Huang may prove that the ‘irreplaceable CEO’ is a myth

Detailed summary

Jensen Huang had 60 direct reports, Bloomberg News reported.

Nvidia has no chairman, No 2 or public succession plan. Photo / Getty Images

The year was 2009 and Oracle’s then-CEO was talking about his friend Steve Jobs, who had recently returned to lead Apple after a liver transplant. Pundits would later go on to say the same about Jeff Bezos, that Amazon’s founder and CEO had “no viable successor”. (Both companies, of course, would go on to do just fine without their founders.)

It’s worth remembering those prophecies as that word – irreplaceable – gets bandied around with abandon about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has stepped down after nearly a week of turmoil at the company he co-founded and the industry he anchored. One of many examples: “I believe Jensen is irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership,” Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire posted on X, a sentiment Elon Musk endorsed.

Revelations from the New York Times, that Huang had an extramarital relationship with the company’s vice-president of health care, made it impossible for the board to let him keep his job. While less shocking than Huang’s earlier admission that he had an affair with a suspected Chinese spy, he had clearly violated the company’s code of conduct to “avoid situations where our actions create a conflict”. Before, board members could make the case that Huang was the victim of a honeypot scheme. But there’s no convenient explanation for a relationship with a subordinate.

The board named CFO Collette Kress as the interim CEO, but now its members will have to plan for a future without Huang at the helm. This appears to be something they had rarely considered before, after allowing Huang to structure the company almost entirely around himself. The question now is whether he had also built it to survive without him. As Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana put it to me: “The difference between a cult and a religion is that one outlasts the other.”

At Nvidia, the evidence suggests that Huang created a system much more akin to the former.

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