For 33 years, NVIDIA had exactly one CEO: Jensen Huang. The company’s billionaire co-founder was famous for his black leather jackets, marathon keynote presentations, and his almost obsessive involvement in every aspect of NVIDIA’s operations.
Then, earlier this morning, Huang abruptly resigned amid a scandal involving extramarital relationships, including allegations that one of his romantic partners had ties to Chinese intelligence. The resignation sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and raised immediate questions about who could possibly replace the man who transformed a graphics-chip company into an artificial intelligence powerhouse worth trillions of dollars.
The answer, at least for now, is a 59-year-old businesswoman named Colette Kress. Kress, NVIDIA’s chief financial officer since 2013, has been appointed interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor. Harvey C. Jones, a longtime board member, has become the company’s first chairman.
If you’ve never heard of Colette Kress, you’re probably not alone. Unlike Jensen, she doesn’t spend much time delivering flashy keynote speeches or cultivating a public persona. For most of the last 13 years, she’s been working behind the scenes, helping manage the financial operations of one of the fastest-growing companies in corporate history.
As a result of joining NVIDIA a full decade before the AI boom, Colette has been richly rewarded. Through a combination of executive compensation, well-timed stock sales, and a mountain of NVIDIA shares she still owns, she has accumulated a personal fortune of $1 billion. That makes her one of the richest self-made women in America.
And here’s one more fun anecdote: Colette’s decision to join NVIDIA was partly influenced by her two young sons, who were just 8 and 10 years old at the time. Why? They were obsessed with video games.
(via NVIDIA)
Before NVIDIA: A Quarter Century Working Her Way Up The Corporate Ladder
Colette Kress was born in 1967 and studied finance at the University of Arizona. She subsequently earned an MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her professional career began in 1989 at Texas Instruments, where she spent eight years working in various corporate finance positions.
In 1997, she made the jump to Microsoft. Over the next 13 years, she worked her way through increasingly senior financial management positions, eventually becoming chief financial officer of the company’s Server and Tools division in 2006. That was a substantial job, overseeing financial strategy for a major enterprise software business responsible for products such as Windows Server, SQL Server, and the development tools used by businesses around the world.
After 13 years at Microsoft, she moved to Cisco Systems in 2010, where she became senior vice president and CFO of its Business Technology and Operations Finance organization. Her responsibilities included financial strategy, planning, reporting, and business development across Cisco’s engineering and operational divisions. By 2013, Kress had accumulated nearly 25 years of experience working at three of the world’s most important technology companies.
And then Jensen Huang came calling.
Her Two Young Sons Convinced Her To Join NVIDIA
In 2013, NVIDIA was a relatively modest technology company, generating around $4.3 billion in annual revenue. It was best known for making graphics chips that powered gaming computers, professional workstations, and other graphics-intensive applications. The company was looking for a new chief financial officer, and Jensen Huang was personally involved in the recruitment process.
According to Huang, he interviewed 22 candidates before choosing Colette Kress. But there’s a particularly charming detail about how she ended up taking the job. Kress had two young sons, ages eight and ten, who were enthusiastic video game players and knew all about NVIDIA because its graphics processors powered many of the games they loved.
When their mother told them she was considering a position at NVIDIA, they encouraged her to take it. Imagine that. After spending nearly 25 years working her way up the corporate ladder at Texas Instruments, Microsoft, and Cisco, two elementary school-aged gamers helped convince their mother to make the most financially rewarding career move of her life.
Kress accepted the job in September 2013. During her first week, she asked Jensen how long he envisioned her staying at NVIDIA. Huang later recalled his response on a podcast: “For as long as we shall live and death do us part.”
It was an amusingly dramatic answer to a fairly routine workplace question. But the arrangement lasted for 13 years, an eternity by Silicon Valley executive standards, and those 13 years would transform both NVIDIA and Kress’s personal finances.
From $4 Billion In Revenue To $216 Billion
When Colette joined NVIDIA, the company was still primarily associated with video games and computer graphics. Artificial intelligence was an important research field, but few people anticipated that AI would someday become the driving force behind a multitrillion-dollar technology company.
Under Jensen’s leadership, NVIDIA invested heavily in developing graphics processors capable of handling enormous computational workloads. Its CUDA software platform allowed developers to use GPUs for scientific computing, machine learning, and eventually sophisticated artificial intelligence systems.
Kress managed the financial side of this transformation, overseeing financial planning, capital allocation, investor relations, and the company’s increasingly complex relationships with customers and business partners. As CFO, she became a familiar voice on NVIDIA’s quarterly earnings calls, explaining its performance to Wall Street analysts.
Then came the artificial intelligence explosion. Following the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, demand for NVIDIA’s chips surged as Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and other technology giants began spending extraordinary sums building AI data centers. NVIDIA became the primary supplier of the processors needed to power those facilities.
The numbers were staggering. When Kress joined NVIDIA, annual revenue was around $4.3 billion. In fiscal 2026, NVIDIA generated $215.9 billion in revenue, an increase of more than 5,000%.
