> until today I believed that his vastly superior judgement

What changed today?

Every major leader and CEO has obvious blind spots. They're geniuses at X but idiots at Y.

Look at all the great CEOs with ridiculous political views. It's fine: they do have vastly superior judgement, just not in areas where it doesn't directly affect their business.

For the NVDA CEO, it happens to be a woman. That puts him in probably the 80-90% of great leaders on whom that works.

I don't think the second half what you're saying is true. He has had a good hand, yes, but I think what we're seeing is "simply" the effect of a successful company being run by one of its founders. There is always a kind of reversion to mean once a successful company moves away from founder control, and that hasn't happened for Nvidia.

> ...but until today I believed that his vastly superior judgement to his peers is to credit for Nvidia's success.

Have you considered how many billions of dollars of Nvidia sales were through entities diverting chips to China?

While there's no doubt that this is not the majority of the company's revenue, it's also not an insignificant amount.

If you had to pin Nvidia's success on one thing, the honest answer would be "right technology, right time." Without AI...And the questions about how sustainable that market is are now being asked by the market.

I think that says more about other CEOs than of his brilliance.

He denied, implausibly, all knowledge about Supermicro. I don't think that is going to work this time.

The crime here isn't giving secrets to the Chinese, it is helping them evade export controls. Again, this is something that Nvidia and Jensen has been investigated on repeatedly. If he knew that Megaspeed was a front for China, quite hard to deny given that Alice Huang seems to have brought Chinese execs to every meeting with Jensen then it is very bad. And yes, the stuff that Jensen would have said would have been very useful because, I assume, the inference is that he would have been helping them evade sanctions.

The very best case from here is that the board fires him.

A spy like this isn't looking for chip schematics, they're looking for strategy. Strategy that comes from the CEO. Ultimately the main thing a CEO brings is judgement, and this was extremely poor judgement.

> God god, no.

> There's very little he could ever accidentally tell someone that would matter that much.

I think the practical implications matter a lot less than the PR and legal ones.

If the stock price plummets tomorrow and doesn’t recover, the board may have to act.

Similarly, if the right governments start asking hard questions, the board may have to act.

This is likely going to be a slow-rolling shit show for a while. At the very least, it’s legitimate grounds for one or more congressional investigations, which may start here but could go anywhere.

If there isn’t anything important he could tell, then he isn’t very important and they don’t need him.

What percent of nvidias success was due to vision, vs luck?

I made a boat load of money off of the Tesla IPO(and then holding for 12 years) but I only invested because I thought they wouldn't be a successful car company but would produce a bunch of patents that would be valuable when licensed to the big auto makers.

Obviously I got that wrong, but my investment still worked out - and I still have friends and family coming to me for investing advice because I made the right move but for the wrong reasons

> what they do

So, he is responsible for the crypto and AI bubbles? If tomorrow AI crashes and Nvidia share value with it would that make Nvidia CEO an idiot?

CEO worshiping is going too far.

That Nvidia exists, it is ATI / AMD GPUs. They are doing mostly OK, but nothing like Nvidia especially in the dollars department.

Not really. The key difference IMHO is not the CEO, it is that ATI/AMD always was the smaller underdog, while the established players Intel/NVIDIA get thrown money at them due to the "no one got fired for buying IBM" effect.

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There were a lot of computer graphics cards manufacturers back in the 90's. Nvidia survived amongst the whole pack of them. 3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATI, Cirrus. How much of that is soley due to Jenson vs outside factors outside of his control, only he really knows, but I think her deserves a bit more credit than right place right time. CUDA was a very expensive investment with zero guarantee of payoff. The market could have gone an entirely different way and Nvidia would have failed.

> first crypto/blockchain, then AI, neither of which they really had any part in boosting.

Nvidia boosts AI a lot. They are the central bank of AI. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673098

To be honest other hardware companies had years to catch up to Cuda and ML, but they invested shit into their software stacks.

Even when AI boom was imminient but 10 times smaller 2-3 years ago they did not invested heavily enough and Nvidia went all in.

I have no clue what percent of that decision making was Huang, but all the competition leadership was certainly incompetent.

So at least he did built company with a good leadership. Its a fact. Even if I personally dont like Nvidia or its products.

The had the insight to develop and promote CUDA long before DL was a thing. IIRC AlexNet was when CUDA really paid off.

> they just happened to be in the right place, twice, in quick succession

that is generally what it looks like when someone is smarter than you

Yeah, they had been working on CUDA for a very long time before AI turned out to be interesting again.

Yeah, but in this case they also built the pickaxes and drills and did it better than any other pickaxe and drill builder. In your analogy, they are commodities and a shop like that can be set up by anyone. But in this case, that doesn't apply. And if you look at their sales composition, they never pivoted away from gaming, but data centers clearly became ludicrously more attractive in the AI era. But they were always very good at computing triangles, perhaps the best in the world. They were lucky that market forces made that computation very valuable but they were not lucky in their ability to build it.

I'm sorry, who exactly? NVIDIA essentially has no real competition because of how wildly successful they are.