Jul 20, 2026
Over the last three-and-a-half years, Jensen Huang has gone from a CEO whose name was known only in tech circles to a globally recognized corporate rock star. And as that celebrity has grown, more and more people want a piece of it.
Huang is the CEO of Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA], an American hardware company that makes the processors and chips required for AI computing. Its stock has increased nearly 1,000% in value over the past five years.
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That was particularly evident last Friday when one of Huang’s signature Tom Ford leather jackets went up for auction. Pre-sale estimates put the expected sale price at between $40,000 and $60,000. When the gavel finally fell, the jacket sold for $960,000.
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Even Sotheby’s, which hosted the auction, was surprised.
“The response to this sale surpassed even our highest expectations,” Sotheby’s head of modern collectibles, Brahm Wachter, said in a statement to CNBC.
Sotheby’s certainly helped that furor by talking up the jacket in the catalog description.
“Instantly recognizable to audiences around the world, the ‘Jensen Jacket’ has come to be a relic of a simple belief: that the future is built by people brave enough to journey into the unknown before anyone else can see what they see,” the auction house wrote.
“This is not only a jacket. It is the uniform of a ‘first believer.’ … This jacket represents both a tangible artifact from a transformative era in technology and an investment in the next generation of innovators.”
The buyer was not identified. Sotheby’s says the proceeds will go to a philanthropic initiative in support of the Edge Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to innovation.
A familiar uniform
It’s rare to see Huang in public without his signature leather jacket. This particular one was worn in 2023 at an event at Foxconn in Taipei, Taiwan.
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Huang has adopted a philosophy favored by Steve Jobs of wearing the same outfit virtually all of the time. Others who have followed that approach range from author Tom Wolfe to Johnny Cash.
Jobs described how he came up with his distinctive uniform of black turtleneck, Levi’s jeans and grey New Balance sneakers when speaking with author Walter Isaacson for his biography.
Jobs came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, both because of its daily convenience and its ability to convey a signature style, the book says. So Jobs asked designer Issey Miyake to make some black turtlenecks, and he made “like a hundred of them” for Jobs.
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The price of fame
Tom Ford leather jackets aren’t cheap by any means. Prices for one from the designer range from $6,990 to $15,990 when bought new. (Huang’s preferred style is closer to the $7,000 range.)
But add in Huang’s celebrity and the value escalates tremendously as the auction showed. It’s something other CEOs have joked about as well.
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Two years ago, Huang and Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg joked about a “jersey swap“ on Instagram. Four months later, the two were on stage at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference and swapped jackets for real.
Zuckerberg gave Huang a black leather coat with shearling. Huang gave Zuck the coat he had been wearing for the past two hours.
“This is worth more because it’s used,” Zuckerberg said.
He could not have been more right.
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Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience at many of the internet's biggest news outlets. In addition to his activities as a writer, reporter and editor, Chris is also a frequent panel moderator and speaker at major conferences, including CES and South by Southwest.
