Saks Completes $600M Financing Early, 98% of Debt Holders Sign on to Exchange
The company looks forward to focusing on integrating Neiman Marcus now that the controversial exchange is done.
Saks Global has buttoned up its latest financing package early.
The retailer said it received $300 million in connection with its debt exchange offer on Friday, rounding out the $600 million package it revealed in late June.
About 98 percent of the eligible bondholders agreed to exchange their notes.
The deal could bring the temperature down on the Saks financial drama — at least for now.
To buy Neiman Marcus Group, Saks took on $2.2 billion in debt from bondholders in December, just as Wall Street was feeling giddy over what many hoped would be more business-friendly policies from a second administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
But when the reality of having Trump back in the White House led to a trade war with the world and the retail outlook dimmed, bondholders got spooked, particularly since a little-noticed provision in the bond prospectus allowed Saks to pile as much debt as it wanted onto its Fifth Avenue flagship.
Saks was already fending off vendors over slower payment terms and late back payments when a meltdown in the bond price added a sense of uncertainty — again — to the company and its finances. The retailer’s bonds traded at around 30 cents on the dollar for a time, but the company was able to negotiate a deal with some bondholders that eventually brought along the rest of the pack.
Now Saks is limited in how much debt the Fifth Avenue flagship can carry, leaving the building to stand as collateral for the bondholders in the event of a bankruptcy.
While many lenders and vendors to the company have been worrying over the potential of a bankruptcy for months, the retailer clearly sought to present the completion of the exchange as the final turning of the page on what’s been an uncertain and disruptive time.
Marc Metrick, chief executive officer, said: “With this transaction, we are embarking on Saks Global’s next chapter, with the financial flexibility to drive long-term value and growth for our stakeholders, particularly our brand partners. Our bolstered liquidity position, combined with our improved inventory flow and the work we have done to strategically integrate our businesses, positions us to continue executing on our strategy to advance the luxury shopping experience for our customers. We thank our bondholders for their continued confidence in our business.”
Metrick works closely with Saks Global’s executive chairman Richard Baker, who for years dreamed of buying Neiman Marcus and combining the two luxury department store powerhouses.
Together they have a vision that has lots of moving parts — from the new terms with vendors to a Saks presence on Amazon and a new single operating structure for the two chains.
But in the run-up of the deal and this year, vendors complained, bitterly at times, about not being paid for shipments, in many cases not for several seasons. And while Saks promised to make good on its bills — and some vendors have been paid — other suppliers have continued to privately complain that the money is always on the way, but still slow to arrive.
A source close to Saks said of the finalization of its latest financing package: “Now you’re going to not hear from brands anymore about not getting paid. You’re not going to hear from brands anymore about concerns. You’re not going to hear anymore from that side of the equation.”
But the world might well be hearing a little more about Saks’ finances before the spotlight will be able to the big luxury retail “reset.”
That’s because debt watchdog Standard & Poor’s previously said it viewed the financing as “tantamount to a default” since bondholders “will receive less value than they were initially promised and will rank lower in terms of priority than the new money notes.”
S&P said it expected to lower its rating on Saks to “selective default” or “default” after the financing was completed.
That “selective default,” if were to come, is a technical distinction that stems from the bonds being exchanged for new debt below par.
The new bonds have not yet been rated.
Now Metrick and Baker have to convince the market that the they’ve solved the Saks financial equation.
Billions Flow to New Hedge Funds Focused on AI-Related Bets
A 23-year-old former OpenAI researcher quickly amassed more than $1.5 billion for ‘brain trust on AI’
Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 23-year-old AI influencer, started Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund that now manages over $1.5 billion.
Situational Awareness gained 47% in the first half of the year, outperforming the S&P 500 and tech hedge funds.
Other firms are launching AI-focused funds, including Value Aligned Research Advisors and Point72 Asset Management, to capitalize on the AI boom.
