Stephen Witt

He talks to you as if you're just sat down at a coffee shop with him.

It's amazing.

That's extremely rare.

It doesn't happen with CEOs in my experience.

And I've tried to interview or have interviewed many of them.

So his candor is just extraordinary.

And it really helps him in business too because he is the fastest to admit if something's not working, what needs to change.

There was no illusions, right?

And there's no sunk cost fallacy with Jensen.

He's a really great critical thinker just because he's so honest and rigorous with himself.

Now the flip side of this, it's like a Greek tragic flaw, the same thing that makes him great kind of makes it difficult for him.

He's totally neurotic.

I can confirm your suspicions that most CEOs are basically egomaniacs, but Jensen is not, truly.

He truly is not.

In fact, he's like riddled with guilt and self-doubt and this drives him, it fuels him.

This is what makes it work for him because he's constantly assessing both Nvidia's competitive position and his own role and asking what's the thing that could make this company collapse?

Weirdly, almost everything Jensen does comes from a negative emotion that he has, typically fear or guilt.

And almost every action Jensen takes is actually, or at least can be construed as a defensive action to save his company from ruin.

It's a really unusual way of thinking.

And I think actually his internal life is kind of hard.