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Jensen Huang is no longer the CEO of NVIDIA. I don’t usually stay up past midnight trying to ascertain the fate of chip company CEOs, but that’s what I did last night. Because NVIDIA is not a normal company, and Jensen Huang is not a normal CEO.
In a huge surprise this morning, Huang announced his resignation after an emergency meeting of NVIDIA’s board, called after Huang admitted to an affair with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy. In a lot of circumstances, that would be enough. But every good spy story needs a twist, and the Huang saga already has several.
Just last night, “The Times” reported that Wang had also been carrying on an affair with one of his direct reports, another executive at NVIDIA, and that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had a direct confrontation over Megaspeed, the Singaporean company at the heart of the Huang affair as the Trump administration debated what to do.
There’s no question in my mind that this is the biggest tech news of the year. Huang is one of the towering figures and big personalities of the AI boom. He’s the co-founder and leader of NVIDIA, the company at the center of this strange new world we’re living in. He’s maybe the most prominent AI optimist and a strong advocate of loosening restrictions on chip sales to China. He’s a singularly powerful CEO who’s also made a lot of people very, very rich. All of which is why this story is so shocking and why we have so many questions.
How could the judgment of someone so powerful have been so bad? Why didn’t the White House do anything if a major American CEO was involved with the Chinese spy? And maybe most importantly, what happens now? The
AI sector has lost the hands on leader of its linchpin company. The “let her rip” AI optimists lost their loudest voice. NVIDIA shareholders have lost many millions of dollars of value. And all this is happening just one week before the first frontier lab goes public. What could go wrong? I’m Max Read. This is “Hard Fork.”
Hello and welcome to the first “Hard Fork” from the post-Jensen Huang era. For a momentous occasion like this, we’ve got a killer panel. We have technology reporter Ryan Mac, who just broke the story that Jensen Huang was having an affair with one of his reports at NVIDIA. We’ve got reporter Ana Swanson, who’s been breaking news all across this story for a week, whose scoops are too numerous to mention. And once again, from Singapore, we’re joined by contributing writer for “The New York Times Opinion,” Stephen Witt author of “The Thinking Machine,” a biography of Huang and NVIDIA. Welcome to Hard Fork, everybody.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, so we’re recording this around 10:00 AM here in New York City. It’s been around an hour since we first learned the news that Jensen Huang had resigned as CEO of NVIDIA. Ryan, what do we about how this decision was made?
So this played out this last night and this morning. Last night, we published a story about a second relationship that he had, extramarital relationship, with an executive at NVIDIA, this vice president of health care, Kimberly Powell. And Jensen was already teetering, given some of the early reporting from Ana and others about his first relationship. And that seemed to set the wheels in motion even more. And so the board met. This morning, before the market opened, they put out the announcement. Jensen resigns. And here we are.
It seemed, from where I was sitting, the board meeting was taking forever. There was an announcement this was going to happen. There was a sense that probably the outcome was that he was going to be forced out. Stephen, what do you think the board’s perspective on this was?
Many people on the board are themselves NVIDIA billionaires. I think there’s four different members of the board who own more than $1 billion in NVIDIA stock, and they’ve never seen this company without Jensen. Jensen is the only CEO that this company has ever had for over 33 years.
Some of these guys have been with him from the very beginning, from the very first day. So it’s very hard, I think, for them to let go of Jensen, even when it’s almost forced that they have to. I suspect that they were looking for some way not to do that maybe.
Maybe you go to counseling Jensen. Maybe you step back for a little bit, and then maybe you come back in a little while later. But look, the stock is down quite a lot already. It went down today again. That cost them. That cost the board members real money.
And so they’re attempting to act in not so much in the interests of morality or the interests of even good taste, but in the interests of NVIDIA shareholders. And that’s a tough decision to make. It’s not clear that this company is worth more with Jensen gone than it is with a very tarnished Jensen in charge.
One aspect of this story that’s been interesting is the extent to which the Trump administration has been aware of this affair. And there seems to have been some internal conflict about it. I’m wondering if anything has changed this week within the White House and within the administration that would tip the scales against Jensen in a situation like this.
