ジェンスン・フアン退任――Nvidiaのライバルは好機をつかめるか

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changed its tune and who's going to be running NVIDIA, at least for now. Let's get started. We, just for the room, we released the podcast this morning before this happened, and then it happened. So now we're talking again. I mean, who doesn't want multiple offerings from the Uncanny Valley crew, Brian? It's true. Constant updates. We're going to do an hourly podcast from now on. Just like iterative, getting real in the weeds. No, how surprised is everybody that this happened? And I guess first, if you want some setup about what happened, you can listen to our previous episode. But I guess I'll first say really quickly, Jensen Wong admitted to an affair with an alleged Chinese intelligence asset who was selling a lot of chips to. And then a report came out that he had another affair, allegedly, with someone who reported directly to him at NVIDIA. And that feels like the final straw. So we're caught up.

Are we surprised still? I mean, the first thing to say is the company does have rules on the books saying that they're, you know, you're not supposed to have a relationship with a direct report. And so when we talked and it was the Chinese spy, although that is the obviously like more scandalous thing that has happened. It also really felt to me like Jensen was going to weather that storm. But then when the second affair came out, that felt like it gave the board a really good excuse if they needed one to say like, okay, we have to stop. And I think it's fair to say here that while there is no current reporting on additional affairs, I think the concern is if two have already come out, what if more continued to become public and they need to kind of stop the bleeding? But he still fought pretty hard to retain his role, right? I don't think the board wanted him to resign.

I don't think Jensen wanted to resign. I think that their backs were completely against the wall on this one. Like, the company has already been through an incredibly embarrassing scandal that it is, you know, that will drag out for the next many months as Jensen is dragged before the Senate and has to answer to people who have serious concerns about his advocacy for China. and where NVIDIA chips have been going and all of that. Now there's a second affair again with a direct report. And, you know, I think that the situation became very, very quickly untenable for everyone involved. Absolutely. And now NVIDIA has a new CEO in the name of CFO Colette Kress. Tell me about her. Interim. So, yeah, she'll be there for the time being. But she's been at NVIDIA for a long time. She's been there since 2013, which means that she's worked closely with Jensen since before the company was the darling of the AI world, back when it was a graphics processor for a gaming laptops company.

She was at Cisco and Microsoft before that. She's a real industry veteran. I think my understanding is she's really a classic CFO. Like, I don't know if she's a long-term visionary leader of this company, but she knows NVIDIA inside and out. And I think if you're looking for stability and you're looking for someone who's not going to create new drama and who's not going to have a scandal, that seems like she really fits that bill. Yeah, I think what they need right now is stability. Like you said, they need someone to kind of take the reins. They don't want anything else dramatic to happen to the company. And of course, they're going to, you know, immediately kick off a search for a new visionary leader, which, as we said in the last episode, there's not an obvious successor here. They've got to find someone who has incredible technical prowess, who has a real vision for where the AI industry is going, and who will be able to learn NVIDIA's business. I think it's doubtful that person – well, actually, I really should have learned from this experience that I shouldn't have hot takes.

I was going to say, I don't think the person is going to come from NVIDIA internally, but what do we know at this point? It could be anything. So, yeah, Colette will take the reins for the moment, and the company needs to kind of weather the storm and come out the other side. And I think she does, as you might have guessed, she's going to be operating the business the way Jensen had, at least in terms of advocating for closer collaboration with China and the sort of the business lines that NVIDIA has been going down, leaning more into CPUs recently, open source. I don think you going to expect anything other than business as usual And when you have her in there you know if you talked before China is so important to NVIDIA future Jensen Long had lost all credibility on that point So, you know, having someone in there who can make the case that, hey, we should have a better relationship with China. We should be able to sell more to China who is not, you know, compromised in the way that Jensen has been. That's an upside.

I mean, it's a lot of downside for NVIDIA that Jensen's gone, but at least they can come into these conversations without that baggage. I think that's the main point here. And perhaps even right the ship even slightly. I mean, with news of Jensen's departure, NVIDIA's stock plunged, like absolutely plunged. But one of Cress's big roles as CFO was communicating with Wall Street. So I'm assuming that there's like a world where this could be slightly reassuring to investors, perhaps? I think so. The thing about the market, I guess, is that everything's always baked in, right? Like the market has already accounted for so much. So it did take a big plunge. I think as we're recording this, if it had been stabilized in a little bit, I shouldn't say that because by the time this is out, it's going to go wildly in one direction or another. It means it's time for another emergency pod. We're just going to keep this going all day. We're going to have to do another emergency pod. Exactly. All day. Get ready, folks. We have been talking a lot, though, about how interconnected not just the AI industry is, but the entire U.S. economy, how tied up it is with just a few companies. And NVIDIA really is – it's kind of NVIDIA and anthropic.

