Even Our Heroes Are Human

How could he do this? That was my first reaction to Jensen Huang’s admission. In an email to Nvidia employees on Sunday, he wrote, “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children.” Four days later, he resigned as CEO of the company he co-founded 33 years ago and gave up his seat on its board. I’ve been covering technology long enough to know some of the questions I should ask when a founder of his stature steps down. I’ve also been around long enough that I ought to take a second look at the first question that came to mind.

There are good reasons Nvidia’s board had to get involved. Independent directors are investigating reports that Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. When the board announced the inquiry, it said it had no reason to believe U.S. national security or company secrets had been compromised. The New York Times subsequently reported a second relationship, with a senior Nvidia executive who reported to Huang. Anyone who has ever worked for somebody else understands the problem that would present. How freely can an employee say no to the person who runs the company? Employees and shareholders are entitled to answers about how Huang exercised the authority they entrusted to him.

Then there’s the question facing just about everyone with money riding on the AI buildout. If you run a neocloud, one of the specialized cloud providers that rents out computing power for AI, you may have counted on Nvidia for considerably more than a shipment of GPUs. Look at CoreWeave. Nvidia invested $2 billion in its stock. Under a separate agreement with an initial value of $6.3 billion, Nvidia agreed to purchase certain computing capacity CoreWeave couldn’t sell to other customers. Imagine walking into a bank to finance a data center with that agreement in your pocket. Now imagine walking in to finance the next one, and the banker asks if Nvidia is prepared to do it again.

Colette Kress, Nvidia’s longtime CFO and now its interim CEO, knows exactly what those commitments cost and what Nvidia stands to gain from them. Before Huang’s resignation, Jake Behan of Direxion told Reuters that investors would apply a discount to Nvidia until they knew who would run it and how much its strategy would change. I’d watch what happens to the next project that needs Nvidia’s help getting financed. Kress could decide the economics justify another deal on similar terms. She could also tell the developer to come back when more customers have signed. Either decision would tell us something about how much of the AI buildout rested on one man’s willingness to make a bet.

I admired Jensen Huang. I still admire what he built. It took considerable nerve to spend years pursuing a view of computing that most of the industry took its sweet time coming around to. He earned the respect of people who understood what he was doing early and plenty of us who caught on later. Somewhere in there, though, admiration became adulation. Those of us who cover this business had a hand in that. We put the founder on the cover. We tell the story of the big bet through his eyes. After a while, even those of us who helped write the story can forget how much of the man falls outside it.

As a Steelers fan, I ought to recognize the habit. On fourth and long, I want the quarterback who can stand in there with a linebacker bearing down on him and put the ball where only his receiver can catch it. Let him do that to win a championship and people in Pittsburgh will be telling their grandchildren about him. Somewhere over the years, “What a player” has a way of becoming “What a man.” Ask a fan what he admires about the guy and he’ll take you through that fourth quarter, play by play. I’d probably do the same. Listen to how much we think we’ve said about a human being by describing what he did with a football.

Which brings me back to that question. How could he do this? If an old friend called to tell me he’d been unfaithful to his wife, I might be angry with him. I’d feel for his wife, particularly if she were my friend, too. Depending on how long I’d known the guy, I might spend a good part of that call telling him what a damn fool he’d been. What I doubt I’d have much trouble doing is believing him. I’ve lived long enough to know that people can love their families and still make choices that hurt them terribly. How did Jensen Huang’s ability to see the future of computing earn him an exemption from that?

To borrow a word from the AI business, maybe humans are non-deterministic. You can have 33 years of evidence about a man’s judgment and still be genuinely surprised by a choice he makes. I’m disappointed in Jensen. I also feel bad that this is how his time running Nvidia ended. We needn’t take up a collection for him. He owns roughly 3.6% of the company, which should see him through. But underneath all that wealth is a husband and a father who has some answering to do. He can ask his family to forgive him. His wife and children get to decide what forgiveness looks like, in their own time, with no obligation to tell the rest of us a thing.

I expect I’ll keep having heroes. I like being around people who get up out of their seats when somebody does something extraordinary. I’m usually up there with them. What I’d like to remember the next time I’m on my feet is how easy it is, somewhere in all that applause, to decide the fellow taking the bow has somehow risen above the weaknesses I’ve spent a lifetime learning to live with in myself. Jensen owes his family an explanation for what he did. I owe myself an explanation for why I thought him incapable of it. After all, when I looked up and saw those feet of clay, who did I think put him on that pedestal?