I'm actually surprised at this. I figured everyone would justify keeping him because he made Nvidia (and investors) so much money. Money > anything else
I'd go as far as to say the second leak helps him a bit, by reframing this as a cheating scandal rather than it being more about him knowingly evading an embargo.
Having an affair with your direct report also wildly increases the risk that Nvidia would be embroiled in high-profile lawsuits, either for sexual harassment or favoritism
A CEO admitting to an affair with a customer after previously denying it, seems like a sufficient reason for removal, even before you add the geopolitical intrigue.
Because the customer in question raises questions of the CEO's judgement, plus the possibility of knowledge that the target was violating sanctions. We don't know. That's why it's a bad situation for the stock.
It also seems like there’s a high potential for half of Jensen’s position to be granted in a subsequent divorce decree, meaning there could be enormous selling pressure in the next several years.
I don’t think she’s likely to sell it right away, but I do think she’s a lot more likely to sell it sooner than they would have together as of last week.
That change is still material to the future outlook as the price is the intersection of supply and demand and the predicted supply of $NVDA shares for sale just increased by tens of billions of dollars worth.
The stock seems to be responding more heavily to the potential loss of Jensen than it does to the potential continuation of Jensen given new knowledge.
Morality is not a straight line, once someone has cheated they sort of accepted it for themselves after feeling guilty but that doesn't transfer to other places where someones morals are challenged.
Two back to back including one with a subordinate and one involving a person violating export controls though are pretty tough to weather. And I doubt that's the end of the affairs too, I'm not a Huang is months away from having dated every woman on earth extrapolationist but I also doubt he's only had (or has) 2.
I don't know why you're getting downvotes. The parent comment, "Most likely the internal findings from the investigation point to something more troubling/illegal", is comical. The information on the public record already points to something troubling/illegal, as you just pointed out!
Plus Jensen Huang is an immigrant from Taiwan. And this administration does not like people who haven't been born on this geographical soil (being not born on US soil, I am obviously not against it, just pointing out obvious animosity of current US administration towards immigrants in general)
That certainly won't be the conclusion of the board as less surprising firing Jensen - stock-wise the best-performing CEO of this decade so far - affects the stock way more negatively than sex affairs with spies and employses made public because shareholders don't care about your sexual moral or code of conducts for regular employees (of which neither Jensen nor Kimberly were). So there is more to it than the public will be let known.
After the news about a potential foreign compromise, disclosure of an affair with a subordinate is pretty damning. One can be discounted as poor judgement. Two is a pattern that's hard to dismiss. I wonder if we'll learn of other shenanigans or whether kicking him out stops future (possible) disclosures.
Poor judgment? He was larger than life persona, many times compared to Musk (minus huge Twitter follower) who is also very well known for his extramarital affairs.
Its like saying: I mean, molesting children is not nice and not morally great, but who cares for a priest? He isn't hired for being a good person, he is hired to conduct worship services during Sunday mass.
How illegal is it for a CEO to sell goods (potentially a core component used in military weapons) to a foreign government after your government said not to?
- we can't allow China access to buy or lease any GPUs
and
- turns out China is half the customer base, so cutting them off will crash the market, and the Chinese will just build their own anyways
Considering Trump & Jensen traveled to China just to sell more GPUs and despite that the CCP banned Chinese companies from importing Western Hardware in favor of domestic alternatives, I have my doubts this story makes sense
Bummer. He stood in the way of regulatory capture and AI monopolists had him removed. I foresee the open model / open weights ecosystem eventually getting locked down, especially the most competitive Chinese models.
It's not about the weights, it's about inference. Banning American inference providers from serving "non-vetted" models would surely bring a lot of customers back to OpenAI and Anthropic. Just when they go public.
Nvidia is not the proximate provider of open weight inference. That’s Nvidia’s customers, cloud compute services like AWS. If there was a move to ban open weights models, I am pretty sure these companies would howl much louder to the government than Nvidia, and they’re arguably more influential as a group.
If he had affairs with normal staffers and NOT involved with a chinese spy, he'd probably would have survived. The fact that he's out means he definitely supplied the chinese with chips.