I definitely think there is this sense in Washington that the tide has turned against Jensen Huang. For a long time, Jensen had this very close friendship with President Trump that, at least for Republicans, made him hard to touch. That’s something that wasn’t there initially at the beginning of President Trump’s second term, but something that the two men kind of cultivated and that grew over time. And I think it became very difficult for a lot of people in the president’s party to advocate for tougher restrictions on chip sales to China, just because they might go crosswise at that very close relationship.
But now that Jensen sin is on the outs, you really do see these much more aggressive calls, particularly from Congress, but also people in the administration about advancing chip restrictions, Elizabeth Warren today issuing a statement saying that Jensen’s resignation doesn’t absolve him or the company for any responsibility for putting national security at risk or potential violations of laws. So there really is this sense that efforts are heating up in Washington to scrutinize the company’s sales to China a lot more closely.
I mean, you reported on a confrontation between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Can you walk us through that story a little bit and tell us what you think it means, in a broader sense, about what’s happening inside the White House?
Yeah, absolutely. So the thing to know is that the Commerce Department is responsible for American technology export restrictions. And so it plays this really important role in setting the boundaries of NVIDIA’s global business, how much they’ve been able to sell to China in recent years.
And so President Trump has obviously grown closer with Jensen Huang. Jensen Huang is also cultivated a closer friendship with Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce. And increasingly in internal discussions, Howard Lutnick has been seen as the person pushing back or delaying various export control measures, whether it’s putting Megaspeed on the entity list to trade blacklist or broader restrictions that would stop Chinese companies from remotely dialing into data centers in Southeast Asia.
And so there’s an awful lot of finger pointing going on right now in this situation. But a lot of those fingers are pointed at Howard Lutnick. And it remains to be seen how that evolves for the Commerce Department. Is there some fallout in terms of personnel there too? Or maybe they start to move much more aggressively on advancing some of the rules that people have been asking for.
Ryan, I want to turn to the story that you reported out yesterday. So we’re recording this on Thursday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, towards the end of the day, around 5:00 PM, “Times” reported that Huang had, in addition to the affair with the CEO of Megaspeed, Alice Huang, who’s allegedly a Chinese spy, he was also having an affair with an NVIDIA executive who reports to him. Ryan, what can you tell us about how you came across this story? I understand it started with a tip.
Yeah, we had been reporting on it for a couple of weeks on this separate reporting line to the Megaspeed story. And it picked up steam in the last couple of days, obviously with everything playing out. When I think there’s this drumbeat of stories that happens, what happens as reporters is you get more and more people getting the confidence to talk.
And so we had a few more people reaching out, some people that maybe didn’t want to talk initially come back to us and say, hey, actually, I do know about this thing. And we got to a point where we were confident in our reporting and confident in the original tip that Jensen had this affair with this Vice President, Kimberly Powell, who oversaw health care at the company. Kimberly Powell has been at the company since 2008. She has worked her way up through the health care initiative at the company to become this quite powerful executive in her own right at the company.
She gives talks about applying the company’s AI products to health and science. She’s often by Jensen’s side at big events. We understand them to have traveled together around the world.
And this is something that had been talked about for a long time within the company. People raised eyebrows at this kind of relationship. And we got it to a point yesterday where we were comfortable in publishing it. And we did.
Stephen, was this second wave of the story surprising to you as somebody who’s been reporting on Huang and NVIDIA for a long time now?
No, not at all. I mean, in fact, I’d been hearing things all summer about this. It was very hard to prove. For a long time, people didn’t want to talk. Ultimately, it took, well, excellent reporters at “The Times,” of course, who probably will win a Pulitzer for this one, but especially the classified intelligence. That’s what it took to pierce the veil here. I had been hearing things all summer. I’d been getting some tips. They weren’t even about either one of these women. I think that’s ultimately what probably forced the board’s hand, was the continuation that this would just probably get worse and worse the longer that Jensen stuck around. It must have been very hard for them to get rid of him, ultimately. And perhaps he really did just resign. I guess we’ll see.