Leopold Aschenbrenner emerged last year as a precocious artificial-intelligence influencer after publishing a widely read manifesto. Then he decided to try his hand at stock picking.
The 23-year-old with no professional investing experience quickly raised more money for a hedge fund than most pedigreed portfolio managers can when they strike out on their own.
As valuations of Nvidia, OpenAI and other artificial-intelligence companies continue to soar, so do investments in hedge funds hoping to ride the AI wave.
Aschenbrenner’s San Francisco-based firm, Situational Awareness, now manages more than $1.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. He has described the firm as a “brain trust on AI.”
His strategy involves betting on global stocks that stand to benefit from the development of AI technology, such as semiconductor, infrastructure and power companies, along with investments in a few startups, including Anthropic. He told investors he plans to offset those with smaller short bets on industries that could get left behind.
Situational Awareness gained 47% after fees in the first half of the year, one of the people said. In the same period, the S&P 500 gained about 6%, including dividends, while an index of tech hedge funds compiled by research firm PivotalPath gained about 7%.
Aschenbrenner, a native of Germany, briefly worked as a researcher at OpenAI before being pushed out. He named Situational Awareness after the 165-page essay he wrote about the promise and risks of artificial superintelligence. He recruited Carl Shulman, another AI intellectual who used to work at Peter Thiel’s macro hedge fund, as director of research.
The firm’s backers include Patrick and John Collison, the billionaire brothers who founded payments company Stripe, as well as Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, whom Mark Zuckerberg recently recruited to help run Meta’s AI efforts. Graham Duncan, a well-known investor who organizes the Sohn Investment Conference, is an adviser.
“We’re going to have way more situational awareness than any of the people who manage money in New York,” Aschenbrenner told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel last year. “We’re definitely going to do great on investing.”
In another sign of the demand for Aschenbrenner’s services, many investors agreed to lock up their money with him for years.
Other recent launches include an AI-focused hedge fund from Value Aligned Research Advisors, a Princeton, N.J.-based investment firm founded by former quants Ben Hoskin and David Field. The fund, launched in March, has already amassed about $1 billion in assets, a person familiar with it said. VAR also manages about $2 billion in other AI-focused investment strategies.
VAR’s investors have included the philanthropic foundation of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, according to regulatory filings reviewed by fund-data tracker Old Well Labs.
Veteran hedge-fund firms are entering the fray, too. Last year, Steve Cohen tapped one of his portfolio managers at Point72 Asset Management, Eric Sanchez, to start an AI-focused hedge fund that Cohen planned to stake with $150 million of his own money. Assets at the fund, called Turion—after AI theorist Alan Turing—now exceed $2 billion, people familiar with the matter said.
Turion is up about 11% this year through July after it gained about 7% last month, the people said.
It is no surprise that thematic funds are springing up to capitalize on the AI frenzy. In years past, hedge funds that specialized in the transition to clean energy and investing with an environmental, social and corporate-governance lens proliferated in response to client demand.
Identifying a winning theme isn’t the same thing as trading it well. Investors’ tastes can be fickle; many prominent ESG hedge funds have either shrunk or gone out of business.
The market swoon that followed the January release of an advanced, low-cost language model from Chinese company DeepSeek showed the fragility of the valuations of AI winners, though the market has roared back since then.
AI-focused investors argue the long-term trend of development and adoption are inevitable, even if there are bumps along the way.
With only so many publicly traded companies that operate in the AI-adjacent economy today, stock picking funds often pile into the same positions as one another and more generalist hedge funds. Vistra, a power producer that supplies the juice to AI data centers, was a top-three U.S. position of both Situational Awareness and VAR Advisors as of March 31, according to their most recent securities filings.
Other hedge-fund managers are debuting funds to make investments in privately held AI companies and startups. Gavin Baker’s Atreides Management teamed up with Valor Equity Partners to launch a venture-capital fund earlier this year that has raised millions from investors including Oman’s sovereign-wealth fund. Each firm separately invested in Elon Musk’s xAI.
