the first PC graphics processor in the early 1980s. He later co-founded the semiconductor company Nvidia, where he remained for a decade, owning the position of technology director. After Nvidia went public in 1999, Prim transferred most of his shares to a charity, as he decided it was “too much” to keep. A few years later he left the company, in part because of a bad first marriage, which ended in divorce amid allegations of domestic violence against him by his ex-wife. By 2006 he had sold the last shares of a percentage that would be worth $70 billion today, according to Forbes calculations.
Instead, the magazine estimates his net worth today to be close to $30 million. Prim has donated almost ten times that amount to RPI.
Did he regret giving away an entire fortune? Speaking to Forbes he seems to answer in the affirmative. “I did a bit of a crazy thing and I wish I had held a little more (Nvidia stock),” he admits.
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