Jensen Huang's biographer says there was a culture of omertà and deference towards Huang inside Nvidia that enabled him to "be his worst self" (Stephen Witt/New York Times)

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I started hearing rumors of Mr. Huang’s infidelities earlier this year, but was unable to confirm them. Inside Nvidia, there was a culture of omertà that was difficult to break, and this enabled Mr. Huang to be his worst self. I sensed this deference, at times, in the sycophantic laughter of his subordinates when he was around, and the little things they muttered once he left the room. Ultimately, it took government intelligence to pierce Nvidia’s culture of silence — along with the reporters at this newspaper. But now that containment is shattered, and I will not be surprised if more women come forward. No one will be surprised. …

In truth, Mr. Huang was quite arrogant. He had little tolerance for disagreement and almost no capacity for open discourse. When you contradicted him, even over the most trivial matter, it was like lighting a fuse. Stick to your position and soon he exploded, screaming at you for your idiocy. A harangue from Mr. Huang could last an hour or more; his executive staff appeared genuinely afraid of him. Listening to their stories, I was reminded of the abusive music instructor from the movie “Whiplash.”

As of Thursday afternoon, the fallout from the Huang spy and employee affairs has erased about $500 billion of Nvidia’s market value, but that’s actually up from the roughly $1 trillion it was down after the company’s stock crashed 16 percent on Thursday morning, and really up from the $1.7 trillion it was down after news of Huang’s spy-lover news first broke.

“The premise here is that there is no successor to a generational founder,” says Michael Monaghan, portfolio manager of the Founders 100 ETF, which invests in founder-led companies. “It’s that they’re one of one, and what they bring from a vision, execution and grit standpoint is not replaceable.”

While some investors are exiting Nvidia positions based on that premise — Monaghan’s fund must, per its prospectus — others will see the slip in Nvidia’s price as an opportunity to buy a great stock on proverbial sale, he says.

Looking purely at the numbers, the opportunity to buy a stock with Nvidia’s prodigious projected growth at its current depressed price “happens once a decade, maybe once in a career as an investor,” he says.

“We expect the [Nvidia] team to maintain its leadership in AI,” JPMorgan’s team said, while cautioning that “history has shown that one execution misstep often leads to more.”

“Maintaining flawless execution” will be critical to Nvidia and the sector going forward, they said.

A $9,000 leather moto is not the outerwear of a man faithfully going home to his wife and kids after a long day of architecting the AI revolution. That’s a man in a midlife crisis with an active Raya profile and a Harley in the garage. If someone had consulted me years ago, I’d have said Huang is clearly someone who drinks wine with his mistress in the middle of the day. (The Times uncovered a 2023 photo of Jensen appearing to do exactly that at a luncheon in Shanghai with Alice.)

We may have undiagnosed issues with vulnerability (as reflected in our need for a supplemental dermis), but we’re not stupid. Did we acquire multiple jackets that our spouses smeared as “identical to the last one”? Yes. But a lot of our spouses don’t know the difference between a 1.5-ounce leather and a three-ounce leather, which is like not knowing the difference between Texas and cheese. This was our thing, OK?

Then Mr. Huang, with his own penchant for black leather jackets, had to go and become a household name, the pillar of artificial intelligence, and the man, we were told, without whom the future itself might vanish and the world regress to however it got things done in 2022.

It was annoying to watch a billionaire cosplaying as a rebel, perhaps in order to mask his extraordinary power. Here he was boasting in interviews of not even knowing where his jackets came from, saying his wife and daughter bought them for him, when we in the community could tell you what we ate for dinner any of those fateful days when a new jacket came into our lives. Leather jackets are for people with chips on their shoulders, not microchips in their palms.

We aren’t ones for conspiracy theories, but a few events around the same time seem to create a narrative that is hard to ignore. The intelligence community had much to gain. The second New York Times story on the topic explicitly states (five times) that the basis for its reporting is the U.S. intelligence community. Trump, Rubio and Lutnick have known about all of this since before their trip to China in May. What’s more is that there is reporting that Lutnick stalled the Chinese chip crackdown. Something has shifted in that relationship, and now the wind is blowing in the other direction.

