[nimbius]

Huangs net worth is $80 billion. Hes literally one of the richest people in the world and arguably the least qualified to address the public in any form.

The mans completely detached. Nothing, none of what anyone experiences in the real world impacts him in the least. The man wouldnt be able to empathize with the sufferings of predatory college lending if he tried. his stratospheric wealth makes him practically undefinable in the context of actual hard work or labor.

Everything hes made in life came from the hard work and excess capital of people like Stanford students.

[duggan]

I dunno, it sounds like he's as self-made as it gets. Immigrant family, worked in Denny's, got an electrical engineering degree, founded Nvidia.

I don't mind dunking on the disconnected rich who luck their way into fortune, but this doesn't seem like one of those cases.

[nottorp]

There's no data on wikipedia about his family. They moved from Taiwan to Thailand and then the US. That doesn't say if they were rich, poor, or who they knew.

I mean, i used to believe self-made man stories until I found out who Bill Gates' mother is. Now I'd rather see some research.

[deciplex]

I know plenty of people like that and none of them are billionaires. No one's saying you're going to become a billionaire by sitting on your ass and waiting for it to happen (unless you're born into it of course, which many of them are) but the point of survivorship bias is to note that you have to do all those other things and then you have to get lucky. And once you're lucky the tendency is to attribute your oversized success to all the other things, but that simply isn't the case.

It's funny that all the comments pointing this out are getting heavily downvoted here. I thought we were all (or mostly) into Bayesian reasoning here. Perhaps not, or perhaps many of us are really bad at it.

[Ninjinka]

He's a Taiwanese immigrant who graduated early and built his own company. I think he contributed some hard work himself.

[Draiken]

That's somewhat irrelevant IMO.

There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky.

This is the nature of survivorship bias.

[bell-cot]

> The difference is: he got lucky

So...back in 1993, when Jensen Huang was founding Nvidia, how many of those million-ish "smarter" people had any real interest in founding a graphics card company? Or any sort of company, period?

Yes, luck favored him a number of times, to make it to $8e10 net worth. If he was only worth a measly $8e5, would you have some other reason(s) to sneer at him?

[Draiken]

I don't understand why everyone assumes I'm talking down on him. I'm merely pointing out how irrelevant that quote is.

> how many of those million-ish "smarter" people had any real interest in founding a graphics card company? Or any sort of company, period?

That's not the right question. The right question is: how many of those even had the opportunity to do this? I'd doubt it's more than a single digit.

He made it. Congrats to him. But we don't know why he made it. No, it wasn't because he "suffered". It wasn't because he worked hard. We quite simply can't know.

If you can't attribute his success to what he is saying, it's not relevant. Now that he made it, he can proclaim it was any of his millions of choices, but by definition it cannot be a few generic choices, because many more made the same choices and never made it.

Luck is a stub for all of the infinite choices and events that conspired for him to be where he is today. It's nice to pretend it's hard work that leads to success (or in this case "pain and suffering"), but it's most definitely not true.

[MrYellowP]

I guess at least some people realize how insulting you are.

"Luck" is often a reason given by losers. It's the argument that shifts blame away from their own poor, often stupid decisions. It's used by losers when it comes to starting and running businesses, just like it's used by losers who failed to buy-in on cryptos or stocks when they were low.

"Oh, your business actually took off? You got lucky!"

"Oh so btc hit 69k? You got lucky."

They talk as if they had any clue whatsoever (because to make the assessment you need to understand the matter at hand), but if that was the case, they'd be amongst the actually objectively successfull people.

So ... yeah, right. I didn't make the right decisions at the right time to make sure [project] works out, after doing lots of research. No, I just got lucky. I didn't put hard work into [my project], I just got lucky.

Fuck. You.

It's not luck. No. It's simply not being a clueless loser. It's "putting hard work into reaching your goal". It's "not giving up". It's "standing your ground against the losers who want you to fail".

