Liz’s view
How do you fire a CEO who has delivered 700,000% returns? One easy way is for the government to make you, but President Donald Trump thinks Nvidia’s Jensen Huang should keep his job. Another is for shareholders to make you, but I’d expect Nvidia’s shares to regain Monday’s losses — relatively muted by the standards of “our CEO had an affair with a Chinese spy” — by week’s end. Or at least I’d put better odds on that than the prediction markets are putting on Huang being fired, currently at 14% by the end of the year and a bit higher by the time Democrats get their gavel swinging.
Much will depend on what those Democrats and Nvidia’s board, which is running its own investigation, unearth about who knew what and when. But the bigger question is what Nvidia is worth without Huang at its helm. Is he the indispensable force behind the world’s most valuable company, as Nvidia chronicler Stephen Witt suggested Monday, or an able salesman of a sought-after product that, by now, sells itself?
Corporate chiefs today are more replaceable (and replaced) than ever, as the job has come to hinge more on handling constituencies of investors, regulators, and us in the media than on mastery of any particular corporate engine room.
