Nvidia CEO on brink of being fired after second affair claim

A really, really huge bit of breaking news coming out of the United States this evening in relation to the NVIDIA scandal and all the speculation surrounding the future of that company's chief executive, Jensen Huang. According to the Wall Street Journal, Jensen Huang is about to be fired by the NVIDIA board. Now, Jensen Huang is one of, if not the, Biggest players in the AI world, he is the chief executive of the second most valuable company on earth, NVIDIA, which before all of this had a market value of $4 trillion. He was one of the original co-founders of that company back in 1993, and has been pivotal to growing it into into the behemoth that it is tonight. And yet tonight, it seems... He is about to be sacked after the news that he had two extramarital affairs, including one with a woman who is suspected of being a Chinese spy. Those revelations caused the value of NVIDIA to plummet and raised lots of questions about Jensen Huang's future, questions which seems might be on the verge of being answered. Simon Marks joins me, LBC's Washington correspondent. Simon, a very good evening to you. What more do we know? Well, very fast-moving developments now, Ben, on both sides of the country, out in Santa Clara in California, where NVIDIA is headquartered. According to the Wall Street Journal, the board is preparing to meet at some point over the next few hours in order to oust Jensen Huang from the company that he built from the ground up. And this news broke about an hour after the New York Times published an investigation. piece revealing that Jensen Huang has had a second extramarital affair, this time with one of his subordinates at NVIDIA, a woman reportedly in the company's vice president of health care. Under NVIDIA's code of conduct, employees are told to avoid situations where their actions create conflict, including personal relationships. It is not unusual for American companies to have. We have strictures in place banning affairs between people in power above the people with whom they are having an affair. Yeah. There is no, there's been apparently, there is apparently, according to the New York Times video of Mr. Wang and this subordinate employee being affectionate with one another at a hotel in San Jose in California during an NVIDIA conference in March. The New York Times says it has. Has not seen the video, but while all of that is taking place out on the west coast of the country and clearly. shaking NVIDIA to its foundations up in New York, where the financial markets had already closed by the time the New York Times revealed the second NVIDIA affair. NVIDIA ended the day trading almost 3% up in value, but the second that New York Times story was published, you can see in aftermarket trading the stock price of NVIDIA sinking like a stone. And just before I came in here to talk. It was down 8% in value with every indication that it is going to continue falling. And of course, the great concern here, I mean, there are multiple levels to this story, but the great concern here will be that NVIDIA is such a pillar of the AI industry. And there are already people in the United States who fear that there is an AI bubble in the stock market, including only last week, the mayor of New York City, Zoran Mamdani, saying that it was beginning to feel to him very much like the subprime mortgage crisis that resulted in a stock market crash here back in 2008. There is every possibility that NVIDIA's value is going to be substantially hit. Even if the board moves quickly to oust Jensen Huang, because he is NVIDIA, he built the company from the ground up, two of his children work in senior executive positions for the company, it is far from clear who would take the leadership of that enterprise forward without him. There are also going to be concerns about all of this at the White House, because it is only going to rekindle still unanswered questions about how much Donald Trump knew about the fact that Jensen Huang, A regular visitor to the Y. Someone who has accompanied President Trump on international travels was slated to go with President Trump to the APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Shenzhen in China, in just a few weeks' time. We still don't know exactly when Donald Trump learnt that Jensen Huang was having an affair with a Chinese spy. So huge questions about that. Politically, massive questions. questions for the financial markets. And remember, you know, if there is an AI bubble that does burst and it is too early to say that that is going to happen. But if it does happen, it doesn't just affect the American financial markets. It is going to affect the entire world. So I think nervousness definitely is going to be the order of the hour here in Washington, on Wall Street and obviously at NVIDIA headquarters tonight. It sort of begs the question, Simon, I mean, as you said, the potential fallout from this is almost kind of incalculable. Why the board didn't act sooner? Because, yes, it's only a few days since those revelations came to light. And yet people will say, well, if you were going to get rid of Jensen Huang eventually, why didn't you do it before the share price plummeted to the extent that it has? Yeah, I mean, I think that is a legitimate question, but there are questions that about this story date all the way back to a year ago. It was in October 2025 that the New York Times first published an article reporting that there had been a friendship. Between Jensen Huang and the woman that we now know to have been a Chinese spy, although the Chinese government, I think it's important to say, denies that that's the case. But that initial report in The New York Times back in October 2025, which would which did not assert that the two of them had had an affair, but raised questions about the somewhat opaque nature. Of who this woman was, the Singaporean company that she was representing, which the New York Times indicated in that early report appeared to be some kind of front, was not necessarily exactly what it purported to be. Those questions were not immediately followed up. And there have been several people this week saying, well, it's almost as though that initial New York Times story was published and people didn't. They didn't act on it. They didn't read it. They didn't react to it. When you go back to it now and read it from 12 months ago, it's extraordinarily prescient about everything that has followed. So, look, there's going to be massive oversight questions about the composition of the board at NVIDIA, why this has taken, even over the short term, in the last couple of weeks so long, as Mr Wang's difficulties have intensified. It was only a few days ago that he conceded, having the first affair. and apologized to his family. Now we know there is a second one. Yeah. But again, if you are sitting on that NVIDIA board and you know that Jensen Huang is NVIDIA, it's a one-man show. It is very difficult to take the decision to get rid of him. But it's clearly this report from the New York Times of the second affair that has completely forced the board's hand in Santa Clara tonight.