There are different levels of smoothness.
There’s Joey Tribbiani asking: How you doin’?
There’s Don Draper saying: If you don’t like what they are saying, change the conversation.
There’s DB Cooper sipping on a bourbon and parachuting off with $200,000 in ransom money and never being found again.
There’s Neal Caffrey’s roughish smile before he tells you that he stole a bunch-load of Nazi treasures.
There’s James Bond asking the bartender to shake properly. There’s Galileo muttering under his breath that “it moves”.
But perhaps, at the very top of the list right now, is Jensen Huang jiving with an Instagrammer in Taiwan with a drink in hand, instantly recognisable even without his trademark leather jacket.
The post evoked multiple reactions on X (formerly known as Twitter), but one that caught the eye was by Apoorva Govind wrote in the language of Shakespeare: “NGL, I always thought he had zaddy energy. Back in 2012, when I interned at Nvidia, he’d invite the interns over to his place and throw a whole-ass frat party. He’s quite fun!”
After multiple reactions to the post, some of which tried to insinuate that Huang perhaps had some salubrious adventures, she wrote: “Someone please send Jensen my apology. Seems like the cancellationists are coming out of the woodwork. At least won’t be on my watch. I have absolutely nothing but awesome things to say about him.”
AI and Jensen Huang
Since the release of the first iteration of ChatGPT in late 2022, the world and its uncle haven’t stopped talking about the potential of AI. Sometime last year, when it emerged that Chat GPT had been trained on an NVIDIA supercomputer, its value increased by 200 billion dollars. A few days ago, NVIDIA went past Microsoft to be named the most valuable publicly traded US company. Currently, it sits third, with $3.113T behind Microsoft ($3.342T) and Apple ($3.181T).
In
Power: A Social Analysis, Bertrand Russel argued that the world was divided into three groups: leaders, followers, and heretics. The followers follow the leader because they believe they imbibe the quality of the leader by doing so. However, the new era of social media seems to have upended that old social hierarchy, and more often than not, heretics are the leaders who elucidate the most loyalty from followers. In the old days, they were called cult leaders or sages. These days, they are usually tech bros.
The messianic cult of Steve Jobs has often seen numerous tech bros elevated to god-like levels. Even when Jobs was at his peak, popularity-wise, many worshipped at the altar of Bill Gates, who they believed was a true tech visionary with no need for theatrics.
In more recent years, we’ve been enthralled by Mark Zuckerberg (more so thanks to Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of him in The Social Network) and Elon Musk, who has cemented his position (at least among his fans and himself) as the OG champion of free speech thanks to his purchase of Twitter that he has now rebranded to X. The latest entrant to the list of Titan-like tech bros is Jensen Huang.
JENSANITY: The Rise of An Icon
Till a couple of years ago, very little was written in the mainstream about Jensen Huang, a tattooed CEO who wants to live on as a robot so he can lead Nvidia for years. Today, the 60-year-old is a global pin-up on par with BTS.