Saturday, November 14, 2026

14: NVIDIA

I Wrote Jensen Huang’s Biography. Here’s What Led to His Downfall. Mr. Huang’s unraveling is not a technology story. It is a timeless tale of masculine hubris, of a man undone by reckless overconfidence. Some things never change. .......... Mr. Huang’s marauding, relentless intellect, which never slowed down or turned off. ......... Alice Huang, an executive who managed a Singapore-based company that owns data centers in Southeast Asia. These data centers are suspected of helping Chinese A.I. developers circumvent U.S. restrictions on sales of Nvidia equipment. A recent report in The Information suggests they were used as a way station to illicitly smuggle some $7 billion of equipment into China. .......... consider Mr. Huang’s reported involvement with Kimberly Powell, an executive in the health care group at his company and his direct subordinate. A former Nvidia employee told me this affair was common knowledge in the company — the same company that employs both of Mr. Huang’s children in executive roles. It’s a stunning and disrespectful display of arrogance. I asked the former employee why Mr. Huang would behave this way, right in front of his kids. The former employee said that it got him high — a narcissist’s high. ............ Inside Nvidia, there was a culture of omertà that was difficult to break, and this enabled Mr. Huang to be his worst self. I sensed this deference, at times, in the sycophantic laughter of his subordinates when he was around, and the little things they muttered once he left the room. Ultimately, it took government intelligence to pierce Nvidia’s culture of silence — .......... Mr. Huang went to considerable lengths to cloak his arrogance. When I first met him in 2023, he and his handlers were pushing the idea that he was a humble man. In our conversations, Mr. Huang was constantly deflecting attention away from his success, always quick to assign credit to his employees and executive staff members. He also liked to glad-hand service people. He was a dishwasher once, a point he never let you forget. He loved visiting small, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and leaving extravagant tips. I’d met him for breakfast at Denny’s, and he tipped our waitress $1,000 in $100 bills. He didn’t make a show of it, either. I had to track her down to ask. ........... Over time, though, I began to suspect that this was an act, one performed not for the observer but to flatter himself. In truth, Mr. Huang was quite arrogant. He had little tolerance for disagreement and almost no capacity for open discourse. When you contradicted him, even over the most trivial matter, it was like lighting a fuse. Stick to your position, and soon he exploded, screaming at you for your idiocy. A harangue from Mr. Huang could last an hour or more; his executive staff appeared genuinely afraid of him. Listening to their stories, I was reminded of the abusive music instructor from the movie “Whiplash.” ............. Mr. Huang went to even greater lengths to present himself as a family man. Here, the act was harder to detect and must have involved a great deal of self-deception. He spoke of his wife, Lori, and his kids, Madison and Spencer, all the time. Unlike his flimsy man-of-the-people shtick, this affection for his family seemed genuine. He traveled with them often, all over the world. He encouraged his kids to leave careers in unrelated fields to join him at his microchip company. Several weeks ago, at a wedding in Hawaii, he gave away his daughter, Madison, to Nico Caprez, another Nvidia executive. ............. Mr. Huang met his future wife when he was 17. The two were lab partners in an electrical engineering course, and Mr. Huang was so shy, it took him six months to ask her out. She was his first girlfriend, and they married in their early 20s. She left the work force to raise their kids so Mr. Huang could pursue his dream of founding a company. He has spoken often of the sacrifices she made for him. ........... While reporting his biography, I spoke to some of the Huangs’ oldest friends. These were people they knew in their 20s, long before the money and the fame. I sometimes dropped little hints: Was there any chance of infidelity, perhaps? Any rumors of marital friction? Any arrangements? The response I got was that the Huangs’ marriage was happy, even ideal — something to be emulated. .............. In a divorce, Lori Huang could become one of the richest women in America. It’s possible the Huangs signed a prenuptial agreement, or have some other agreement, but I doubt it. When they married, in the mid-1980s, neither had much in assets. The hundreds of millions of Nvidia shares they jointly own are held in family trusts. They recently donated $75 million toward a flagship building at Vanderbilt University’s new campus in San Francisco. Another building they helped fund at Oregon State University, where they met, is nearing completion. ............ In the early days — the 1990s — Nvidia was a boys’ club. The staff played video games and drank beer in the office, and almost no women worked there. ........... In 2023, while at Nvidia’s campus, I saw Mr. Huang make an impassioned call for gender parity at Nvidia, where men still account for 80 percent of its employees. ........... I was surprised — and, frankly, amazed — when Mr. Huang became President Trump’s close ally in 2025. He’d never shown much interest in politics and had limited Washington connections. He didn’t attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration. But soon, in a masterly display of social engineering, he’d gained the president’s trust, mostly by flattering him. By the time of the president’s tech summit at the White House this September, Mr. Huang was seated at Mr. Trump’s right arm. ............ it was politics that triggered Mr. Huang’s downfall. He persuaded the president to lift export restrictions on Nvidia chips to China, and this put him in conflict with the more hawkish members of the president’s staff — especially Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose sharp criticisms of China at one point got him barred from that country. It was Mr. Rubio who oversaw the memo that exposed Mr. Huang. ........... Now Nvidia must find a successor. That’s going to be difficult: Mr. Huang never groomed one and has no second in command. Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive, but she comes from the world of finance, not electrical engineering, so I don’t think she can provide a long-term solution. ........

Nvidia without Jensen Huang is like the Bulls without Michael Jordan.

