Jensen Huang and the end of the unchecked CEO
Today, let’s look at the fallout of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
Key points
- President Trump told reporters Monday that he believed Jensen Huang’s account and said he did not recall receiving a briefing warning him about Mr.
- But the era of the unchecked CEO may be ending with him.
- Done badly, you get the debacle at HP, which in 2010 fired CEO Mark Hurd over a close personal relationship with a contractor—and falsified expense reports related to it—only to reach for outsider Leo Apotheker, who lasted less than a year.
There’s much to admire about Jensen Huang, from his humble beginnings to his energetic keynotes, cool leather jacket and patina of common sense in a world where his peers can come off as a little odd.
(Huang is a dual citizen of Taiwan and the U.S.) It also includes board members who expressed “confidence in Jensen” when announcing their independent review.
Additional details
- Did Huang ever wonder how a former TV journalist in Beijing suddenly became managing director of an obscure little cloud company that also suddenly had the means to buy millions of dollars of sophisticated Nvidia chips?
- The cautionary tale starts with the CEO, a former dishwasher at Denny’s who created one of the most consequential and valuable technologies in history, only to tarnish that legacy with a colossal failure of judgment that put his company, career, and possibly the security of both his countries at risk.
- Done well, you get a board director like former Johnson & Johnson CEO Jim Burke, who, as an independent director at IBM, was key in replacing failing CEO John Akers with Lou Gerstner in 1993.
- I was chatting with Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld yesterday, who described it as a “board imbued with idolatry” that appears to have no Plan B should Huang be judged unfit to lead.
- (Exhibit A: Elizabeth Holmes.) Huang’s so-called founder mode, with 60 direct reports and no 1:1 meetings, also creates a structure that makes him hard to replace.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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