What sets Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang apart from Elon Musk and Sam Altman

“I feel like you’re interviewing Elon right now, and not me.”

That’s what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told author Stephen Witt when asked to reflect on the future he’s helping create, a telling moment that highlights how differently Huang sees himself compared to tech titans like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Witt, whose new book The Thinking Machine dives deep into Huang’s life and Nvidia’s meteoric rise, shared the encounter in a recent interview with Business Insider. In it, he painted a picture of a CEO who’s driven by logic, not visions, and who bristles at being lumped in with Silicon Valley’s dreamers.

“Elon is a science-fiction guy,” Witt said. “Almost everything he does kind of starts with some science-fiction vision or concept of the future, and then he works backward to the technology that he'll need to put in the air.” That’s not Huang’s style. “Jensen is exactly the opposite," he said, adding that Huang hates science fiction.

That frustration came out when Witt played a clip of science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talking about machines thinking faster than humans. Huang didn’t want to hear it. He became cold and distant, and the conversation fell apart.

The divergence becomes even more apparent when looking at public personas. Musk has hosted livestreamed company-wide meetings about achieving a “theory of abundance” through AI. Altman writes lengthy blog posts envisioning a multi-stage journey toward artificial general intelligence. Huang? He keeps his head down and his feet planted. “Jensen does not produce documents like that, and he refuses to,” Witt said.

Despite being known for his keynote speeches, Huang reportedly dreads them. “He hates public speaking, he hates being interviewed, and he hates presenting onstage,” Witt said. “Which is weird, because he’s super good at it.”

Witt also revealed that Huang doesn’t have a named successor, or even a clear second-in-command. He revelead that Huang's org chart is him and then 60 people directly below. Nvidia's board has also asked about succession, but there's no succession plan right now.

Huang, now 62, is still very much at the centre of Nvidia, a company that went from powering gamers’ rigs to becoming the backbone of modern AI. While Musk may be planning cities on Mars, Huang is busy building the tools that make that kind of dreaming possible.

“He's meeting Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other entrepreneurs in the middle,” Witt said, talking about Jensen Huang's focus on building the hardware for CEOs like Musk and Altman, rather than dreaming about an AGI future.