Employees Who Worked at This Company for the Past 5 Years Are Now Multi-Millionaires in 'Semi-Retirement'

Santa Clara-based Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is now one of the world's most valuable companies, skyrocketing from a $346 billion valuation in January 2023 to a $3.338 trillion valuation last week.

The tech giant's 3,000% stock growth in the past five years has worked out well for its staff — employees who have been with Nvidia for five years are likely millionaires now.

A product manager at Nvidia, say a level three out of eight total tiers, makes an average of $77,700 in stock per year, per Levels.fyi estimates.

According to Finlo's investment calculator and Entrepreneur's calculations, a $77,700 stock grant received in 2019 would be worth over $1.6 million today — not including the worth of stock bonuses accumulated in more recent years.

Following the same methodology: An entry-level software engineer would have close to half a million, a senior solution architect would have $1.3 million, and a level four data scientist would have $2 million from their initial stock grant alone, provided they all joined five years ago.

^{Nvidia headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Photographer: Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

Though it might seem like a good thing to have employees become wealthy due to a company's success, Nvidia has had to work on keeping long-term, "semi-retired," multi-millionaire employees motivated.

At a December company-wide meeting, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly had to answer questions about "semi-retired" employees.

Huang responded by asking every employee to take responsibility for their work and become the CEOs of their time.

Related: Elon Musk, Dell, Nvidia Team Up on AI Factory, Supercomputer

So why do employees choose to stay at Nvidia instead of leaving, if they have the financial means to pursue either option? The reason could be a solid company culture.

A look at Nvidia's culture page shows an emphasis on "one team" and "no politics, no hierarchy."

An MIT assessment of Nvidia employees found that the company's cultural values aligned with what they experienced in the workplace. Compared to hundreds of other large companies, Nvidia's culture was well above average.

"If you like what you do and are being compensated really well for it, why leave?" one Reddit user said in a thread about the topic.

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