The 62-year-old CEO of the world’s most valuable company said his humble roots as a dishwasher have, in fact, helped him learn to spurn no task. 

“You can’t show me a task that is beneath me,” he said in an interview with Stanford’s graduate school of business, which recently resurfaced on X.

Even in his most humble of jobs, the world’s ninth-richest man never shied away from the dirty work.

“I cleaned a lot of toilets. I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined, and some of them you just can’t unsee,” he said.

If someone approaches Huang with a call for help, he said he tries to at least contribute. That way, at least, the person with the problem can see a new way of thinking about the problem, he added. 

“If you send me something and you want my input on it, and I can be of service to you, and in my review of it, share with you how I reason through it, I’ve made a contribution to you,” Huang said. “I’ve made it possible for you to see how I reason through something, and by reasoning, as you know, how someone reasons through something empowers you.”

These values have been fundamental to Huang’s leadership style and are partly why he is worth $161.8 billion, according to Forbes. Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the U.S. at age 9 without his parents. As a teenager, he took a job as a dishwasher at Denny’s. 

It was actually at Denny’s where Nvidia, Huang’s future company, got its start, according to the Nvidia website. 

Years after he worked at the chain as a dishwasher, the Stanford graduate met with his future cofounders, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, to discuss the idea of a chip that would make 3D graphics possible on a PC. This idea sparked what would later become Nvidia, a chip empire that is now worth $4.5 trillion.

It wasn’t easy at first, according to Huang. When he presented the idea to his boss at LSI Logic, Wilfred Corrigan, he called it “one of the worst elevator pitches he’s ever heard.”

Still, Corrigan convinced Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital, to hear the pitch because of Huang’s strong work ethic.

Elon Musk, who actually played a role in Nvidia’s origin story, commented on the resurfaced Huang interview this week. 

“This is the way,” Musk wrote on X. When Nvidia introduced its first AI supercomputer, Musk was apparently the only one who reached out, saying he had a “a nonprofit AI lab” in need of such a product. Despite Huang’s skepticism that a nonprofit would buy a $300,000 computer, he personally delivered it to San Francisco to what he later realized was the OpenAI team behind ChatGPT. Musk left OpenAI in 2018.

Sobering new research from the think tank Resolution Foundation shows that for aspirational Brits looking to move up the wealth ladder, not even a lifetime of savings would be enough. 

In fact, the average worker would need to save their earnings for 52 years, to raise £1.3 million ($1.7 million), the amount needed to move from the middle and become as wealthy as the richest 10%.

And it gets worse: That’s with zero outgoings.

“Wealth gaps in Britain are now so large that a typical full-time employee saving all their earnings across their entire working life would still not be able to reach the top of the wealth ladder,” Molly Broome, senior economist at the Resolution Foundation and the lead author of the report, wrote.

And for those who happen to be born in the working class, the odds are increasingly stacked against them. 

“Wealth mobility in Britain is low—people that start life wealthy tend to stay wealthy, and vice versa,” Broome added.

As the saying goes, money makes money. The report revealed that the key driver of widening inequality is the so-called “passive” gains. Essentially, those who bought property and invested their money in pensions have seen their wealth balloon since 2010.

Workers in the U.S. would need to save for 70 years to unlock the American dream 

As inflation squeezes workers in a cost-of-living vise, paired with a job crisis that’s not been this bad since the financial crisis, and AI threatening to make it even worse, the salary it takes to be considered rich keeps climbing further out of reach. And the issue is transatlantic.

Even in the U.S., workers say they’d need at least $2.3 million to feel rich (up $100k from two years ago). Meanwhile, separate research highlights they’d need a staggering $4.4 million to achieve the American Dream—the house in the suburbs, two children, an annual vacation, and a new car in the drive.

In fact, Investopedia did the math and calculated that achieving those milestones would cost over $1 million more than most Americans will make in their lifetime.

With median weekly earnings of full-time workers averaging at $1,214, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it would take 36 years of full-time work to feel rich with $2.3 million in the bank. That’s before a single bill is paid, and still $2.1 million short of affording the American Dream.

It would take the average American worker nearly 70 years without a single outgoing to reach that $4.4 million benchmark—far longer than most people will work in a lifetime, and that’s without even considering automation’s impact on the future of work, inflation, or any unexpected financial shocks.