One year, 41M digits: How Luke Durant found the largest known prime number

My understanding is that he used to be an engineer at NVIDIA. And while I know salaries can be quite high in the US, I didn't realize they where high enough to let you spend $2 million for a 1 year hobby project.

This is an outlier. I met someone who was a millionaire working at Nvidia in 2018. That's not that uncommon working in tech. The stock has gone up about 30x since then. He's probably worth at least 20M if not more now. That's definitely an outlier.

Luke didn't just work at NVIDIA. He spent over ten years there and was, for a while, one of the CUDA architects.