Nvidia Needs Jensen Huang, but Its Governance Must Catch Up

By Daniel Okafor

Nvidia’s stock fell 16% in the last week and 24% in the last month, according to the Outside the Box opinion column examining an alleged spy scandal involving CEO Jensen Huang.

The column put Nvidia’s post-decline valuation at roughly $4 trillion. It said the chipmaker still represented about 6.5% of the S&P 500 and 13% of the Nasdaq-100. Every major index was down, according to the columnist, and Nvidia served as the anchor.

Huang co-founded and runs Nvidia, which supplies the hardware behind artificial intelligence. The column casts him as the public face of the largest engine in the economy and the central risk in the company’s leadership structure.

Outside the Box captures that dependency in seven words: “Nvidia is Huang and Huang is Nvidia.” The source does not argue that Huang should leave. It argues that Nvidia must separate his indispensability from a lack of governance.

How indispensable is Jensen Huang?

The column points readers to Steven Witt’s biography of Huang, The Thinking Machine, for a blunt assessment of his importance. “AI probably doesn’t happen, at least as fast or effectively as it’s been happening, without this guy,” the column said. It compares Huang’s forced departure to removing Thomas Edison from the electricity project.

Investors face a harder problem: Nvidia has no obvious successor to Huang. Unlike Apple, which telegraphed succession and gave markets time to absorb the shift from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook to John Ternus, Nvidia has not showcased its leadership team.

The columnist concedes that Nvidia may have strong executives, but says Huang has remained front and center. It says no succession plan exists beyond one that presumably began a week ago.

The column invokes Bill Clinton, Kristi Noem, Steve Easterbrook and Andy Byron as shorthand for powerful leaders who place themselves above ordinary rules. The examples frame the governance concern surrounding Huang rather than establish separate findings about those individuals.

The stakes extend beyond succession because Nvidia plays a central role in the economy and has a revenue-sharing agreement with the U.S. government tied to export licenses. The columnist therefore says investors are exposed to whether Huang survives the scandal.

What is pressuring Nvidia beyond Huang?

The columnist had warned in August that Nvidia was too big and now said the warning had proved correct. Even before Huang faced allegations of fraternizing with “the enemy,” the column said Nvidia was overvalued.

The company’s financing arrangements are propping up many AI platforms, effectively making Nvidia a lender to its customers, according to the column. The valuation decline did not remove that exposure.

Export policy adds another risk. The column flags tougher export rules that could make Nvidia chips harder to sell to China, alongside concerns about what Huang discusses with Chinese counterparts.

In August, the columnist cited Cloud Security Alliance research that identified Nvidia’s market dominance as a major part of an overall AI-industry systemic security threat. The research advised companies to find weak points and fix them before something breaks. The column says investigations followed, and Nvidia hired a former prosecutor to investigate the Jensen Huang spy scandal.

What governance changes would protect investors?

The columnist recommends keeping Huang in place but adding oversight because his departure could harm prosperity and national security. Since AI drives the U.S. economy, the argument runs, Huang cannot simply exit.

The board should act immediately, not next year. Its prescribed reforms are straightforward:

• Appoint an independent chair.
• Publish a succession plan.
• Build an executive bench that investors can name.

If Huang stays, he will have to share the stage. That means replacing an undefined succession arrangement with named executives, a public process and a chair able to oversee the founder and chief executive.

Washington also has a role, though the column rejects a public “perp walk.” Because the government shares chip-export revenue, it is entitled to know who Huang talks to and what gets shared. It should handle the matter quietly and seriously as national-security work, without turning it into a spectacle that hurts 401(k) portfolios.

Huang must stop being the whole show, the column argues. The leather-jacket keynotes made Nvidia a legend, but they also made it fragile. A company this central to the economy cannot hinge on one man’s personal or professional judgment.

Does any of this make Nvidia cheap?

None of the proposed governance changes makes Nvidia cheap or fixes the concentration problem, according to the column. Even if Huang survives, an index fund remains a bet on one company and the man running it. That was true before the scandal, and the columnist says it will remain true afterward.

The proposed fix is procedural rather than financial: retain Huang, impose guardrails and build the bench. The next measurable test for investors is whether Nvidia can name an independent chair and a credible executive bench while export rules and the government revenue arrangement remain unsettled.