Idk about others but I am literally so jaded with the leadership of our country that a CEO billionaire having a couple affairs doesn’t faze me anymore like of would’ve in the past.
- Relationships with subordinates is a violation of policy, demonstrating a lack of judgement and a willingness to break the rules
- Relationships with subordinates create legal liability for the company by enabling claims of sexual harassment, hostile workplace, coercion/abuse of authority
Your comment focuses solely on company profits. I don’t care about company profits. I do care about HR policing things they should not be allowed to police.
I would agree for a "regular" employee - as the CEO you are literally the face of the company, so you are held to a higher standard. When you look bad publicly, the company looks bad - that's the job you agree to when you become CEO.
It's not a personal romantic relationship if the other side is either a direct subordinate or the head of a chip smuggling operation in violation of federal export control laws
This seems like a wild over reaction to the stock. Does anyone actually think Jensen being CEO of Nvidia is with $1 trillion in market cap?! The reason Nvidia is dominant is because of their ecosystem and them having the best chips, not because of some guy that leads the company.
I mean practically speaking if he gets hauled in front of congress we don’t know that money would keep flowing. Investor lawsuits, etc, like - it could have become financially unteneble as well.
I am in shock, Jensen is one of the pioneers in our industry and we will always remember his accomplishments. But I do fear Nvidia will now only make safe bets and not be able to innovate in an ongoing industrial revolution because they lack their biggest, boldest visionary to set the direction. This man has created an insane wealth for over 50% of his employees. An extraordinary leader, engineer, salesman and team builder. I still believe in the excellent talent at Nvidia, but I do not believe in a board that fires their best person and we have seen several examples of a board/leadership ruining a company because they lack the founders vision, fighting spirit and ownership. Jensen deserved another punishment, not getting fired.
The “foreign asset” got him is what I want to say. It’s tough letting this slide from the American technostate. One of our biggest gaps between competitors was architectural.
Extramarital affairs are pretty common in our ruling class, so unless the media is conveniently withholding information, think he got in bed with the wrong folks.
Elon(and others) got it right by making perfidity a feature of there character right up front by bieng VERY public about whatever they get up to.
Jensen just so happens to be a convienient scapegoat to buy a news cycle away from the very difficult political and economic situation that would otherwise be the lead story, and I bet that having him fold his hand quite so easily is actualy not what they were hoping for, and good on him for doing it.
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA.
Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
I think the biggest problem is the way Huang was creating demand by orchestrating the financing of the entire tech industry. The CFO in charge can handle the contract details, but do they have the strategic chops and relationships to keep doing that?
And it was all high risk. It may be only a once in a generation founder who wants to orchestrate that risk.
And again, no one was expecting NVIDIA to stay flat, massive growth was priced in.
“some fines” could be a very big deal. Sanctions laws have teeth.
How much of Nvidia’s revenue came from infringing sales to china? If so, that revenue is probably going to disappear as now they will have to really be serious about export controls or face much greater pain. Some estimates I’ve seen is 30% of their revenue perhaps disappearing overnight!
Sure, but then that would mean they can now take those chips and sell them to Musk, Zuck, or Dario at inflated prices instead.
And I'm pretty sure any CEO with at least a bachelors degree knows about the De beers diamonds story, so, I really find it hard to believe they will struggle with the concept of maintaining their artifical scarcity/demand.
If 30% of their chips were going to China and now they have to stop that, it means they will have an excess supply of chips and the prices would go down instead of up.
>, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA. [...] Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
The key is that NVIDIA is in a fast-changing technology sector and that means the core business requires NVIDIA to keep innovating new and better products that beat the competition. Having a company continuously adapt and iterate future products requires a visionary leader that pushes the company to stay on the cutting edge. Competitors and alternative products like Google TPU, Amazon Trainium, AMD, Cerebrus, etc are not standing still; they're innovating too.
Many shareholders (including employees with RSU stock) are worried that NVIDIA without Jensen puts them in a weaker position for the future unless they can find someone with equivalent influence and vision.
