黄仁勋丑闻引发英伟达继任风险与治理担忧

And this is a singular see here CEO who runs this company in a singular way. You have some great anecdotes in the story about how Jensen Wong does it, but how does he run this company? Mean it's a how he does it in terms of where he finds the energy is is a question that I've asked him and other people have asked him. And I honestly, I don't know. But in terms of what he does, it's quite remarkable. And it is, you know, we're we're familiar here with the kind of the cult of the, the omnipotent CEO.

But this is real, right? This is a man who built a company, and this isn't me saying this or anybody else saying this. This is his own words. He built this company around himself and around the way he believes the company should be structured in order to be flexible, in order to respond to such a brutal and fast moving market as the semiconductor industry. You know, in one word, he micromanaged it. Everything flows through him.

Well, you're saying you're saying by looking at every. Every salary that every employee is paid. Is micromanaging. And like, oh, I got to smile. You know, I kid, but I did learn that in the piece. I mean, that is I was I was shocked to read that in your story. I mean, this is a company that has 42,000 employees. He looks at the salary at every single one. I mean, whether he still does, I don't know. But I mean, you know, the example is that all employees there are required to submit regular emails talking about what their top five priorities are, what they're working on.

And he reads them and tells them, no, that's that's not a priority anymore. This is a priority. He'll sometimes be quite rude or quite direct or quite a brutal, or he'll use it as a way to understand what his employees think is important and to redirect that sense of importance. So he he's absolutely paranoid. He believes that as a CEO, he can't just be, you know, sitting in in a wood paneled room and smoking cigars and patting himself on the back.

He has to be out there. He has to be in everybody's minds. He has to be interacting with them and learning with them. Very dynamic. And, you know, it's been very successful. Yeah. It's successful. I think what's also interesting is you including the story that, um, some Nvidia employees have noticed that Jensen was less engaged in recent days and maybe not doing some things, um, that were pretty regular, including not immediately responding to his regular top five emails, said this individual who didn't want to be identified.

You do wonder, you know, how much of what ultimately came to light Sunday, Monday, you know, was starting to brew? Um, and it was certainly on his plate. And he and he had a certain awareness of it that something was not going to be so great. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, obviously Just in terms of the timeline. And he had publicly denied that he had a romantic relationship with this, with this lady. Um, and then more and more reports came out that said not only was she suspected of being, um, a Chinese agent, but then that the relationship was actually romantic.

So, um, you know, on a personal level, when, you know, he laid it out in the note that we got that he sent, you know, he apologized to his wife, he apologized to his family. He apologized to Nvidia employees. He apologized to partners of the company and apologized to shareholders. And you have to say that he was identifying all of those who had something at stake in his behavior and, and, and a reason to judge him for it.

Um, okay. So, Ian, I want to go to the performance part of this because the headline of your piece is the 700,000% return magnifies Nvidia's succession risk. It's what I find so, so interesting. As for so many years and Carol talked about this a lot yesterday, Nvidia was this company that was doing these graphics processors that maybe not everybody was familiar with. If they weren't into gaming or covering gaming or building sort of like DIY computers at home.

And then back four years ago, 2022 ChatGPT comes out and this company explodes. It's up almost 1,000% since then. You can see it on the chart right there. How is Nvidia changed in the last four years? You're absolutely right. I mean, it was a niche player. It was a solidly run company by, you know, most accounts of what Wall Street thought of it. But there were limits to where it was going and where its technology could go.

Their rise very much coincided with Intel, who had dominated the industry for 20, 30 years, falling asleep at the wheel. Jensen's genius was, if you want to call it that, and some people do. To see the opportunity and to seize this opportunity. So they, you know, the numbers just speak for themselves, right? This year, this financial year, we're on course for $400 billion of revenue, right? And that's just. No chip company has ever even come close to that.

The influence that they have on the rest of the industry is enormous. So as a company, they're in the spotlight. Everything they do is in the spotlight. Everything they do carries more responsibility and more pressure. And so far they've lived up to that. They've certainly hired more. But that kind of fast charging Jensen is a capstone on a on this, you know, organization that just sprints forward and gets better and faces every challenge that's only ratcheted up.

So the question now is if we're going to face life without that capstone, then what happens? Yeah. I mean, I think we think about this a lot. And with companies like Tesla and SpaceX and Elon Musk. Right. We thought about it with Apple and Steve Jobs. You know, and I do wonder about again. Well, it doesn't seem like any succession plan is certainly in place about the expertise that is behind this company. One man certainly can be a vision, but there's so many people that are often involved.

And what do we know? I feel like we think about Nvidia and we know one individual for the most part. What else do we know about, like what goes on at this company and the other key leaders. And that's that's the question of the moment and may become an even more important question. You know, they have some extremely well respected technical engineers. I mean, Jensen isn't they're at a terminal designing the chips. Of course, he's not close yet.

He takes thousands of people to do that. So, you know, we have technical leaders like Ian Book who appear at technical conferences and represent the company's architecture and the company's vision for where it's going and how things should change in that regard. You know, very well respected. And, you know, within the organization there are others quite famous, um, engineers. But there's a difference between being a famous engineer and leading a whole industry.

Ian, just looking forward, uh, we mentioned this in the last couple of hours, Nvidia's independent board members have tapped a former top federal prosecutor to help probe Jenson Wong's relationship with a Chinese spy. In terms of developments here, to get an understanding about who will be at the helm of the company in the last 30s that we have with you, what is the next part of this story to unfold? Simple to understand the board want to keep in.

If they get evidence that shows behavior that compromised Nvidia or compromised national security, then their ability to do that will be limited. Could he stay on as executive chair of the board but no longer be CEO? Depends on how serious the nature of any information is.