Over the last three-and-a-half years, Jensen Huang has gone from a CEO whose name was known only in tech circles to a globally recognized corporate rock star. And as that celebrity has grown, more and more people want a piece of it.
Huang is the CEO of Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA], an American hardware company that makes the processors and chips required for AI computing. Its stock has increased nearly 1,000% in value over the past five years.
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That was particularly evident last Friday when one of Huang’s signature Tom Ford leather jackets went up for auction. Pre-sale estimates put the expected sale price at between $40,000 and $60,000. When the gavel finally fell, the jacket sold for $960,000.
Even Sotheby’s, which hosted the auction, was surprised.
“The response to this sale surpassed even our highest expectations,” Sotheby’s head of modern collectibles, Brahm Wachter, said in a statement to CNBC.
Sotheby’s certainly helped that furor by talking up the jacket in the catalog description.
“Instantly recognizable to audiences around the world, the ‘Jensen Jacket’ has come to be a relic of a simple belief: that the future is built by people brave enough to journey into the unknown before anyone else can see what they see,” the auction house wrote.
“This is not only a jacket. It is the uniform of a ‘first believer.’ … This jacket represents both a tangible artifact from a transformative era in technology and an investment in the next generation of innovators.”
The buyer was not identified. Sotheby’s says the proceeds will go to a philanthropic initiative in support of the Edge Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to innovation.
A familiar uniform
It’s rare to see Huang in public without his signature leather jacket. This particular one was worn in 2023 at an event at Foxconn in Taipei, Taiwan.
Huang has adopted a philosophy favored by Steve Jobs of wearing the same outfit virtually all of the time. Others who have followed that approach range from author Tom Wolfe to Johnny Cash.
Jobs described how he came up with his distinctive uniform of black turtleneck, Levi’s jeans and grey New Balance sneakers when speaking with author Walter Isaacson for his biography.