It is a Sunday night in May at Taipei's Raohe Street Night Market, and a crowd has gathered around a grilled corn stall. The man at the centre of it is wearing a black leather jacket. The queue is long, so he makes the vendor an offer: he will pay for everyone in line if he can skip ahead.

The man is Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, and one of the richest people in the world. In Taiwan, where he was born, crowds follow him from restaurant to restaurant. Fans have a name for it: "Jensanity".

Jen-Hsun Huang was born in Taipei on February 17, 1963. His family later moved to Thailand, where his father worked at an oil refinery. His mother, determined that her sons learn English, picked 10 random words from the dictionary for them to learn each day.

When Huang was 9, political unrest in Thailand led his parents to send him and his older brother to relatives in Washington state. Those relatives sent the boys to the Oneida Baptist Institute, a boarding school in rural Kentucky. Huang did not yet speak English fluently. He was the youngest student in his class and did cleaning chores at the school.

Decades later, speaking to Stanford students, he put it plainly: he had cleaned more toilets than all of them combined.

His parents eventually joined their sons in the US and settled in Oregon. As a teenager, Huang worked at Denny's, an American diner chain, washing dishes, bussing tables and waiting.

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