President Trump reveals Jensen Huang called him yesterday 'going through hell,' and says Huang should only have stepped down if the woman was a spy
Stephen A. Smith: “Before I let you get on out of here, shifting, Jensen Huang.”
Trump: “Yeah.”
Stephen A. Smith: “Nvidia, resigned as CEO.”
Trump: “Sad.”
Stephen A. Smith: “Your feelings about that?”
Trump: “Well, he’s a tremendous talent. He did something that nobody else, you know, you have China and these people, they copy. They pirate so much. Here’s a chip that’s so complex, so brilliant that you can’t copy it. I mean, it’s beyond copying because of their level of genius. What he’s done is incredible. He built an incredible, Nvidia is unbelievable.”
Stephen A. Smith: “Should he have stepped down?”
Trump: “Well, the big thing is, was the woman a spy? And I don’t know if that’s been determined yet. But if the woman was a spy, yes. If the woman was not a spy, perhaps it would be different. But I can tell you this, somehow, he’ll end up in his feet. I mean, I know him. I know him pretty well. I always thought of him as a fine man."
"I spoke to him yesterday. He’s going through hell. What he feels most badly about is his wife and family. That’s what he is really, that’s what he told me. And in, strongest, he called me as the president. I’m president, and he called me. And he said, what I’ve done to my wife and family is, that’s what he talked about.”
Given NYT article, I think Jensen is gone at $NVDA, potentially by tomorrow morning with my guess the CFO as interim-CEO. But I think the stock bottoms on a RELATIVE basis compared to the semi index post earnings next week at the latest. The new interim CEO will probably want to set a low bar and the stock could trade at a single digit PE vs 11x currently on CY26.
There are 40K employees at Nvidia and Jensen was a generational CEO but the pipeline of products I believe will sustain the company for ~2 years. There is a deep bench of direct reports. The analogy I would give is Steve Jobs took his medical leave in Jan-2011 and sadly died in October. $AAPL stock however rose 26%/26% in 2011/12 vs S&P 0/+12% Nasdaq -2/+14% on blistering revenue growth of 66%/45% in FY11/12. It took till year 3 for Apple revenue growth to slow dramatically to <10% in FY13 and then the stock massively underperformed that year.
For the AI trade and Nvidia’s stock, the bigger question for me remains the same. Was June 22nd the top in the AI trade overall? I do not think so given Agentic AI just started this year. OpenClaw came out in January for the tech savvy and Muse from Meta for the rest of us in September with others introduced since then. Agentic requires 10-100x more tokens. But time will tell if that was THE TOP.
From a technical standpoint, it does not matter if that was THE TOP. There has been forced selling in AI stocks and this Nvidia news is likely to clean out the rest. Why does it not matter? Even if it is March of 2000 and Nasdaq declines 78% from peak to trough over 2 ½ years, there were still 7 rallies that averaged 25% along the way back then. I think another one started on 11/5 but time will tell.
Stay nimble and best of luck.
Fearless Engineering: The CS-4 is our first engineering documentary.
Through lab footage and conversations with the engineers behind each breakthrough, the film follows the creation of the CS-4, our latest wafer-scale AI system.
0:00 introducing the engineering team
1:09 Wafer-scale history
2:28 Powering the wafer
4:00 The cooling problem
4:18 Designing the cold plate
5:11 Holes in the wafer
6:33 the alignment problem
7:47 The CS-4 PRD
8:35 Designing for deployability and serviceability
11:01 Removing the motherboard
11:25 Removing internal cooling loops
11:41 inventing the power rack
12:35 A one-person lab deployment
14:03 Backpack: 50% fewer components
14:55 Connecting the compute backpack to cooling manifold
17:58 shifting Cerebras’s focus from training to inference
19:09 Building the Cerebras Cloud
20:01 CS-3 vs. CS-4 performance
20:49 3D Stacked DRAM