Jensen Huang Discusses Return as Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Three Days After Exit

A War Room for a Comeback

Jensen Huang, who built NVIDIA ( NVDA ) into the world's most valuable chipmaker over 33 years as chief executive, has spent the weekend sounding out a return to the job, three days after the board accepted his exit. The Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Huang has discussed a comeback with confidants and that one ally is assembling a “war room” of technology executives to lobby both the board and the White House. The company says no formal process has begun. Huang gave up the president, chief executive and director roles on November 11, and a regulatory filing shows the board accepted the resignation with immediate effect, with the company confirming it the next day. Chief financial officer Colette Kress runs the company on an interim basis while the search for a permanent successor continues, and the newspaper reported the board also approached Arm CEO Rene Haas as a candidate. The exit followed reports of relationships with a subordinate and with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, described as a suspected Chinese spy. The stock closed down 4.34% at $166.19 the day the exit was confirmed, after falling as much as 14% intraday, and sits more than 30% below its October 6 record. Analysts at the Kobeissi Letter wrote that it is “going to be an interesting week to say the least.”

@KobeissiLetter · X post

Kobeissi Letter.

View on X

152,233 Signatures Demand Reinstatement

An open letter demanding Huang's reinstatement while an independent investigation runs had drawn 152,233 signatures by Sunday, having passed 100,000 on Saturday. The tally includes 7,397 people who self-identify as current employees, about 17.61% of a workforce of roughly 42,000, and 80,749 who identify as shareholders; the categories are self-declared and unverified. Names attached to the letter include Elon Musk, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and Y Combinator's Garry Tan. The letter asks the board to reinstate Huang as chief executive while the review is under way or, failing that, to explain its decision with supporting evidence, disclose the investigation's scope and expected timeline, and give Huang a chance to answer the allegations. Board chair Harvey C. Jones has publicly backed the interim leadership, saying the board “fully trusts” Kress and her management team. Nvidia has not endorsed the campaign, and the signatory lists do not by themselves confirm any individual's employment or holdings. The petition grew fast: when it first drew wide attention it stood at 11,098 signatures, and Saturday's crossing of the 100,000 mark added employees and investors to the count. It sits alongside a separate report that major shareholders asked the board to review all leadership options, including Huang's return.

NVDA Rebounds From the Exit Shock

Sunday's tape suggests the initial shock is fading. COINOTAG data puts NVIDIA at $164.14, up 2.61% over 24 hours, inside a $156.13 to $166.28 range, though the daily trend remains a downtrend and the 14-day RSI reads 30.4. COINOTAG's composite scoring ranks $156.43 as the nearest support, at 87/100, with $167.39 the strongest resistance above, at 88/100. Positioning is contained: the NVDA stock perpetual , an expiry-free contract similar to futures , carries open interest near $457.2 million with a funding rate of 0.2445% per interval.

Bessent Pushes for an Outside Hire

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used a Sunday appearance on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures to call for a “dramatic shake-up” in Nvidia's leadership, saying the board should look outside the company when it picks Huang's successor. He said he wants to establish whether Nvidia deliberately ignored warnings that shell companies in Singapore and elsewhere were routing semiconductors to China, and expects answers from the board and its external legal advisers within ten days. He also wants to know whether the company's culture pushed forward sales that appeared unlawful in pursuit of revenue targets. Bessent's move reframes a personal scandal as a national security question. He noted several agencies had pursued action against Megaspeed but the Commerce Department held final authority, and he argued no new legislation is needed because existing rules only require enforcement. Big investors split on the question of a return: billionaire Leo KoGuan said he has stopped buying, writing “No further investment without Jensen,” while Altimeter's Brad Gerstner and Atreides' Gavin Baker urged the board to keep all options on the table, including Huang's reinstatement.

