No, the engineers he employed did. They will continue to do so after his departure.
There are too many bad CEOs, so the CEOs who are not bad, like the CEOs of NVIDIA and AMD, must still be praised, and the success of their companies was conditioned by them not being bad CEOs.
Or perhaps I'm misreading you. You did, after all, open with saying that you agree with my comment that you're replying to. So if your only point is "the board didn't care, that was an excuse to get rid of him" and you're not excusing his behavior, then sure, I agree with that statement. His behavior was an open secret among the company, after all; they had to have known, but were willing to ignore it when it was convenient to them. Which is immoral of them, let me add. I agree with you that that's what they did. I do NOT agree (and I hope you're not saying) that it was ethical or moral of them to ignore it until it became publicly known.
However, if he is fired, that is more a punishment for the company than for him, because he is extremely rich and at the age of retirement, so he does not work because he needs to, but just because he enjoys it.
A real punishment for him would be to lose without compensation a part of his NVIDIA shares.
If it is ever proven that he broke any export control law, then a punishment for that is a decision for the judicial system.
What you’re not seeing is that the infractions you describe are just drops in a bucket. This guy created billions of dollars and is responsible for the revolution in ML we see today. It is through his foresight that ML is even possible at the scale we see today. He changed the world. He is one of the core people sitting in the center of a global paradigm shift that will change our lives as we know it. You thought this ai stuff was just chat bots? Now it’s writing our software and dismantling academia piece by piece. It’s obvious what’s coming next.
What should be ALSO fucking obvious is that kind of change makes fucking a couple employees and some random honey pot from China basically NOTHING in comparison. It doesn’t fucking matter if there’s some unfairness or some kind of bullshit conflict of interest or favoritism in the company because that shit is MINOR.
You said sometimes obvious things need to be restated implying that it needs to be restated for me specifically. Let me fucking straight with you. YOU are the one fucking blind to the obvious. Wake up.
I guarantee you the board doesn’t give a fuck about any of this shit. They were just waiting for an opportune time to oust him. It was the same for bill clinton. God ousting him for favoritism when favoritism basically exists for almost every company out there? Seriously?