The company’s market capitalization followed an equally remarkable trajectory, eventually surpassing $5 trillion and briefly touching $6 trillion. And while Jensen became the public face of that extraordinary success, Kress was the executive responsible for explaining the financial results, managing the company’s finances, and helping allocate the enormous amounts of cash NVIDIA was generating.
Of course, NVIDIA’s success also had another consequence. It made Colette Kress extraordinarily rich.
How Colette Kress Became A Billionaire
CelebrityNetWorth estimates that Colette Kress has a net worth of $1 billion. Most of her wealth comes from NVIDIA stock she accumulated through more than a decade of executive compensation.
According to the company’s September 2026 SEC filings, Kress beneficially owned around 4.78 million NVIDIA shares, held directly and through various family trusts and investment entities. At a $3.85 trillion market capitalization, those shares would be worth roughly $756 million.
But here’s where the numbers get even more interesting. Kress hasn’t simply held every NVIDIA share she ever received. Over the years, she has sold substantial amounts of stock, particularly as the company’s valuation skyrocketed during the artificial intelligence boom.
Our analysis of publicly disclosed SEC transactions indicates that between 2015 and September 2026, Kress sold an estimated $204.8 million worth of NVIDIA stock. Between 2015 and 2023, she sold $46.9 million worth of shares. She followed that up with $53.9 million in sales during 2024, another $68.2 million in 2025, and $35.8 million through September 2026.
That’s nearly $205 million in gross stock sale proceeds, on top of a remaining disclosed NVIDIA position valued at more than three-quarters of a billion dollars. The sale figures are before taxes, and they don’t tell us exactly how much cash she retained, invested elsewhere, spent, or transferred to family members. Some of the shares still attributed to her are also held in trusts, where legal ownership and personal economic interests can differ.
But they give us a pretty good idea of how an executive who joined NVIDIA in 2013 could eventually accumulate a billion-dollar fortune. And we haven’t even discussed her salary.
$110 Million In Executive Compensation
Between fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2026, Colette Kress earned a combined $110.2 million in reported NVIDIA executive compensation. That includes $91.2 million in stock awards valued when granted, $10.6 million in base salary, and additional cash bonuses, incentives, and other compensation.
For fiscal 2026 alone, her total compensation package was valued at $14.34 million, including a $900,000 annual base salary, $600,000 in performance-based cash compensation, and $12.83 million in stock awards. The previous year, her compensation package was worth an even more impressive $21.36 million.
But those figures don’t fully illustrate how lucrative her stock awards became. During fiscal 2026, for example, Kress acquired 442,087 NVIDIA shares through the vesting of awards granted in earlier years. Those shares were worth $63.9 million when they vested, reflecting the enormous appreciation in NVIDIA’s stock price since the grants were originally made.
That wasn’t an additional salary payment on top of her annual compensation. It was the appreciated value of earlier equity grants, and it helps explain how Kress became so wealthy. Like many successful Silicon Valley executives, she received a substantial portion of her compensation in company stock, and as NVIDIA’s share price exploded, the value of those awards increased dramatically.
There’s also a potential income stream that doesn’t depend on her salary or future stock grants. In May 2026, NVIDIA increased its quarterly dividend to 25 cents per share. At that rate, Kress’s disclosed shareholdings would generate roughly $4.8 million in annual dividends, assuming the holdings and dividend rate remained unchanged.
As we recently explained in an article about Jensen Huang’s dividend windfall, the company’s new dividend policy created an extraordinary source of cash income for its largest shareholders.
Now Comes The Hardest Job Of Her Career
For all of her financial success, Kress is now facing a challenge unlike anything she’s encountered during her nearly four decades in corporate finance. She has to lead NVIDIA without Jensen Huang, and that’s a much bigger problem than simply finding someone to occupy his office.
Unlike most large corporations, NVIDIA operated with an unusually flat management structure. Huang had more than 60 senior executives reporting directly to him, giving him an extraordinary degree of personal involvement in the company’s daily operations. He was also the company’s chief salesman, product visionary, and public ambassador, maintaining relationships with everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to political leaders and executives throughout NVIDIA’s global supply chain.
Kress knows the business intimately. She has spent 13 years managing its finances, communicating with investors, and helping oversee its extraordinary expansion. But stepping into Jensen’s role means taking responsibility for an enormous organization that was designed around one man’s leadership style.
She also inherits NVIDIA at a particularly complicated moment. Wall Street is increasingly scrutinizing the enormous sums being spent on AI infrastructure, while NVIDIA’s financial partnerships and investments in customers such as CoreWeave and OpenAI have raised questions about the sustainability of the AI investment boom. The company continues to navigate U.S. restrictions on advanced chip sales to China, fierce competition, and heightened scrutiny following Huang’s resignation.
Meanwhile, its board must decide whether Kress is the right person to lead NVIDIA permanently or whether it needs someone with a deeper engineering or product-development background. For the time being, she’s doing both jobs: CFO and interim CEO. In announcing her appointment, newly named chairman Harvey Jones expressed confidence in Kress and NVIDIA’s existing leadership team, emphasizing the need to keep operations, customer commitments, and product development moving forward.