A Company Built Around One Executive

Research firm SemiAnalysis argues the resignation exposed an organization engineered around a single decision-maker. Huang personally supervised roughly 60 direct reports, kept product decisions open until late in each cycle, and left no deep bench: besides him, only five executives appear on the company's leadership page, two of them in legal and finance. Kress holds the interim seat, with GPU engineering head Jonah Alben and Ian Buck, the hyperscale computing vice president who helped create CUDA, viewed as the leading internal candidates, although one insider said Buck never wanted the role. The firm's bigger warning is financial. Disclosed off-balance-sheet guarantees reached $530 billion in fiscal Q2, up from $184 billion the prior quarter, including $36 billion in take-or-pay commitments to emerging AI clouds, next to a $99 billion equity portfolio. Supply and capacity purchase commitments jumped from $119 billion to $279 billion in a single quarter, largely memory locked through Huang's personal negotiations; SemiAnalysis estimates SK Hynix quotes Nvidia $3.0 to $3.3 per gigabit for 2027 HBM4, against $3.7 to $4.1 for rivals such as AMD, Broadcom and the hyperscalers. Its tracker further attributes more than 1.5 gigawatts of restricted chips reaching China, which the firm links to Washington's renewed push for tighter export controls.

Musk Mocks the Remaining Directors

The ten remaining directors, all of them non-employees, drew open ridicule after Advaita Capital founder Gayatri Sarkar posted screenshots of directors' one-line titles on X on Friday, November 13. Musk replied the next day: “This is the board making decisions about what used to be the most valuable company on Earth!?” The mocked titles include former PepsiCo North America CEO Dawn Hudson, who chairs the compensation committee; Melissa Lora, who spent 31 years at Taco Bell and retired as its international president; former Eli Lilly digital chief Aarti Shah; Caltech engineering professor John Dabiri; and former Goldman Sachs vice chair Suzanne Nora Johnson, appointed in May with effect from July 13, a move that expanded the board to 11 seats. The proxy statement shows the core is different: four venture veterans from the 1990s, Mark Stevens of Sequoia Capital, Tench Coxe of Sutter Hill Ventures, chairman Harvey Jones, a former Synopsys CEO who took the chair on November 11, and an audit chair who once ran Synopsys's finances, together hold about 74.14 million shares, roughly $12.07 billion at Friday's $162.85 close. The lead independent director, a former Cooley chief executive, specializes in internal and government investigations.

Q3 Filings Split on the Stock

Quarterly filings submitted around the crisis show institutions moving in both directions. Grant Private Wealth Management reported in an SEC filing that it cut its Nvidia stake 33.2% in the third quarter, selling 47,003 shares to hold 94,402 shares worth $21.56 million; the stock remains the firm's largest position at 9.3% of its portfolio. Larger holders added instead: State Street lifted its stake 1.6% to about 1.098 billion shares valued at $202.05 billion, Bank of America raised its holding 2.2% to 195.4 million shares, and Amundi added 10.4% earlier in the year. Institutions and hedge funds together hold 65.27% of the stock. Insiders had already been selling: director Mark Stevens sold 622,239 shares at an average $231.62 on September 4 for $144.12 million, and executive vice president Timothy Teter sold 30,460 shares at $222.80 on September 21 under a pre-set 10b5-1 plan. Over the last 90 days, insider sales total 1.77 million shares worth $399.45 million. Street views diverge as well: Rosenblatt cut its price target to $300 from $390 on Friday while keeping a Buy, Melius Research downgraded to Hold on Thursday and cut its target to $185 from $315, Royal Bank of Canada set $225, and the consensus remains Moderate Buy with an average target of $277.89.

The showdown over Huang's return lands days before the earnings report due Tuesday, November 17, Kress's first since taking over, and the fundamentals she inherits are strong: the August quarter delivered revenue of $96.22 billion and earnings per share of $2.22, both ahead of forecasts, alongside a $150 billion buyback approved on September 28. The structural questions are harder, given a founder-built guarantee book of $530 billion and $279 billion in supply commitments negotiated in person. COINOTAG's composite scores frame the near-term trade: from the $164.14 last price, the nearest level is resistance at $167.39, scored 88 out of 100.