Intel was once on top of the world with CEO Andy Grove running things. But then the followup CEOs didn't keep Intel at the cutting edge and they lost market leadership to TSMC, AMD, and Apple Silicon in various areas. The world changes and Intel didn't adapt fast enough.
It very much clashes with the idea held by some that CEOs are fungible and that the value is all created by ICs. But yes, semiconductors are at the forefront of human technology and you need the whole company (including c suite) firing on all cylinders.
How though? Is there any legal cases where this has been sucessfully done before? And even they couldn't NVIDIA drag their feet on it for years in court?
Personally I think a bigger risk than that is AI models getting good enough to legitimately just reverse engineer and open source CUDA directly.
They'll be fine for a few years with a talking donkey running the place because they have a roadmap. And then when the situation on the ground has changed and the future is ambiguous, they will nosedive like SGI did. My money is on Huawei now. Way to go America! You've actually outdumbed the CEO's poor choices of mistresses.
Sort of agree but he did go around and spoke how export controls to China have no effect, and then he's in bed with a foreign asset, so lots of geopolitical stuff in there.
Plus whole lot of people waiting for that signal that the "AI bubble " is about to burst. No bubble will be bursting as a cause of this.
It just sucks because Jensen was basically the last big tech CEO that seemed like a human being, and knew what the hell he was talking about. I guess a little too human in the end. But this has pretty much destroyed my last bit of faith in any of them.
Meh, not really. NVidia stock is presumably rebounding as we speak -- unless they pick someone political or unhinged to take over, this will just be a blip.
And I doubt it'll cost him much. What could you pay the founder of the second most valuable company on the planet who already holds $150B in equity? It'd be as absurd as paying Donald Trump.
> NVidia stock is presumably rebounding as we speak
Not in premarket so far, 12% down sing yesterday.
Also why would it do better? Overall Huang seems to be a highly competent CEO. Replacing him with someone seems risky (especially if the board is influenced by Trump & co.). Especially given that Nvidia never had any other CEO.
Would make 0 sense for several reasons. Very gullible thing to take anything seriously Musk spouts out. So strange that there is basically a fantasy world out there for Musk fanboys.
As an outsider, can the US president pardon Jensen AND Nvidia? Let’s say he “donates” a cool hundred million dollars, and the fact that as per US law corporations are people, I think Trump can technically do that?
Jensen is basically Nvidia, he has ruled it for over 30 years single handedly, he took the risks and had the vision to take it to where it is today under his leadership. Without him, they are just some chip company, and will be revalued as such. The innovation will stop.
How many of his dozens of direct reports will leave the company as his successor, guided by some management consultancy, convert the company to a more normal hierarchy?
Wow, Reuters is orwellian. I was just reading something about Huang owning something like 3,6% of the company, when mid-sentence the page refreshed and the paragraph disappeared.
I think this is, respectfully, ignorance on your part. The Reuters URL is not a static article, it's a "live" feed of brief blurbs about the subject at hand that are being added in real time. The live feed updated to add new content while you were reading it, and you likely just missed finding your place when you tried. In point of fact, the 3.6% paragraph you mention was still there when I looked a moment ago:
>Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and is its fourth-largest investor with a stake of about 3.61%, will not remain on the board.
I don't know if it's necessarily Orwellian. News organizations always publish about breaking news quick with either a stub or an intro paragraph to a pre-written article, and then rewrite it. I would prefer a published article history, of course, but I don't think it's malicious.
The algorithms reward both speed and unchanging URLs.
The party speaker literally adapted to the change in eternal enemy mid sentence without breaking the grammar. How much more fast-acting and live can you get? Are you suggesting that they had a free press in 1984 that didn't have to update their own description of what was happening?
a CEO doesn't have to be a friend of the consumer- it's not their job. What Jensen made of NVIDIA, now a market leader not just in its original gaming segment, but in compute in general, deserves recognition.
