Jensen Huang Wasn’t a CEO. He Was Nvidia’s Operating System.

Nvidia has handed the keys to its CFO after pushing out its founder. Nortel, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Intel have already paid for the illusion that managers are interchangeable.

On November 12, 2026, Nvidia made official the departure of Jensen Huang, who had run the company since founding it in 1993. Colette Kress, CFO since 2013, becomes interim CEO while keeping her finance role, and a board chair position, which had never existed before, has been created for Harvey Jones, a director since 1993. The stock fell as much as 9% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, then more than 11% before Thursday’s opening bell. The instinctive reading fits in a single sentence: one CEO leaves, another arrives, the machine keeps running.

That is the sentence I take issue with. The vast majority of people still have a far too naive view of Jensen Huang’s role at Nvidia. The American system of parachuting in professional managers, of installing a hired executive at the top of a company in crisis, simply cannot run a high-tech company like this one.

Four days to undo thirty-three years

First, the facts. On November 8, Huang admitted to infidelity in a message to employees. The woman involved is a businesswoman linked to Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company, whom U.S. intelligence suspects of spying for Beijing, a charge China denies. The board opened an independent investigation and reaffirmed its confidence in him. On the 11th, The New York Times, citing five former employees, revealed a second relationship, with an Nvidia vice president. The board met in emergency session that same evening. The next day, the company’s announcement spoke of a “transition” without giving a reason; according to Reuters and Le Monde, it was indeed the board that removed him.

I’m not pleading his innocence. A relationship with an executive under one’s authority is a textbook governance breach, and a suspicion of espionage is no small matter when you sell the chips that all of American AI depends on. The board had grounds. What I dispute is the idea that it has simply swapped drivers.

A CEO leaves, a system shuts down

At Nvidia, some sixty executives report directly to Huang, and none of them stands out as number two. At a conventional company, that would be an org-chart aberration. At Nvidia, it is the engine: no middle layer where information gets diluted, no fiefdoms, decisions made quickly by a man who understands silicon, software, and the customer all at once. Old Huang, as the Chinese internet calls him, didn’t run Nvidia from a distance. He was its operating system.

The numbers tell the same story. Nvidia had roughly 42,000 employees at the close of fiscal 2026, against net income of $120.1 billion. That works out to $2.86 million in profit per person. Apple, in fiscal 2025, earned $112 billion with about 166,000 full-time equivalent employees, barely $675,000 a head. Nvidia does more than four times better than Apple. All of that comes down to Old Huang’s hyper-efficient way of running things.

And it is not merely an execution machine. He is the one who bet on CUDA when the market couldn’t see the point, who turned a graphics card maker into an infrastructure supplier, and who, in July, put Nvidia’s weight behind open AI models while OpenAI and Anthropic kept their distance. Bets like these don’t come out of a committee.

The graveyard of parachuted managers

When Nortel, in Canada, hit a crisis, they brought in managers: a former admiral in 2004, a Motorola veteran in 2005. Nortel filed for bankruptcy in January 2009 and vanished. When BlackBerry hit a crisis, its founders stepped aside in 2012 for an executive who had come over from Siemens, then for another manager the following year, and the company gave up making its own phones in 2016. Who still thinks about BlackBerry today? When Nokia hit a crisis, it went out and hired Stephen Elop from Microsoft in 2010. Three years later, the phone division had been sold to Microsoft, and Nokia phones quickly disappeared. There are countless examples like these.

The most telling case is also the one closest to what Nvidia is going through. In 2018, Brian Krzanich resigned from Intel after a relationship with an employee, and Bob Swan, the CFO, served as interim CEO for seven months before being confirmed in the job. On his watch, Intel piled up manufacturing delays and let a process lead it had held for decades slip away to TSMC. In 2021, the company had to bring back one of its own engineers, Pat Gelsinger, to try to repair the damage. A chipmaker, a personal scandal, a CFO as interim chief: we have seen this movie before, and it ends badly. Apple itself lived the script in the 1980s, when John Sculley, recruited from Pepsi, set the company on a slide that would bring it to the brink of bankruptcy before Jobs came back.

France knows this profile well: the career executive who moves from Bull to Thomson, from France Télécom to Atos without ever having designed a product. The professional manager knows how to read a balance sheet. He does not know what needs to be built three years from now.

Neither Lisa Su nor Tim Cook

People will throw counterexamples at me. Lisa Su resurrected AMD; Tim Cook multiplied Apple’s value. True, and they confirm my thesis rather than refute it. Lisa Su holds a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, and she spent years building her own machine at AMD, around her own bets. Tim Cook inherited a finished product and an organization designed by Jobs, which he has run with formidable efficiency without creating a new category.