So much of this is riding on. And so I think we have yet to see what the ramifications of this will be if NVIDIA is able, like we said, to weather the storm, continue growing and leading the AI boom. It has been, perhaps it won't be dire, but so much of what has happened already has been completely unexpected for everyone involved. So that I think there's a lot of uncertainty and instability that we still have yet to account for. So from the politics side, I can see this very much impacting the White House's relationship with AI related firms. I can just see this becoming a thing and, you know, we're going to continue reporting this out. But Wired is keeping a very close eye on what this means for these relationships. Talk to me from like the Silicon Valley side. What is going to get impacted here? Is it crazy to say that Anthropics IPO could get like tossed up in the storm? What are we really looking at? No, so here's my thing. I think I'm not sure about the Anthropoc IPO.

I think, again, everything's priced in, and I think they're going to do just fine. It'll still be worth whether it's $1.2 trillion or $1.4 trillion or whatever. It's going to be a huge IPO, one of the biggest history, regardless of this. What I'm interested in is right now people don't have many alternatives. Even if you wanted to separate yourself from NVIDIA because of this scandal for some reason, you're not going to find something better out there for the most part. Some other companies have had some gains lately. So in the short term, I don't know. I don't think that this maybe changes that much. This will be one of the takes, much like Zoe writes her takes, I'm going to regret saying this. I think short term it doesn't do that much. I think longer term, though, we've already seen a lot of companies investing in making their own silicon and making their own chips and sort of finding ways to optimize their own sort of hardware stack against their software. So I think of it the way that after everyone saw Apple making its own processors and having huge efficiency gains on the iPhone,

companies started doing that within the smartphone world. Everyone has their own sort of processor in the smartphone world. I think that's happening increasingly in the AI world, and I think that's long-term a threat not to the industry but to NVIDIA itself. It comes at a time when other companies are really trying to find a path to do this without relying so much on NVIDIA, and this is only going to accelerate that process. Yeah, I mean, but that was true regardless. Like, this isn't a software moment. Like, I think when Elon Musk took over X and suddenly people were fleeing the platform, you saw Meta kind of seize its moment and launch threads in, you know, a few short months. You can't really do that with GPUs. Like, other companies have been trying to compete with NVIDIA for years, and that competition has only heated up as the AI industry has become more and more powerful and there's more and more money to be had. But this is some of the most complex technology on the planet. And so you cannot just see an opportunity and turn it around really, really fast. It takes years of research and manufacturing.

And so I think there already was this opportunity for other companies to come in and try and grab some of NVIDIA's market share. And I'm sure they will try and capitalize on the moment, but it's not going to be as easy as other examples we've seen in recent history. Oh, for sure. But I think it's more like if you're open AI and you're like, I've been dabbling with making my own chips, right? I think then you go from dabbling to saying, oh, maybe there's more urgency here and I need to put more behind that. So I think I agree with you 100%. I just think it maybe accelerates and changes the way some people are thinking about how they go forward. Yeah, and the people that are already doing it, I mean, like, is Lisa Su from AMD doing a victory lap right now? I assume that she's ordered balloons. Isn't Jensen like her cousin or something? That's correct. Family drama. Family drama. That makes it even better. Great Thanksgiving coming up. Has this happened before, you guys? I mean, I know that CEOs have stepped down over, in some ways, less.

The spy of it all makes it extra fun here. Have we built the entire U.S. economy around the very horny behavior of a very powerful man? I don't know if we built it around. Yes. I asking the questions our listeners want to know I would tweak the sentence We built the economy around the behavior of a horny man not around the horny behavior of a man Does that make sense Wow. Absolutely. All right. Good editing. Good editing. I'm just trying to diagram that sentence a little bit out. I want to hear what Zoe has to say about this, too. I think we talked about this a little bit yesterday where, yes, So much of the economy relies on too few companies right now, NVIDIA being the main sort of bulwark there. But also so interesting, I think we wouldn't have seen this at other companies in that other tech companies are set up where their CEOs are untouchable and Jensen is not.

So Jensen owns 3.5% or so of NVIDIA. The board can do this. If Mark Zuckerberg could do anything, sort of like getting arrested, and still be in charge of meta. There's just no recourse. Elon will be in charge of his companies for as long as he wants. So I think the fact that there was even an opportunity for accountability here is in and of itself interesting in a way that's sad. You know what I mean? There could be accountability everywhere, but that's not how these companies are set up. And perhaps that's why it's so shocking. We never get to see accountability in this manner and speed. Yeah, I feel like there are examples of kind of really unexpected departures or departures that were expected but still came as a real shock. Like even Steve Jobs, which it was known that he was very ill for a long time, but he was so synonymous with Apple and Apple's success before his death. And yet he had this really solid bench of potential executives who could come in and take his place.

