The indispensable man
While he’s never been as flamboyant or as fearsome as other celebrity CEOs, and until now had seemed to be scandal-free, few CEOs have been as successful or as powerful as Jensen Huang over the past few years. As a PC gamer myself, I’ve been a Nvidia guy since 1999, when I got an Alienware computer packing a Riva TNT2 card. They were always just a gaming hardware company as far as I knew, and even years into the AI boom I kept thinking “the graphics card company?” Frankly, I enjoyed going days, weeks, and even months without thinking of Jensen Huang.
At some point the company itself became inescapable, as did their CEO with his fine leather jackets. Even though I’ve been skeptical — that’s putting it mildly — of AI, Jensen Huang at least seemed somewhat understandable. His was the company selling the shovels during the gold rush. His was the one company out of all of them that was booking actual revenue. And, again, unlike your Musks and your, well, mostly your Musks, he scanned more or less like a normal guy.
He probably was a normal guy once, even for longer than most in his position would have been. But nobody becomes a centibillionaire and stays normal. Nobody piles up this much money without losing their connection to reality. Nobody has this many people kissing their ass 24/7 before they start believing it.
Wouldn’t you know it, even level-headed, mild-mannered Jensen Huang started saying some truly deranged and baffling shit. This is the guy who said he doesn’t know his own home address. The guy who said every employee should be given a six-figure token budget. The guy who has said, more than once, that AGI is here. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was merely trying to keep the train rolling, but now I have to wonder if he actually believed it.
There was an episode of Seinfeld that guest-starred NY Mets great Keith Hernandez, who would remind himself whenever doubt and uncertainty began to creep in that “I’m Keith Hernandez.” At some point, Jensen reached his “I’m Keith Hernandez” stage. Who knows exactly when, but certainly it was before he began an illicit, years-long affair with a Chinese intelligence agent. Why shouldn’t I go upstairs with this hot babe who used to work for Chinese state media? I’m Keith Hernandez!
Given the subsequent news of a different affair with an executive at his own company, one has to think that Jensen’s cavorting has more or less been an open secret, one that everybody was fine with as long as they were making money. But as often happens with these situations, nobody cared until, suddenly, everybody did. (See also: Michael Jackson, Russell Brand, Harvey Weinstein, etc. etc. etc.)
The important thing about both of the affairs we know about is not that Jensen has been unfaithful to his wife. Although I doubt it, for all we know they had an open relationship or at least an “understanding.” The truly catastrophic errors in judgment are the relative positions of both of his paramours. Sleeping with someone who reports directly to you at work is wildly unethical at best, and predatory at worst. Sleeping with a foreign spy who is manipulating you to circumvent trade laws is a crime. This guy is a huge idiot.
And yet even now, with news of his resignation, he’s still being treated as the indispensable man. His business success is undeniable, but is he the only man on planet earth who could have achieved what he has? Come on. As I write this, Nvidia’s stock is down 11% on the news. Think about it: a CEO who now has admitted to what are, again, catastrophic errors in judgment, is still considered so vital to the company’s success that investors are freaking out.
Nvidia doesn’t even have a succession plan! Jensen is so indispensable that they can’t even contemplate life without him. Usually you have to go to Turkmenistan for thinking that blinkered. But now the indispensable man has been dispensed with.
He’s probably leaving forlorn voice mails on Alice Huang’s phone. Why isn’t she calling him back?