Nvidia's Jensen Huang tops "most popular CEOs" survey, check out the best and worst approval...

[midian182]

In a nutshell: It's not uncommon to find the most successful companies led by the most unliked bosses, but there are exceptions. According to a new survey of 13,171 verified US professionals, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has the highest approval rating (96%), while Apple chief executive Tim Cook also made the top five. The list includes CEOs with the lowest approval ratings, too: Western Digital's David Goeckeler came in joint last with an approval rating of 0%.

Professional social network Blind carried out the survey to determine the approval rating of 103 CEOs, based on employees' feedback in August 2023. The network asked workers: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way your CEO is handling their job?"

Sitting at the top of the approval ratings is Jensen Huang at 96%. Nvidia has been one of the biggest winners in this year's AI boom, thanks to it holding an estimated 95% share in the AI servers market. The company's share price has trebled since the start of 2023, and it now holds a $1.16 trillion market cap.

"He saw this AI mania coming 10+ years ago," a verified Nvidia professional on Blind said of Huang. "I trust him completely."

In the summer of last year, back when Nvidia missed earning expectations and the economy was even worse, Huang assured employees there would be raises, not layoffs, at the company.

Following Huang is Walmart's Doug McMillon at 88%, with Palo Alto Networks' Nikesh Arora (84%) in third.

Apple's Tim Cook comes in at fourth place with an 83% approval rating. Since taking over from Steve Jobs in 2011, Cook has overseen Apple's rise to become the largest company in the world by market cap, which is currently $2.81 trillion. Cook has long been reportedly liked by employees, despite Apple being one of the many companies telling workers to get back into the office at least three days per week. The CEO's voluntary 40% pay cut this year could have increased his appeal, too.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora was a senior executive at Google, and later the president of SoftBank Group until 2016. He took on the role of CEO and chairman at Palo Alto Networks in 2018.

The final top boss in the top five is Ali Ghodsi, CEO of data/AI company Databricks (83%).

AMD's Lisa Su also scored high on the list, landing in eighth place with an approval rating of 79%.

Job security is a major influence on how much an employee approves of their boss. Only one CEO in the top ten has laid off staff in the last year or more. That was Autodesk, which cut 2% of global staff in February while continuing to hire throughout the rest of the year.

Overall, the CEOs' approval ratings are far from impressive, with the average being just 32%. E-commerce, financial services, and the tech industry had the most popular bosses.

At the bottom of the pile were many companies who have seen big staff cuts this year. Linda Yaccarino, who Elon Musk appointed CEO of X/Twitter, has just 4%, slightly ahead of Snap's Evan Spiegel (3%). John Riccitiello, who has just announced he is stepping down as head of Unity following the installment fee controversy, has 2%.

Two CEOs have the unwanted distinction of scoring 0%: Western Digital's David Goeckeler and Nordstrom's Erik Nordstrom. Western Digital laid off more than 200 employees in June, while Nordstrom is also cutting jobs.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/100465-nvidia-jensen-huang-tops-most-popular-ceos-survey.html

 

[SalmanIsHere]

Comparing Lisa with Jensen is not a good idea.
One is Visionary and another is just a employee riding on the succes of Keller and Zen team.

 

[yRaz]

Comparing Lisa with Jensen is not a good idea.
One is Visionary and another is just a employee riding on the succes of Keller and Zen team.

One is a scumbag who just listens to market analysts and the other sells products people want at a price they can afford.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

One is a scumbag who just listens to market analysts and the other sells products people want at a price they can afford.

Ignoring that AMD prices GPUs at similar levels to nvidia, when possible. Oh, and remember that they started jacking up CPU prices the moment they pulled ahead.

 

[Bluescreendeath]

Comparing Lisa with Jensen is not a good idea.
One is Visionary and another is just a employee riding on the succes of Keller and Zen team.

Lol, Lisa Su saved AMD from bankruptcy, helped put together the teams responsible for the different Zen cpus, and was responsible for AMD dominating console hardware specs.

 

[scavengerspc]

We all know that when a certain mindset commits to a company or business, they tend to stick with that decision. And they won't give up on it, no matter how many times they get bent over.

