In 1993, Jensen Huang met two of his engineering friends at a Denny’s in Silicon Valley. Over pancakes and coffee, Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem kicked around an idea that sounded ambitious at the time: building chips that could deliver realistic 3D graphics on personal computers.
Within months, the idea became Nvidia—the company that would eventually power the AI boom and become the most valuable business in history, with a market cap topping $4.6 trillion.
For Huang, the journey from earning a few dollars an hour as a Denny’s dishwasher to a net worth of about $157 billion, thanks to a 3% company ownership, is likely bittersweet to look back on.
But Nvidia’s lesser-known third cofounder took a very different financial path.
Priem owned about 12.8% of Nvidia at the time of the company’s 1999 IPO, when the chipmaker was valued at roughly $1.1 billion. Not long after the listing, he began transferring much of his stake to a charitable foundation. By 2006, he had sold all of his shares.
If the baby boomer had held on, that original stake—not accounting for any stock dilution—would be worth more than $597 billion today. That’s enough to make Priem the second-richest person in the world, just behind Elon Musk.
Even with a private jet and mansion, Nvidia’s third cofounder has some regrets about selling out early
Priem graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a technology-focused university in upstate New York, in 1982. While studying engineering, he also spent four years playing cello in the school’s orchestra—something he credits to boosting his tech creativity.
“To perform, you have to practice, right? And you have to be creative,” Priem told Forbes in 2023. “So I started applying that to electronics and computer science.”
After college, Priem built a career at the center of early tech innovation, working as an engineer at Vermont Microsystems, GenRad, and Sun Microsystems before helping launch Nvidia. At the tech giant, he worked behind the scenes, creating the foundational architecture that allowed engineers to design algorithms for Nvidia’s chips.
In hindsight, his decision to sell out can look like one of the most expensive early exits in Silicon Valley history. But Priem has said the choice felt entirely rational at the time. Holding on to the shares would have meant sitting on what he described as an “excessive amount of money.”
Still, he’s admitted he occasionally wonders what might have been.
“I wish I’d kept a little bit more [Nvidia shares],” Priem told Forbes. The outlet estimated his net worth at around $30 million.
Now in his late sixties, Priem said Nvidia crosses his mind at least twice a day—when he puts on and takes off his Omega Speedmaster X-33 Mars watch, a gift from Nvidia on his fifth company anniversary.
He lives in a multimillion-dollar California home in an area with unreliable cell service. As the owner of a private jet, he flies four times a year to his alma mater, RPI—where he serves on the board of trustees. Since 2001, Priem has given more than $275 million to the university. Philanthropy, he has said, gives him “purpose and sanity.”
Nvidia’s other cofounder, Malachowsky, still serves as a senior vice president at Nvidia. While his exact net worth is unknown, he is a billionaire.
Early shareholders of Facebook and Apple sold out early—and missed out on billions, too
Priem isn’t alone in walking away from a fortune. Early investors and founders at some of the world’s biggest tech companies have sold major stakes that later turned out to be worth billions.
Take Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel, for example. He was the first outside investor in Facebook, purchasing a 10% stake in the social media company for $500,000 in 2004. When it went public in 2012, Thiel decided to cash out—selling about 20 million shares in the company and netting about $400 million at the time. Today, they would be worth about $13 billion.
Ronald Wayne did something similar—on an even larger scale.
The lesser-known third cofounder of Apple sold his 10% stake in the computer just 12 days after its inception. He received $800 at the time and later accepted another $1,500 to give up any future claims to the business.
Had he kept his shares, they could be worth upwards of $400 billion today, given Apple’s nearly $4 trillion market value.
“If I stayed at Apple I would have probably ended up the richest man in the cemetery,” Wayne recalled to CNN.
“I knew that I was standing in the shadow of giants and that I would never have a project of my own,” he added to Business Insider in 2017. “I would wind up in the documentation department, shuffling papers for the next 20 years of my life, and that was not the future that I saw for myself.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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