Defeated and sunk. Jensen Huang, the famous businessman who was in charge of Nvidia, fell to hell this week. His resignation as CEO of the company he had led for 33 years has caused a corporate earthquake on Wall Street, whose shock wave reaches the White House, the United States Congress and threatens to shake the thriving AI industry.
Huang's last hours at the company were bitter and devastating for someone who was considered a rock star, admired by the industry, investors and with a legion of fans who asked him for selfies and autographs. “I'm a piece of shit,” Bloomberg claims he told one of his collaborators on Wednesday night, where he accepted the surrender after receiving intense pressure from the board of directors and investors.
Huang was immersed in guilt. He kept saying that he "didn't care." And when asked about any issue, he responded laconically: “I don't care,” as revealed by Bloomberg.
Nvidia's board of directors fired Huang this Thursday for the skirt affair scandal, which the executive insisted on denying for months. And it was finally uncovered when it was learned that one of his three extramarital relationships was with an alleged Chinese spy.
The council called an emergency meeting Wednesday afternoon to discuss Huang's future after The New York Times revealed that he had a second extramarital affair and discovered that he had been lying for weeks.
The council meeting was long. Serious errors in Nvidia's governance, without a succession plan, without a clear number two and with an unusual structure for this type of listed company, complicated Huang's departure. He had run the company with personal management, with attention to details, but with little delegation of important decisions. He had a group of 60 managers under his supervision, something unusual in corporate policies, whose structures advise that they be reduced to less than 10 people.
The company's share price had plummeted by a third in the last month, the equivalent of almost two billion dollars. The situation had worsened in the last week after acknowledging infidelity with Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese spy who used her closeness to the Nvidia executive to set up a network to smuggle advanced chips to China. The rest of the directors and investors wanted to plug the wound before the bleeding spread to other companies in the technology industry.
The internal debate over his departure and his replacement prolonged the meeting for hours. Finally, just minutes before the markets opened early Thursday, his resignation was announced and the appointment of CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO while the company found a more suitable person to lead the third largest company in the world.
Huang had handed over the Nvidia crown after weeks of fighting to retain power, denying rumors about his infidelities. The self-confident, witty and charismatic technology magnate is now a remorseful guy who punishes himself by blaming himself for the damage he has caused to his family and the company he founded.
Huang managed to turn a small company manufacturing graphics cards for video games into the symbol of the global rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia is the cornerstone around which the AI industry is built. It is the world's largest chipmaker and controls the market for cutting-edge semiconductors used in data center servers to train the most sophisticated AI models.
Huang has become unemployed, but he still has a long job ahead of him. The scandal has captured the attention of legislators in the United States Congress, concerned about the consequences of an espionage case in a strategic company for national security.
Also due to the close relationship between Huang and the president of the United States, Donald Trump, who has defended the businessman to the end. He even phoned him last Tuesday to convince him not to resign and to continue fighting to keep his job and defend the company. But the call was useless, the pressure from the markets was stronger than the president's words.
Huang has been called to testify before Congress in the coming days, where he will have to clarify his relationship with Alice Huang and whether she could have put some of the secrets of Nvidia's next-generation chips at risk.
In recent days, Huang has stated that he does not care what happens to him, according to Bloomberg from people who have spoken with him. His main concern, he assures, is his wife and family and not “ruining the lives” of the women with whom he is now romantically involved.
