I wonder how much of this is to do with how recent and explosive (relative to the history of the company) nvidia’s growth was. Like before the back to back booms of cryptocurrency and AI, the company was mainly selling products to gamers (iirc, their datacenter business was like 10% in 2019). It wasn’t that long ago that nvidia’s comparable companies were like… super micro and western digital, rather than Apple and Google.

Also having been more capital intensive and founded further back, Jensen had less sway in the early days of the company and may have put off using the growth to his advantage.