NVIDIA went nowhere for much of its history. Just look at its stock chart for most of its history.

They got a major upside due to two things that happened outside of NVIDIA: Crypto currency and AI, both of this found GPUs to be the best available technology to retrofit. Most of the initial work in retrofitting GPUs to these workloads happened outside of NVIDIA.

So, it's not Jensen but the Crypto and AI that propelled NVIDIA.