Colette Kress Net Worth: $1B as NVIDIA’s Interim CEO

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Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s chief financial officer since 2013 and now the company’s interim chief executive, has a net worth of $1 billion, according to Celebrity Net Worth. The 59-year-old businesswoman was appointed interim CEO in November 2026 after Jensen Huang — NVIDIA’s only chief executive in its 33-year history — abruptly resigned amid a scandal involving extramarital relationships, including allegations that one of his romantic partners had ties to Chinese intelligence. Those allegations have not been proven, and NVIDIA says it has no reason to believe its secrets or national security were compromised.

Before NVIDIA: A Quarter Century on the Corporate Ladder

Colette Kress was born in 1967 and studied finance at the University of Arizona. She subsequently earned an MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her professional career began in 1989 at Texas Instruments, where she spent eight years working in various corporate finance positions.

In 1997, she made the jump to Microsoft. Over the next 13 years, she worked her way through increasingly senior financial management positions, eventually becoming chief financial officer of the company’s Server and Tools division in 2006 — a substantial job overseeing financial strategy for a major enterprise software business responsible for products such as Windows Server, SQL Server and the development tools used by businesses around the world.

After 13 years at Microsoft, she moved to Cisco Systems in 2010, where she became senior vice president and CFO of its Business Technology and Operations Finance organization. Her responsibilities included financial strategy, planning, reporting and business development across Cisco’s engineering and operational divisions. By 2013, Kress had accumulated nearly 25 years of experience working at three of the world’s most important technology companies.

And then Jensen Huang came calling.

Her Two Young Sons Convinced Her to Join NVIDIA

In 2013, NVIDIA was a relatively modest technology company, generating around $4.3 billion in annual revenue. It was best known for making graphics chips that powered gaming computers, professional workstations and other graphics-intensive applications. The company was looking for a new chief financial officer, and Huang was personally involved in the recruitment process. According to Huang, he interviewed 22 candidates before choosing Colette Kress.

But there is a particularly charming detail about how she ended up taking the job. Kress had two young sons, ages eight and ten, who were enthusiastic video game players and knew all about NVIDIA because its graphics processors powered many of the games they loved. When their mother told them she was considering a position at NVIDIA, they encouraged her to take it. After spending nearly 25 years working her way up the corporate ladder at Texas Instruments, Microsoft and Cisco, two elementary school-aged gamers helped convince their mother to make the most financially rewarding career move of her life.

Kress accepted the job in September 2013. During her first week, she asked Jensen how long he envisioned her staying at NVIDIA. Huang later recalled his response on a podcast: “For as long as we shall live and death do us part.” The arrangement lasted for 13 years — an eternity by Silicon Valley executive standards — and those 13 years would transform both NVIDIA and Kress’s personal finances.

From $4 Billion in Revenue to $216 Billion

NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. When Kress joined, the company was still primarily associated with video games and computer graphics. Under Jensen’s leadership, NVIDIA invested heavily in developing graphics processors capable of handling enormous computational workloads, and its CUDA software platform allowed developers to use GPUs for scientific computing, machine learning and eventually sophisticated artificial intelligence systems.

Kress managed the financial side of this transformation, overseeing financial planning, capital allocation, investor relations and the company’s increasingly complex relationships with customers and business partners. As CFO, she became a familiar voice on NVIDIA’s quarterly earnings calls, explaining its performance to Wall Street analysts.

Then came the artificial intelligence explosion. Following the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, demand for NVIDIA’s chips surged as Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and other technology giants began spending extraordinary sums building AI data centres. When Kress joined NVIDIA, annual revenue was around $4.3 billion. In fiscal 2026, NVIDIA generated $215.9 billion in revenue — an increase of more than 5,000%. The company’s market capitalisation eventually surpassed $5 trillion and briefly touched $6 trillion.

How Colette Kress Became a Billionaire

Celebrity Net Worth estimates that Colette Kress has a net worth of $1 billion. Most of her wealth comes from NVIDIA stock she accumulated through more than a decade of executive compensation.

According to the company’s September 2026 SEC filings, Kress beneficially owned around 4.78 million NVIDIA shares, held directly and through various family trusts and investment entities. At a $3.85 trillion market capitalisation, those shares would be worth roughly $756 million.

But Kress has not simply held every NVIDIA share she ever received. Celebrity Net Worth’s analysis of publicly disclosed SEC transactions indicates that between 2015 and September 2026, Kress sold an estimated $204.8 million worth of NVIDIA stock: $46.9 million between 2015 and 2023, $53.9 million in 2024, $68.2 million in 2025 and $35.8 million through September 2026. Those sale figures are before taxes, and they do not tell us exactly how much cash she retained, invested elsewhere, spent or transferred to family members. Some of the shares still attributed to her are also held in trusts, where legal ownership and personal economic interests can differ.

$110 Million in Executive Compensation

Between fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2026, Colette Kress earned a combined $110.2 million in reported NVIDIA executive compensation. That includes $91.2 million in stock awards valued when granted, $10.6 million in base salary and additional cash bonuses, incentives and other compensation.

For fiscal 2026 alone, her total compensation package was valued at $14.34 million, including a $900,000 annual base salary, $600,000 in performance-based cash compensation and $12.83 million in stock awards. The previous year, her compensation package was worth an even more impressive $21.36 million.

Those figures do not fully illustrate how lucrative her stock awards became. During fiscal 2026, for example, Kress acquired 442,087 NVIDIA shares through the vesting of awards granted in earlier years. Those shares were worth $63.9 million when they vested, reflecting the enormous appreciation in NVIDIA’s stock price since the grants were originally made.

There is also a potential income stream that does not depend on her salary or future stock grants. In May 2026, NVIDIA increased its quarterly dividend to 25 cents per share. At that rate, Kress’s disclosed shareholdings would generate roughly $4.8 million in annual dividends, assuming the holdings and dividend rate remained unchanged.

Now Comes the Hardest Job of Her Career

For all of her financial success, Kress is now facing a challenge unlike anything she has encountered during her nearly four decades in corporate finance. She has to lead NVIDIA without Jensen Huang. Unlike most large corporations, NVIDIA operated with an unusually flat management structure: Huang had more than 60 senior executives reporting directly to him, giving him an extraordinary degree of personal involvement in the company’s daily operations. He was also the company’s chief salesman, product visionary and public ambassador.

Kress knows the business intimately. She has spent 13 years managing its finances, communicating with investors and helping oversee its extraordinary expansion. But stepping into Jensen’s role means taking responsibility for an enormous organisation designed around one man’s leadership style — at a complicated moment, with Wall Street scrutinising the sums being spent on AI infrastructure, questions about NVIDIA’s financial partnerships with customers such as CoreWeave and OpenAI, US restrictions on advanced chip sales to China and heightened scrutiny following Huang’s resignation.

Meanwhile, the board must decide whether Kress is the right person to lead NVIDIA permanently or whether it needs someone with a deeper engineering or product-development background. For the time being, she is doing both jobs: CFO and interim CEO. Longtime board member Harvey C. Jones has become the company’s first chairman, and in announcing her appointment he expressed confidence in Kress and NVIDIA’s existing leadership team, emphasising the need to keep operations, customer commitments and product development moving forward.

*Net worth figures are estimates only, based on public sources.