Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO who has just resigned over his affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, has a signature aesthetic that makes him stick out from the Silicon Valley tech bro crowd. In a mucky cesspit of quarter-zips and puffer vests, 63-year-old Huang gives keynote speeches, appears on conference calls and even goes out for drinks with his mistress in his trademark leather jacket. He is a connoisseur of these luxury jackets. His favorites include a $9,000 Tom Ford number with crocodile embossing and another biker-style design with an edgy snap-tab collar. The warning signs were there all along: this is the wardrobe equivalent of maxing out your credit line on a mid-life crisis Porsche 911.
But Huang’s sartorial affiliations do follow a tech blueprint. It seems that in order to make it in Silicon Valley, you need a signature uniform. The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs set the trend with his signature black Issey Miyake turtleneck, blue Levi’s 501s and New Balance sneakers. Among the new generation of AI and social media overlords, though, having a distinct uniform has become a prerequisite before you even deliver your inaugural TED Talk about the future of AI chips, or your company's blood testing capabilities. Below, we look at the uniforms of billionaire tech villains – some fallen, some still standing – and what their clothing choices say about them.
Elizabeth Holmes
The most distinctive uniform of them all is Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced Theranos founder who is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for investor fraud. Her get up has been satirized in pop culture ad nauseam. She rose to fame as the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world, appearing on the cover of Forbes in 2014 in a black Jobsian lightweight turtleneck, cigarette trousers and a matching vest. Just as infamous is her hair and makeup: unkempt blond locks pulled back into a low bun, pale under-eye concealer, thick strokes of black liner across her lash line and hastily applied red lipstick. At the time, she adopted the mock neck look to give off Steve Jobs energy and assert power at her company. But this year, Holmes’s famous ensemble became a Halloween punchline following the release of Nathan Fielder’s bonkers documentary, You Can See Everything. A turtleneck can only get you so far.
Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004, had a pretty standard, disheveled tech bro appearance to begin with. He had a pair of skinny jeans, a loyal allegiance to a form-fitting grey t-shirt and a dream for an interconnected future. It was the type of nerdy look that suggests that his brain is so occupied with being clever all the time that clothes are merely an inconvenience. But in 2024, he took a decidedly streetwear-esque pivot. Zuck had grown out his Julius Caesar haircut into loose curls, put on a silver chain, and started wearing designer, oversized T-Shirts (the boxy kind that have short sleeves but still somehow manage to cover the entire bicep). More recently, he was pictured looking like a Yellowstone character in a chunky shearling coat. I would wager that as Meta has fallen out of public favor – with people chastising the algorithm over brain rot but continuing to use it anyway – he’s trying to appeal to the mainstream. Call him the tech bro next door.
Jeff Bezos
Like Zuck, the Amazon founder has also reinvented his look in recent years. When he started out, Bezos wore standard, ill-fitting suits, but now has a penchant for form-fitting polo shirts and aviator sunglasses. These days, he seems to have attempted a jacked-up Iron Man-meets-Mission: Impossible aesthetic, with his bulging muscles visible beneath his designer threads. Sometimes, if you squint a little, he looks a bit like Mr. Clean.
Elon Musk
This one is harder to pinpoint. Elon Musk’s style is as meandering and messy as his X feed. He’s had a space cowboy era, a MAGA goth era and a satirical graphic t-shirt era. The vibe isn’t curated like the rest, but I guess this just speaks to his erratic, unpredictable nature. He just lost $446 million in donations backing the Republicans at the midterm elections, his Cybertruck is being phased out and a damning new movie has just been released about him. Lest we forget the time he wore a gothic MAGA baseball hat, black sunglasses and a long black coat to the White House.
Sam Altman
The OpenAI co-founder is one of the last remaining tech billionaires who still has a sloppy, Social Network-era style. He’s thrown on a suit when it’s needed, but he’s typically seen in crewneck sweaters with a pair of jeans and trainers. But with the billions of dollars he is making from his energy-guzzling ChatGPT empire, I would guess that a stylist-assisted glow-up is coming his way soon — like Zuck and Bezos before him.
Jensen Huang
We already know about Huang’s jacket habit. But what — or who — is his style inspo? Interestingly, Huang has claimed it is his wife of 40 years, Lori Huang, and his daughter who dress him. He’s been keeping up the look for a while now. He wore a leather jacket on the cover of Time magazine in 2021. This July, one of Huang’s pre-worn and signed Tom Ford jackets sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $960,000. What does it say about him? That he is a self-assured man, ready to hop on a motorbike at any given moment? Well, he must have some confidence about him – he’s behind the company selling a data processing chip that is key to AI development, which is to say, the future of ChatGPT and others — so basically the most lucrative thing anyone in the world can own right now. Maybe all that power went to his head, but ultimately his jacket collection also tells us that he’s a man who has reached a particular mid-point in his life. The type of mid-life crisis where you are caught having an extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Sports cars and Harley Davidsons be damned.
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