George Epstein: Stroke of Genius

At over $5 trillion, Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company. Jensen Huang, its long-time CEO, must be a genius, right?  Well, maybe. Nvidia made the best chips for displaying cool graphics in computer games. It was a modest-sized, successful company. Then crypto mining became a thing. Turns out graphics chips were faster at computing the mining algorithms than general purpose PC chips. The company got a nice revenue boost. Then the lightning bolt — along come massive data centers built to support artificial intelligence, and they created the insatiable international lust for graphics chips that are the only way to efficiently build AI models. Mr. Huang has certainly maximized the revenue that resulted, but having an entire industry drop into your lap when you thought you were in the Call of Duty enhancement business is way more luck than genius. 

Our president chose massive increases in tariffs as a means raising billions of dollars in order to offset some of the enormous tax breaks for wealthy people in the big, beautiful bill. He claimed that the brilliance of that move would even reduce the deficit because it would raise so much money. Unfortunately for the president, the legislation he relied on to declare the wild tariff surges without congressional approval requires a national security basis. Under Supreme Court grilling, the president’s lawyer had to declare that the purpose of the tariffs had nothing to do with raising money — directly contradicting the president.