At least one portfolio manager is planning an AI hedge fund as a comeback vehicle. Sean Ma wound down his Hong Kong-based firm, Snow Lake Capital, after it agreed to pay about $2.8 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges last year that the firm participated in stock offerings of companies that it had also bet against.
Ma took over an investment firm called M37 Management in Menlo Park, Calif., earlier this year. He is currently fundraising for a hedge fund focused on AI software and hardware.
Record butter prices leave bakers with indigestion
Squeeze on butter churns exacerbated by huge demand for whey protein, originally a waste product of cheesemaking
One of life’s little culinary pleasures — taking a bite out of a freshly baked croissant — grows ever more expensive. Across the globe, record butter prices threaten the affordability of an everyday indulgence.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s butter price index is at an all-time high, according to the latest reading in June. An imbalance between supply and demand suggests little relief in sight. At the most recent Global Dairy Trade auction, which helps set the direction for dairy prices, butter reached an average of more than $7,200 per metric tonne. While that is down from the highs set in May, it is still 54 per cent higher than two years ago.
In Poland, the cost of butter was elevated enough that the government announced plans in December to sell off 1,000 tonnes of its reserves in a bid to curb the surge. In New Zealand, the issue has become a topic of political recrimination. In France, where butter consumption per capita is among the highest in the world, there are growing concerns over supply shortfalls. Grim news for lovers of the Kouign-amann, a Breton pastry made nearly 30 per cent of butter.
The problem with butter starts with milk. The global dairy industry is experiencing a decline in milking cow herds amid droughts and diseases. That has kept a lid on production. World milk supplies from five leading producer regions — the EU, US, New Zealand, Argentina and Australia — is forecast to grow less than half a percentage point this year.
In the hierarchy of dairy processing, bottlers are typically first in line to get milk. Then come makers of ice cream, yoghurt, cheese and butter. In recent years, competition for cream — a key component of butter — has grown as low-fat diets have faded in popularity and consumers, especially in the US, Middle East and Asia, return to higher-fat dairy products.
The squeeze on butter churns has been further exacerbated by the explosion in demand for whey protein. Originally a waste product of cheesemaking, whey is now a multibillion-dollar industry, giving dairy processors more reasons to devote more milk to making cheese instead of butter.
The high price of butter will be felt by food and confectionery makers who are already facing high costs for cocoa after prices for beans hit a record earlier this year. Those who make premium products — or bakeries with a captive audience — will presumably do their best to pass along higher raw ingredient costs to buyers of dairy-based goodies and flaky breakfast treats. Quel dommage!
Cover:
-Crypto firms, including Coinbase Global, Kraken, and Ripple Labs, have been urged to embed crypto into American daily lives by President Donald Trump's cabinet and leadership team. During President Joe Biden's administration, many of these companies had been sued by securities regulators or under investigation. The Trump administration's approach has led mainstream financial institutions to embrace crypto, encouraging banks that were almost prohibited from doing business with digital-asset firms to dive in. Companies that were sued by securities regulators are now being courted to implant themselves into American systems. The last major crypto crash, FTX's failure in 2022, had virtually no effect on the economy or wider financial system. However, Lee Reiners warns that a major downturn is imminent, with the pain likely to be acute.
Interview:
-no update
Tech Trader:
-The long-awaited tech tariffs arrived this week, and the market rallied despite uncertainty. President Donald Trump announced a new tariff of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors, with no charge for those building in the US or committed to build there. Apple will be one of the recipients, and the stock rallied 3.2% on Thursday. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index (SOX) was up 1.5% that day as investors tried to sort through the president's meaning. The term "chips and semiconductors" has had an elastic definition since April, with the SOX beginning the year down 28%. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs have been modified twice by the administration, most recently with tariffs ranging from 10% on imports from the UK to 41% for Syria.