Nvidia Lost Its Founding C.E.O. Can It Keep Its Momentum? Throughout the years, tech giants have had mixed records after losing visionary founders who propelled their success. Successors with tech expertise helps. ........ He resigned on Thursday after the disclosure of affairs with a woman identified by U.S. intelligence as a Chinese spy and with an executive who reported to him. .......... Nvidia’s business as the leading chip supplier to artificial intelligence data centers is flourishing. Mr. Huang’s hasty exit, analysts say, will have little near-term effect on the company’s business, despite a big stock-market reaction. (The company’s shares have fallen 14 percent in the last five days.) ........... At Nvidia, founded in 1993, Mr. Huang recognized more than a decade ago that chips used mainly for image-processing in computer games could be repurposed as the hardware engines for A.I. software. It was a huge bet for the small company — and paid off. ........ “You can coast on the founder’s work for years with good execution,” said Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, who is an adjunct professor at Stanford University. “But you can lack the founder’s vision to see over the horizon and identify what’s next. That’s why the best successors have a lot of technical acumen as well as business acumen.” ............ For Nvidia, its next leader is going to have to chart a long-term strategy. With a 90 percent share of the current market for advanced A.I. chips and cash flooding in, the company will be able to bankroll its next moves. ............ Nvidia’s very market dominance invites competition. Google, for example, has developed chips designed for A.I. And companies in the United States and China are working on open-source alternatives to CUDA — Nvidia’s software platform for its chips — that are free to use and modify. The CUDA software, used by an estimated four million developers, reinforces Nvidia’s grip on the market. ............ Seeing the next A.I. market turn could take fresh eyes.

7 People Nvidia Could Consider for Its Next C.E.O. President Trump suggested Tim Cook, Apple’s former C.E.O., to replace Jensen Huang at Nvidia. Here are others with experience in chips or A.I. ...........

Few candidates could be expected to maintain Jensen Huang’s ultra-flat management structure at Nvidia, where an estimated 60 people were reporting directly to him.

................ Finding a successor to Jensen Huang at Nvidia is being compared to replacing Steve Jobs at Apple. In many ways, it’s actually harder. ............... Mr. Huang, 63, has much deeper technical expertise than the late Mr. Jobs did, with a keen understanding of the field of artificial intelligence and what chips and other technologies are needed to support it........ Unlike Mr. Jobs, Mr. Huang also forged close friendships throughout the industry, creating a complex network of partners, customers and suppliers. He turned Nvidia into a major player in Washington, built on a close relationship with President Trump ............. Mr. Huang shaped a culture at Nvidia that drove rapid-fire innovation while attracting some of the most accomplished engineers.

Jensen Huang’s Fall Is a Dark Consequence of What’s Happening in Silicon Valley Silicon Valley finds itself increasingly under the control of a handful of dominant chieftains and investors. And as these extraordinarily powerful executives grow closer to President Trump, the dark consequences of the wheeling and dealing are coming to the fore. ............... Over time, scandals, crisis and economic strain compelled regulators and public shareholders to demand more rigorous safeguards to protect the economic interests of everyday investors. This pressure led to many of the rules we take for granted today. Publicly traded companies must have an independent board of directors to hold executives accountable; they must disclose their operations clearly and in full; shareholders have rights. ............ some of Silicon Valley’s largest companies are basically authoritarian realms. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, is one of many successful founders who were granted a special class of stock that gives them effective control over their companies’ futures; the founders of Anthropic have proposed a similar arrangement ahead of their initial public offering, giving them collectively a majority of voting power, though they would own a much smaller share of the company. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has a similar arrangement. ............ Mr. Huang lacked the special shares that would have made him impossible to fire. Instead, he entrenched himself in the company by overseeing seemingly every aspect of its operations. Nvidia dominates the manufacture of cutting-edge chips needed for artificial intelligence development, making the company critical to the success of the American A.I. industry (and also a highly desired target of foreign powers, China in particular). Yet Mr. Huang ran the $4 trillion company almost like a family business, rather than as a public company accountable to millions of shareholders. Ignoring traditional management structures, he had about 60 executives report directly to him. He never identified a successor. Both of Mr. Huang’s children, who are in their 30s, were swiftly rising through the ranks, with reports that they were being groomed as his heirs apparent. .............. Then Mr. Trump returned to power. Silicon Valley’s elite almost immediately began making nice with the president, a logical move given his lengthy history of favoring his friends (and persecuting his perceived enemies). Mr. Huang seemed to develop a particularly close relationship with Mr. Trump — a useful connection given that the Commerce Department had restricted sales of Nvidia’s most cutting-edge chips to China in 2022. Mr. Huang repeatedly pressed Mr. Trump to ease the restrictions, and, over time, his wishes seemed to come true. A Commerce Department inquiry investigating whether the Singaporean company Megaspeed was diverting Nvidia chips to China was abruptly halted by the administration and transferred to the Justice Department. .................. (China has rejected the espionage claims.) ........... Just as these tech companies are becoming central to the fortunes of millions of American households, we have become willing to tolerate weak governance practices that put immense power in the hands of a few individuals. ............... The American stock market has been the engine of the country’s growth and a center of attention and envy for the rest of the world — thanks, in part, to our robust corporate governance structure. Remarkably, at a time when a handful of technology companies are powering both the market and our economic growth, we risk forgetting that lesson.

He Survived a Coma and Left Russia. Now His Film Confronts the Costs of Putin’s War. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” a Cannes prizewinner, uses the story of a cheating spouse to examine the compromises Russians make under authoritarianism.

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