Nvidia's Employees Begged Their CEO to Stay. The Website Has Already Erased Him.
Within hours of Jensen Huang's resignation, an internal vote found more than 97% of Nvidia staffers wanted him to stay, while the company's website quietly relisted him as a mere founder. The tug-of-war over the departing chief executive is now playing out on Chinese social media, where his downfall has become a proxy fight over the future of US-China AI rivalry.
When Nvidia announced on November 12 that Jensen Huang had resigned, the company's own website moved fast. Within hours, the man who had run the chipmaker for 33 years was no longer "CEO" — the leadership page relisted him simply as a founder, a change Chinese users noticed and turned into a trending topic of its own.
His employees, meanwhile, were scrambling to undo the decision. According to a report by Ifeng Tech, a vote circulating among Nvidia staff found that more than 97% of those who took part wanted Huang to stay. A Chinese employee told the outlet: "We love Jensen so much — we hope he comes back!" Others were more fatalistic. "What's the use? A new bombshell drops every two days," one China-based staffer said, noting that colleagues had already started job hunting in case the local business takes the fall.
The grief is not just corporate. Huang's resignation followed the disclosure of an affair and a board investigation, and Bloomberg reported that in his final days he was worn down, apologizing to his wife and calling himself "a piece of trash" — a confession relayed by Chinese media with heavy irony. On the day of the announcement, President Trump was asked about it and sighed audibly, suggesting that Apple's Tim Cook would be "a great choice" to run the company.
One Chinese commentator on Weibo, writing to a million followers, said the American AI industry was "wailing" — "only people who actually work in it understand what it means to lose the man."
The article's Chinese fans, meanwhile, have been reading the resignation as a proxy fight over the country's place in the AI race. The fact that Bloomberg's own analysis framed the loss as a win for China's state-backed AI companies was, in turn, treated as a new low in the escalating US-China rivalry. One Weibo user mocked the thesis: "Bloomberg's been reading too many web novels — they think they can still choke us."
The stock's slide — roughly $182 billion in a single day — has been the loudest signal of the market's own verdict. The board's interim CEO, Colette Kress, now has to run the company's most valuable franchise while the board searches for a permanent successor. The flowers and a single candle that were placed outside Nvidia's headquarters in the days after the announcement, photographed by Business Insider, suggest the answer to the employee petition is unlikely to be the one the staff wants.