Jensen Huang resigned from Nvidia in early 2025, ending a tenure that began with his co-founding of the company in 1993.
That departure follows a period where the CEO insisted on controlling every narrative detail, a strategy that has now backfired.
The Denver interview
I travelled to Denver in July 2024 to speak with the Nvidia chief at SIGGRAPH. I had previously interviewed him for a magazine feature earlier that year, and the executive communications team had asked me to return for this conference.
What followed was unusual. During the preparation call, a young woman named Madison Huang, Jensen’s daughter, took the lead. She was clearly intelligent and commanded respect. She discussed the slides Jensen would present and offered suggestions on how to prompt him to talk about specific moments.
Slides? Prompting? That did not sound like an interview.
I raised concerns with my editors and Nvidia. We agreed I would ask the questions I intended, including those about the environmental impact of data centres. Huang would also refer to slides. The session did not go smoothly. Footage is available on YouTube.
Former and current Nvidia staff sometimes tell me I handled the situation well. Huang was domineering and evaded several questions. Immediately after our session concluded, he held an impromptu Q&A with a much more adoring crowd than I. I was then guided offstage, where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined him for a fireside chat.
As a long-time journalist, I am used to occasional adversarial interactions. This was simply a CEO being a CEO. Huang later agreed to meet with me again in December 2024. But the Denver interview underscored how much Jensen Huang wanted to control the narrative. He assumed he would. And to a large extent he did. Until this week.
The story he told
Narrative has always been a critical part of Huang’s success. He was not just an electrical engineering nerd who toiled away on something that would eventually find product-market fit.
By Huang’s own telling, he was an immigrant founder, an underdog, a family man who chased and eventually married his college sweetheart. He was a scrappy startup operator who dined at Denny’s in the early days. A visionary who worked Sundays and did not sleep well because he always heard the hoofsteps of competitors. A parent who brought his kids into the corporate fold. A man who loved Nvidia so much he tattooed an abstract version of the company logo on his arm.
Huang built the highest-valued publicly traded company in history. That part is not just fairy tale. It is true. Now, it is starting to read more like a Greek tragedy.
Back in January 2024, when I sat down with him for our first-ever in-person meeting, Huang talked about the importance of storytelling.
Jensen Huang: Somebody who I really admire, as a leader and a person, is Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe. He said he always wanted to be a journalist because he loved telling stories.
WIRED: It seems like an important part of building a business, being able to tell its story effectively.
Yes. Strategy setting is storytelling. Culture building is storytelling.
You’ve said many times you didn’t sell the idea of Nvidia based on a pitch deck.
That’s right. It was really about telling the story.
Of course, even then, Huang was caught up in the crosshairs of the US–China AI war and at the mercy of regulators. After Donald Trump’s reelection that year, Huang once again deployed his storytelling skills and lobbied the Trump administration to loosen export controls, so he could sell some of his company’s chips to China.
Flat structure and total control
Another crucial part of the Huang lore is that he ran a “flat” organisation, with a few dozen top executives reporting to him. This is sometimes reported as being 60 people; insiders have told me at times it is closer to 35.
Huang once said the structure allowed Nvidia to adapt a lot more quickly, which we need because our technology is moving so quickly. Huang was also known to be controlling of all aspects of the business—participating in every significant meeting, seemingly aware of every moving part, and staying in the loop on sourcing, supply chains, and the company’s allocation of chips.
The final chapter
This is where Huang’s cult of leadership, and his Nvidia storytelling, may have come to a stupidly disappointing final chapter. As one former employee put it, Huang cannot simultaneously have had knowledge of every element of Nvidia’s business and then potentially feign ignorance about where the chips may have fallen, both figuratively and literally.
His apparent lapses in judgment have now led him to resign from the very company he coaxed into existence, and have shattered the mythos of its ever-prescient founder.
It is certainly not the narrative ending Huang would have chosen, were he still in control.
