Ousted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang might be out of a job, but he’ll probably land on his feet just fine.
Even with the company’s stock price drop, its founder’s net worth is still estimated at north of $140 billion. But it could’ve been about $1 billion higher if not for a purchase he made nearly three decades ago.
“My only regret was at the IPO, after the IPO, I wanted to buy my parents something nice, so I sold Nvdia stock at a valuation of $300 million, the company was at a valuation of $300 million, and I bought them a Mercedes S-Class,” Huang said during an interview at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It is the most expensive car in the world,” he joked. “They still have it.”
At the time, S-Class prices ranged from around $65,000 to $135,000. He didn’t go into details about the model, but even assuming he bought a mid-level one for $100,000, that much IPO stock would be worth around $650 million right now and nearly $1 billion at Nvdia’s peak market capitalization earlier this year.
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Huang has apparently remained a fan of Mercedes products over the years and was spotted earlier this year buying a U.S.-built Mercedes-Maybach GLS SUV worth more than $300,000 in Taiwan, where he was born.
While the value of his parents’ car represents unrealized gains and not what the car is actually worth, another Mercedes-Benz actually is the most expensive car that has ever been sold.
The 300 SLR “Uhlenhaut” Coupe was one of two race cars that were being developed for the 1956 season under chief engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut before the disastrous Mercedes crash at the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans that claimed 84 lives and led to the automaker’s motorsports withdrawal.
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The car was sold in 2022 at a charity auction to raise money for the Mercedes-Benz Fund supporting research and scholarship in the fields of environmental sciences and decarbonization for a high bid of $143 million. Had that money gone into Nvidia stock at the time, it would’ve caught the company’s recent 10x valuation increase and be worth roughly $1.4 billion today.
