Jensen Huang Resigns as NVIDIA CEO After 33 Years

Wtf why is everyone assuming Nvidia skirted an export ban and treasonously sold chips to China? It was done legally with the US government taking a cut: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/07/business/economy/nvidia-c...

Nvidia is a profitmaxxing company in a profitmaxxing economy and so it is going to profitmaxx; the criticism should lie with the US government: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/republican-senator-urges...

Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).

I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.

Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.

It is baffling to read comments that this is excusable or he should be retained 'in interest of the shareholders'. Setting aside the obviously poor judgement, the appearance of impropriety has serious ammunition behind a situation that already looked weird. More practically, he's compromised now. Whether it's further scandal or the impending criminal investigations, there might be further hooks people have on him.

The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.

I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".

I cant help but see a difference in the moral standard to which Jensen is being held compared to the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held. Why can one get away with shocking moral behaviour, but the other has to step down for a mild affair. If Jensen didnt have the affair, or it never came to light, would all of this still have taken place?

When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.

Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.

Just a sad state of affairs. Jensen was by far the biggest voice pushing for open weights and keeping the Anthropic / OpenAI doom narrative from getting out of control.

Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.

Jensen's the most pro-open weight guy and calmest on China public figure at that level.

Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.

Tin foil hat take: I think Jensen's been sniped.

For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.

I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference for unsigned and registered open-models in the firmware of modern GPUs. Anthropic and others are pushing hard on this. First the hardware export ban, eventually the software one via hardware-enforced execution controls like IETF hinted at

I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that