Musk praised Huang for always working with employees to solve problems – a habit formed after washing dishes and scrubbing toilets at a fast-food chain.
In March, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave an interview at Stanford Graduate School of Business, recounting his experience working at the fast-food chain Denny’s.
“For me, no job is lowly. I washed dishes, I cleaned toilets. I cleaned a lot of toilets, probably more than all of you combined,” he said. Huang said that this experience shaped his work habits – always directly involved in solving problems with his employees.
On June 30, when a host of Bloomberg Reposting this interview video on X, Elon Musk commented: “That’s the right attitude. When toilet paper was scarce during the pandemic, I always made sure our factories and offices had enough toilet paper.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (left) and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Photo: Reuters
Musk is now a client and friend of Huang’s. The Tesla CEO has a similar working style.
The billionaire said he used to sleep on the Tesla factory floor to directly inspect the cars coming off the production line. “I slept on the floor not because I couldn’t go across the street and rent a hotel. It was because I wanted to be worse than everyone else in the company. When they were tired, I wanted to be more tired,” he explained on Bloomberg 2018.
Analysts say Musk’s praise of Huang goes beyond the fact that they share similar leadership styles. He has not hesitated to take shots at other billionaires who are also known for their crazy work ethic, such as Mark Zuckerberg of Meta or investor Mark Cuban of Shark Tank.
The reason may be that the two fortunes are now closely linked. Musk’s ambitions in artificial intelligence now need Nvidia’s AI chips.
Musk and Huang have also expressed their admiration for each other. “Tesla is so far ahead in self-driving cars. One day, every car will have this feature,” Huang said in an interview with Yahoo Finance in May. Musk later responded on X, saying, “Thanks Jensen.”