Musk says it would be ‘an honor’ to hire scandal-struck Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Detailed summary

World’s richest man expresses support for under-fire executive, who could be forced out of the chipmaker he founded after its share value dipped 9 percent

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Elon Musk has said it “would be an honor” to hire Jensen Huang, at risk of being fired as Nvidia’s CEO after reports he had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy tanked the chipmaker’s share price.

The world’s richest man replied to a post on his social media platform X from a financial blog called Zerohedge appealing to him to take on Huang, 63, if he is ultimately let go by the company he founded in 1993, whose products are powering the current global AI boom.

“That would be an honor,” the SpaceX and Tesla boss wrote in response.

Musk and Huang have reportedly known each other for at least a decade, with Nvidia supplying chips for the former’s Tesla Model S and X vehicles and its hardware powering that company’s self-driving technology, as well as xAI. The two men have also collaborated on space-based data centers.

The forner paid tribute to the Nvidia boss on X just last month, saying that they were “old friends are the best friends,” adding: “Jensen rocks.”

Huang previously discussed his trillionaire friend (he is a humble billionaire by comparison) during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience last December, crediting him as being the “first customer” for his DGX-1 deep-learning supercomputer in 2016 when “nobody in the world wanted it,” giving his business a huge boost.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s board of directors was meeting late Wednesday to decide Huang’s fate following the reports about his personal life. The company’s shares fell approximately 9 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday, knocking approximately $350 billion from its value.

The executive sent a memo to Nvidia employees Sunday admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife and saying he was “deeply sorry” for the hurt he had caused without going into details.

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