Maybe not completely, maybe not with the total vision, but like Apple would and did. continue to grow. I think the moment that I think of more right now is Sam Altman's very brief and dramatic ouster from OpenAI, because that one, like this, no one really saw coming. It was such a shock. It was so unexpected. You know, there were a lot of questions as to why. But of course, that took place over the course of essentially a single weekend where the board pushed him out. there were all of these background negotiations. And then ultimately, he was able to come back and resume his role as CEO. How long did that take? How long did writing that ship take? Are the stakes similar or different here? Oh my gosh. Is OpenAI's ship righted? I think is the... That's a great question. Sam Altman was able to come back. Obviously, he was able to kind of remake the board with

friendlier people. But I think that Anthropic has really continued to be pretty ascendant and pretty focused in the wake of that, what employees call the blip when Sam Altman left. Whereas OpenAI, it felt like has continued to spin out, have drama after drama and be a little less focused in comparison. I think NVIDIA overall is a much more disciplined company. It's not like DAI Labs, it has a typical corporate structure. It has very defined goals. It's been around for a lot longer. And so I think, you know, these are different and very significant ways. Although Zoe, what they didn't have was a succession plan, right? Like I think Jensen pointedly, as of you did interviews within the last few weeks or month where he was like, I'm going to be here for decades. I don't really need to have, like sort of proudly not worried about a special plan and a structure that's so flat.

We've talked about this before, too, but he had 60 direct reports all up to him. So I think it is, you know, a little irresponsible, maybe. Here we go. I think he probably had a fiduciary responsibility to share others to think a little bit harder about what happens if I'm not here. I think that there is sort of this sense of I'm the only person who can do this. I'll be here forever. that, and I see how that you kind of need to have that attitude to be the CEO of the biggest company in the world or one of the biggest companies in the world. But the backside of that is we're going to find out if that's true really soon. No, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, he's been leading this company for 30 years. And, you know, it seems like while we're not sure what the board knew when, like certainly within NVIDIA, there were whispers about these things happening. And like we talked about in the last episode, Jensen had an affair with a woman, a former TV journalist, who was running basically a smuggling operation that by all accounts, he should have known about.

Allegedly. He should have known exactly what was going on there. And so I think if you have enough hubris that you can make those decisions and still feel completely untouchable, then, you know, it makes sense in that kind of twisted logic that you would also think like, I don't need a successor because I'm untouchable. And in fact, you know, that has proved to not be the case. one thing we've been seeing in the lead up to this was silicon valley really vocally defending jensen wong and saying it's one mistake it's no big deal and then saying it's two mistakes what's the problem and even this morning after the news happened we're still seeing people say he's he's an irreplaceable icon it's sort of like they're trying to take sort of a you have to separate the artist from the art kind of argument, but for CEOs, um, does that surprise anybody that they still hanging onto this And like I guess I know how I feel Is that a fair argument Can you separate the artist from the art in a Silicon Valley big tech CEO context Does that make any sense whatsoever

I mean, this is an area that Silicon Valley is very sensitive about. Like, it's such a founder oriented environment here. And I think that Jensen is the founder of this business. He built this company from the ground up. He started it at like a Denny 30 years ago. So, yeah, I think there is a lot of loyalty, not just to him, but to the idea that a founder is a unique type of person and that they bring something to the table that no one else can replace. I had conversations with people that really made me laugh where, you know, they would say like, well, Jensen's irreplaceable. And his biggest mistake was like admitting the affair in writing. And I was like, well, I do feel like the biggest mistake was having a relationship with a Chinese spy, perhaps. But like, yeah, I hear you. I also wonder how much this is, I don't know, even slightly like a little bit of lip service. On the D.C. side, Trump has been voraciously defending Jensen.

And yet we also know that there's machinations behind the scenes to figure out some sort of accountability measure in some kind. Right. whether that's congressional hearings or other things that could be coming down the pipeline. So two things can be true at once. It's like what Brian said earlier. Everyone's saying, like, oh, no, Jensen. And yet they're all ready to start building their own chips or figuring out how to diversify that pool. And the interesting thing about, you know, a lot of these relationships is they are very transactional. I don't know if we're going to continue to see the types of defenses that we have seen so far. But like this is a moment, I mean, the China Hawks, like this is their time. I feel like it's not conspiratorial to say like, you know, in some ways they orchestrated this moment insofar as they were instrumental in like getting the information out there. And so I think they're going to, I would assume, be using this moment to, you know, try and turn Trump more toward their side, to be more anti-China, to not have as many trade loopholes or what have you.

And Jensen has been the voice against that and many times the only voice against that in the room. So I'm really curious to see how this plays out. And Zoe, you've got your kids guesting on the pod, which is adorable. And again, another thing that I think should become a fixture. Thank you for doing this when you've got your hands full. Oh, my gosh. They would love it. Yeah, they're in the laundry room right now watching Unicorn Academy. So this is honestly the best morning they've ever had in their lives. Love that for them. Love it for us. All right. Well, good luck to CollectCress. Good luck to your 401k, everybody. Thank you all for jumping on this emergency podcast. Thank you. Thanks, all. That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Pran Vandy, who's also our New York studio engineer. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles and Daniel Roman. Kate Osborne is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is where it's global editorial director.

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