The Trader:
-Stocks have risen to near all-time highs, despite concerns about President Trump's tariffs and a weakening labor market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased over 1% this week, while the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite have gained 2.3% and 3.8%, respectively. Corporate earnings have been strong, with stocks like Shopify and Arista Networks soaring on big beats. Investors are hoping that bad job news will prompt the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates next month, with traders now pricing in a nearly 90% probability of a quarter-point ease at the Sept. 17 meeting. However, the Cboe Volatility Index (VIX) was on track to end the week trading around 16, indicating the absence of fear in the stock market. Frank McKiernan, managing partner and co-founder of Third View Private Wealth, believes the S&P 500 can hit 6900 by year's end, 8% higher than current levels.
-Healthcare stocks have been the worst performing sector in the S&P 500 this year, with the Health Care Select Sector SPDR ETF falling 3.7% this year. The ETF, which includes insurers, pharma companies, and medical-device makers, has been hit hard by reimbursement costs, Trump administration efforts to lower drug prices, remaking the Food and Drug Administration, and potential tariffs. Eli Lilly, an obesity-drug maker, has also experienced losses due to competition concerns. However, the healthcare ETF has stabilized, finding support near $130, the level that has attracted buyers since the S&P 500's early April selloff. The fund has remained in a long-term uptrend since early 2009, suggesting a potential recovery.
Features:
-Experts predict that quantum computers could eventually crack the security codes of blockchain, the underlying technology for Bitcoin, which could severely damage investors' trust in the $2T-plus market. Around a quarter of all Bitcoins are protected with algorithms that could be cracked by quantum computers in five or 10 years. As quantum computing advances, the damage could spread to newer wallets and the market's structure. The crypto industry is aware of these risks and is quietly preparing to defend itself. Some firms are already working on quantum computing, but the big question is how quickly quantum develops, and whether the security features of blockchain will match those of quantum. Blockchain, the easier to understand technology, is the beating heart of the Bitcoin market.
Europe:
-European defense stocks have plateaued for the past two months, following a two-thirds surge from January to June. Germany's Rheinmetall now has a trailing price/earnings ratio around 95, compared to 57 for Nvidia. European weapon makers trade at a one-third premium to US peers, and the majority of European spending increases has been anticipated in market forecasts. However, questions still linger over the anticipated Old World arms bonanza, as the industry needs to believe that the interest is neither transitory nor likely to be spent outside Europe. Northern Europe, led by Germany and the Nordics, should march steadily toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's new goal of spending 3.5% of gross domestic product on defense. Buying European could prove challenging in some of the sexier and more expensive weapons systems, as US-made F-35 fighter jets and Patriot air defense systems are best in their class globally. However, Europe holds its own on the ground and at sea, with Germany signaling big spending on Euro-made Boxer and Patria armored vehicles, along with Leopard tanks. Six European companies are "tier one" contractors on the F-35, including BAE Systems, Italy's Leonardo, and a vertical takeoff mechanism from Rolls-Royce Holdings.
Emerging Markets:
-no update
Commodities:
-Rare-earth miner and refiner MP Materials reported better-than-expected second-quarter numbers, causing shares to rise again. The company reported earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (Ebitda) of negative $12.5M from sales of $57.4M, which was below Wall Street's expected $20M. In the second quarter of 2024, MP reported an Ebitda loss of about $27M on sales of about $31M. Shares added 4.6% on Friday, closing at $74.32, a new 52-week and all-time high. Despite the positive results, investors are focused on the future with MP Materials stock and remain optimistic about that future. MP stock has been up roughly 200% over the past three months, with an average Wall Street price target of about $60. A transformational deal with the Department of Defense in July led to the gains, with the Pentagon agreeing to a $400M equity investment, a commitment for up to $350M in additional funding, and a $150M loan. The money will fund the construction of a new domestic rare-earth magnet-manufacturing facility and the expansion of MP Materials' current mining and processing capabilities.
