Nvidia's board is reportedly weighing whether to remove CEO Jensen Huang, and two of tech's louder voices have picked sides in public before any decision has landed.
The board is said to have met on November 11 after Huang admitted to an affair and suspicions of a second came to light. Allegations of a second affair, this one with an Nvidia executive, have since deepened the doubt over his future. No decision has been announced. Nvidia's share price has slid since the first allegations, and the stock was down 6.3% in premarket trading on November 12.
On X, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney opened with "Save Jensen." He called an ouster "an Apple firing Steve Jobs level of idiocy" and "a grievous harm to the United States of America." He described Huang as "the visionary driver of the future of tech from the gaming GPU era to CUDA to AI supercomputers." CUDA is Nvidia's software layer that lets developers run general-purpose code on its chips, and it is a large part of why those chips dominate AI work.
Elon Musk, replying to an X user who asked him to hire Huang, wrote: "That would be an honor." The thread then filled with AI-generated images of a Huang and Musk partnership.
Neither man sits on Nvidia's board, and Sweeney's case rests entirely on Huang's value to the company and the industry. It does not address the allegations the directors are reportedly weighing. Musk's reply reads as a quip more than an offer.
Sweeney's analogy also cuts both ways. Apple did push Jobs out in 1985, and brought him back in 1997. Boards that part with a founder-era leader can reverse course, but the Apple case shows how long that took.