 

[wiyosaya]

Lol, Lisa Su saved AMD from bankruptcy, helped put together the teams responsible for the different Zen cpus, and was responsible for AMD dominating console hardware specs.

Not to mention - domination in the server CPU market.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

ZERO percent approval is rough!

What are they doing to their employees???

 

[wiyosaya]

Ignoring that AMD prices GPUs at similar levels to nvidia, when possible. Oh, and remember that they started jacking up CPU prices the moment they pulled ahead.

That's business in the western world. If you want to lay blame, lay CPU pricing blame on Intel. They started the modern "price your CPUs way beyond what they are worth" trend. Even that, though, it goes back almost two decades, now. But still, capitalism.

As to Jensen being on top - it must be the leather.

 

[nnguy2]

Comparing Lisa with Jensen is not a good idea.
One is Visionary and another is just a employee riding on the succes of Keller and Zen team.

Show me on the doll where AMD hurt you.

 

[redgarl]

Comparing Lisa with Jensen is not a good idea.
One is Visionary and another is just a employee riding on the succes of Keller and Zen team.

One is a snake oil seller overhyping products with catch words and catch phrases to clueless market analyst, and the other literally revolutionized the semi-conductor industry with new manufacturing concepts while moving their respective company from bankruptcy to stardom...

 

[redgarl]

Ignoring that AMD prices GPUs at similar levels to nvidia, when possible. Oh, and remember that they started jacking up CPU prices the moment they pulled ahead.

1600$... enough said...

 

[human7]

I suspect that there's some selection bias at play, here. For example, with Walmart, how many of the "verified professionals" were in corporate versus in the stores? In general, however, the results don't seem too surprising. But I would like more details, and the Blind page doesn't go into those details (at least not enough for my liking).

 

[Lew Zealand]

This is just a poll of professionals who answered the question:

"Which CEO made my stock portfolio the most money last year."

That's it. In previous years it's Tim Apple or Lisa Savior but this year it's Leather Huang.

 

[scavengerspc]

This is just a poll of professionals who answered the question:

"Which CEO made my stock portfolio the most money last year."

That's it. In previous years it's Tim Apple or Lisa Savior but this year it's Leather Huang.

Good point. Anyone doing a search for "most liked, admired" CEO or company poll, and things take a turn.

https://www.inc.com/business-insider/owler-most-liked-ceo-tech-industry.html

 

[wiyosaya]

Good point. Anyone doing a search for "most liked, admired" CEO or company poll, and things take a turn.

https://www.inc.com/business-insider/owler-most-liked-ceo-tech-industry.html

Well, the article is a bit dated - 2017, but the results are quite different.

 

[Dimitrios]

Comparing Lisa with Jensen is not a good idea.
One is Visionary and another is just a employee riding on the succes of Keller and Zen team.

What an ignorant comment. I have seen some great and bad comments over the years but this one is bad.

 

[Dimitrios]

Lol, Lisa Su saved AMD from bankruptcy, helped put together the teams responsible for the different Zen cpus, and was responsible for AMD dominating console hardware specs.

I followed AMD even when I was a kid. I owned a small amount of shares of AMD. Lisa was the only one that could save AMD. I even thought AMD would go bankrupt at one point. She was smart and she was good at mind games as well. Her best move was claiming "they won't focus anymore on high performance CPU's" then INTEL got cocky and lazy and she tricked them and surprised them like deer in the headlights. Selling the fabs and offices were smart moves, gaming consoles and other actions were great. She was very good with numbers too.

 

[godrilla]

The once Starbucks and previously Walgreens Ceo just stepped down due to poor performance just to be as a consultant for the company with another 10 million dollar bonus besides the 25 million dollar sign on bonus she received when she onboarded initially. All the rest of staff get pay freezes and hour cuts across the board.
Imagine getting paid 10 million dollars to be a consultant on how to destroy a company further!

 

[b3rdm4n]

Of course he's popular, he's living rent free in the minds of AMD superfans everywhere, the same superfans that stand ready and willing to white knight for Lisa Su. You don't have to look hard to see either, in fact some are in the room with us right now...

