Nvidia's CEO is gone. Now what?

Résumé détaillé

Nvidia CEO and co-founder, Jensen Huang, resigned from both his management and board roles overnight, after somewhere between one and three alleged affairs

You probably don't know what I'm talking about, or you do and don't care.

In case you've missed the blanket coverage, Nvidia is the world's largest computer chip maker, whose products are powering the vast bulk of the AI revolution.

And are in such high demand, they sell with around 75% gross margins – that is, about 4 times what they cost to make! Those are unheard-of margins for a manufacturing business, and underscore both the company's technical leadership and the fact that demand is running far faster than supply, meaning Nvidia can essentially set almost whatever price it wants.

The company's CEO and co-founder, Jensen Huang, resigned from both his management and board roles overnight, after somewhere between one and three alleged affairs, including one with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy, and another who was an employee at the company.

That's actually not that much, in percentage terms, but two things bear mentioning. First, this is a $5.9 trillion company, so 4.3% is still a lot of money. And second, that extends the company's total share price fall to over 30% since its highs in early October.

(The daily fall was more than 12% when shares first traded, overnight our time. The panic subsided as the night went on.)

But let's get one thing out of the way first: the story is blowing up mostly because 'CEO has affair… with pictures' is heaven for subeditors chasing clicks.

Yes, we all say we read the financial press for the serious stories, but… the newspapers aren't silly. As I wrote the other day, it's the old 'I buy Playboy for the articles' thing.

So they'll cover this thing from as many angles as they can until the clicks stop clicking.

Début de l'article, extrait de The Motley Fool Australia. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.