Again, the decision to oust him was correct, but finding someone with a comparable long-term vision and skill is going to be nigh impossible for the company. And sure, bring even more downvotes for that
Maybe you're missing my point: I don't really care about that. I don't use NVIDIA, I don't own any stock, and there will be other GPU stacks for AI. It's tech industry drama and is kinda trashy and compelling in that respect, but NVIDIA did a lot of nasty things for consumers like me and I have to look elsewhere for the performance I want. NVIDIA being led well is not something I care that much about.
what if Jen-Hsun intentionally leaked industrial secrets to China because even if he's taiwanese, his familly is loyal to PRC? And the whole spy/affair is just a cover-up because someone was about to expose him, maybe blackmail him?
He should resign bc of fucking his clients and employee ( I know no man at his level got punished by abuse their power in the past, but I really hope this can be the norm)
> In a wide-ranging interview on Wednesday, Himes told POLITICO he left the briefing given by heads of U.S. intelligence agencies to top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees without clarity on whether Alice Huang knowingly cultivated information for the Chinese government on the $4 trillion U.S. chip company, or was a “useful idiot” unaware of China’s wider espionage activities.
My native tongue is Chinese and Russian , English is my third language. Can you teach me how can I portray the news I linked to accurately so you are satisfied?
Neither the affairs nor the direct consequences for him are very surprising (especially if you heard about the sex cult stuff that's been going on at the top of AI research). Not even the chinese spy story would be terribly far-fetched. I'm sure he's very high on China's list of people they'd like to control. Heck, even if she wasn't a spy, they probably knew about the affair. The only really surprising part is the timing. Midterms crushed Republican fueled AI dreams, Anthropic IPO is imminent and mere days before NVDA earnings? Someone betting against the market is making a fortune right now. This is likely yet another facet of the trillion dollar insider game we've seen running in the current administration. They know they're cooked, so they'll extract as much money as possible while they still can.
What are the implications if up to 15% of revenue was "fake"? The investors have been pricing Nvidia based on demand and revenue from (most places except for China). Since it turns out that it was actually (most places including China), doesn't that imply the market is actually smaller than they thought? Can buyers sue because they paid increased prices for their products due to sanction breaking by Nvidia?
> the second affair alone would fell most CEOs because it was with an employee
I mean realistically, no it would not. They do not resign for that in general. It is tall order for them to resign or leave when there is credible or proven accusation of actual abuse or harassment, there is not even that in play.
> At CNN, Mr Zucker faced criticism from those who believed the network gave too much coverage to the former president, especially during the Republican presidential primary. Mr Trump has also criticised what he saw as unfair coverage.
I will happily argue that affair was just an excuse for other reasons. His coverage was not pro-Trump enough.
He's facing one of the largest divorces in history, you don't think that would be a little distracting?
And if you don't know why leaders can't have relationships with their employees, that ignorance is on you. You're trying to insult other people but it just makes you look bad.
A lot of marriages survive even after stuff like this. Especially in Asian cultures. The fact that his wife is White is the only thing that hurts him on his chances here.
Or she'd be more than adequately rich, worth around $75bn, able to do whatever the hell she wants with the rest of her life, able to have impacts independent of him, and free of a sleazy worm who humiliatingly cheated on her twice.
I'm quite interested to know what you mean here, between the lines. OK, he was running a multi-trillion dollar company, are you saying currently it's a over-reaction because of that, and the reaction would have been justified if it was smaller/bigger company? I'm really not sure what the underlying point you're trying to make here.
My understanding is that he has been very hands on, but it's also not that unusual for people who have built successful businesses to "check out" once the role chances from building an early-stage company to growing a large one. Whether or not that works obviously greatly depend on whether the people around them can take up the slack.
Resignation means that he can start liquidating his shares without input from shareholders or directors.. Divorce will also be likely. Affairs with the staff would matter if he had promoted people; who knows what else is in that stack. He had planted his own kids with no experience in tech as executives there too . He is a zillionaire though and he has enough cash for many generations.
I guess even if Jensen Huang leaves scorched earth, he will have sufficient money for the rest of his life. On the other hand, any other person who invested into Nvidia stocks will have a much more serious problem. :-)
So, it would not be a dumb idea for Jensen Huang to leave scorched earth and "let the world burn" (and in particular cause utter panic in the AI sector). :-)
That change is still material to the future outlook as the price is the intersection of supply and demand and the predicted supply of $NVDA shares for sale just increased by tens of billions of dollars worth.
