CZ and Musk Join the Founders Backing Huang After His Nvidia Exit

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's president, chief executive and board member on Thursday, 12 November, effective immediately, after days of reporting on his personal conduct. He had acknowledged being unfaithful to his wife in a message to employees on Sunday, Decrypt reported. Colette Kress, the company's executive vice president and chief financial officer, was named interim chief executive and keeps the finance job until a permanent successor is named. Within hours a line of technology and crypto founders said in public that the board had made a mistake. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was among the first of them. Bitcoin fell with Nvidia's shares the same morning.

What the crypto side said

Zhao posted his verdict on X on Thursday, and Decrypt and The Block carried the same wording.

"It's a mistake for Nvidia to let Jensen resign," Zhao wrote on X.

Dan Held, a bitcoin entrepreneur and former Kraken executive, wrote that Huang "shouldn't have resigned." Anthony Pompliano told his readers not to get distracted by the headlines and argued that open-source AI is "essential to the freedom of billions of people in the future." Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong was milder, telling CNBC he had "a lot of respect for Jensen" and that Huang had "built an incredible company." Decrypt gathered those reactions in a piece it published on Thursday morning, Pacific time.

Asked on X by another user to hire Huang, Elon Musk replied "That would be an honor." Bloomberg and Fox Business both reported the exchange on 12 November. Musk did not say an offer had been made, and Nvidia has said nothing about where Huang goes next. The Instagram post that brought this story to the desk reads that reply as a readiness to hire Huang personally. That goes further than four words on X will carry.

Four opening figures, none of them the same

The market record is where this story stops agreeing with itself. The Block put Bitcoin as low as $71,200 on Thursday and called it the weakest in nearly 12 weeks. Cointelegraph described lows near $71,000 and dated them to the lowest level since 20 August, an 11-week reading. The two do not reconcile. On liquidations, The Block reported more than $750 million in crypto positions closed over 24 hours, including $634 million of longs, citing CoinGlass; Cointelegraph cited the same source for $730 million. Nvidia's own open is worse for the record: down 12% at The Block, 14% at Decrypt, nearly 13% at Cointelegraph and more than 6% at Fortune. We could not establish which opening print the others were measured against.

Bitcoin was already soft before Thursday. The chip rout that knocked Bitcoin to $75,463 on 6 November had set the tone for the week.

Thirty-three years, and the founder argument

One figure from the Instagram post checks out. Huang spent 33 years building Nvidia, a count both Decrypt and Fortune used in their Thursday coverage, and Perplexity chief executive Aravind Srinivas reached for the same number in his own thanks to Huang. Fortune dated the founding to 1993, the only one of the four outlets to give a year. Fortune's dateline also reads 11 November while its text says the announcement came Thursday; the other three put the resignation on Thursday, 12 November.

Underneath all of it ran an argument about replacing founders at all. The post credits Naval Ravikant with the view that Steve Jobs and Travis Kalanick should have taught the industry that a founder cannot simply be swapped out, and Bryan Johnson with the line that Nvidia needs its founder at the helm. Neither quote appears in any of the four outlets checked here. Both stand unverified. Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, who is on the record, wrote: "A sad day for NVIDIA, developers, America, and all humanity."

Who signs for Nvidia now

Kress holds both jobs until the board names someone permanent, and the board has not said when that will be. Huang's next move is unknown. For this market the open question is narrower than the governance debate: how much of Thursday's slide was Nvidia's doing, after a week in which two liquidation counts failed to agree on the damage already done.

Read also: Binance Replaces Its CFO Nine Days After Its Record Theft