Jensen Huang's Ouster: Inside Nvidia's Governance Failure

Nvidia's board nearly declined to act against Jensen Huang and moved only after general counsel Tim Teter insisted, according to reporting by The Information. The detail is the sharpest yet in a scandal that has already claimed the company's founder-CEO and damaged several reputations across two coasts.

The affair count was the proximate problem. Huang told senior executives at Nvidia that he had had a single affair, with Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed, a major Nvidia customer. That account was false. He reportedly had at least two additional affairs, one of them with a direct report. Lying to your own executives is a dismissal offense at most public companies. At Nvidia, it took a lawyer's intervention to reach the obvious conclusion.

Why did the board hesitate?

The composition of the board answers much of that question. It is dominated by people who have known Huang for decades, and the company operated without a board chair. A body of longtime friends, with no independent chair, is not built to judge the founder. That structure is now on display for every governance committee in the industry to study.

Washington supplied the rest of the pressure. Huang's political friendships proved insufficient, and several reports suggest factions within Trump-led Washington actively worked against him. Many of the reporters driving the story are based in Washington rather than San Francisco. Silicon Valley is meanwhile recalibrating toward the ascendant left — Alex Karp, for one, is a Democrat again, as Politico noted on November 11.

The espionage angle deserves colder scrutiny. Some U.S. authorities have described the former Megaspeed executive as a spy. More recent reporting, including from CNN on November 12, casts doubt on that claim. The truth may matter less than the utility of the accusation, which served as a convenient weapon against Huang.

Who still supports Huang?

A sizable base in Silicon Valley does. Venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and Ron Conway rushed to his defense, as did Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. Within Nvidia, Huang retains a legion of allies. On Thursday evening, an employee petition circulated online advocating his reinstatement, according to Wired.

That loyalty may age badly. Congressional investigations loom, and Huang has agreed to testify before Thanksgiving. Reports on how he actually ran Nvidia already describe a leader comfortable steamrolling more cautious executives. Interim CEO Colette Kress has spent her early tenure, per The Information, trying to tame the company's riskiest bets — an implicit verdict on the bets themselves.

The media does not escape judgment either. Huang's bullying tendencies went undercovered for years, first because Nvidia was too complex to cover well, and later because Huang presented himself as the articulate nerd-poster-boy of the AI age. The question of who else currently escapes close coverage as the technology landscape widens is left hanging, and it should be.

What does the biographer say?

Stephen Witt, author of the 2025 Huang biography "The Thinking Machine," is blunt. In a November 12 essay for The New York Times, he describes Huang as a person energized "by arrogance and toxic self-regard." Witt also documents the industry's willful blindness. Nvidia's early-1990s corporate mascot was Dawn, described as an "underdressed, large-breasted C.G.I. pixie," quietly memory-holed in 2020 around the time Huang began talking about empowering women at the company.

Witt, contemplating a return to his subject, offered a sequel title: "The What-Were-You-Thinking?! Machine." The joke lands because the blindness was collective. Nvidia's board, its investors and its press corps all saw what they preferred to see.

Separately, The Information reports that the Commerce Department is finalizing its long-awaited AI remote access rule, and that Alice Huang's companies invested in DeepSeek, which builds chips promising competition with Nvidia's. The commercial fallout from Huang's departure will therefore unfold against an already shifting competitive backdrop, with congressional testimony before Thanksgiving likely to set its tone.

By Nathan Brooks