On Thursday morning, Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang resigned from the company that had become, in many ways, synonymous with its chief executive.
Less than an hour later, when the markets opened, Nvidia’s stock had lost roughly $546 billion in market value. Though it has rebounded somewhat, the last weeks of scandal—including a reported second affair with an Nvidia employee—have tanked the chip maker’s valuation by more than $1 trillion.
Huang’s very public downfall began in late October, when the The New York Times reported that the CEO had a “close relationship” with Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore-based chip buyer Megaspeed and alleged asset of China’s Ministry of State Security. (The two are not known to be related.) At that time, Nvidia’s market cap was around $5.2 trillion.
On November 8, Nvidia announced it was investigating its CEO, after Jensen publicly acknowledged the affair. By the following morning, roughly $1 trillion had been erased since the scandal started.
If you hang out with a certain type of person who thinks of themselves as a day trader, they might have talked about “buying the dip” over drinks last weekend. If you believe Nvidia can thrive without Huang, there’s still time! The dip has dipped even further. But the early consensus seems to be that this could be more of a prolonged plunge.
“Huang is irreplaceable,” Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, told WIRED last week. “He built Nvidia into the juggernaut it is today, and he was the visionary behind the GPU, which has sustained the intelligence revolution.”
There are very real questions about what the end of Huang means for the global economy. Not only are Nvidia’s chips used to train most major AI models, the company has invested billions in a number of other tech companies. As of an August regulatory filing, Nvidia owned nearly $30 billion worth of Intel stock and roughly $21 billion of SpaceX stock.
For now, Nvidia’s loss is other chipmakers’ gain. AMD shares are up 28 percent over the last five days, and Broadcom is up nearly 16 percent. Nothing to see here.
More Numbers That Illuminate Huang’s Value:
- Nvidia’s market share of chips used in training frontier AI models: Roughly 90 percent
- AI companies in which Nvidia has invested at least $100 million: 8, as of its August filing.
- Huang’s pay last year: $36 million
- Portion of Nvidia owned by Huang: 3.5 percent, as of March—which means the scandal has devalued Huang’s own share of the company by more than $50 billion.
- Reported affairs: 2 (so far)
- PR firms hired with expertise in sex scandals: At least one
- Huang relatives employed by Nvidia: One son, one daughter, and one son-in-law
- Leather jackets owned: Several, including a $960,000 Tom Ford number. (But not that vintage Saint Laurent jacket everyone was talking about on X.)
