Jensen Huang Made Elon Musk Beg for Chips. What Could 'Two Affairs' Cost Him And Nvidia?

In 1993, three engineers sat in a Denny's booth and talked about building a chip company. Thirty-three years later, one of them is still running it. And Nvidia's directors are meeting to decide whether Jensen Huang should stay.

The road from the diner to the boardroom ran through two bets. The first was CUDA, the software that let programmers use Nvidia's graphics chips for work that had little to do with graphics. The second was that artificial intelligence would give all that computing power somewhere to go.

There's footage from 2016 of Huang delivering Nvidia's first AI supercomputer to OpenAI. Elon Musk, then a co-founder of the young research lab, was there to receive it. A decade later, companies run by people like Musk were scrambling to get their hands on as many Nvidia chips as Huang would sell them.

The numbers tell you how quickly the bet paid off. From fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2026, Nvidia's revenue went from $16.7 billion to $215.9 billion. Net income climbed from $4.3 billion to $120.1 billion. The company was worth about $420 billion in late 2022. In May 2026, it became the first to touch $5.5 trillion.

Huang had also built a company in which roughly 60 executives report directly to him. He has said he prefers developing a generation of potential leaders to anointing a successor. Bernstein's analysts put the result in three words: Huang “IS NVIDIA.”

That is the company the board has to govern tonight.

Why Nvidia is tense

Three days after Huang told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife, a second allegation surfaced. The New York Times reported that he had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's healthcare chief and one of his direct reports. 

That account remains unconfirmed. The board was already investigating whether Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort in a separate matter involving Alice Huang, a former executive at a Singapore-based Nvidia customer. Beijing has denied the espionage allegation.

Then came word that the directors were preparing to oust him. Nvidia closed Wednesday at $173.73, up 2.92%. In after-hours trading, it fell as much as 8.56% to $158.92. At that price, roughly $1.7 trillion had been erased from Nvidia's October 6 peak of $5.78 trillion. About $600 billion of the loss came after the board announced its investigation on Sunday.

The directors have yet to announce a decision. If they remove Huang, somebody has to walk into Nvidia the next morning and take charge of a company that sends dozens of its most important decisions to one desk. There is no publicly designated successor. And on November 17, somebody has to take questions from Wall Street.

Six boardrooms that have been here before

McDonald's had a successor. Intel had an interim CEO. McDonald's fired Steve Easterbrook in 2019 over a relationship with an employee and named Chris Kempczinski the same day. Intel's Brian Krzanich resigned in 2018 after the company learned of a relationship with an employee that violated its policy. Intel put CFO Bob Swan in charge on an interim basis and took seven months to give him the job permanently. 

Intel's later troubles had many causes. What the two cases show most clearly is the difference between announcing a firing and announcing a handover. Nvidia has yet to show it can do both in the same breath.

HP got Mark Hurd out. Finding stability took longer. Hurd resigned in 2010 after an inquiry found inaccurate expense reports linked to a relationship with a contractor. HP then cycled through leaders as it struggled to settle on a strategy. The immediate governance decision took days. The consequences of repeated leadership changes played out over years.

Apple survived losing Steve Jobs. It eventually brought him back. Jobs lost a power struggle in 1985, was stripped of operating responsibilities and left Apple. By the time he returned in 1997, the company was in deep trouble. Nvidia's finances are in a different place. The parallel is in the job itself. A board can replace the chief executive and still spend years looking for someone who can decide which big bet the company should make next.

Uber found a way past Travis Kalanick. Investors forced Kalanick out in 2017 after a crisis over the company's culture and conduct. Dara Khosrowshahi came in, stabilised Uber and took it public. The company endured, with a different appetite for risk and a chief executive whose mandate was to make it work at scale. That is one plausible future for Nvidia if the board decides the company now needs a different kind of leader.

OpenAI's staff made the board reverse itself. Directors removed Sam Altman in 2023. Within days, he was back after most employees threatened to quit. Reporting on Nvidia suggests strong employee support for Huang. There has been no comparable revolt at Nvidia, but directors have to consider how the engineers and executives they would rely on after an ouster might respond to it.

Amazon kept Jeff Bezos. The Kobeissi Letter points to Amazon's shares more than doubling after Bezos's affair became public in 2019. Bezos stayed in the job, but his case involved neither an alleged relationship with a subordinate nor a foreign-intelligence inquiry touching a major customer. Amazon's subsequent stock performance tells Nvidia's directors little about how to handle those questions.

The research offers limited comfort. A study of 187 forced CEO departures from S&P 1500 companies, cited by Kobeissi, found weaker long-term returns after outperforming chiefs were removed. It dealt with performance-based ousters. Nvidia's directors are weighing questions of conduct and governance. Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld put Huang's chances of keeping his job at roughly even.

What goes out the door with Huang

Start with the price. Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives reckons Nvidia would be worth 25% to 30% less without Huang. Applied to a valuation of about $4.07 trillion, that would imply a discount of roughly $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion. Kobeissi argues that much of the discount is already in the shares. Economist Mohamed El-Erian thinks investors may still be underestimating how much of Nvidia's value depends on one person. The after-hours selloff captures the anxiety. It cannot settle that argument.

Then there's the work. Nvidia has to deliver the Vera Rubin platform, keep developers building on CUDA and negotiate with governments that want their own AI infrastructure. Huang has personally driven all three. 

He has also been Nvidia's most visible advocate in Washington against cutting China off from American chips. The foreign-intelligence inquiry gives advocates of tighter export controls fresh ammunition. If Huang leaves, Nvidia loses its most recognisable advocate. If he stays, he has to make that case while the investigation is still open.

And there are the customers. Larry Ellison once described himself and Musk as “begging” Huang for chips. In a market where getting the hardware first can determine when a customer gets to launch its next AI system, the person who makes that allocation has enormous leverage. A successor inherits the orders. The relationships take longer.

Futurum Group's Daniel Newman expects Nvidia would lean more heavily on its leadership team because one person is unlikely to fill every part of Huang's job. That would spread the work across people who already know the business. It would also change how Nvidia makes decisions, especially when the next big bet calls for moving before the market agrees.

The next morning

The morning after a departure, Nvidia's engineers would still know how to build chips. Developers would still have nearly two decades of work tied to CUDA. The company would still have an integrated hardware and software platform and $95.2 billion in supply commitments. The question is who gets to make the calls that matter three or five years from now, when today's products have shipped and the industry is looking for its next breakthrough.

Nvidia's own annual filing warns that it depends heavily on its long-serving executives and that failed succession planning is a risk. Longbow's Jake Dollarhide thinks the directors will wait until they have a replacement with enough standing in tech to take over. The allegations may force them to decide on a timetable of their own.

In 1993, three engineers could decide what Nvidia would become over a meal at Denny's. On November 17, Wall Street will be listening for who gets to make that decision now.

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