Jensen Huang and the End of the Founder Fairy Tale

It was July of 2024, and Jensen Huang was punchy. I had agreed to travel to Denver, Colorado, to interview the Nvidia CEO at SIGGRAPH, the annual confab of computer graphics PhDs and practitioners. Early that year I’d conducted a lengthy sit-down interview with Huang for a WIRED magazine feature, which apparently went well enough—both for WIRED and for Nvidia’s executive communications team—that I had been asked to interview Huang again at this conference. Another opportunity to grill the CEO of the modern world’s most consequential company? Yes, of course. I began preparing. What ensued was, in a word, bizarre. During the first prep call for the conference, the type of call in which PR handlers typically try to coax specific questions out of journalists to prevent an ambush, a youngish, vaguely familiar woman took the lead. This was Madison Huang, Jensen’s daughter. She was clearly intelligent, commanding respect. She told me about the slides Jensen would be presenting on stage at SIGGRAPH and offered suggestions for key moments when I might tee him up to talk about the slides. Slides? Tee up Jensen? What kind of “interview” was this? I raised my concerns with both my editors and Nvidia. We agreed that I would ask the questions I intended to ask him, which included questions about the environmental impact of data centers, and that Huang would also be referring to slides. Let’s just say the interview didn’t go smoothly. (It’s on YouTube.) To this day, former and current Nvidia workers sometimes tell me that I “handled” the whole thing well. Huang was domineering, evaded some of my questions, and, immediately after our session concluded, did an impromptu Q&A session with a much more adoring crowd than me. Then I was guided offstage, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopped on, where he and Huang had a lovey-dovey fireside chat. As a longtime journalist I’m used to occasional adversarial interactions; I really don’t lose sleep over them. This was just a CEO being a CEO. Huang later agreed to meet with me again, in December 2024. But that interview in Denver had underscored for me how much Jensen Huang wanted to control the narrative. Not just wanted to; he assumed he would. And to a large extent he did. Until this week. Narrative has always been a critical part of Huang’s success. He was not just your average electrical engineering nerd who toiled away on something that would eventually find a product-market fit. By Huang’s own telling, he was an immigrant founder, an underdog, a wife guy who chased (and eventually married) his college sweetheart, a scrappy startup guy who dined at Denny’s in the early days. A visionary who worked Sundays and who didn’t sleep well because he always heard the hoofsteps of competitors. A parent who brought his kids into the corporate fold. A man who loved Nvidia so much he tattooed an abstract version of the company logo on his arm. Huang built the highest-valued publicly traded company in history. That part’s not just fairy tale. It’s true. Now, it’s starting to read more like a Greek tragedy. Back in January 2024, when I sat down with him for our first-ever in-person meeting, Huang right off the bat talked about the importance of storytelling. Here’s an excerpt: Jensen Huang: Somebody who I really admire, as a leader and a person, is Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe. He said he always wanted to be a journalist because he loved telling stories. WIRED: It seems like an important part of building a business, being able to tell its story effectively. Yes. Strategy setting is storytelling. Culture building is storytelling. You’ve said many times you didn’t sell the idea of Nvidia based on a pitch deck. That’s right. It was really about telling the story. Of course, even then, Huang was caught up in the crosshairs of the US–China AI war and at the mercy of regulators, as I wrote at the time. After Donald Trump’s reelection that year, Huang once again deployed his storytelling skills and lobbied the Trump administration to loosen export controls, so he could sell some of his company’s chips to China. Another crucial part of the Huang lore is that he ran a “flat” organization, with a few dozen top executives reporting to him. (This is sometimes reported as being “60” people; insiders have told me at times it’s closer to 35.) Huang once said the structure allowed Nvidia “to adapt a lot more quickly, which we need because our technology is moving so quickly.” Huang was also known to be controlling of all aspects of the business—participating in every significant meeting, seemingly aware of every moving part, and staying in the loop on sourcing, supply chains, and the company’s allocation of chips. This is where Huang’s cult of leadership, and his Nvidia storytelling, may have come to a stupidly disappointing final chapter. As one former employee put it, Huang can’t simultaneously have had knowledge of every element of Nvidia’s business and then potentially feign ignorance about where the chips may have fallen, both figuratively and literally. His apparent lapses in judgment have now led him to resign from the very company he coaxed into existence, and have shattered the mythos of its ever-prescient founder. It’s certainly not the narrative ending Huang would have chosen, were he still in control. This is an edition of Steven Levy’s and Lauren Goode's Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.