A public petition to reinstate Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO has passed 130,000 signatures, and Elon Musk says he signed it. No one can say how many of those signers are real.
Musk wrote on X on November 13 that he was signing a petition to bring Huang back, without saying which one. At least one large petition is circulating, with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, shareholders, partners and current and former Nvidia staff supposedly among the names. The signatories are apparently unverified. Counts also vary: one letter had more than 91,000 signatures at the time of writing, while the larger petition is past 130,000. The "Stand with Jensen" letter argues that "suspicion or association alone is not a sufficient basis for ending Jensen's leadership."
The push is not unanimous inside the company. Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia's vice president for applied deep learning, said on X that a letter purportedly circulating at Nvidia is fake and that he would not sign it even if it were real. He said he supports the board and interim CEO Colette Kress. Thousands of employees have reportedly called for Huang's return on an internal forum.
The backdrop is a collapse that took under two weeks. It began with U.S. intelligence sources alleging that Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, passed information to Chinese intelligence. Reports of an affair with her followed, then a second alleged affair with an Nvidia executive. The board, Congress and the FBI are all investigating. Nvidia announced Huang's resignation hours after Musk posted that hiring him would be an honor.
That last detail matters for how to read Musk's signature. He is not a neutral voice, and a petition with no identity checks is a mood, not a mechanism. The comparison people will reach for is OpenAI's 2023 reversal on Sam Altman, but that came from a staff revolt over a board decision. Here the board's decision sits alongside federal inquiries, and the company is also facing allegations about the smuggling of up to 1.5 million GPUs.
The board is reportedly weighing outside candidates, including Arm CEO Rene Haas and Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji. Kress's first test comes on November 17, when she reports third-quarter results as CEO.