Streetwise:
-Yeti Holdings, a company that started making rugged coolers for anglers and other outdoorsy types, has experienced a drop in its shares, with net sales falling 4%. The company, which will turn 20 next year, now makes more than half of its business in drinkware. Jefferies analyst Randal Konik, one of Yeti's biggest boosters on Wall Street, points out that management trimmed its sales guidance for the year but raised its profit guidance, indicating that the company is navigating the drinkware spill well. Inventory fell, suggesting that sell-through at stores has been stronger than wholesale orders. Yeti is launching 30 new products this year, including tote bags, camp chairs, dog beds, skillets, flasks, and more. Free cash flow is healthy, management is buying back stock, and the valuation is down to 12 times next year's projected earnings.
OpenAI priced GPT-5 so low, it may spark a price war
OpenAI astounded the tech industry for the second time this week by launching its newest flagship model, GPT-5, just days after releasing two new freely available models under an open source license.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went so far as to call GPT-5 “the best model in the world.” That may be pride or hyperbole, as TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff reports that GPT-5 only slightly outperforms other leading AI models from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI on some key benchmarks, and slightly lags on others.
Still, it’s a model that performs well for a wide variety of uses, particularly coding. And, as Altman pointed out, one area where it is undoubtedly competing well is price. “Very happy with the pricing we are able to deliver!” he tweeted.
The top-level GPT-5 API costs $1.25 per 1 million tokens of input, and $10 per 1 million tokens for output (plus $0.125 per 1 million tokens for cached input). This pricing mirrors Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro basic subscription, which is also popular for coding-related tasks. Google, however, charges more if inputs/outputs cross a heavy threshold of 200,000 prompts, meaning its most consumption-heavy customers end up paying more.
But OpenAI is really undercutting Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1, which starts at $15 per 1 million input tokens and $75 per 1 million output tokens. (Anthropic does, however, offer big discounts for prompt caching and batch processing — storing/reusing prompts and processing multiple requests together.)
Anthropic’s model has been extremely popular among programmers, both as a choice within popular coding assistant Cursor and for powering its own such assistant, Claude Code. (Note that Cursor offered GPT-5 as an option minutes after it was announced.)
Developers who have had early access to GPT-5 are touting the pricing. Simon Willison, one of the developers featured in OpenAI’s launch video, writes in his review: “The pricing is aggressively competitive with other providers.”
But GPT-5 is also priced competitively with GPT-4o. OthersideAI’s co-founder and CEO, Matt Shumer (maker of HyperWrite), writes that GPT-5 “is cheaper than GPT-4o, which is fantastic. Intelligence per dollar continues to increase.”
Some on X called OpenAI’s fees for the model “a pricing killer,” while others on Hacker News are offering similar praise.
Will competitors like Anthropic follow? Will Google — who undercut OpenAI on pricing before — get even more affordable? If so, we could be witnessing the start of a much-awaited LLM price war.
There’s no doubt a price war would be welcome. The underlying economics of vibe-coding tool providers, for instance, is pretty shaky because of the high and unpredictable fees they have to pay model makers, as TechCrunch’s Marina Temkin reports. And there are countless startups building on top of AI models as well.
Silicon Valley has been hoping that the LLM price-to-performance ratio will eventually improve, along with inference costs. But it seemed like such an equalization could be years away as the tech industry invests hundreds of billions to build data centers and infrastructure to support growing AI demand.
OpenAI itself has a $30 billion-per-year contract with Oracle for capacity, when it only recently hit annual recurring revenue of $10 billion. Meanwhile, Meta plans to spend up to $72 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025, and Alphabet has set aside $85 billion for capital expenditures in 2025, driven by AI needs. In the face of such enormous expenses, costs typically go one way: up.
Given such investments, it may be too soon for startups looking at their rising model API bills to rejoice from OpenAI’s lone move to lower pricing.
Yet this week, OpenAI threw down the gauntlet to put pressure on prices not just once but twice. We’ll see if others follow.