If these people you're mentioning, were so smart, they'd be rich.

Now take a good fucking guess why they're not.

[Draiken]

What a load of crap. Being a hard worker is not causation for being rich. That's such a naive take.

How many people working 3 jobs you know are billionaires? Even millionaires? Are those not hard working people?

Yeah, citing crypto, which is literally gambling, tells me the kind of argument you have.

Not sure why the personal attacks are necessary.

[uxcolumbo]

I don’t understand why you are being downvoted.

Can folks who downvote please explain why?

Because survivorship is a real thing and becoming a billionaire isn’t just down to hard work or resilience.

[Draiken]

It's simply easier to down vote than it is to have a conversation. Especially with strong arguments.

The fact is: people want to believe hard work leads to success. It's a nice thought.

Many people center their entire lives around this concept. If someone challenges it, it can make them very angry.

> isn’t just down to hard work or resilience.

I'd argue it's never down to either of those. These are way too common to be relevant in the equation. Imagine if I told you all hard working resilient people were billionaires. I'd be factually incorrect and be rightfully called crazy.

But when folks don't say it out loud and instead only imply, it's suddenly accurate. Makes no sense.

[m3kw9]

So being unlucky makes one more qualified?

[Draiken]

No?

The point is: he's no more qualified than anyone else. Whatever he's saying is simply not reproducible and most certainly not what made him a billionaire. Otherwise we could all just replicate whatever any billionaire does and inevitably become one. That's not how it works though, is it?

It's easy to say it was hard work that got you there after you're the 1e-20% that made it.

[tester756]

>The point is: he's no more qualified than anyone else.

On the other hand to what you're saying

He had to make fuckton of decisions over his whole time as a CEO and that's where it brought him, so he definitely had at least some idea, vision, direction supported by some traits.

[Draiken]

I don't know mate. Maybe you're right, but I still doubt it.

Once you're a CEO with hundreds of thousands of very smart people under you, making the wrong decision is much, much harder. There's some skill to it, but so few people get into that position that simply not making completely dumb decisions can already lead to success. A good company has self-sufficient people that don't need to be micro-managed.

I've said it many times before: give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of talented individuals and I'm pretty sure they'll manage just fine. But we can't know for sure, so... maybe you're right in that sense.

Going back to the original point though, had he pointed out his decisions and vision, that'd be completely different compared to attributing it to "suffering and pain". That's plain silly.

[tester756]

Luck is an intersection of preparation and opportunity

[cpach]

Was luck involved? To some degree I guess. But come on, to say it’s pure luck, is that credible?

[Draiken]

I'm not saying it's pure luck. I'm saying the only relevant part is luck.

If you get billions of smart hard working people, you still only get a few hundred billionaires. The only differentiator is luck.

You're one of the lucky that could migrate, went to the right schools, met the right set of people, were born in the right year and so on.

It's purely the logical conclusion. Some people get inspired through quotes like that, and it's probably good to lie to yourself that your hard work will inevitably pay off. But we should all know that it's ultimately a lie.

[tester756]

>If you get billions of smart hard working people, you still only get a few hundred billionaires. The only differentiator is luck.

There are no billion equal people.

There are other differentiators than just opportunity: environment, background, culture, childhood, experience, vision and maybe traits.

>It's purely the logical conclusion. Some people get inspired through quotes like that, and it's probably good to lie to yourself that your hard work will inevitably pay off. But we should all know that it's ultimately a lie.

That's not a lie, it just doesn't guarantee success. But it increases probability (when you talk in general, not some specific person).

[Draiken]

>There are other differentiators than just opportunity: environment, background, culture, childhood, experience, vision and maybe traits.

That's what I mean when I say luck. It's a combination of millions of variables that eventually lead to the successful outcome. The vast majority of those we have no control over.

So I stand by it. Ultimately the difference is luck. You can't pinpoint one of those millions of events and say: this was it. It's always a combination of them all.