Lisa Su can’t run Nvidia, and neither can Tim Cook. Not for lack of intelligence, but because Nvidia isn’t a company you manage: it is a company you reinvent at the pace of a new architecture every year. Dropping even a brilliant executive into an organization with sixty direct reports amounts to asking them to rebuild it in their own image, which is to say, to dismantle the one that generated $2.86 million in profit per employee. As fate would have it, Lisa Su is a distant cousin of Jensen Huang. Talent seems to run in the family. That doesn’t mean it transfers from one org chart to another.

Talent isn’t made in a seminar

Most people believe hard work alone can make anyone succeed at anything. The sharpest know this is false. I am not a geneticist and will not pass judgment on methodology, but behavioral genetics has established the finding: the heritability of intelligence rises from about 20% in infancy to perhaps 80% in later adulthood, and a study of 11,000 twin pairs across four countries measures it at 41% at age 9 and 66% at age 17. Decades of research on tens of thousands of twin pairs place the heritability of adult intelligence between 50% and 80%. The “blank slate” theory was rejected by the data long ago: humans are not exempt from the genetic influences on complex traits that other species exhibit.

My conviction is that talent and starting conditions set hard limits. Effort multiplies existing ability; it cannot create it. Denying biology wastes lives and feeds a false narrative of equality, the one that would like to believe a good hiring process and an MBA can mass-produce Jensen Huangs.

I would rather spell out what this figure does not say myself, before someone throws it back at me. Heritability is a population statistic: it measures the share of differences between individuals that can be attributed to genes within a given group, not the ceiling of any particular person. And what makes Huang irreplaceable is not his IQ alone, since Colette Kress and Lisa Su are both exceptionally intelligent. It is the combination of technical instinct, a founder’s authority, thirty-three years of accumulated context, and the stomach to bet the entire company. A combination so rare that no school produces it and no headhunting firm can pull it off the shelf.

What the market understood before the board did

Investors, for their part, didn’t hesitate. Dan Ives values the stock at $300 with Huang and $225 without him, effectively assigning a quarter of the company’s value to a single man. According to Armina Rosenberg of Minotaur Capital, the market is already pricing in an Nvidia without its founder as the likely outcome.

And the only one who reacted like an entrepreneur was another founder. Overnight from November 11 to 12, Elon Musk replied “That would be an honor” to a user who suggested he hire Huang. Opportunism, no doubt: Nvidia has invested up to $2 billion in xAI, and Musk’s companies are among its biggest customers. But Musk knows what a founder is worth, because he is one.

The cruelest part is legal. Huang holds only about 3.6% of the company, and the bylaws allow a simple board majority to remove him “with or without cause”. The founder of one of the most valuable companies in the world was, in the eyes of the law, an employee who could be let go.

What critics will say

“A company that depends on one man is poorly governed.” True on paper, and that is precisely the price of its efficiency. You cannot have sixty direct reports, no barons, decisions made in a single meeting, and a designated heir waiting in the wings. Analyst Gil Luria points out that an immediate ouster is a problem without a succession plan. I think a succession plan would have been nothing more than a comforting fiction. You don’t plan a founder’s succession: you survive it, or you don’t.

“BlackBerry still exists; its last CEO saved it.” It exists as a security software vendor. The company survived, but what made it matter died. If that is the future people want for Nvidia, let them say so.

“The real problem is China, not management.” The China file weighs heavily, no question. Three Republican House committee chairs want to question Huang behind closed doors on November 18 about his dealings with Megaspeed, and Democrats, fresh from winning the midterms, are calling for tighter controls on chip exports to China. Huang had argued for years in favor of selling his chips in China, and we saw this summer that an embargo builds the very competitor it claims to contain. That is exactly where the interim arrangement is worrying: as Clubic notes, Colette Kress has no proven experience with China-related political issues, even though they sit at the heart of the crisis. The most geopolitical negotiation in the industry has just been entrusted to the most numbers-driven person in the company.

My take

On November 17, Colette Kress will present her first quarterly results as chief executive. They will be excellent, because Jensen Huang will have prepared them. When she arrived in 2013, Nvidia was generating $4.13 billion in revenue, compared with $215.9 billion in fiscal 2026: she counted every dollar of that growth, but she did not decide the bets behind it. The real first results without Huang will arrive in two or three years, on the day the next bet has to be chosen and there is no one left to make it alone against everyone.

The board was within its rights to sanction misconduct. It would be wrong to think it has merely changed pilots. You don’t replace a company’s operating system with a spreadsheet. Nortel, BlackBerry, and Nokia tried. So did Intel. Nvidia has just added its name to the list.