Ryan, there’s a specific detail I want to ask you about in this story. I’m just going to read it. It says, “When reached by phone Wednesday and asked about his relationship with Ms. Powell, Mr. Huang said, I don’t think you should be talking to me directly.” He then hung up. I have to ask, why is the CEO of NVIDIA, in the middle of probably the worst week of his life, picking up the phone at all?
Good question. I’m not going to take credit for that one. Tripp is the one that — Tripp Mickle, our colleague, who has been doing amazing reporting, made that call. And frankly, when he told us what happened, we were stunned. I mean, I honestly don’t know why he picked the phone, why he even said anything.
As reporters, we have to put these tough questions in front of the people we’re going to report on. And so just doing our due diligence in that process, he made that call. And like most calls and most email reach outs, we expected them not to say anything or a press person to come back to us. And in this case, he picked up. So it was, yeah, just kind of an insane moment in this very bizarre and upside-down story.
I want to ask you about another detail. “The Times’” story included a report that they were at a conference together, and a bystander saw them, and I’m quoting, “being affectionate” and documented it on their phone. So it seems like a lot of people were around.
There was maybe an understanding or a sense that the affair was being carried out in view of other NVIDIA executives and employees. This seems to comport with what Stephen was saying before about there having been tips or ideas. Was that your sense too, Ryan?
I think there were just a lot of suspicions out there. And yeah, that anecdote that’s in our story came from GTC, this NVIDIA developer conference that happens every year. This year was in San Jose. I don’t believe they thought they were in a place that could be seen.
But someone did take out their camera and capture some of that. And as we understand it, the security team then sequestered them in that process. And it was a surreal anecdote for us to hear and something we definitely fact checked along the way because it was just so bizarre to us.
So about an hour after this story breaks, the “Journal” reports that NVIDIA is getting ready to oust Jensen. Does that mean it’s the second relationship that did him in, Stephen? What do you know about this?
In my interviews with him, Jensen went to such great lengths to present himself as a family man. It was something he really, really emphasized. He talked about his wife all the time. Every time I talked to him, he started talking about his wife, the sacrifices she had made to make NVIDIA possible.
She stepped away from her own career to raise her kids and then bringing his own kids in the company, even as he’s openly consorting with another executive. It’s almost hard to imagine that that would happen. In some ways, it’s just a classic tale of masculine hubris and overconfidence. But I think probably the board, when they started to put all this together, was like — there’s such a severe error in judgment here that it calls everything into question.
Yeah, if I can just jump in on something Stephen and Ryan are saying. I’ve had very limited interactions with Jensen Huang, but I always got the feeling that he had created this incredible company just through shear force of will. I mean, this is his personal project that he has created over three decades, something that has just transformed global technology and the economy. And he just seems like the person who wills things into being.
And that’s always the feeling I got with his attitude toward, for example, chip-smuggling concerns. He has very consistently denied over years that chip smuggling is just not occurring, even in the face of big smuggling busts by the US government or reporting that I and others had carried out to consistently denied that it was happening. And so I think that just might be one of his strengths, but also his weaknesses, that if I were to analyze the man, he sees the world in the way that he would like it to be. And that has largely been a success for him. But in this episode, maybe it was his downfall.
I’d also say, this is someone who hasn’t been viewed as this rock star CEO until very recently. Of course, he’s run his company for more than 30 years. But this kind of global fame he’s experiencing is relatively new. And I guess the ascent of NVIDIA to this stratosphere is relatively new.
And as reporters, we see what we — his public persona changed to a point where he has famously signed someone’s chest, a female fan’s chest at an event. He was pictured with the CEO of Megaspeed openly. And part of me thinks, if that’s happening in front of us, what’s going on that we aren’t seeing? And now we’re starting to see some of that reported out now.
I think also Jensen created a reality bubble around himself. Inside the company, he was like — it was almost like a cult leader when he got up and talked. He was like a prophet. But the thing was, everything he said actually came true. And then when something you said came true, everybody in the room made $1 billion.
And so this created, I think, this thing that you couldn’t even disagree with Jensen inside the company. And he wouldn’t let you anyway. He’d just start screaming at you if you didn’t agree with his point of view. I disagreed with Jensen once, and it was like lighting a fuse on a stick of dynamite. And when it went off, he just started screaming at me. I’m a journalist. I don’t work for the company. There’s nothing to be gained from with that.
