Inside the dismal final days of Jensen Huang: a broken man heard saying things like ‘whatever’ and ‘I don’t care’

Detailed summary

Everything you need to know before you reach the office this morning.

We’re getting some extraordinary reporting on what it has been like inside Nvidia during Huang’s last days. Before his forced resignation, Huang had given up, Bloomberg says, and was heard saying things like “whatever,” “I don’t care,” and referring to himself as a “piece of sh--.”

That, of course, was in stark contrast to how Huang historically ran the company. Huang had “imperial control,” and ran it like a “feudal system,” according to the FT. “I can’t tell you what a cult this place is,” a source told the paper. General counsel Tim Teter wore a leather jacket just like Huang’s, the source said: “Jensen is a god, and that’s how he’s worshipped.”

Noteworthy: In addition to having no board chair, the company also did not have a compliance officer, the FT says.

Interim CEO Colette Kress and whoever replaces her as permanent CEO will have messy office politics to deal with, according to the FT. Huang’s daughter Madison Huang is a senior director of marketing at the company, but she acts like her father’s de facto chief of staff, the FT says. Nvidia also employs her husband Nico Caprez and Huang’s son Spencer.

Kress, meanwhile, sometimes did not get Huang’s respect, the WSJ reported. He once called her “a deer in the headlights” and a “reporting CFO” (as opposed to a strategic leader) during a meeting in which they were discussing Nvidia’s agreements “to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips,” the WSJ said.

Kress struggled to rein in Caprez, who had made multiple offers of financing to cloud providers and data-center builders in return for shares of revenue.

Lenders relied on the Huang family's backing for AI financing when structuring deals with AI providers. Without Huang at the top, “that Nvidia guarantee is not worth what it was worth a week ago, that puts those neocloud businesses at risk,” Joe Kaiser of Switchyard Partners, an AI financing company, told Fortune’s Catherina Gioino.

Ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and commerce…

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