Kimberly Powell is 48 years old, a Vice President of Healthcare at Nvidia, and she reports directly to Jensen Huang. She also, according to the New York Times, had an extramarital affair with him. That report dropped Wednesday. It was the second affair to surface in a matter of days.
The first one involved a suspected Chinese spy.
The Wall Street Journal now reports that Nvidia's board of directors is preparing to remove Huang as CEO — the same Jensen Huang who spent the last three years being treated as the most important businessman alive. The man whose leather jacket became a meme, whose keynote speeches moved markets, whose company briefly became the most valuable on Earth. That guy. His own board is showing him the door.
Nvidia's own code of conduct tells employees to "avoid situations where our actions create conflict" — including "personal relationships" — and promises the company "promptly investigates reports of misconduct." Turns out Jensen Huang managed to violate both of those provisions simultaneously, which is actually impressive if you think about it from a pure efficiency standpoint.
The timing here is brutal. Howard Lutnick testified before the Senate Banking Committee this week about concerns surrounding Nvidia — the government scrutiny over chip exports to China was already a five-alarm fire. The board didn't need a scandal. They got two.
Wall Street spent years building a cult of personality around Huang. Every earnings call was an event. Every product launch was covered like a space shuttle mission. Analysts didn't just recommend the stock — they genuflected. The entire AI investment thesis was, in large part, "Jensen Huang is a genius and you should trust him." Not the engineering team. Not the product pipeline. Him.
That's the problem with cults of personality in the corporate world. They work spectacularly until the personality turns out to be a liability. Elizabeth Holmes had the black turtleneck and the board of former secretaries of state. Adam Neumann had the barefoot mystique and WeWork's "elevated consciousness." Huang had the leather jacket and a trillion-dollar valuation. The uniform changes. The ending doesn't.
The Chinese spy angle is the one that should concern people beyond Nvidia's stock price. We're talking about the CEO of America's most strategically important semiconductor company — a company at the center of the U.S.-China technology war — maintaining a relationship with someone flagged as a suspected intelligence operative. The national security implications don't require elaboration. They require a briefing.
Nvidia's board apparently decided that two affairs, one involving a direct report and one involving a foreign intelligence concern, crossed whatever line they had drawn. The code of conduct language about "prompt investigation" suggests they'd known something was off. Whether they acted promptly is a question someone with subpoena power should probably ask.
The stock is going to do what the stock does. The real story is simpler. The most powerful man in the most important industry in America couldn't follow his own company's employee handbook.
He wrote the rules. He broke them. His board read them back to him.