Huang has insisted that Nvidia has seen “no evidence of any AI chip diversion.” He’s been pretty emphatic on that point, actually. I am now wondering if that is even a little bit true. If the board is cutting Huang loose, there’s probably more on chip smuggling allegations coming. More substantively, Nvidia reportedly intervened in a 2025 Commerce Department investigation of Megaspeed, which was suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips — halting the investigation. Since the scandal broke, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appears to have become the fall guy for this, with Axios reporting that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “confronted” him about failing to note Megaspeed as a national security concern and Politico saying “more than half a dozen Republicans have demanded answers” from him. …

Come January, Elizabeth Warren will be able to send subpoenas in her role as the chair of the Senate Banking Committee. And wouldn’t you know, she seems to be pretty interested. Democrats will control both the House and the Senate. Their voters have given them a mandate to root out corruption. And boy howdy, does Nvidia look like a sitting duck right now. If Huang knew chips were being diverted — or had reason to know that — and tried to ensure their sales anyway, he may have committed actual crimes (bribery, espionage, smuggling, whatever) and, under a functioning legal system, could actually go to jail. Nvidia dispensing with its indispensable CEO is the company reducing its risk of getting roped into Huang’s drama.

We believe Jensen Huang is an irreplaceable part of Nvidia and the AI Revolution more broadly.

Once the dust settles, firing Jensen Huang would prove to be a costly mistake.

It is time to pause and consult your shareholders.

Trump has stuck with Huang. But the scandal is draining the company of the political capital that its CEO had accumulated during the Trump 2.0 era, according to more than a dozen lobbyists, executives, former administration officials and industry analysts who were interviewed for this story.

“If you have a personal brand that’s tied to the corporate brand, you have to think about: ‘What’s my bench look like? Who’s gonna be ready to step up into the spotlight?’” said Brett Bruen, a former diplomat and adviser to President Barack Obama who now runs the public affairs and crisis communications firm the Global Situation Room. “The fact that Nvidia apparently had none of this in place is both shocking and incredibly stupid.”

“Not only did they lose share value. They have lost and — in some cases — done irreparable harm to their relationship with the government, with clients and with investors,” Bruen added.

Nvidia’s new interim CEO is the company’s longtime CFO Colette Kress, which instantly makes her the most powerful woman in tech, in the AI industry, and in the business world, overall, since she now runs one of the world’s three most valuable companies.

Notably, Huang didn’t mention the highest-ranking woman executive in his own company, someone who joins him on nearly every quarterly earnings call and has deeper knowledge of Nvidia’s finances than probably anyone else in the world. As CFO, Kress was an integral part of one of the most valuable companies in the world—one of the most powerful women in tech by any measure.

As interim CEO, Kress now sits atop the bedrock of the entire AI industry at its most precarious moment. The choices she makes while in this role will reverberate across tech, geopolitics, and the broader economy.

Regardless of whether that promotion becomes permanent, we now know just how powerful Kress is in the tech industry—and that her omission from Huang’s list was just one in a long line of bad calls.

Huang has made Nvidia the AI industry’s backer of last resort — and he did much of the dealmaking himself. Despite having dozens of direct reports, he was personally involved in many of its investments worth billions of dollars, according to company founders who have received money from Nvidia.

When CoreWeave, the neocloud and prodigious buyer of Nvidia chips, saw its IPO falter last year, Huang led Nvidia to step in with an anchor order. When OpenAI needed support to build a massive data centre campus in Ohio, Huang had Nvidia guarantee up to $105bn of its lease and power payments.

He then worked with Wall Street groups on a plan to use Nvidia’s balance sheet to mobilise more than $500bn of outside capital for chip financing. Several deals are under way, people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia is planning to invest $10bn in Anthropic in a private placement alongside the Claude maker’s initial public offering next week.

I think what happened to Jensen over here, it’s a clear example of the dangers of lust. Lust is so dangerous that it can destroy the smartest, the most powerful of men. Yet despite the danger, it is so very appealing. And that’s because lust, it’s a part of man’s nature. …

I believe that most men, maybe even the vast majority of men, they have never experienced what it’s like to be pursued aggressively by a beautiful woman. It’s absolutely exhilarating, maybe even intoxicating to feel so wanted without having to ask.

[I]f there’s one tech industry wife guy to rule them all, it has to be Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder and his wife, Priscilla Chan, met as students at Harvard University. In 2024, to celebrate his love for his wife, Zuckerberg recorded a cover of T-Pain’s “Get Low,” which was apparently playing when they first met. Zuckerberg also built a 7-foot-tall statue of Chan, and implored others to join him in bringing back the “Roman tradition of making statues for your wife.” Chan, meanwhile, has stuck by Zuck through Congressional hearings, lawsuits, local jiu jitsu tournaments, and his blinged out fashion rebrand. They share two children and recently went as “burger night” for Halloween, which we have to admit was fun.

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