Internet users were quick to mock Nvidia after photos and videos showed flowers laid outside the corporate headquarters, hours after its CEO resigned over his extramarital affairs.
Jensen Huang announced he was stepping down from his role Thursday, culminating a headline-filled week about his personal life. That included an affair with an alleged Chinese spy and also with an executive who reported to him.
In the hours after his resignation, the tech firm’s stock tumbled, and closed the day down 4 percent. Unknown people also laid flowers along the Nvidia sign in California - which the internet immediately mocked for looking like a memorial.
“They’re putting flowers outside the NVIDIA HQ sign like it’s a grave I’m [crying],” one X user quipped.
“HAHAHA! Flowers? Seriously? Geeez…” another added.
The mocking continued on social media over the display.
“What? Is this real?” one asked.
“Are people seriously placing flowers underneath Nvidia logo as if the company just passed away?!” another stated.
Flowers are typically placed along signs or landmarks as a memorial for someone who has passed. In the Nvidia case, however, it was just a massive shakeup for the company at the forefront of AI.
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993, which is now at the heart of the AI revolution. He is the company’s fourth-largest investor with a stake of about 3.61 percent, and will exit the Nvidia board with immediate effect, the company announced Thursday. “Jensen’s contributions to Nvidia are profound. Nvidia is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world. The board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry,” Nvidia said in a statement.
Huang’s problems began when The New York Times reported he had had an affair with former Megaspeed director Alice Huang — no relation — whom U.S. intelligence has said facilitated shipments of Nvidia’s microchips to Chinese firms as part of a foreign intelligence operation.
The newspaper subsequently alleged that the executive had also had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, his company’s vice president of healthcare, who is also married.
After the first of the infidelities was disclosed, the executive sent a memo to Nvidia employees Sunday admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife of 40 years, Lori Huang, and said he was “deeply sorry” for the hurt he had case without going into details. Nvidia’s board responded by launching an internal investigation.
China meanwhile denied the espionage claims, calling them “purely unsubstantiated and directed at smearing China.”
Huang’s exit creates a leadership vacuum at the $4 trillion chipmaker, that is the driving force behind the global AI boom and at the heart of the big tech arms race between the U.S. and China.
For years, Nvidia was best known to video gamers for helping produce top-tier graphics. But its chips' ability to perform many calculations at once has made them a strategic prize in the US-China race to dominate AI technology. It also made Nvidia the world's most valuable company.
The success turned Huang into a rock-star CEO, mobbed by fans in Taiwan and South Korea who would ask him to sign books, posters and even their bodies.
Prior to the announcement, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an expert on corporate governance at Yale School of Management, told NBC News the scandal meant Huang had “lost his legitimacy to lead internally in the eyes of the company, and he’s lost his external credibility in the eyes of key constituents, including customers.”
Colette Kress, current executive vice president and chief financial officer will serve as interim chief executive officer until a permanent successor has been named. The Board has started a search for a permanent CEO and will consider internal and external candidates, the firm said Thursday.