The biggest founders in tech have risen up in public for Jensen Huang, the Nvidia boss who resigned on Thursday after 33 years building the company into America's most valuable firm — calling the removal a mistake and a generational blunder, and asking out loud who benefits from pushing out the man at the centre of America's chip race with China.
Why it matters: Nvidia's chips are the engine of the artificial intelligence race, and Huang was not a hired manager — he founded the company and ran it for three decades. His fall came over an old personal affair that has been pulled into a national-security investigation, days before Nvidia's earnings and before President Trump's meetings in Shenzhen. When the builders of America's tech industry say a removal like this smells wrong, ordinary investors, workers and anyone whose pension rides on the AI boom should hear why.
The chorus was blunt. CZ, the founder of Binance, wrote: "It's a mistake for Nvidia to let Jensen resign." Naval Ravikant wrote: "Jensen Huang is the Steve Jobs of Nvidia. He is irreplaceable." Tobi Lutke, the Shopify founder, called it a "Generational blunder. At least based on the information that's available." Tim Sweeney of Epic Games wrote: "A sad day for NVIDIA, developers, America, and all humanity. Jensen founded and ran one of the few companies to reach a massive scale while driving massive continued innovation and ubiquity." Bryan Johnson added: "It's all hands on deck for the human race and NVIDIA needs its founder at the helm." Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas thanked Huang "for 33 years of bold leadership," saying he "built a small startup into America's most valuable company."
Then the reaction turned geopolitical. Palmer Luckey, the founder of defence firm Anduril, wrote: "China wants Jensen out, so I want him in." Peter Steinberger wrote: "If that Spy's goal was to destabilize one of the most successful American companies, they achieved their goal. Ousting Jensen feels rushed and not right."
And Amjad Masad, the Replit founder, asked the question now hanging over the whole affair: "The timing is suspicious, so worth asking: who benefits and why now? If Jensen, the premier champion of open models, is taken out then anyone who wants AI closed, centralized, and controlled might benefit." He pointed at the midterms, and at the upcoming IPOs, as part of that timing. Palantir's Shyam Sankar amplified Masad's post to his own followers with one line: "Who benefits?"
How could a founder be pushed out of his own company at all? The numbers explain it. When Nvidia went public in 1999 it used one-share-one-vote, so Huang held just 3.6 percent of the voting power — he never had the final say. Compare the founders who protected themselves: Mark Zuckerberg holds 61 percent of Meta's voting power, and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin hold 53 percent through shares carrying ten votes each. On the controlling-class chart, Snap's founders hold 99 percent, Musk 85 percent, Dell 77 percent — and Huang sits last, at about 4 percent. In 2004 only 5 percent of U.S. tech IPOs used the dual-class structure that locks in a founder's control; last year nearly half did. Huang built the world's most valuable company without ever taking that protection.
The other side of the story is the board's. Huang apologised on Sunday for unfaithfulness, in a statement that did not name Alice Huang, the former top executive of Nvidia customer Megaspeed International who was accused last year of shipping Nvidia chips into China and whom U.S. authorities suspect of spying for Beijing — allegations China calls baseless, on which the Justice Department has reached no conclusion, and on which she has not been charged. Nvidia's independent directors hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz on Tuesday to investigate, and Huang resigned on Thursday. U.S. officials say President Trump will not raise the Alice Huang case with Xi Jinping in Shenzhen, because a national-security investigation is not China's business and chip controls are not up for negotiation.
The situation now: the founders have asked their question in public — who benefits — and it hangs over Nvidia's earnings on November 17 and the Shenzhen meetings on November 19. A company America is counting on in the chip race has lost its founder in a week, and the people who know founders best are saying the removal itself is the story to watch.
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