How can you trust anything he says after this?
Why should regulators or other customers believe any promises made by him?
His credibility is shot - the day to day stock prices changes are irrelevant.
Maybe he will donate his proceeds to charity...
I have a feeling we'll know the reasons for certain when Nvidia's stance on open models and local AI does an about-face.
The spy thing is juicy, maybe it's surface level, maybe it's deeper.
Right now, he made them lose 700 Billion dollars. So the investors lawsuit also will be the biggest in history.
More likely would be large fines and possibly restrictions and audits of all future exports.
- we can't allow China access to buy or lease any GPUs
and
- turns out China is half the customer base, so cutting them off will crash the market, and the Chinese will just build their own anyways
Considering Trump & Jensen traveled to China just to sell more GPUs and despite that the CCP banned Chinese companies from importing Western Hardware in favor of domestic alternatives, I have my doubts this story makes sense
Nvidia is just about the only company that's both a monopoly and captured most of the value.
Literally any other CEO would be resigning from another company if they did the same thing
But that's just my personal moderation style.
IMO, should be illegal for company policy to retaliate against someone for a personal romantic relationship.
- Conflicts of interest compromise trust and judgement
- Relationships with direct reports create a conflict of interest
- Relationships with direct customers create a conflict of interest
- Policies should be set such relationships are either disallowed or require strict oversight / disclosure
- Companies should enforce their stated policies equally as required by employment law
- Affairs demonstrate a lack of judgement, a lack of candor, and are problematic for positions of trust
- An executive that lies about an affair creates a risk of blackmail and a liability for the company
- Relationships with subordinates is a violation of policy, demonstrating a lack of judgement and a willingness to break the rules
- Relationships with subordinates create legal liability for the company by enabling claims of sexual harassment, hostile workplace, coercion/abuse of authority
but I’m the CEO!
Are you serious?
Extramarital affairs are pretty common in our ruling class, so unless the media is conveniently withholding information, think he got in bed with the wrong folks.
It’s really not hard.
Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
And it was all high risk. It may be only a once in a generation founder who wants to orchestrate that risk.
And again, no one was expecting NVIDIA to stay flat, massive growth was priced in.
How much of Nvidia’s revenue came from infringing sales to china? If so, that revenue is probably going to disappear as now they will have to really be serious about export controls or face much greater pain. Some estimates I’ve seen is 30% of their revenue perhaps disappearing overnight!
And I'm pretty sure any CEO with at least a bachelors degree knows about the De beers diamonds story, so, I really find it hard to believe they will struggle with the concept of maintaining their artifical scarcity/demand.
The key is that NVIDIA is in a fast-changing technology sector and that means the core business requires NVIDIA to keep innovating new and better products that beat the competition. Having a company continuously adapt and iterate future products requires a visionary leader that pushes the company to stay on the cutting edge. Competitors and alternative products like Google TPU, Amazon Trainium, AMD, Cerebrus, etc are not standing still; they're innovating too.
Many shareholders (including employees with RSU stock) are worried that NVIDIA without Jensen puts them in a weaker position for the future unless they can find someone with equivalent influence and vision.
Intel was once on top of the world with CEO Andy Grove running things. But then the followup CEOs didn't keep Intel at the cutting edge and they lost market leadership to TSMC, AMD, and Apple Silicon in various areas. The world changes and Intel didn't adapt fast enough.
Personally I think a bigger risk than that is AI models getting good enough to legitimately just reverse engineer and open source CUDA directly.
Plus whole lot of people waiting for that signal that the "AI bubble " is about to burst. No bubble will be bursting as a cause of this.
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
And I doubt it'll cost him much. What could you pay the founder of the second most valuable company on the planet who already holds $150B in equity? It'd be as absurd as paying Donald Trump.
So if he held 150B stock say before, now he has 100B.
The rest of the market isn’t looking very solid either.
Not in premarket so far, 12% down sing yesterday.
