Are 78% Nvidia employees millionaires? You have probably seen the headline by now. Nvidia, the company behind the chips that power most of the AI boom, supposedly has a workforce where nearly four out of five people are millionaires. It sounds like a stretch, so I went looking for where the number actually comes from.
The short version is that it is believable, but nobody has proven it.
Are 78% Nvidia employees millionaires who came from
It did not come from an Nvidia report or a regulatory filing. It comes from an anonymous internal survey, first shared on X by The Kobeissi Letter. The questionnaire reached roughly 3,000 employees, which is about a tenth of the company.
The survey found that between 76% and 78% of respondents had a net worth above $1 million, and around half were above $25 million. There was no detailed breakdown beyond those two lines.
How Nvidia employees got this wealthy
It mostly comes down to stock and time.
Nvidia’s share price is up about 3,776% since 2019. If you joined before the AI boom, took your stock grants, and simply held on, that kind of run can change your life. Grants at Nvidia vest over four years, so the longer you stay, the more shares you own, and the more those shares are worth.
There is also the employee stock purchase plan, which lets staff buy shares at a 15% discount. Nvidia reworked that plan after the 2008 downturn and made it easier for ordinary employees to take part. Buy at a discount, hold for years, and the math gets very friendly.
People who study this kind of wealth tend to say the same thing. The ones who ended up with the biggest numbers were rarely the ones who sold at every vest. They stayed five, ten, even eighteen years and let the shares sit.
What it looks like at company scale
Nvidia had around 36,000 employees when this survey was making the rounds, and it is closer to 42,000 now. Apply 78% to 36,000, and you get roughly 28,000 millionaires. That is a rough extrapolation from a sample, so read it as a ballpark and not a headcount.
Why almost nobody leaves
Nvidia’s turnover is reported at just 3.7%, which is remarkably low for tech. More than 40% of new hires also come in through referrals from current employees.
Part of the reason is obvious. Walking away from unvested shares is expensive. Former employees have said that quitting could cost them over 15 million RMB in stock gains in a single year. People call it the golden handcuffs, and the name fits.
The price of all that money
The money comes with a heavy workload. Employees describe seven-day weeks, late nights that run until 2 AM, and a lot of tightly managed meetings. Jensen Huang has reportedly compared working at Nvidia to a voluntary sport and told people to manage their time like a CEO.
Oddly, Nvidia still placed second on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list for 2024. Plenty of people are clearly willing to make the trade.
Why I would not treat 78% as settled fact
A few things keep this from being a clean statistic.
The survey was anonymous and self-reported, so no one checked the answers. It also covered only about 10% of staff, and the people who chose to answer may not look like the average employee. Longer-tenured and higher-paid people could be overrepresented.
Then there is the question of what “net worth” includes. It covers everything a person owns, such as a house, savings, a spouse’s income, and earlier investments. Someone can be a millionaire on paper without Nvidia stock being the reason.
Tenure matters too. Someone who joined last year is in a very different position from someone who joined in 2012. And since so much of this wealth is stock, it rises and falls with Nvidia’s share price.
What other companies can take from this?
Nvidia shows what can happen when equity reaches the whole workforce and not only the executives. People stay longer, they recruit friends and former colleagues, and they care about how the company performs. The catch is that it only works while the stock keeps climbing.
So, is it true?
Probably close, for the people who answered. The wealth is real for many long-serving employees, and the stock history backs that up. But 78% is a survey result, not a verified count of everyone on the payroll. Treat it as a strong sign of how much wealth Nvidia has created, and not as an exact figure.
FAQs
Are 78% of Nvidia employees really millionaires?
Survey results point to 76% to 78%, but the survey was anonymous and covered about 3,000 people, so it is not a confirmed company-wide number.
How did Nvidia employees become millionaires?
Mostly through stock grants, a discounted employee stock purchase plan, and a huge rise in the share price since 2019, especially for people who held their shares.
Does being a millionaire here mean the money came from Nvidia stock?
Not always. The survey measured total net worth, which can include property, savings, and other investments.
What is Nvidia’s employee turnover rate?
Reported at about 3.7%, which is very low for the industry.
Is it worth working at Nvidia for the money?
The pay and equity are strong, but employees also report long hours and a lot of pressure. How well it works out depends on when you join and how the stock does.