Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable company Nvidia, works seven days a week, driven by constant fear of bankruptcy

Since founding Nvidia in 1993, Huang has felt a persistent sense of uncertainty, believing the company is "30 days from going out of business," he said in a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, as reported by Entrepreneur.

"The sense of vulnerability, the sense of uncertainty, the sense of insecurity — it doesn’t leave you," he said.

"The feeling, no different from the feeling I had this morning when I woke up: ‘You’re going to be out of business soon.'"

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, June 2024. Photo by VnEpxress/Khuong Nha

Despite Nvidia’s rise to become the first public company to reach a market capitalization of $5 trillion last month, Huang’s fear of failure remains ever-present, Fortune reported. "It is exhausting," he said, noting that he’s "always in a state of anxiety."

However, this fear is also his greatest motivator. "I have a greater drive from not wanting to fail than the drive of wanting to succeed," he said. "Failure drives me more than greed or whatever it is."

As Nvidia leads the AI race, providing chips, systems, and software that power major AI models across global cloud data centers, Huang continues to work tirelessly. The 62-year-old CEO maintains a rigorous schedule, working seven days a week, starting at 4 a.m. to check his emails, he said.

"Every day. Every single day. Not one day missed. Including Thanksgiving, Christmas."

Huang also shared that his children, Spencer and Madison, who started as interns at Nvidia, have adopted the same work ethic. "Now we have three people working every day and they want to work with me every day and so it’s a lot of work," he said.