Nvidia’s Jensen Huang admitted that despite being a cool guy in the tech industry, he gets stage fright. Huang’s nervousness is echoed by other technology leaders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Many people have taken great care to reduce the pressure of public speaking.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is considered a “cool guy” in the tech industry, but he said in a recent interview that he still gets nervous when he stands on stage.
Huang’s “60 Minutes” interview aired on Dec. 29. The Nvidia co-founder said it was a scary experience to be in front of a large crowd at last year’s GTC AI conference.
“I’m an engineer, not a performer. When I went out there and everyone was excited, it took my breath away,” Huang said after the keynote speech. “I’m still scared.”
He is the executive of a company with a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion, and Mr. Hwang’s style (including his signature black leather jacket) and stellar success in the burgeoning field of AI have earned him a cool-guy reputation in Silicon Valley. I am getting. Still, Huang admitted he was nervous about giving the speech. It’s a question he will have to face again when he gives the keynote speech at CES in Las Vegas on Monday.
He’s not the only tech founder who struggles with public speaking. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, known for leading iconic launch events, may have seemed a natural at speaking in public, but he reportedly began planning months in advance. It is said that it was standing upright.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates envied Jobs’ effortlessness and said Jobs had a talent for appearing unrehearsed on stage. In their 2015 book “Becoming Steve Jobs,” Brent Schlender and Rick Tezzeri wrote that they actually spent an entire day considering the presentation.
“We’ll never get to that level,” Gates said on an episode of the Armchair Expert podcast.
Some leaders have publicly admitted that they are nervous when speaking on stage in front of a large audience. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will turn 40 in 2024, said that when he founded Facebook as a teenager, he “didn’t know anything about running a company or communicating in public.”
But age and experience have made him more comfortable being himself in public, Zack said in the thread.
Elon Musk was one of the most outspoken voices in 2024. As the owner of X (formerly Twitter), Musk posts almost daily using his account. Before owning the platform, he was still actively tweeting, but admitted in 2019 that he lacked public speaking skills.
I’m very bad at public speaking! Fuck.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2019
Billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett once said that his fear of public speaking would have negatively affected his career.
“I was afraid of public speaking. I couldn’t do that,” Buffett said in the 2017 documentary “Becoming Warren Buffett.”
Rather than let his anxiety get in the way of his career, Buffett said he enrolled in a public speaking course after graduating from business school in 1951. Decades later, he still believes the course changed his life.
