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EconTalk · 2026-04-13 · 64 min · 10,985 words

The Man Who Built NVIDIA (with Stephen Witt)

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Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.

We'd love to hear from you. Today is March 5th, 2026, and my guest is author Stephen Witt. His latest book and the subject of today's conversation is The Thinking Machine, Jensen Wang, NVIDIA, and the world's most coveted microchip. Stephen, welcome to Econ Talk. Well, thank you so much for having me.

So this is really an extraordinary book. It's it's a history. indirectly of, I'd say, the last 30 years or so of the digital age, it's an incredible portrait of a visionary and his company. I think some of my listeners and viewers will know, will have heard of NVIDIA, but won't know much about it other than perhaps that it's the most valuable company in the world measured by market capitalization.

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