Also why would it do better? Overall Huang seems to be a highly competent CEO. Replacing him with someone seems risky (especially if the board is influenced by Trump & co.). Especially given that Nvidia never had any other CEO.
I am not sure if you and I are looking at the same chart. Down 12% Pre Market.
We will never change, thank god AI doesn't have sexual instincts... yet
P.S: not saying this should happen.
You probably think Musk spend his days soldering Raptor engines...instead of posting racist memes all day while stoned on ketamine...
I think this is, respectfully, ignorance on your part. The Reuters URL is not a static article, it's a "live" feed of brief blurbs about the subject at hand that are being added in real time. The live feed updated to add new content while you were reading it, and you likely just missed finding your place when you tried. In point of fact, the 3.6% paragraph you mention was still there when I looked a moment ago:
>Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and is its fourth-largest investor with a stake of about 3.61%, will not remain on the board.
Careful not to shoot from the hip!
The algorithms reward both speed and unchanging URLs.
But I think it is misplaced here as the line still exists:
> Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and is its fourth-largest investor with a stake of about 3.61%, will not remain on the board.
> The description of events changing in real time to suit the narrative is a theme in Orwell's work.
This Orwellian nightmare knows no bounds, when will it end?
NVIDIA's long-term future will suffer because of it, no matter how correct the decision is
He also wasn’t a friend of the consumer. I don’t know what Nvidia becomes but he wasn’t good for me personally, or the machines I run.
Again, the decision to oust him was correct, but finding someone with a comparable long-term vision and skill is going to be nigh impossible for the company. And sure, bring even more downvotes for that
--typed from a linux desktop seated next to a Mac
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wo%C5%BAniak
(Curiosity got me)
I mean, if you set aside banging a Chinese spy and banging a subordinate, whilst married, I guess.
The resignation is evidence that no.
Why would this ever be the case? Even if his parents were hardcore KMT when he was growing up, I don’t think that’s quite how KMT works.
The spy thing though smells so suspicious, even some in congress raised this. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/jim-himes-alice-hua...
This is a far more nuanced statement than you're portraying it to be. He appears comfortable with the spying conclusion, just not who was in on the chain of command. (An "unwitting spy"; https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/15/world/roosevelt-aide-call...)
The sanctions evasion and $25M donation to the White House ballroom project around that time raise other questions relevant to the firing.
The doubt appears to be over whether she was personally aware of that fact.
Or, uh, only if they are politically opposed to a ban on open/foreign AI models? Can't have anything disrupt the IPOs...
sis/bro he was honeypotted
Also a LOT of people meet at work...
You're behind. A second sex scandal (with one of his subordinates) broke last night.
Then it was a negotiation about how.
Sometimes people can see the writing on the wall and choose to not burn down their life’s work on the way out.
That’s also why more recent tech companies got rid of that pesky independent board by having total voting control.
But my guess is, he'd rather resign on this note than what will come out in a few weeks.
I mean realistically, no it would not. They do not resign for that in general. It is tall order for them to resign or leave when there is credible or proven accusation of actual abuse or harassment, there is not even that in play.
McDonald's, Intel, CNN, NBC, CBS, Astronomer, Best Buy, Nestlé, Kohl's, Comtech, BP, CBOE, Barclay's.
Not hard to find examples from the last ten years.
> At CNN, Mr Zucker faced criticism from those who believed the network gave too much coverage to the former president, especially during the Republican presidential primary. Mr Trump has also criticised what he saw as unfair coverage.
I will happily argue that affair was just an excuse for other reasons. His coverage was not pro-Trump enough.
And if you don't know why leaders can't have relationships with their employees, that ignorance is on you. You're trying to insult other people but it just makes you look bad.
She'd be stupid as hell to divorce him.
But that doesn't preclude there being a lot of competent talent on the second rung. (I think 60 people reported directly to him.)
Hard to imagine that could have been the case given that he was Nvidia's CEO from the very beginning.
Don't worry about him.
So, it would not be a dumb idea for Jensen Huang to leave scorched earth and "let the world burn" (and in particular cause utter panic in the AI sector). :-)
LLMs will be completely unaffected, but the pricing remains to be seen.