Is Nvidia cooked without Jensen Huang?

Jensen Huang was larger than life at Nvidia. He was the AI boom’s most recognizable evangelist, the chip maker’s chief visionary and dealmaker, and the force behind Nvidia’s ascent to the most valuable company on the planet.

A week ago, Huang admitted to an affair and apologized to his family. Nvidia disclosed it was investigating whether he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. And then The New York Times reported a second affair, this one with an Nvidia executive who was one of Huang’s direct reports. He resigned on Thursday.

Huang’s abrupt downfall is a stress test of founder worship. The market put a price on it: Nvidia’s market cap tumbled $573 billion last week, more than all but 18 companies in the entire S&P 500.

“It’s like the Bulls without Jordan,” author Stephen Witt, who wrote a biography on Huang, said on CNBC. “I don’t know how they are going to replace this guy.”

That is the essence of key-man risk, as my colleagues Sarah E. Needleman and Tim Paradis reported. When one leader is so closely identified with the strategy, the products, and the culture, their departure can create a vacuum that no org chart (let alone one with 60 direct reports to the CEO) can immediately fill.

Much of Silicon Valley came to Huang’s defense in recent days. Sarah Guo, a venture capitalist, called him “one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs of all time.” Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire said Huang’s “contributions to American innovation and AI leadership cannot be overstated.”

For sure, there are several examples of seemingly irreplaceable CEOs Steve Jobs at Apple and Travis Kalanick at Uber whose companies still thrived under new leadership.

And even some of Huang’s biggest proponents aren’t standing by him. “No one was a bigger defender of Jensen than I was but there are rules about sex with subordinates,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said on X. Just because someone is brilliant doesn’t mean he can do what he wants.

If it can’t? Dick Costolo, the former Twitter CEO, floated an idea. Prediction: 3-4 years from now, [Nvidia] will miss a quarter or two, and they will bring Jensen back to run the company, he said.

“Like fame, everybody is outraged for 15 minutes, and there is nothing Americans love more than the comeback story.”