But that indicated to me, like, oh, this guy has no brakes. There’s no one telling this guy, you’re acting out of turn here. Even his PR people, they were there, and they just let him yell at me for 20 minutes. There’s no one around him saying, Jensen, reel it back in. He had no one like that in his life.
I will say, also, just a little more than a week ago, Jensen did give an interview to Bloomberg in which he said that his interactions with the woman, Alice Huang, were just very normal and just usual operations. And then in a week, we saw that narrative change just so dramatically.
Yeah, I would say reading —
Keep going, Ryan.
Yeah, reading the tea leaves —
I love it. Just to be clear, I really love it when you guys are all talking to each other.
See you later, Max.
I don’t have to do anything, yeah.
By just reading the tea leaves of the statement they put out about the resignation, I mean, they said glowing things about him. Or they give their — nice things they said about him. But Jensen is not quoted in that anywhere. He doesn’t give a statement. So that feels very telling to me.
This is a good place to pause. We’re going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to get into it a little deeper. [UPBEAT MUSIC]
Welcome back. This is “Hard Fork.” I’m with Ryan Mac, Ana Swanson, and Stephen Witt, and we’re talking about Jensen Huang’s resignation from NVIDIA. I mean, one of the reasons I’ve been waiting to see if Jensen could retain power is because it has felt, as we’ve talked about, the Trump administration has this vested interest in NVIDIA as a linchpin company for the stock market and for the AI industry. Obviously, as we’ve talked about, Trump and Jensen have a friendship, and it felt maybe a little bit like, at some point, the Trump administration would put its finger on the scales or swing in and continue to protect him. Seems like that didn’t happen last night, Ana.
Yeah, I’m not sure what conversations may have taken place, if there were calls going back and forth. That was definitely something that we had been asking about and very curious about. But yeah, it seems like President Trump’s powers don’t extend that far to save someone like Jensen Huang in this situation.
And we have to see, whether this has an impact on US policy when it comes to NVIDIA, whether that remains more favorable. Of course, NVIDIA, as you say, is a very important part of the stock market, really important to US data center construction, the American edge in AI, just systemically important company at this point. So there’s certainly a lot of motivation to keep them intact and doing well. But we’ll have to see where it goes from here.
One more question along those lines, I’m wondering to what extent you think the midterm elections last week have freed up space inside the White House or inside the US politics in general to allow the anti-Huang camp to push against him and try and get him out of place?
It felt like that really did open the floodgates. And so another thing that Jensen did he worked on cultivating very close ties with Trump. But he left the Democrats behind. And a lot of people in Washington are second guessing that strategy. For instance, there was one episode where Jensen went to brief the Hill, and he only met with Republican lawmakers, which a lot of people in Washington thought was fairly clumsy, given that the expectation that things might turn over in two or four years. But certainly, some of those relationships are time limited. A lot of more traditional CEOs certainly make an effort to reach out more to both sides of the aisle.
And now you have Democrats coming back. I mean, they have had to weigh this equation between courting tech money that had flowed over two Republicans or seizing on popular opinion, which was more skeptical of data centers and tech CEOs and their relationships with Republicans. And clearly, Democrats have chosen to go in this more antagonistic route when it comes to AI executives and Jensen Huang. And so there are several pieces of legislation being considered on the Hill now that would clamp down more on chip sales abroad in addition to the variety of data center pushback we’ve seen around the country.
Yeah, he also alienated a significant chunk of what I would call the tech right. Marco Rubio, guys like Palmer Luckey, they didn’t like that Jensen was selling chips to China. They thought that was not in the US’s best interest. I mean, Trump obviously was his ally. But he really alienated the Democrats. There were a lot of people on the right who weren’t that happy with Jensen either.
Yeah, and let’s talk about what happens next and what’s going forward. Stephen, let me ask you. So we’ve been talking over and over again about this Jensen is this singular figure across his whole company, 60 direct reports. Does that mean that the board had never even — they must have never really even thought about a succession plan? Or had they?
