On Thursday morning, Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang resigned from the company that had become, in many ways, synonymous with its chief executive.
Less than an hour later, when the markets opened, Nvidia’s stock had lost roughly $546 billion in market value. Though it has rebounded somewhat, the last weeks of scandal—including a reported second affair with an Nvidia employee—have tanked the chip maker’s valuation by more than $1 trillion.
Huang’s very public downfall began in late October, when the The New York Times reported that the CEO had a “close relationship” with Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore-based chip buyer Megaspeed and alleged asset of China’s Ministry of State Security. (The two are not known to be related.) At that time, Nvidia’s market cap was around $5.2 trillion.