Nvidia’s Quiet Rising Stars? The Son and Daughter of Billionaire Founder Jensen Huang
After early careers far from Nvidia, Madison and Spencer Huang are growing forces within the world’s most valuable company.
The Takeaway
• Madison and Spencer Huang have risen steadily within Nvidia in the last several years—largely without notice to outside observers.
• Their arrival at Nvidia comes as their father, CEO Jensen Huang, has guided the publicly traded firm to become the world’s most valuable company.
• Madison has become part of a small group of Nvidia execs nicknamed “The Band” who travel with Jensen.
At an all-hands meeting earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang received a question that prompted him to talk about a personal topic: nepotism at Nvidia.
In response, Huang acknowledged that Nvidia had indeed hired the children of many employees and insisted it didn’t bother him. He said he believed those parents wouldn’t have vouched for their kids unless they felt certain their children wouldn’t embarrass them. Besides, many second-generation Nvidia employees often outperformed their parents, Huang added with a laugh.
Of course, there’s a pair of second-generation Nvidians who have not yet eclipsed their parent: Huang’s own children.
Many employees in the audience saw the whole exchange as a reflection of growing intrigue within Nvidia about Madison Huang, 34, a senior director who joined the company in 2020, and Spencer Huang, 35, a product line manager who followed his sister to Nvidia two years later. (None of the Huangs would comment for this story, which is based on interviews with 30 people who know Madison and Spencer.)
Both Spencer and Madison have been steadily promoted. And while soft-spoken Spencer has kept a relatively low profile, Madison has not. In a sign of growing influence, Madison has joined a group of a dozen or so executives who travel with Jensen to his major speaking events. Known informally as “The Band,” these executives review presentation slides with him in hotel rooms, then go to event venues to scrutinize the details, like how the venue will light Jensen’s face on stage. It’s known as thankless, behind-the-scenes work that sometimes keeps executives up until the early hours of the morning on the eve of a major event, such as GTC, Nvidia’s annual developers’ conference, but puts them in Jensen’s innermost orbit.
Neither Madison nor Spencer works in Nvidia’s core business: making and selling the computer chips that have turned publicly traded Nvidia into one of the foremost players in the AI era during recent years. Rather, they work in divisions their father seems to value as areas of additional growth beyond chips—Madison in simulation software for industries such as manufacturing, and Spencer in robotics.
Their relationship to their father looms large over them at Nvidia. “I think it’s human nature that nobody is going to be in a meeting with either one of them and not have it on their minds,” said Greg Estes, a former Nvidia vice president who retired in May after 15 years at the company and who knows all three Huangs well. “The thing is, though, both of them work really hard, are good at their craft and care deeply about the company.”
For a long time, it wasn’t obvious that Madison or Spencer would end up at Nvidia, and neither followed a conventional path to Silicon Valley. Madison went to culinary school, later studying pastries and wine, while Spencer opened a cocktail bar in Taipei. (“I was happy to see that they wandered off at first chance,” said Jens Horstmann, a tech investor and longtime family friend. “I think they wanted to break out and see something different.”)
They have returned to the Bay Area as rarities in the tech world, at least to some degree. Corporate dynasties have long existed in more traditional industries, like media and finance. But since many of the largest businesses in Silicon Valley have scarcely existed for more than a couple decades, few have been around long enough to see a founder or CEO groom their children as possible successors.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who appears here at a White House press conference, has seen his company vault onto the world stage amid the AI boom. (Getty Images)
By and large, the children of the generation of tech founders who established their fortunes in the 1980s and 1990s seem to have deliberately tacked away from following in their parents’ footsteps. Bill Gates’ kids, for instance, have never held any roles at Microsoft, nor have Steve Jobs’ children at Apple.