 

[Beerfloat]

One is a scumbag who just listens to market analysts and the other sells products people want at a price they can afford.

Nvidia doubled 2nd quarter revenue over last year because of demand. It projects tripling third quarter results. Clearly the products people want are Nvidia’s.

Of course Huang tops a list of employee approval. He’s absolutely killing it as usual.

 

[yRaz]

Nvidia doubled 2nd quarter revenue over last year because of demand. It projects tripling third quarter results. Clearly the products people want are Nvidia’s.

Of course Huang tops a list of employee approval. He’s absolutely killing it as usual.

a tripling of revenue is interesting because the H100 has dropped from 60k to 30k in the last 3 months due to a lack of demand. The majority of the revenue is in the AI/compute market, not the consumer side. I really would like to see what these numbers are based on because I see nVidia being an *** to their customers

 

[poshflamingos]

One is Visionary

LMAO

This "visionary" was responsible for inflating the cost of flagship consumer GPUs from $700 to $1600 in half a decade; brough prices for high-end 80-tier cards from $500 to $1200 along with it; made literally the worst generation launch Nvidia has ever had in terms of performance/$ with the RTX 4000 series; moved chips one step down the model stack in order to deliver worse value for customers (e.g. xxx07 chips were always used in sub-$200 50-tier models, but now the AD107 chip is the $300 RTX 4060 instead); tried to brand the 4070 Ti as a "12 GB 4080" (which would move the rest of the products even further down the stack from where they are now); is selling $400 cards with a miserable 8 GB of VRAM; is locking features (like frame generation and ray reconstruction) away from older customers in order to force them to upgrade to the new (and awful value) series, despite the fact that older cards are perfectly capable of supporting those features; and for over a decade now has had the strategy to invest in proprietary features that fragment the market and ****s over customers who decide to buy other brands (CUDA, PhysX, 3D Vision, G-Sync, DLSS and so on).

Is the vision from this "visionary" to be as anti-consumer as possible?

 

[b3rdm4n]

I see so many false comparisons of someone who has a vision for the future of rendering technology and innovation in the market, and an economic leader who made changes that saved a company from going under. These things really aren't the same. Not to mention AMD seems content to price like Nvidia for the most part (and in the absence of a halo product that could actually compete with the competitors halo product), have second rate features in a bid to claim parity, and has engaged in anti competitive and anti gamer moves too, while trying to sing a song of saving gamers - which is working on some. Whoops, how dare I criticise AMD, even when they are objectively making some proper s**t the bed miss-steps, from sales, to marketing to design and execution. Quick someone make a leather jacket joke, they're not tired at all.

 

[poshflamingos]

Not to mention AMD seems content to price like Nvidia for the most part

This is just complete and utter nonsense. The 7900 XTX matches the 4080 but is priced $200 lower ($900 vs $1100). The 7800 XT matches the 4070 but is priced $100 lower ($500 vs $600). The 6700 XT (not replaced by a 7000 model yet) matches the 4060 Ti but is priced $80 lower ($320 vs $400) and crucially comes with 4 GB more VRAM (12 GB vs 8 GB) on top of that. The 7600 matches the 4060 but is priced $40 lower ($240 vs $280). AMD consistently prices their products lower than Nvidia's counterparts.

(and in the absence of a halo product that could actually compete with the competitors halo product)

Halo products are an minuscule, insignificant part of the market, and are completely irrelevant to the vast overwhelming majority of GPU customers.
Looking at the Steam survey, halo products account for less than 1% of the GPU market, while mainstream products in the ~$200 to ~$500 range completely dominate the chart. In this segment, AMD and Intel GPUs are priced strongly, and Nvidia's products are by far the worst value of the bunch (despite, sadly, being most of the marketshare, as most buyers are not tech savvy).

and has engaged in anti competitive and anti gamer moves too

"My source is that I made it up!"

even when they are objectively making some proper s**t the bed miss-steps, from sales, to marketing to design and execution

Nvidia literally just launched the worst value GPU series of their entire 3 decades of existance. That was much, much bigger than a "miss-step".