Nvidia CEO Learned English Without Speaking English—Plot Twist!
KEY POINTS
- •Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang learned English from his mother using a dictionary despite her language barrier.
- •He shared this experience during a talk with the Cambridge Union, highlighting its impact on his leadership.
- •Huang's upbringing in Taiwan and Thailand shaped his perspective, driving his approach at Nvidia.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia's head honcho, credits his leadership skills to his mom’s ‘teach-through-a-dictionary’ method. Born in Taiwan, shuffled through Thailand, then dropped in the US at age 9 like a linguistic grenade. Mom taught English using a piece of paper and a dictionary — despite not knowing English herself — basically parenting by DIY Google Translate circa 1980s. Nvidia went from a 1993 startup to a $5 trillion AI-boom beast under his ‘How hard can it be?’ mantra. Also in the immigrant parent club: Pavel Durov of Telegram fame, whose dad wrote more scientific papers than most people read books, and DoorDash’s CEO Tony Xu, who grew up washing dishes with his multi-job hustling mom — truly inspiring labor conditions for future CEOs.
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Jensen Huang’s mom taught English without speaking English. So basically, Nvidia’s gone $5 trillion treating problems like a challenging word puzzle nobody actually understands. We’re all just Googling our way through life while pretending we know what we’re doing.
If your mom taught you English with a dictionary she couldn’t read, congrats, you too can lead a $5 trillion company and pretend you know what 'AI' really means.
Jensen Huang: the CEO who learned English through ‘guess and hope’ and still created a chip empire. Meanwhile I can't even guess my way out of a paper bag.
Source: Businessinsider | Published: 11/14/2025 | Author: Shubhangi Goel
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