>That's not a lie, it just doesn't guarantee success. But it increases probability (when you talk in general, not some specific person).

If inspirational quotes were phrased like that, I agree, that's not a lie. But at least in my bubble I only see folks with fanatical belief that if you work hard you are guaranteed success. I even got personal attacks for my comment from one of those fanatics.

Or even more commonly, like in this case, already successful people attributing their success to "hard work", which is extremely misleading.

The Tyranny of Merit[1] talks about this in a lot more depth.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Merit-Whats-Become-Common/dp/...

[Aloha]

You dont have to go to Stanford to get a decent job, or even work for Nvidia.

You dont have to go to a top tier school, or even college at all to be a working (and decent) engineer.

Going to Stanford and taking on gobs of debt is absolutely a choice you make, I agree with you about discharging college debt, and whatnot, but some of this is based on choices individuals make.

[waswaswas]

Due to generous financial aid policies, Stanford ends up being free or cost-to-family less than flagship state schools for all but (depending on definition) the professional class and wealthy...

[jjtheblunt]

Please support your assertions with linkable citations to data.

[m3kw9]

Rich hater be hating here. He came from poor to the top and wasn’t passed a silver spoon, so he has enough qualifications to lecture.

[COGlory]

It's not rich hating, it's that there's a billion poor people who weren't passed a silver spoon, worked hard, but ultimately failed in the one key element: luck. Rich people never understand that most of their success came from luck. In general, it makes them very unqualified to tell other people how to get rich.

And no I'm not saying rich people are too dumb to understand it, I'm saying that they're trying to rationalize survivorship bias, which pretty much everyone on planet earth does, knowingly, or unknowingly.

I'd highly recommend Fooled by Randomness for more on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

[jjtheblunt]

The point is he's NOT saying how to get rich...that high expectations aren't a dependable strategy. I took it as he's acknowledging luck happens.

[COGlory]

I'm not sure what he's saying exactly in the article, because it's paywalled. I'm just responding to my parent comment:

>He came from poor to the top and wasn’t passed a silver spoon, so he has enough qualifications to lecture.

[ytx]

I agree that there is a huge component of luck. But that does not invalidate the work, risk, and talent involved. Nobody "succeeds" (in the sense of creating a trillion dollar company) just by "working hard" or "being smart".

The fact is it's a lot harder to create a company or build something new, than to be an employee and "work hard" all your life. There's nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that everyone rich (especially this guy!) is just luck is ludicrous.

[m3kw9]

You got some points but hard work does put one in position to get lucky. By participating and choosing to work hard and focus on one thing over the other, you are taking risk and there is a reward to that risk and luck comes into play. So give both worked hard, and one got luckier and more rich it shouldn’t lower his status. If he was born rich, that would help your argument

[deciplex]

The point I think he's trying to make is that our economic system, to a greater degree than many of us want to recognize, hands out rewards arbitrarily. Merit alone will not get you there: luck and family connections (which is basically another form of luck) help a great deal more.

I think a reason we find this so disagreeable to think about is that it removes much of the incentive to work hard. If you are not wealthy and you don't work hard, you have a basically 0% chance of achieving wealth. If you do work hard, you have a 5% chance (for example). So, sure, if you want fiscal security then you have to work very hard, but even with hard work success is unlikely, with the factors other than "work hard" largely out of your control.

Then, of course, if you do achieve success it's easy to attribute it solely to your hard work (after all, again, if you hadn't done that, you wouldn't have been successful) - which is supremely annoying to everyone else as it very obviously isn't the case.

[exe34]

> Rich people never understand that most of their success came from luck.

Is it really important if they understand it? Isn't enough for everybody else to know that?

[desiarnezjr]

His beginnings were humble enough, so I'm not sure what your point is. I don't believe for a second that any of NVDA's success was handed to him or them - they effectively helped create and propagate a market for GPUs at a time when it was at best a niche.