He's still a shareholder. It is considered extremely bad form to start a company that competes with a company that you are still a shareholder of unless you have not been fired with cause. The only other example I can think of is Jobs. So it is possible but I would assume that post Jobs contracts were put together in such a way that it would be very hard to compete with the company you got booted out of and that you are still a shareholder of. I've signed a couple of contracts over the years just as shareholders and those already mentioned that if I had competing interests the deal would be null and void and I'd be liable, and for good reasons too.

Why couldn't he just sell his shares then buy unencumbered fresh shares straight on the stock market? Lose <1% of spread...

He could pretty trivially divest or move his shares into a blind trust or something. This isn't rocket science, and furthermore it's not as bad form as you might think. It happens all the time with little repurcissions.

You think the kind of lawyers that power the documents behind these endeavours (a couple of trillion dollars) have not thought about this?

> the kind of lawyers that power the documents behind these endeavours

Those lawyers were hired by Jensen.

And paid by NV.

Why would Jensen without Nvidia be a better bet than Nvidia without Jensen?

Why does it need to be? Why not both? What if both produces a net positive, as competition is usually a good thing?

> Why would Jensen without Nvidia be a better bet

Because he can start a new company knowing everything that he got wrong the first time around, be able to hire absolute badass engineers who got fired from Nvidia because some Manager or HR thought they smelled wrong and was a hygiene risk, or quit Nvidia because they didn't like the work they were being assigned, be able to raise capital from investors who currently won't invest in Nvidia because of reasons, be able to strike new deals that hasn't happened because someone at Nvidia isn't letting them happen.

Nvidia is a very old company, not as old as Intel but close. Old companies build their own internal overhead you just cannot get rid of that would just kill a new company

Thought they smelled wrong? Am I missing a reference to something?

idk reading everything what is coming out it looks like he had much unlimited power to do whatever he wanted. so i dont buy that someone (even legal) was a hurdle for him.

How old are you?

What are you talking about? Do you understand how companies work?

That's not how the world works. Most of what NVIDIA does is protected by patents and trade secrets, not to mention CUDA.

And what do you mean by "the things he did wrong the first time"? NVIDIA was the most valuable company in the world at one point either this year or last year, and it's still in the top three. He did everything right from business perspective.

[delayed]

> be able to hire absolute badass engineers who got fired from Nvidia because some Manager or HR thought they smelled wrong and was a hygiene risk

This is … oddly specific

I don't think Jensen without Nvidia would be better, but he's uniquely suited to fund a company, raise an enormous amount of capital, jumpstart contracts and partnerships, utilize connections at the highest levels of the global economy, and attract talent across all levels of a new company. Very few people, if any, have the foundations to do this.

It's not just the Chinese spy. NYT:

> Jensen Huang... also had an extramarital relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company.

In what way did this affect nvidia's products?

How is that relevant? You could claim he was a victim of a honeypot, but an affair with a report is an abuse of power. Any regular employee would be terminated within a day. A CEO in his position will take a little more than a day.

I used to be a frequent visitor to /r/nvidia ~15 years ago until ~5 years ago. Around 2020 it turned increasingly into a sort of stock price cult. The discussions were corrupted with people who felt like they had a duty to try to help increase the stock price. I'm seeing inklings of that in these sorts of threads. How are these people so unaware of standard corporate policy? This is like the stereotypical case that's presented by HR to new hires.

It's an abuse of power, but it's also an excuse to get him out. Fortune 100 boards don't make decisions of this financial magnitude because of ethical considerations. Some political wind must have shifted against Jensen.

You mean like Sergey Brin was over Amanda Rosenberg? Oh wait, he wasn't.

1. That was 2014, prior to #MeToo, etc. This is less tolerated now (which is good, in my opinion).

2. Huang does not have the same control over the board that Brin and Page had. That doesn't make it "better", but it does affect the outcome.

Even putting that aside, it affected the share price, so I don’t see why the board wouldn’t care.

So what ? Does it make him a bad boss ?

Yes.

...yes... maybe effective at business, but definitely a bad boss to have relationships with your directs

I can overlook a lot for a bad boss that makes me a multi-millionaire possibly ten times over.

Sleeping with a direct report makes you a bad boss yeah

... yes? Obviously?

What do you mean "allowed"?

I assume golden parachute + noncompete contract.

Ah, the golden handcuffs.

> whether Jensen will be allowed to start another Nvidia

Sure. After he's done responding to the Congress and various investigators and his family, something I suspect will occupy a good part of his next decade.

> He now knows how not to get trapped into a tactically targeted honeypot…

Does he? Plenty of serial cheaters out there getting caught repeatedly.

He will have a non compete agreement for a while. May be 1 year or more.

In California?

California allows paid noncompetes but it's not clear what they could offer him since he already has ~$150B.

I am Lip-bu at Intel, I’d wire Huang after news cycle cools.

> he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.

Building an Nvidia competitor would be a long, hard slog that almost certainly ends in failure for anyone including Jensen Huang.

They (NVIDIA) have tens of thousands of patents on their technology that would be hard to build around and commitments that lock up 60-70% of TSMC's CoWoS capacity.

> Jensen will be allowed to start another "Nvidia".l

Jensen has a very good relationship with Musk. I think he would hire him and put him CEO of Terrafab, of course only if Jensen is down for it as well.

This is a fascinating theory.

Almost worth the time I wasted reading through the steaming pile of trash that all the other comments on this story are...