I think the board had maybe considered a couple possible successors, but Jensen almost deliberately never groomed a successor. It’s almost like asking, well, now that Michael Jordan’s gone from the Bulls, who do we replace him with? There’s not an obvious candidate of anyone, anywhere who can do what Jensen did.
He really was a Dynamo in this way, a force of nature who could both see very deeply into the future of computer science and also be the very tough CEO, screaming at suppliers in Taiwan to get things delivered on time. And he was also schmoozing with customers, and he’s also got Trump on the phone. It’s unique to Jensen. It’s incredible some of the stuff he was able to pull off. So you can’t really replace him. You almost need three people to do the job that he did.
Yeah, I mean, let’s talk for a second and just marvel at the significance of having one single person at the center of a company like this. This is a $4 trillion company, I mean, at the time of recording. It’s the second most valuable company in the world behind Apple. It controls something like 90 percent of the market for computer chips used in big AI projects. I mean, I just think it’s worth — Ryan, can you characterize the significance of this company and therefore the significance of Jensen Huang and his resignation here?
Arguably the most important company for the whole global AI industry. And Jensen Huang was the key man of that key company. And so now that he is gone, what comes next? I think we’re all wondering. And that is what’s at stake here. He is, in many ways, irreplaceable. And the impacts of that will be felt on the global market for days, if not weeks, to come.
What do we know about Colette Kress? So she was the CFO and is now the interim CEO that they’ve just announced this morning. Stephen, did you interview her for your book?
I did not. She declined to be interviewed. Colette is great, from what I hear. But she can only ever be a temporary or interim CEO. And the reason for that is, although she’s a very good executive, she is not a world-class computer scientist. She’s a finance person. And so if you’re not a world-class computer scientist, over the long term, you cannot be the CEO of NVIDIA or really any microchip company. The CEO of the company has to be an electrical engineer.
They have to understand computing from the level of the transistor, scaling all the way up to the level of the data center. And this was something the board really told me. This was the reason they believed in Jensen so much right from the beginning. He actually didn’t have that many business skills at first, but he was a world-class computer scientist. And that was the bottleneck. That was the thing that was hard to find.
If you look at people like Lisa Su, the people who lead other competing microchip companies, they also have this quality. So there are other world-class computer scientists inside NVIDIA. In fact, there’s many of them. But then that person also has to be like a great chief executive. One name that came up a lot was a guy named Ian Buck. I interviewed him. He’s like the smartest guy alive.
But he’s never really dealt with customers. He’s never gotten on the phone and screamed at his suppliers in Taiwan to deliver things yesterday. So finding somebody who has all of these rare qualities and putting them together in one person, it’s really tough. It’s really hard to find that person. The board is going to have a hard time. An impossible time, honestly, replacing Jensen.
I was also just doing some research, and there’s of a precedent for this. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stepped down in 2018 after having an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate at the company, and up stepped the company’s CFO, Bob Swan, into the CEO role. He lasted less than three years. He was out by 2021. And so yeah, these hard tech companies that need this kind of expertise, you don’t really find that from these financial experts.
Yeah. One question I have about Colette Kress is, I mean, she’s the CFO. Surely she knew something about Megaspeed. I have to imagine this is also on the minds of everybody in Washington right now.
Yeah, I agree. I think that is naturally where people’s minds here will go. How much, if anything, did she know about the business with Megaspeed? So again, Megaspeed was accused of allegedly diverting chips into China. The US government has been investigating it for that. It was also running what is now a legal business, but setting up data centers in Southeast Asia that serve Chinese clients.
But the way that business was set up, it was just very obviously this Chinese company in Singapore that quickly rebranded itself and started to buy massive amounts of chips. We also know that Jensen Huang knew the woman that was leading the company at that time very closely, raising a lot of questions about what his knowledge was of what the company was doing and how much he was potentially even involved in setting up this company, Megaspeed, which provides computing power to Alibaba. So there are still a lot of questions about how far that inquiry will go. The Department of Justice is carrying out a criminal investigation into Megaspeed right now.
