Jensen Huang's name is tied indelibly to Nvidia, but he's not the company's sole founder: Curtis Priem was Nvidia’s first CTO and one of the three co-founders of the iconic PC graphics company -- and he'd be worth around $70 billion today if he'd held onto his Nvidia shares. He is reportedly eccentric, living “off the grid with unreliable cell service,” while writing ambitious and intricate world problem-solving manifestos.
Priem was profiled in Forbes this weekend, and fortunately, the ex-CFO is still comfortably wealthy. He also seems happy to devote much of his time to projects that benefit others, particularly students at his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York
While Priem’s name might be forever tied to his co-founding of Nvidia, his career in computer graphics was successful and well-established long before the green team first got together. The Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate is credited with designing the “first graphics processor for the PC,” the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter. He then spent several years working at Sun Microsystems and was responsible for developing the GX graphics chip there.
