Tech Billionaires Slam Nvidia Board for Ousting Jensen Huang
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Nvidia's board ousted CEO Jensen Huang, triggering a wave of condemnation from Musk, Luckey, Sweeney and other tech leaders; Huang's 3.6% stake — large in dollar terms, powerless in a boardroom vote — exposes the cost of going public without dual-class shares.
Why is Silicon Valley up in arms?
Elon Musk said on X he would sign a petition to reinstate Huang. Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao called the move "a mistake" by Nvidia.
Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney labeled it a "serious corporate-governance failure" and compared it to "Apple-fires-Steve-Jobs levels of stupidity."
Telegram founder Pavel Durov was bluntest: "Huang made a rookie mistake — he had a board. Founders: don't have boards."
Why can't a 3.6% stake protect the CEO?
Huang holds roughly 3.6% of Nvidia, worth an estimated $140 billion — an enormous sum, but nearly weightless in a board vote.
This means → without a dual-class share structure — a mechanism that lets founders keep majority voting power on a minority economic stake — no amount of money buys decision-making control.
Nvidia went public in 1999, before dual-class structures became standard in tech. The practice only went mainstream after Google's 2004 IPO.
How have other founders shielded themselves?
Musk holds roughly 17.7% of Tesla; Bezos still holds about 8.78% of Amazon post-divorce — both far above Huang's 3.6%.
Andreessen Horowitz partner Marc Andreessen said in 2012 that the firm encourages every portfolio founder to structure their company so they are hard to remove, adding: "It is not safe to go public today without dual-class."
In plain terms = the VC consensus crystallized over a decade ago — founders must put on the "bulletproof vest" before the IPO, or risk being voted out.
Ousted founders — how differently do their stories end?
Steve Jobs was fired from Apple and took 12 years to return. Sam Altman was ousted by the OpenAI board and came back in five days. Travis Kalanick never returned to Uber.
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg was fired by his board two months ago and reinstated 33 hours and 20 minutes later. He advised giving events "a few days before drawing conclusions when information is incomplete."
This reflects a stark reality: whether a founder can return hinges on how fast employees and investors rally — the window is measured in days, sometimes hours.
How are the market and investors reacting?
According to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia shares plunged sharply after the news broke, erasing more than $500 billion in market value.
Some Nvidia investors have urged the board to reconsider, calling for a "slow, careful, and deliberate" evaluation of future leadership that keeps all options open.
This means → the market voted with real money — the board has already seen the price tag of ousting Huang.
What does this mean for the broader tech industry?
Huang's ouster has thrust the absence of founder-protection mechanisms back into the spotlight.
In plain terms = if a founder who led Nvidia for three decades and built it into a trillion-dollar company can be removed by a single board resolution, any founder without dual-class shares could be next.
The next thing to watch: whether this episode pushes more tech companies to lock in dual-class structures before going public.
市场有风险，内容仅供研究参考，不构成投资建议。