Jason: Jensen Huang will be back at Nvidia within 12 months | E2363

Jason Calacanis (0:00)

All right, everybody, it is Friday, November 13th. There's a ton in the news. This is This Week in Startups. We have to get to work immediately and talk about the situation at Nvidia. Lon, tee it up.

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Lon Harris (0:47)

So Jensen Huang is out as CEO of Nvidia, the company he founded in 1993 and has run for its entire three-decade history. The board announced Thursday that longtime CFO Colette Kress is now interim CEO. Huang will have no further ties to the company. Director Harvey Jones, the former synopsis CEO, is the board's first ever chair. The ouster, of course, follows reports of three alleged affairs. Per Bloomberg, directors met remotely late into Wednesday night, and Huang was given no choice. But to resign, we're already starting to see some political fallout from this Jason. In Congress, Senate banking chair Tim Scott wants Huang to testify on December 3rd, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to follow on December 10th. Three House GOP chairs gave Huang until Friday evening to confirm a closed-door interview on December 1st or face a subpoena. That's probably when we'll get some of the first quotes and feedback from Huang on everything that's going on. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that in an August meeting, Huang tore into Kress, calling her, quote, a deer in the headlights and a, quote, reporting CFO rather than a strategic partner. Two more things I'll add before we get to your thoughts. Per the Wall Street Journal, the meeting was about billions of dollars in guarantees. Nvidia was negotiating for customers who couldn't afford its chips, including deals led by Huang's son-in-law, Nico Caprez. Finally, there's already a lot of discussion about this narrative about one of the women that allegedly was having an affair with Jensen being a Chinese spy. As David Sacks noted, the spy narrative appears to be collapsing. There's the AG, the CAIA, the DNI, top House Intel Democrats are all concluding she may not actually be a spy. We don't seem to have evidence of her being a spy. So Jason, I'll now throw it to you.

What are the big stories that you're following in terms of like every news item is about this? What are the stories that you're following? Do you believe that this is a story about espionage or is this just like inappropriate behavior from a boss?

Jason Calacanis (2:41)

Okay, so we're in a situation where it's a breaking new situation. In a breaking new situation, I'm going to always give a couple of disclaimers. I'm going to say allegedly, and you should keep that in mind as well, and you're going to say, we have incomplete information. Why? When you're in the commenting business like I am, people will clip something. They say, you say, oh, wow, this was stupid. What this person did was dumb. And then it turns out, oh, the story was wrong and what they did was not dumb. And then you have to deal with clips from the past. I'll leave it at that.

First off, innocent until proven guilty. We must maintain that he is innocent until proven guilty. You also need to ask yourself, qui bono, qui malo, right? Who benefits? Who gets hurt by Jensen being ousted? There was a report in The New York Times and we've talked about this. This has been a story that's been hiding in plain sight. But one has to wonder, if this story first broke in October 2025, that story mentioned all of this. Then there was a hedge fund that was shorting the stock because of this relationship with the company in Singapore. So this story has been in the public for 13 months.

And just days after the midterms and Suzy Wiles is out, Stephen Miller is in, it becomes national news. Why now?

An important question I learned as a journalist, also as a detective, why did this happen now? Who benefits? Who loses? So you have to ask yourself, why is this happening now? Obviously, it's somehow tied to the midterms, right? I think you could agree with that, Lon.

Lon Harris (4:20)

That's very reasonable. The timing of it is certainly one immediately followed the other. I mean, I would say correlation, not causation as far as we know right now. But it's a notable coincidence. Correct.