It turned them into one of the most valuable companies in history. The board can figure out succession now.

Is that the reason? Or is it that they happened to make a product that became very in demand?

"happened"?

You say that as if a lottery assigns companies what product they shall make. Or that they found their product designs in a kinder egg.

They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality.

People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck.

Finding yourself making matrix multiplication machines for computer graphics, then suddenly an unrelated technological revolution requires that exact hardware?

They absolutely got incredibly lucky.

This take is crazy; NVIDIA not only built the GPU, *they created the demand.* For a very long time there was nothing like CUDA. They're working on an open-source self-driving car. Back when they were a gaming company, they sponsored the gaming ecosystem.

Jensen Huang cheated on his wife AND conspired to evade arms control regulations, but he's still a genius.

You're getting downvoted for this, but it has some merit. It could be argued that NVDA's flat structure is what led to the company's success - Jensen himself greenlit the development of CUDA from the anecdotes I've heard. However, in the last 2 or 3 years the board should have pushed for more redundancy and a succession plan.

Since NVDA had such a flat corporate structure with Huang having ~60 direct reports, I expect that the company will be lost for a period of time as they try to get their bearings. This is an opportunity for AMD, INTC and others.