The Huangs are certainly not the only examples of families with extended ties at Nvidia. The son of Nvidia co-founder Chris Malachowsky works at the company, too, and so does the son of board member Aarti Shah. Many executives’ kids have interned there, and some parents have multiple children who work at the company, public filings and conversations with more than half a dozen current and former employees show.
Since Madison and Spencer have only recently arrived at Nvidia, it’s impossible to know exactly where they’ll end up within the company and precisely how much sway they’ll amass. But with Nvidia newly the world’s most valuable company, it’s hard to imagine the Huang family story playing out on a bigger stage with more dramatic stakes.
At the time Jensen founded Nvidia in 1993, he was a father of two young children: Madison was just a year old, with Spencer only a year older. Jensen and his wife, Lori, raised them in their San Jose home until 2003, when they moved into a six-bedroom home in the affluent neighborhood of Los Altos Hills a few years after Nvidia went public in 1999.
Spencer didn’t go to a traditional high school his senior year, attending instead the Freestyle Academy of Communication Arts and Technology, a new alternative school for students who wanted to pursue creative careers. There, students could access high-end equipment like professional-grade cameras and editing software to work on photography, design and film, which is what interested Spencer, according to one of his teachers.
Before Spencer’s graduation from the Freestyle Academy, Jensen encouraged Spencer and his classmates to exhibit and present their final projects at Nvidia’s headquarters, according to someone with direct knowledge. He arranged the room so the students could easily play their videos on a screen or hang up their artwork, and he paid for catering, hiring waiters to serve hors d’oeuvres.
The Huangs in 2007 (from left): Madison, Lori, Jensen and Spencer. (Getty Images)
Jensen’s kids became familiar faces at Nvidia. Spencer regularly participated in Nvidia’s annual volunteer day, where employees contributed to a philanthropic project, according to his LinkedIn. Employees said both Spencer and Madison were known to attend GTC alongside their parents long before they started working at the company.
Spencer attended Columbia College Chicago, double-majoring in international marketing and cultural studies. When Madison graduated from Los Altos’ public high school and left for the Culinary Institute of America in 2009, Jensen admitted to feeling bereft. “I’m devastated. We’re empty nesters. I just don’t know how to deal with it,” he told The Mercury News in 2009.
At cooking school, Madison completed a program that prepares students to manage restaurants and other parts of the hospitality industry. She worked as a chef in New York and San Francisco and studied pastries and wine at Le Cordon Bleu, a culinary school in Paris. She also spent nearly four years working at LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate.
Across the world in Jensen Huang’s native Taiwan, Spencer studied Mandarin at the National Taiwan University after graduating from Columbia College. Around 2014, Spencer and a friend persuaded one of Huang’s language professors to help them open a bar in Taipei, R&D Cocktail Lab.
Even as a much smaller company a decade ago, Nvidia had a major presence in Taiwan—its chips are manufactured there—and sometimes Nvidia employees would stop by the bar and good-naturedly ask the bartenders about their CEO’s son. At the bar, Spencer didn’t much discuss Nvidia or his father, who was not yet a celebrity and source of national pride in Taiwan, as he is today. However, Spencer did sometimes talk about his upbringing. “Spencer once told me he has known how to buy stocks since he was eight,” one former employee said.
In at least one way, Spencer tried to emulate his father while running the establishment: Each week, he led a managers’ meeting where employees shared their “top five things,” a list of current priorities, according to a former bartender. That’s seemingly a direct lift from his father’s playbook: For years, Nvidia employees have sent the CEO weekly emails outlining their own “top five things.”
In 2019, both Madison and Spencer started onto a path toward joining their father at Nvidia, enrolling in a six-week, online program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a focus on artificial intelligence.
The same year, Madison began an MBA program at London Business School, a top-tier school known for a large number of international students. Spencer ran the bar through the pandemic until 2021, when he closed its doors after seven years. Later that year, he started his MBA at New York University.
When Madison started business school, it only took a few weeks before many of her classmates began gossiping about her high-profile father. Several of them remember hearing that she flew on a private jet to a group ski trip in France.
