Featured Image Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi / Stringer via Getty
One of Jensen Huang’s trademark leather jackets has been sold at auction after attracting major interest from collectors.
The Nvidia co-founder and chief executive has become closely associated with the black leather look, wearing similar jackets at product launches, company events and technology conferences for nearly 20 years.
His outfit has become as recognisable as Steve Jobs’ black turtlenecks or Mark Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirts, helping turn an otherwise ordinary item of clothing into part of Huang’s public image.
That reputation has grown alongside Nvidia’s rise from a company best known for gaming graphics cards into one of the biggest names in artificial intelligence.
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When one of Huang’s worn and signed Tom Ford jackets appeared at Sotheby’s in New York, bidders quickly pushed the sale far beyond expectations.
After 65 bids, the jacket sold at auction site Sotheby’s for $960,000, despite carrying a pre-sale estimate of between $40,000 and $60,000 — as reported by Dexerto.
The final figure was 16 times higher than the upper end of the estimate and far above the retail price of a comparable Tom Ford jacket, which reportedly sits just below $10,000 — as noted by CNBC.
Sotheby’s said 45 collectors took part in the bidding, while Brahm Wachter, the auction house’s head of modern collectibles, said the result had exceeded expectations.
He said: “The response to this sale surpassed even our highest expectations.”
Pointed out by TechRadar, the black jacket specifically came from Tom Ford’s spring/summer 2023 collection and was worn by Huang at Foxconn Tech Day in Taipei that year.
Independent specialists were also said to have verified both the jacket and Huang’s signature before it went under the hammer.
Sotheby’s presented the item as a piece of technology history linked to Nvidia’s rapid rise during the AI boom.
“The ‘Jensen Jacket’ has come to be a relic of a simple belief: that the future is built by people brave enough to journey into the unknown before anyone else can see what they see. This is not only a jacket. It is the uniform of a ‘first believer'”.
Huang has previously joked about the clothing choice, telling a Reddit discussion in 2016 that he was ‘the guy in the leather jacket’.
His style has also caught the attention of other technology bosses.
In 2024, Huang gave Zuckerberg one of the jackets he had been wearing, prompting the Meta CEO to joke: “This is worth more because it’s used.”
The proceeds from the Sotheby’s sale will support the Edge Institute, a nonprofit focused on innovation.
The money is expected to go towards fellowships, grants and residencies, giving the jacket’s record-breaking sale a philanthropic purpose beyond its value as a collector’s item.
