Since 2024, Jensen Huang has been the closest thing the tech industry has to a pop star, a chip executive whose fans chant his name, buy knockoffs of his leather jacket and wait outside the restaurants where he eats.
Mark Zuckerberg summed up the phenomenon in a 2024 Instagram reply, calling the Nvidia CEO “Taylor Swift, but for tech.”
In Taiwan, where Huang was born, local media coined “Jensanity” for the crowds that follow him from his hotel to his hair salon to dinner, and during Computex that year he autographed a fan’s top while she was wearing it. Online sellers list lookalike jackets under his name and photo. Huang has played along for years, once introducing himself in a 2016 Reddit AMA as “the guy in the leather jacket who repeats things three times.”
The celebrity ran into a far less flattering story on Sunday, when Huang told Nvidia employees in a memo that he’d had an extramarital affair. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did,” he wrote, without naming the other person.
Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation the same day “in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.” The New York Times and the Financial Times reported that U.S. officials believed a businesswoman whose company bought Nvidia chips was working for Chinese intelligence and had a romantic relationship with Huang. Beijing has denied any spy plot, and no one has been charged. The board said it has “no reason to believe” national security or company secrets were compromised and that it retains “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team.”
Investors still knocked roughly $192 billion off Nvidia’s market value on Monday, driving shares down as much as 8.8% in early trading before they closed about 4.3% lower on a day the broader market rallied.
The size of that drop comes down to how much of Nvidia runs through one person. The company made up nearly 7% of the S&P 500 at Friday’s close, by Yahoo Finance’s math, and Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has led it ever since, has no named successor. He’s the keynote, the product launch, the face on fan T-shirts and the company’s main voice in Washington, which means his private life has become shareholders’ business. Dan Ives of Yorkville & Ives called it “a black eye moment for Jensen.”
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Huang went from fan favorite to the main character on X within hours, and many of the jokes were really about the stock. Users dropped him into recreations of the Coldplay kiss-cam moment, made AI videos and turned espionage into a status joke, with one post declaring, “If you don’t have a Chinese honey trap set up for you, you haven’t made it in the tech world.”
Support from the top came quickly. President Donald Trump called Huang “an honorable guy,” and Elon Musk backed him staying on as CEO. Republican lawmakers in the House have asked him to testify about the matter on Nov. 18.
The board hasn’t said how long its review will take or how far it will reach. In the meantime, an Nvidia spokesperson said Huang “is committed to continuing to lead NVIDIA as CEO without interruption,” which keeps the most famous face in AI on every stage while the investigation runs.