I’d also point out that late last year, around the time that a lot of this was coming to a head, NVIDIA suddenly changed the way that they reported revenue to make it much more difficult to figure out how much of their revenue was coming from Singapore and Malaysia, changing the way that they counted those customers globally in a way that was very, very frustrating for us and other reporters trying to point to this just explosion in business in Singapore and Southeast Asia that was tied to China. And so that’s something that a CFO probably would have been intimately involved with.
Yeah, I think so, yeah. Well, let’s talk for a second about the general aftermath of this decision. I mean, Ryan, I think it’s fair to say that the big thing on everyone’s mind is, is this the beginning of the end for the AI boom? What are you expecting in terms of a larger response, Silicon Valley, in terms of AI in general? The Anthropic IPO is coming up next week. I mean, is there a world where everything is totally fine and nothing happens? Is there a world where there’s a big blow up and the stock market crashes?
Oh, man, I’m so bad with predictions.
We won’t you hold —
It’s a dangerous game.
We won’t hold you to it, I promise.
Oh, man. I wouldn’t be —
This is not financial advice on “Hard Fork, I promise.
It’s so hard to say. We’re in the hour two of this happening. I mean, we were having a discussion earlier, what does NVIDIA look like? It looks like the Bulls without Jordan, right? Yeah. I mean, there’s going to be downstream impacts for weeks, if not months. I mean, you mentioned the Anthropic IPO.
NVIDIA is supposed to invest in — it already is an investor in Anthropic and is about to invest more. NVIDIA is involved in a lot of these circular-funding deals, where it not only supplies chips, but financing to companies large and small across the AI and tech ecosystem. Does that continue? Can it continue without this charismatic figure in Jensen Huang calling the shots? If it’s a CFO type now leading the company, will they become a little more cautious with their spending, a little more cautious with the decision making? That’s all going to play out in the next couple, again, weeks and months, and we’ll see what happens.
I will say, one of Colette’s roles was actually overseeing a number of these investments. So she’s pretty familiar with this financing network that NVIDIA built out. It’s controversial, what they’ve done. And there does sometimes look like circular financing. Some of their customers have really taken on a lot of debt in anticipation of future build outs down the road that may or may not occur. And if those payments can’t get made on the debt, that could create a cascade of defaults.
Having said that, NVIDIA’s competition is loving this. Broadcom is up today. AMD is up today. There’s this whole ecosystem of essentially scavengers waiting to feed on NVIDIA’s corpse here. I mean, there’s a lot of people who are happy today. They won’t tell you that. They won’t say that. But there’s a lot of people in the microchip industry who see this as the opportunity that they’ve been waiting for for their whole lives.
You have Elon Musk out there saying he’d be proud to hire Jensen, so it sounds like he already has a landing in Washington.
He’s got his Washington wizards to go to. That’s what SpaceX is.
Well, Elon has Terafab. He’s trying to build this chip manufacturer within the US, a partnership between SpaceX and Tesla. We’ll see how long those companies stay separate from one another. But he is looking to do that. He’s about to spend tens of billions of dollars on that project. And who better to lead it?
Well, ultimately, the determinant of whether this succeeds or fails is not the chip companies. They themselves are downstream of the frontier labs. And to the extent that the frontier labs make products that people want to use or even have to use to stay productive or don’t, the chips will be there to supply them one way or another is my feeling, I think. However, if AI disappoints as a product, if AI ends up being an expensive and broken toy, which it can sometimes seem like, then it won’t work.
Yeah. Ana, we’ve touched on this a couple of times, but I’m wondering what the high-level reaction in Washington has been to the resignation and what you see the next steps on the political side of this? I mean, we talked about hearings. Clearly, there’s still a battle being played out inside the administration. So what should we be looking at for the next few weeks?
Yeah, I mean, I think people in Washington are quite stunned at how quickly this has happened as well. Even though within the administration this discussion about this alleged Chinese spy and Jensen Huang has been going on for quite a long time, things have really happened very quickly in the last week. So obviously, with Democrats now in power in Congress, we’re certainly looking at more calls for hearings involving Jensen and NVIDIA. We’re definitely looking at the possibility of more regulation from Congress, chips bills that could impact their sales somewhat, and then also looking to see if the Trump administration has more motivation to issue these global rules, particularly ones that clamp down on data centers in Southeast Asia, which is this massive loophole that’s been created.
