NVIDIA’S banner year supercharged chief executive officer Jensen Huang’s net worth to new heights. It also boosted three of the chipmaker’s longest-serving board members into the billionaire ranks, in a virtually unheard-of feat of wealth creation.
Tench Coxe, on Nvidia’s board since its startup days, is worth US$5.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is valuing his fortune for the first time. With more than 32 million shares, he’s the company’s third-largest individual shareholder. Coxe, 66, declined to comment on his net worth.
His billionaire peers include Mark Stevens, who’s the 298th-richest person in the world with a fortune of US$9.3 billion, and Harvey Jones, who holds a US$1 billion position in the company and has sold more than US$300 million worth of shares, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Jones could not be reached for comment. Stevens declined to comment.
It’s rare for a company to mint multiple billionaires, let alone those who are directors rather than co-founders or part of a family dynasty. Nvidia’s stock surged 171 per cent in 2024, making it the second-best performer on the S&P 500 Index, amid seemingly insatiable demand for the chips used in artificial intelligence.
‘Happy ending’
It’s a unique case for a board of directors because of the company’s growth, not because of how they were compensated, said Felipe Cabezon, a finance professor at Virginia Tech who researches executive and director compensation.
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Directors receive equity awards as an incentive to grow the company and improve its performance, and if they succeed, they’ll create value for shareholders – themselves included, Cabezon said. In this case, all three men have been on Nvidia’s board for more than 30 years.
“What we observe here is exactly that story,” he said. “Basically, it’s a happy ending.”
Nvidia’s three billionaire directors plus Huang have a combined net worth of more than US$130 billion, making the chipmaker’s board one of the top 10 wealthiest in the world, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Huang is currently the 12th-richest person in the world with a fortune of US$114.4 billion, up more than US$70 billion in 2024 alone, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. A fifth board member, Brooke Seawell, could soon join Stevens, Coxe and Jones in the billionaire ranks. He currently holds a nearly US$700 million position in Nvidia after serving on its board since 1997.
A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.
Like Nvidia’s, other rich boards typically contain a wealthy founder, but they also tend to include members whose fortunes stem from other ventures.
Tesla, for example, has the wealthiest board with a combined net worth of at least US$442 billion. Besides Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, Tesla’s ultra-rich directors include billionaire Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Early bet
Coxe was only a few years into his venture capital career at Sutter Hill Ventures when it made an early bet on Nvidia in 1993 alongside Sequoia Capital, where Stevens was a managing partner. That brought both men onto the company’s board during its formative years and gave them a stake in what was then a little-known startup.
Coxe grew up in Atlanta where his dad, also named Tench Coxe, was a well-known lawyer who helped build Ted Turner’s media empire. He went to Dartmouth College, where he was an All-Ivy squash player, graduating in 1980 with an economics degree and receiving an MBA from Harvard University four years later. He began his career in finance at Lehman Brothers before moving back to Atlanta, where he worked for technology company Digital Communications Associates as director of marketing.
He joined Sutter Hill in 1987 and started investing in the information technology sector, becoming a managing director in 1989. Nvidia was a big break for Coxe, but he also once owned a 1 per cent stake in Snowflake, the cloud-computing company that Sutter Hill incubated, as well as shares in Pure Storage and Mattersight. He currently sits on the board of Artisan Partners Asset Management.
Coxe left Sutter Hill in 2020 and the following year moved with his wife to Texas, where they became known for supporting Beto O’Rourke in his 2022 gubernatorial race against governor Greg Abbott. “We’re pretty middle of the road,” his wife Simone Coxe said in a 2022 interview with the Texas Tribune. “We’re moderates, and I’m more of a liberal moderate than he is probably. But I think that’s how we would both describe ourselves. We need commonsense solutions.”
Politics – and perhaps a gift with money – could be genetic. Coxe is named for his revolutionary ancestor, Tench Coxe, who was assistant to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. BLOOMBERG
