"These Shell Companies Were Obvious": Bessent Gives Nvidia Board 10 Days, Wants Outsider To Replace Huang

Detailed summary

"These Shell Companies Were Obvious": Bessent Gives Nvidia Board 10 Days, Wants Outsider To Replace Huang Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Nvidia needs a "dramatic shakeup"…

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Nvidia needs a "dramatic shakeup" at the top and should look outside the company for Jensen Huang's successor, and he isn't letting the ouster close the books on how the company's chips reached China. (We lay the entire backchannel infrastructure out here... worth a read.)

"This makes me think that as the board conducts a search for a new leader, that they need to go outside the company," Bessent said on Fox News on Sunday, adding that given what was going on inside the chipmaker, "they need a dramatic shakeup."

Asked by Larry Kudlow why Megaspeed, the Singapore firm tied to the alleged Chinese spy at the center of the scandal, never made the Commerce Department's entity list, Bessent left Commerce's "internal workings" to Commerce and turned on Nvidia instead: "Was it a low-level fail? Was it in the middle? Or was it up in the C-suite? And who knew?"

"Because, I mean, these [shell] companies were obvious. They were being investigated," he said. "And did Nvidia use them as a workaround to sell chips to the Chinese?"

Bessent wants the focus moved from Huang's personal "foibles" to the legal and national-security questions, and he put a clock on it. "I want to keep coming back to what was the culture at Nvidia, and were they pressing these seemingly illicit sales to goose their revenues and their earnings?" he said. "And I think we need answers in the next 10 days from the board and from the outside counsel."

Nvidia's strong independent lead director brought in outside counsel, Bessent noted, "and I think we're going to get an explanation on this culture of noncompliance at Nvidia."

The Treasury chief again pointed at Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick over Megaspeed, which Treasury had wanted blacklisted. "As I said, many other departments were pushing for this, and Commerce had the pen," Bessent said, repeating the line he used against Lutnick on Friday.

Rep. John Moolenaar, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee…

Opening of the article, excerpted from ZeroHedge. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.