This Is an Early InningThis morning, Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive and a director, effective immediately. The board accepted the resignation on Wednesday, November 11. Colette Kress, the company's chief financial officer since September 2013, is interim CEO and remains CFO. Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993, was named the board's first-ever chair. A search is underway for internal and external candidates. Earnings are still Tuesday, November 17, at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time.
Shares fell more than 10% at the open. They later trimmed some of those losses, but the first verdict from the market was harsh.
Yesterday I wrote that we cannot afford to lose him as CEO. That is now the outcome. I also wrote: judge the man for what he did, and judge the CEO on what he has accomplished. I still believe both. On Sunday he emailed employees that he was unfaithful to his wife. Press reports, including the Associated Press, TechCrunch and Business Insider, say the resignation followed an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, a board investigation into a possible foreign intelligence effort, and reports of another relationship with an employee. Nvidia's own filing does not state a reason. The investigation should run its course. I am not here to relitigate the personal details.
I am here because this is bigger than one person's private life.
This morning I shared a post by Brivael Le Pogam (@brivael) that I think we need to sit with. He wrote:
"Make no mistake. The Jensen Huang scandal isn't just a story about someone's private life.
It's a lever. And it's going to be used for one thing: taking control of AI."
He is not asking us to ignore the facts. He says the investigation should run its course. He is asking us to look at what is being built on top of them. His argument is that a wave of proposals in Washington would put advanced models behind a permission regime, and that Jensen, and Nvidia with him, had been one of the most powerful public defenders of open-weight models. Without that voice, it gets easier to close the door.
A few hours later I wrote on X: "This is an early inning in the war of open-source AI vs a monitored curated model for political gain. Gosh, how quickly the world turned."
That is the frame I want us to hold.
Why the open-model fight matters
In July, Jensen's first post on X was a letter Nvidia had signed on why open models matter. Safety, innovation, sovereignty. "The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." That is not a slogan from the edge of the industry. It came from the company that supplies the chips most of that industry runs on.
If AI stays open, more people can inspect it, run it, and build with it. If it becomes a handful of monitored, curated models, released only with a license, then someone else decides what the machine is allowed to say. That is a political project, not just a product roadmap. I do not claim to know every bill, or who will pass what. I do claim that the timing, and the incentive, are worth watching. As Brivael put it, this scandal can be a first pretext. It does not have to be the last.
What yesterday's lesson still says
Key-man risk just became real. Nvidia did not name a successor. The word "succession" did not appear in its 2026 proxy. Jensen is a large shareholder, with about 3.5% of the company, but Nvidia is a single-class stock. One share, one vote. He did not have a special class of shares that could have kept him in the chair against his board.
This morning, when the conversation turned to how other founder-led companies are built, I wrote: "Yep, those class B shares are so important." Founder control is not a personality cult. It is a design choice, and shareholders should understand it before a crisis, not after one.
Elon is still the ultimate key-man case, for Tesla and for SpaceX at once. Both companies have said they are highly dependent on him. That is not a reason to pretend a founder is disposable. It is a reason to have a succession plan, and to share enough of it that shareholders are not guessing when the news breaks. I asked for that yesterday. I am asking again today.
I also wrote this morning: "Hire every single engineer leaving Nvidia, @{ymaO3kO2GlOJO0sJ0t49zEAXito1}." A company is bigger than one person, but talent walks, and the AI race is not waiting for a search firm. That, too, is an early inning.
On Friday, November 20, our Slice live is about Delaware versus Texas governance. The title I used last week still fits: "Governance is boring, until it's not."
Thank you for reading, and keep the questions coming.
With love,
Alexandra
Not financial advice. This is an educational explainer with my personal views. Please do your own research.