The administration bans chip sales directly to China, but it hasn’t banned Chinese companies from using data centers just right outside that fence in Southeast Asia. So there’s just a booming industry there. And officials right now are discussing how much to regulate that. They’ve struggled with that question for over a year now. So I’m not sure how quickly that regulation would come out, if at all. But certainly, it is top of everyone’s mind at this moment.
Stephen, you’ve covered Jensen Huang more closely than just about anyone. Would you have ever foreseen this outcome?
No. I thought he would survive the initial scandal, actually. It was only when I started to hear about more women that I was like, oh, maybe not.
There was just such a strong incentive for the company to keep him more so than almost any other company. It’s extraordinary to think of the rise and fall of this man and how rapidly it occurred. It’s like something out of Greek tragedy. He was the most powerful man in AI, one of the most powerful people in the world 30 days ago.
And now he has nothing, really. I mean, he doesn’t have nothing. He has 3 percent of NVIDIA, which is still worth a lot, but he has no executive power anymore. And Trump’s not going to return his phone calls. So it’s just such a shocking rise and fall, and it really shows you that even in the age of AI — AI is taking over everything — it’s still these kind of human foibles that determine what happens. Some things never change.
Yeah. I mean, it’s the biggest story in tech this year. It feels like an espionage novel and a family tragedy all rolled into one. But as Stephen is saying, it has this recognizable human nature element to it. It’s a classic story of hubris. A guy got insanely rich and powerful. He got famous. He started to behave like the rules didn’t apply. Ana and Ryan, is that also how you guys see what happened here?
[LAUGHS]: No, I mean, certainly here in Washington too, this is just dominating the conversation. And I agree. It’s just an incredible rise and fall, a story of somebody flying too close to the sun, and something that will have a lot of fallout here in Congress, but also within the administration, where Jensen had become this very rarefied figure who was very close to the president. There are big questions about how that relationship proceeds from here.
Yeah. Ryan, what about you?
A couple days ago, I was watching AI remakes of “The Odyssey” because Elon Musk said “The Odyssey” remake by Christopher Nolan was too woke. And I don’t know, we’re talking about Greek tragedies here, but maybe some NVIDIA chips are used to make those AI recreations of “The Odyssey.” And now we’re here, and he’s out. And maybe there’s a journey back for him. But it is surreal to watch it all play out.
I don’t think I can wrap it up better than that.
There’s this end game where Jensen, for eternity, is just tortured by satirical memes of himself, generated using his own microchips and equipment.
Wow.
I can’t tell you how fast those memes popped up yesterday. And I think they’re pretty terrible and tasteless. But they were just all over X within 30 minutes of our story going up.
And they’re all being made by the NVIDIA chips humming away in data centers in Singapore and elsewhere.
There it is.
Well, that actually is exactly and precisely a Greek tragedy.
[LAUGHS]:
This has been a really enlightening conversation, guys. I really appreciate you coming and talking me through this. This has been Ryan Mac, Ana Swanson, and Stephen Witt. And I’m Max Read, and this is “Hard Fork.”
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Next week, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and many other tech leaders will be interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin on stage at the DealBook Summit, and it’s hard to imagine they won’t be asked for their thoughts on Jensen Huang. You can watch select conversations from DealBook on November 18 for free at nytimes.com or in “The New York Times” app.
This episode of “Hard Fork” was produced by Whitney Jones and Sawyer Roque and edited by Vjeran Pavic, with additional editorial support from Brendan Klinkenberg, Lisa Tobin, and Brooke Minters. Original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Niemisto, and Dan Powell. Additional video production by Chris Schodt. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork.
Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Jessica Testa, Pui-Wing Tam, Maddy Masiello, Zach Caldwell, Luke Mailander, Thomas Trudeau, Chris Moore, Michael Cordero, and Dahlia Haddad. We love to hear from our audience. If you have any questions or comments or want to give us a piece of your mind, find us nytimes.com/hardfork, or you can email us, hardfork@nytimes.com.
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