But Madison didn’t talk about her father or about a potential future at Nvidia with friends, according to six people in her class. And they also tended not to ask her about it because they felt it would likely make her uncomfortable.
Back in New York, Spencer’s classmates were a bit more oblivious. On orientation day, faculty introduced Spencer as someone who had run a bar in Taipei, and interest in his background as a cocktail bar owner made him a popular figure, according to three classmates.
The Nvidia connection didn’t click for some until a group project led some to Jensen Huang’s Wikipedia page, and people realized the Spencer Haung in their class was a relative. (Two classmates didn’t learn Spencer was Jensen’s son until contacted by The Information.)
In the summer of 2020, while at London Business School, Madison interned at Nvidia in the marketing department and was then offered a full-time role in the marketing department. Several months later, she moved into Nvidia’s Omniverse business unit, which is responsible for Nvidia’s 3D design and simulation software products, as a product marketing manager.
Omniverse is a much smaller business than Nvidia’s chip and data center business, which makes up the majority of its revenue. Still, it is a key strategic bet for Jensen.
A key part of Omniverse involves digital twins—software that lets businesses simulate the design of a factory before actually putting any shovels in the ground. This business is important to Jensen because he believes simulations of the physical world will be immensely powerful, helping to usher in a new wave of AI for robotics, manufacturing and cars. (Such a boom would also increase demand for Nvidia products by new customers.)
From the outside, one might view putting Madison in Omniverse as a way to keep her out of the spotlight, but employees say it was a sign her father trusted her. He has long been deeply focused on growing Nvidia beyond its core business of selling graphics processing units, and he believed Madison could handle it.
Since Spencer came to Nvidia in 2022, he too has worked in another area of emerging interest for Jensen: robotics simulation. As a product line manager, Spencer oversees groups working on developing AI models for robots, as well as simulation software that aims to help robots better understand the world.
CEO Jensen Huang shows off Nvidia’s robotics work at a Paris conference in June. (Getty Images)
Employees say Madison is the more visible and influential of the two siblings at Nvidia. Her role has broadened over the past few years, and she gets involved in a number of different aspects of the business.
Her pay, too, has grown substantially—from around $160,000 annually in 2021 to more than $1 million in total compensation last year, according to Nvidia’s latest proxy filings with the SEC, which requires Nvidia to disclose this information because they are close family members of the CEO.
In March, Madison was promoted to senior director—one step below vice president—and reports to Rev Lebaredian, who reports to Jensen. She’s known by colleagues as someone who works long hours and will reply to emails within minutes. (“She wants to never be perceived as not earning what she’s achieved,” said Dessi Vatcheva, Madison’s close friend and former business school classmate.)
Madison has displayed an expansive interest in the business. A former employee who worked closely with her said that even though she wasn’t responsible for Omniverse’s sales goals, Madison sometimes checked in with salespeople and asked them about their progress.
She isn’t afraid to tell people they are not meeting her expectations or they are disappointing her, half a dozen former employees said. (Her father is known for doing the same.) Madison has sometimes abruptly logged off virtual meetings, which left co-workers feeling like she was frustrated with them, according to two people who have been in these meetings.
Madison’s big personality has made Spencer look more unassuming, according to several people who have worked with him. Colleagues said they couldn’t imagine Spencer getting upset with them or being as intense, for instance.
Madison and Spencer are not household names in the U.S. But in Taiwan, their presence at the family firm hasn’t gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, Madison traveled to Taipei to attend the Computex conference, a major event that draws tens of thousands of attendees.
Wearing a baby-blue pantsuit and crisp white sneakers, she walked the expo floor, greeting companies and stopping for pictures. (Also in attendance: Madison’s boyfriend, Nico Caprez, a London Business School classmate who joined Nvidia as a corporate development manager in February 2024.)
“She is a rock star,” said one attendee. “We all know she is Jensen’s daughter.”