Jensen Walks
Jensen Huang gave back the presidency, the CEO job and his board seat on the same night his board appointed its first chairman.
Hi, AI Enthusiasts!
Welcome back to our Friday Deep Dive.
On Wednesday night a board that had gone thirty-three years without a chairman appointed one, and accepted the resignation of the founder who had run the company since 1993. Both decisions sit in the same filing, in consecutive paragraphs. Nvidia did not say why. In 1985 Apple took the Macintosh away from Steve Jobs and left him chairman, and he sat in that chair for four months before he quit. Nvidia left Jensen Huang nothing at all. He handed back the presidency, the chief executive job and the board seat on a single page, and by Thursday morning the company had a finance chief doing two jobs and a chairman it had never needed before.
That is not how a man leaves when the board has to vote him out. That is how a man leaves when he has decided the room is no longer his.