The Saga of Jensen Huang is no ballad, but it will probably be sung and talked about in tech circles for decades (until superseded by the next scandal).
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang "stepped down" a couple of days ago, after damaging allegations of an extramarital affair with Chinese "honeypot" and suspected spy Alice Huang (no relation, thankfully) came to light, closely followed by revelations of a second affair with Kimberley Powell, the company's vice president of health care. CFO Colette Kress has been appointed as interim CEO and, while in a normal company, she would be considered a good and capable leader, stepping into Huang's shoes is a mighty task, and it is just assumed that Ms. Kress is not up to it, so the comapny is searching for a suitably high-powered and high-profile successor to Huang.
Good luck with that. Jensen Huang is the founder and only CEO Nvidia has had, and is the closest thing to a tech rock star we have. He makes Elon Musk look like the unlovable nerd he really is. Huang rocks his signature black leather jackets, signs autographs at public appearances, and hob-nobs with the likes of Donald Trump and other high-level politicians and celebrities. He is revered in tech and financial circles as near-divine, having grown his company from a lowly producer of graphics chips for video games in the early 90s to the world's most valuable (or now second most valuable) enterprise, worth $4 trillion, in short order.
Nvidia is regularly called the engine behind the AI boom - whatever you might think of that - by virtue of its hardware and software being the foundational infrastructire that powers AI training and deployment which requires crunching vast quantities of data at once. Nvidia chips are now the standard and indispensible environment for AI development, and almost every major AI lab relies on Nvidia hardware (chips) and software to train and run their models.
By retaining control of the company from start to finish and ruling it with a rod of iron, Huang has also made himself indispensible. As the media gushes that "Jensen Huang IS Nvidia!", and categorically denying that anyone else could possibly run the company, the vacuum at the top is palpable. You have to feel kind of sorry for Colette Kress.
What it has really brought home, though, is the over-reliance on key founder figures and the lack of succession planning. Huang is 63 years old, so not old old, but headed for retirement age. Did the board of directors think he would live forever? He could have been knocked down by a bus on any given day, even if a major sex scandal didn't cut short his tenure first. Were they just too scared, or too star-struck to even suggest it?
Nvidia would not be the first big company to mess up its succession plan - Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola, Subway, Uber and Starbucks are just recently examples that botched their transitions. But Nvidia is not just a big company, it's a monster.
In true nepotist style, not unlike a certain North Korean dictator, Huang appointed a daughter (Madison) to a position as senior director marketing in the company, a son (Spencer) to director of product for robotics, and a son-in-law (Nico Caprez) to VP in the AI infrastructure group. But there is no suggestion that any of these were expected to one day take over the big seat.
All of this also begs the question of what measures other tech behemoths like Tesla, Meta, and OpenAI - all run by charismatic semi-mythical founder figures - have taken to ensure their smooth succession. Because Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are not immortal either, even if they like to think so.
Jensen Huang is not actually indispensible and irreplaceable; that's just media hype. The comapny will go on. It has a huge team of strong, smart, capable people. But Huang certainly hasn't made it any easier by playing the rockstar figurehead consummate tech bro type. Drive is good; hubris not so much.
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