Jensen Huang Basically Lit More Than $1 Trillion on Fire in Less Than a Month

Nvidia announced Thursday morning that Jensen Huang had resigned from the company he had become nearly synonymous with. Within the hour of the market opening, the chipmaker's shares had shed roughly $546 billion in value. Although the stock rebounded somewhat, the cumulative toll of the past few weeks — including a reported second affair with an Nvidia employee — has cut more than $1 trillion from Nvidia's market capitalization.

The crisis began in late October, when The New York Times reported that Huang had a "close relationship" with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based chip buyer Megaspeed whom the paper described as an alleged asset of China's Ministry of State Security. The two are not known to be related. Nvidia's market cap stood at around $5.2 trillion at that point. On November 8, the company said it was investigating its own chief executive after Jensen Huang publicly acknowledged the affair; by the next morning, roughly $1 trillion had evaporated since the story broke.

Commentators who urged investors to buy the dip as Huang's troubles deepened have watched the slide continue. Early sentiment points toward a prolonged plunge rather than a quick recovery. "Huang is irreplaceable," Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, told WIRED, crediting him as the visionary behind the GPU and the architect of Nvidia's central role in the AI era.

The stakes extend well beyond one company's stock price. Nvidia's chips train most major AI models, and the firm has poured billions into other technology companies, holding nearly $30 billion in Intel stock and roughly $21 billion of SpaceX stock as of an August regulatory filing. Meanwhile, rivals have captured some of the outflow: AMD shares rose 28 percent over five days and Broadcom gained nearly 16 percent.

What comes next hinges on unresolved questions: whether Nvidia can sustain its dominance in frontier-model training hardware without its founder at the helm, how far competitors can press their momentum, and whether the scandal's fallout reaches the company's sprawling investment portfolio. Huang's remaining 3.5 percent stake also means his personal fortune remains tied to how far the stock falls from here.