Musk says it would be ‘an honor’ to hire scandal-struck Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang - The Independent
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Elon Musk has said it “would be an honor” to hire Jensen Huang, at risk of being fired as Nvidia’s CEO after reports he had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy tanked the chipmaker’s share price.
The world’s richest man replied to a post on his social media platform X from a financial blog called Zerohedge appealing to him to take on Huang, 63, if he is ultimately let go by the company he founded in 1993, whose products are powering the current global AI boom.
“That would be an honor,” the SpaceX and Tesla boss wrote in response.
Musk and Huang have reportedly known each other for at least a decade, with Nvidia supplying chips for the former’s Tesla Model S and X vehicles and its hardware powering that company’s self-driving technology, as well as xAI. The two men have also collaborated on space-based data centers.
The forner paid tribute to the Nvidia boss on X just last month, saying that they were “old friends are the best friends,” adding: “Jensen rocks.”
Huang previously discussed his trillionaire friend (he is a humble billionaire by comparison) during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience last December, crediting him as being the “first customer” for his DGX-1 deep-learning supercomputer in 2016 when “nobody in the world wanted it,” giving his business a huge boost.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s board of directors was meeting late Wednesday to decide Huang’s fate following the reports about his personal life. The company’s shares fell approximately 9 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday, knocking approximately $350 billion from its value.
The executive sent a memo to Nvidia employees Sunday admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife and saying he was “deeply sorry” for the hurt he had caused without going into details.
U.S. intelligence warned former Megaspeed director Alice Huang — who is no relation but with whom the tech boss has been pictured on a number of occasions — was a suspected spy for China.
China has denied the claims that Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was recruited by its Ministry of State Security for corporate espionage purposes, calling them “purely unsubstantiated and directed at smearing China.”
The infidelity was first reported by The New York Times, which has since alleged that the executive had another relationship with Kimberly Powell, his company’s vice president of healthcare, who is also married.
Nvidia’s board responded to the initial affair by launching an internal investigation into the revelations led by law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Huang’s potential exit would create a leadership vacuum at the $4 trillion chipmaker, which has found itself at the heart of the big tech arms race between the U.S. and China.
The fallout from the scandal has also reached Washington, where it has been reported that Trump was “warned” about Huang’s compromised position by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May as the executive joined their visit to Beijing, despite his saying earlier this week he had been blindsided by the news.
Republican leaders of three House committees called for Huang to deliver closed-door testimony on his interactions with the alleged intelligence asset while North Dakota GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer has openly called for him to resign “as a matter of his own conscience.”
Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons have also written to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to demand that all company records relating to Nvidia’s dealings with China be preserved.
