The 100 PMs Who Changed the World · No. 13 | Jensen Huang: The Most Expensive Company on Earth — Stuck Outside the Pantheon of Product Managers

Take a look at this month’s noise first.

OpenAI shipped the GPT-5.6 trio, xAI shipped Grok 4.5, Moonshot open-sourced the 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3, Meta threw out Muse Spark, and even Mira Murati, who left OpenAI, unveiled a model of her own. Every one of them is shouting that they’re the strongest; every release is fighting for the headline. The model war is being fought bloody.

But glance at the bottom of this melee and you’ll notice something a little funny: these mutually slaughtering models almost all run on the same man’s chips.

That man is Jensen Huang. No matter who wins or loses up top, his NVIDIA is selling the shovels — and this month, his market cap soared to $5.4 trillion, the most valuable company on this planet.

A man standing at the most central, most guaranteed-to-profit position in the entire AI era. And yet when I had Claude score the “100 product managers who changed the world”, Jensen Huang came in at No. 13, overall OVR 94 — stuck outside the Pantheon (the 95 line) by one full point.

Spread his six dimensions out and they look like this:

Vision 99 · Insight 87 · Taste 83 · Business 95 · Scale 96 · Originality 95.

Vision 99 is the highest tier in the room; and Taste 83, Insight 87 are the two clearly on the low side of his six. Why can’t a boss whose company is worth more than any other get into the Pantheon of product managers? The answer lies in the gap within this set of scores.

Vision 99: the bet he made at 30 that won him the entire AI era

Start with his strongest dimension — the one that most deserves to be remembered.

In 1993, Jensen Huang was 30 when he founded NVIDIA to make graphics cards. For a long time afterward, NVIDIA was simply “a graphics-card company for gaming” — that was the full extent of most people’s understanding of it.

But Jensen Huang bet on something almost no one believed at the time: the GPU isn’t just for rendering game graphics, it’s a general-purpose computing platform. In 2006 he launched CUDA, letting developers use the GPU for general computation beyond graphics. That decision looked nearly obsessive at the time — it added enormous cost, the market simply didn’t need it, and Wall Street cursed him year after year for neglecting the core business. CUDA waited, alone, for the better part of a decade.

Then deep learning arrived. People discovered that training neural networks required exactly the kind of massive parallel computing the GPU was built for, and the only thing in the whole world that was ready was NVIDIA and the CUDA ecosystem it had toughed out for ten years.

Betting on a future that wouldn’t pay off for ten years, and toughing it out through the whole world’s incomprehension until it did — that’s the caliber of Vision 99. The people on this list who can earn a 99 on vision can be counted on one hand, and Jensen Huang is one of them.

Originality 95 and Scale 96: he turned “selling shovels” into the bedrock of an entire era

What Jensen Huang truly originated isn’t some faster graphics card — it’s a position.

Before him, a chip company was a “supplier” upstream in the industry chain; after him, NVIDIA became the bedrock the entire AI era can’t get around. Today, if you want to train any large model — GPT, Gemini, Kimi, whatever — the first thing you do is buy his cards and use his CUDA. He turned NVIDIA from “the guy selling parts” into “the guy defining how the whole game is played.”

That’s the highest form of “selling shovels.” In a gold rush, the ones digging for gold win or lose, but the shovel-seller profits for sure — and Jensen Huang doesn’t just sell shovels, he monopolized the shovel and, along the way, defined what a shovel even is. At GTC he set a target for two generations of AI chips: by the end of 2027, those two series alone should hit at least $1 trillion in revenue. Scale 96, Originality 95 — no overpayment there.

Taste 83: this dimension being his lowest is exactly what tells you which kind of product manager he is

Now we reach that key gap. Of the six, Jensen Huang’s lowest is taste, 83.

What is taste? For Jobs, it was “this rounded corner is two pixels off and I simply cannot stand it.” For Allen Zhang, it was “in ten years of WeChat, what I’m proudest of is what we didn’t build.” The core of taste is a person taking their own aesthetics and using them to decide, on the end user’s behalf, “what is good.”

Jensen Huang’s products don’t face that layer of “user” at all. His customers are developers, data centers, other companies. Whether a GPU is good is measured by compute, efficiency, ecosystem — not rounded corners, color schemes, feel in the hand. He makes the thing that lets others make good products, not the good product itself. On the yardstick of “holding the line on aesthetics for the end user,” he’s naturally out of the running, and Taste 83 is the reasonable result of this position.

So that 83 doesn’t mean he’s weak in ability — it means he simply isn’t on that track. Jobs and Allen Zhang are taste-type product managers, defining a consumer product through personal aesthetics; Jensen Huang is a platform-type product manager, using vision and technical judgment to build the foundation every other product can’t do without. Both kinds are great, but only the former earns taste points. That, together with Insight 87, is why he’s held outside the Pantheon door — in that top tier, nearly everyone has maxed out on “defining what is good on the user’s behalf,” and that’s precisely not Jensen Huang’s battlefield.

So does he even count as a product manager?

Writing this far, one question is unavoidable: Jensen Huang has never made a single consumer-facing product — does he count as a product manager?

By the traditional definition, barely. But this list has never been about titles; it’s about the degree to which product decisions changed the world. Betting the GPU as a computing platform, nurturing the CUDA ecosystem through a decade of doubt, re-architecting the company from a chip vendor into an “AI factory” — the weight of these decisions is no lighter than that of anyone who made a blockbuster app. He isn’t making one particular product; he’s deciding what foundation every product of this era grows on.

Giving him a 94 and placing him in the Legends tier rather than the Pantheon isn’t a put-down — it’s precision: he tops out on “vision” and “originality,” and is naturally untouched by “taste,” the consumer-grade sense of it. The score itself says clearly who he is.

In closing

This month’s model melee will keep going. GPT-5.6, Grok, Kimi — who ultimately wins, no one dares say right now.

But one thing is already certain: no matter who wins up top, Jensen Huang wins. Because what he stands on isn’t the ring — it’s the ground beneath the ring. A man whose taste scores only 83 has become the most indispensable person in this era that prizes “smart” and “strongest” above all.

That points to another path often overlooked: when everyone wants to make the most dazzling product, there’s another way to win — to build the foundation every dazzling product can’t do without. It doesn’t require you to have great taste; it requires the vision to see ten years out, and the endurance to tough out those ten years. Jensen Huang bet right, and then the whole era had to come buy shovels from him.

The “100 Product Managers Who Changed the World” list and its six-dimension scoring in this piece were all produced by Claude (AI), rating products and business decisions, not the individuals. For the full list, see doaipm.com/zh/rankings.