Could Just Six Votes Oust Jensen Huang? How Would Nvidia’s Share Price Respond?

A sharp sell-off hit Nvidia in after-hours US trading in the early hours of November 12, with shares dropping more than 9% before recovering to trade between 7% and 8% lower. Weak earnings were not the catalyst. Instead, a Wall Street Journal report said Nvidia’s board was preparing to oust co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang and might meet as early as that day to determine his future. According to a subsequent Bloomberg report, directors had engaged an outside firm to identify possible successors and were considering an interim CEO appointment ahead of a wider search.

The controversy began with Huang’s November 8 letter to employees acknowledging that he had been unfaithful to his wife. An independent investigation was announced by the board that day, although directors also voiced “confidence” in Huang and his leadership team. He remained CEO while the investigation proceeded. Pressure for a decision intensified on November 11, when The New York Times reported a second alleged extramarital relationship involving a company executive. Suspicions that the woman in the first relationship had links to a foreign intelligence agency made the matter more sensitive, as did compliance questions over chip transshipments. At that point, the board said it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised, while committing to review all available information.

A board vote on his future was therefore confronting the founder CEO within three days of his admission of an affair and refusal to step down voluntarily. Whether a removal vote translates into an actual leadership change, however, depends on governance protections that Nvidia never put in place.

Why Did Nvidia Leave Its Founder Without a Governance “Moat”?

Among founder-dominated Silicon Valley businesses, Nvidia stands apart in its approach to governance. Dual-class share structures at companies such as Meta and Google strengthen founders’ voting rights, offering considerable insulation from board challenges and activist investors. Nvidia, in contrast, has retained a single class of common stock since listing in 1999. Each share carries one vote, and no arrangement gives its founder additional voting power.

With approximately 870.6 million shares as of March 2026, Huang owned 3.58% of Nvidia’s outstanding stock. That made him its biggest individual shareholder, though his holding trailed BlackRock’s 7.43% and Vanguard’s 7.31%. At 3.58%, his stake cannot independently decide shareholder votes or prevent board decisions.

Removing the CEO involves an even simpler procedure. Article 32 of Nvidia’s bylaws allows a majority of the directors then in office to remove any officer, with or without cause. Of the board’s current 11 members, 10 are independent; Huang is the sole non-independent director. His removal would consequently require six votes, with no veto available through his own vote.

The governance position is central to the current situation. Concentrated founder leadership has given Nvidia strategic continuity over the past 33 years, but the company has never created institutional protections against removing that founder. Now that a personal scandal has brought his future before the board, Huang does not have the structural negotiating leverage available to the founders of Meta or Google.

Who Could Succeed Huang at Nvidia?

Even if the rules require only six votes, a more basic operational issue remains: who would lead Nvidia next? No succession plan has been publicly disclosed, no clear second-in-command has been named, and the company has no chief operating officer. Huang said during a public discussion in 2024 that he then had 60 direct reports, illustrating Nvidia’s long-established flat management model. The lack of a COO has been flagged by Bernstein analysts as a governance weakness. Stephen Witt, who wrote The Thinking Machine, was more explicit: nothing clearly indicated which of those 60 people could be elevated to the role.

Rather than a settled handover, the options raised by analysts and former employees suggest a transitional arrangement. CFO Colette Kress would be a suitable interim CEO, according to D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. Investors know her well after more than a decade at Nvidia, although her experience is primarily in finance and she lacks Huang’s engineering credentials. For the longer term, Vice President Ian Buck is regarded as a possible candidate. Having helped develop CUDA, he now leads the data centre and computing business and deals directly with major cloud providers. None of these possibilities amounts to an official succession decision: they remain suggestions from analysts and former employees, and Nvidia has not named a successor.

Choosing a qualified leader is only part of the succession challenge. Investors still lack a way to evaluate Nvidia’s current valuation and business narrative separately from its founder’s personal influence. In analyst Dan Gallagher’s assessment, picturing anyone else at the helm was difficult, and no one knew how to value Nvidia without Huang.

A different comparison underpins the more optimistic argument. Pointing to Nvidia’s depth of talent and Apple’s performance following Steve Jobs’ death, Dan Niles of Niles Investment Management says Huang is “not critical” to the company’s development over the next few years. There is merit in that analogy, but the timing differs. Apple’s principal product lines, the iPhone and iPad, were already established and expanding when Jobs died, allowing the handover to occur in a comparatively stable product cycle. Nvidia is instead navigating a rapidly expanding AI infrastructure cycle that depends heavily on personal ties with major customers and governments around the world. An interim CEO in these circumstances would have to preserve supply-chain continuity, customer relationships and policy negotiations while participating in an unprecedented competitive race.

What Risks Would Nvidia Face by Retaining or Replacing Huang?

Two sets of risks confront directors at the same time. The decision is therefore more complex than choosing between support for the founder and the enforcement of governance standards.

Keeping Huang in place carries growing risks. A securities class action filed by investors on November 9 against Nvidia and Huang alleges that, before the scandal broke, the company issued “deceptive statements” denying the relationships and clouding investors’ assessment of its business risks. Investors who bought Nvidia securities between October 9, 2025, and November 8, 2026, are covered by the lawsuit. At the heart of the plaintiffs’ case is the adequacy of disclosures about possible national security risks. They allege intelligence links involving the woman in the first relationship and argue that the company’s previous public denials misled the market.

Assessing the risks of a leadership change is less straightforward. Alongside the absence of a named successor sits a governance factor that can be missed: approximately 801 million of Huang’s roughly 871 million shares, or 92%, are beneficially owned jointly with his wife, Lori. Held through living trusts, irrevocable trusts and their foundation, these shares carry voting and investment authority shared by the couple. That joint voting authority remains in place while their marital status is unchanged; a change could necessitate a reassessment. Company rules allow the board to dismiss the CEO, but offer no certainty about how these jointly held shares might be voted at the next director election.

Pressure from outside the company is intensifying as well. Public demands for Huang to resign have come from several US lawmakers. His personal controversy has also entered the semiconductor export-control debate concerning China, becoming intertwined with policy proposals for tighter tracking of chip transshipments. Nvidia’s share price was already down nearly 20% over the preceding month before the scandal, reflecting worries about AI sector valuations. The controversy has thus struck when the pricing environment was already fragile.

An additional core asset sits alongside Nvidia’s GPUs and CUDA ecosystem: the informal trust network Huang has built through personal ties with major cloud providers, governments and supply-chain partners across the world. According to Reuters, people including Elon Musk and Oracle founder Larry Ellison approached Huang directly when seeking scarce AI chips. What makes that network effective is the certainty that Huang cannot be separated from Nvidia.

That certainty has been unsettled by the scandal, which has created three credibility problems at once. The affairs and initial denials have damaged personal credibility. Questions about whether directors were misled and whether the independent investigation is trustworthy concern governance credibility. Suspected foreign intelligence connections and chip-transshipment concerns challenge compliance credibility. Taken together, these matters force investors to reconsider the risk premium associated with Nvidia’s governance and compliance.

The distinction also helps account for an after-hours fall of between 7% and 9%, rather than a steeper decline. The scandal has not altered demand for Nvidia’s chips, its order backlog or its technology roadmap. What investors are repricing is the governance risk around the founder, not the competitiveness of the products. How directors manage those six votes will, however, determine the valuation discount’s scale and persistence. A finding that Huang misled the board could cause it to widen quickly. If the investigation finds no systematic concealment and he stays as CEO, some of the discount could unwind. Even in that outcome, the ongoing prospect of removal through six votes could leave Nvidia with a durable structural valuation discount.