The first Nobel Prize-winning scientist to join a White House cabinet, Steven Chu made history when he became Barack Obama’s energy secretary in 2009. But his move to Washington cost him an incredible $300 million (?222 million).
“I joined the Nvidia board in 2004 before the company took off but I had to sell my shares in 2009 when I joined government,” explained Chu on his early involvement in the microchip firm that recently became the world’s most valuable company with?.
“At the time Nvidia was a small graphics company but there were rules about conflict of interest so I had to sell,” he told?糖心Vlog. With Nvidia’s stock rising 22,000 per cent in the past decade alone, Chu’s stake would be worth $300 million, he said.
Nvidia’s astonishing rise has amazed the stock market in recent years but Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, felt the company had huge promise when he joined.
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“When Jenson Huang [Nvidia’s founder] told me about developing this high-level chip I said ‘if you do that, this computer will be at the heart of every supercomputer in the world’. And he did it,” recalled Chu.
Impressively sanguine about his lost wealth, Chu’s main takeaway from Nvidia is not his own misfortune. Instead, he worries that this American success story – co-created by a Taiwanese-born Stanford graduate, employing foreign-born engineering talent – might not have been able to happen today given the double whammy faced by US academia: massive cuts to federal science budgets and an immigration crackdown deterring many students, particularly from China, from applying to the US.
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“Trump wants to cut science budgets by half or more and reduce the number of foreign postdocs – particularly from China,” explained Chu, speaking earlier this month at the annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in southern Germany.
“That’s a problem because if you go to any major research university, you’ll find about a third of researchers are East Asian.”
Chu’s own parents – born and educated in China before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1940s – are a good example of how this brain gain has worked in America’s favour. “When the communists took over, they couldn’t go back but this is how America got many of its best scientists and engineers – as refugees from Germany, Italy and China.”
“That’s true for business too – many of America’s captains of industry – from Jenson Huang to [ex-Intel boss] Andy Grove and Alexander Graham Bell – were immigrants,” he said.
Reflecting how America “didn’t become a scientific superpower until World World II”, Chu believes the 1930s are instructive in other ways. “In this era America took what was innovative and applied it to industry. That allowed places like Ford to take what Volkswagen and Peugeot was doing but do it cheaper but good enough to work,” he said.
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“That is what China is doing to America now – for instance, taking the electric car and making it cheaper and now better. What we did to Europe, China and now Korea are doing to us,” he said.
Traditionally, the US has been able to stay ahead thanks to its education system, in particular its generously funded world-leading research universities. With that system under attack, however, that advantage is weaker, he said. “Something magical happens at PhD level in US universities – we teach creativity. China is trying to learn this…and then apply it to their industrial sector. When they do, they will blow us away.”
Without America’s outstanding universities and its foreign talent pool diminished, China’s path to global dominance will be immeasurably?easier, predicted Chu. “Trump is perfectly willing to destroy institutions that any country in the world would give its eye teeth for,” he said.
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Unusually for a Nobel laureate, Chu’s prize did not mark the peak of his scientific achievements. He led a committee that recommended the creation of?, a science agency?that has funded more than $4 billion in battery, nanotech and other types of energy research since 2009, generating spin-out companies worth more than $22 billion.
Meanwhile, his time as energy secretary saw further investment, including the funding of an experimental $1 billion carbon capture plant in Louisiana – a stark contrast to the “drill, baby, drill” priorities of the current administration. His?expertise is also credited by Barack Obama as a major reason why the??in 2010 – the biggest oil spill in history – was successful.
And there are his brushes with some of the 21st century’s biggest tech companies, even if Nvidia wasn’t the only big fish he missed out on. “I knew [financier] Richard Blum who said he could get me on the board of Apple – I didn’t say yes because I had a lot of non-profit activities but that was 2006, the year before the iPhone was launched,” he reflected.
Not that he thinks the money would have made much difference. “If I was worth a couple of hundred million dollars, would I have stopped doing science and just bought sports cars and houses? I hope not.”
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