Nvidia's Skyrocketing Market Value and Employees' Wealth

TapTechNews July 2nd, thanks to the booming development of the field of artificial intelligence in recent years, Nvidia's market value has skyrocketed. Since the beginning of 2024, Nvidia's stock price has increased by 151%, and in the past five years, its share price has soared by 3500%, reaching a market value of 3.3 trillion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 24.05 trillion RMB) at one point, surpassing Apple and Microsoft and becoming the most valuable publicly traded company in human history.

The skyrocketing stock price has also made Nvidia's employees extremely wealthy. It is reported that employees who have worked at Nvidia for five full years now are likely to have a net worth of more than a million US dollars. According to the estimates of Levels.fyi, a product manager at Nvidia (at level 3 of the 8 levels) receives about 77,700 US dollars in stock value annually. The Entrepreneur magazine combined with Finlo's investment calculator to calculate that if an employee received stock worth 77,700 US dollars in 2019, just this part of the stock would have a market value of over 1.6 million US dollars today, not including other stock bonuses accumulated in recent years.

Calculating with the same method, a junior software engineer's stock earnings in five years are nearly 500,000 US dollars, a senior solution architect can reach 1.3 million US dollars, and a level 4 data scientist can have a net worth of 2 million US dollars just by relying on the initially granted stocks.

At first glance, it seems like a good thing that employees become rich due to the company's success, but Nvidia also faces the problem of how to keep these millionaire employees who have already achieved financial freedom and are in a semi-retired state motivated to work. It is reported that at an all-employee meeting last December, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had to deal with issues regarding the semi-retired state of some employees. It is understood that the relationship between employees has become increasingly tense, and some new employees feel that some old employees have started to lie down and not fulfilling their job responsibilities at all.

Jensen Huang's response strategy is to encourage each employee to be responsible for himself and become the CEO of his own time.

So, since they have already achieved financial freedom, why would these employees choose to stay at Nvidia instead of leaving the company directly? The answer may lie in Nvidia's corporate culture.

Browsing Nvidia's culture page, it can be found that the company emphasizes the concept of one team and no political infighting, no hierarchy. An assessment conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Nvidia employees found that the company's cultural values are highly consistent with the experience of its employees in the workplace. Compared to hundreds of other large companies, Nvidia's corporate culture is far above the average level.

As one Reddit user said in a related post, If you love the job and the company provides generous rewards for it, why leave?