After Jensen Huang: What Nvidia's Past and Silicon Valley History Say About Founder Departures

Nvidia is entering uncharted territory. Following Jensen Huang's resignation as chief executive on Thursday, the artificial intelligence chipmaker appointed Colette Kress, a company veteran since 2013 who previously served as chief financial officer, as interim CEO. The company also named its first-ever board chair, Harvey Jones, a venture investor with three decades of technology industry experience.

The changes amount to a sweeping overhaul of a leadership structure Huang had dominated since cofounding Nvidia in 1993. He stepped down following reports of his affairs with a suspected Chinese intelligence operative and two employees, matters that drew scrutiny from United States lawmakers, the company's board and its shareholders.

The shakeup leaves an open question: how much of Nvidia's nearly $4 trillion value was tied to the man synonymous with its explosive growth? Dan Ives, an analyst at Yorkville Ives, predicted the company's value could fall 25 to 30 percent without Huang in charge.

Faith in founders runs deep in Silicon Valley, and the numbers help explain why. A Bain and Company report found that founder-led companies performed 2.1 times better than those not led by founders between 2015 and 2025, a figure that rises to 2.6 times for technology firms. "When it comes to succession, the data shows that, as great as these founders are, it's incredibly rare for their successors to do as well as the original founder," Michael Monaghan, portfolio manager of Founders 100 ETF, told Al Jazeera, describing the pattern as part of the evolutionary life cycle of building a company.

Companies such as Meta and Tesla were built around the vision and personalities of their founders. "You can ask: What does SpaceX look like without Elon Musk? What does Meta look like without Mark Zuckerberg? I think the same principle applies here, particularly in an emergency situation like this," Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo-technology at the Eurasia Group, told Al Jazeera.

Musk's own trajectory illustrates the tension. His divided attention and public political activity with the administration of US President Donald Trump became a source of controversy for Tesla, which faced protests at showrooms, brand damage and falling sales. In the first quarter of 2025, Tesla deliveries dropped 13 percent year over year to their lowest level in nearly three years. Tesla's board ultimately kept him, and SpaceX went further: ahead of its public offering earlier this year, the Texas-based aerospace company adopted a governance structure that left Musk with approximately 82 percent of total voting power and wrote into its charter that removing him requires approval from holders of a special class of shares he mostly owns, effectively letting him veto his own firing.

Nvidia's structure is different. Huang had dozens of executives reporting directly to him, yet under the company's bylaws its 11-person board could remove him "with or without cause". He owns about 3.6 percent of the company and holds no majority voting power, unlike founders at Meta and Alphabet, whose special stock arrangements give them voting control beyond their ownership stakes and make it harder for shareholders to challenge leadership.

History offers cautionary tales. After Steve Jobs lost a power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley and left in 1985, the company struggled for a decade; by 1997 it was near bankruptcy with almost $1 billion in losses that year. His return that year set the stage for the iMac and the iPhone. Starbucks followed a similar arc: founder Howard Schultz stepped down in 2000, and after successor Orin Smith retired in 2005, the chain lost more than 80 percent of its value under Jim Donald before Schultz returned in January 2008 and closed hundreds of underperforming locations.

Departures do not guarantee decline, however. Jobs handed Apple to Tim Cook in 2011, and the company briefly surpassed a $5 trillion market capitalisation in July 2026. At Microsoft, Bill Gates stepped down in 2000, Steve Ballmer followed, and Satya Nadella's 2014 pivot to cloud computing and enterprise software lifted its market value from roughly $302 billion in 2014 to $3.88 trillion in November 2026.

For Nvidia, the stakes extend beyond its own stock price, because much of the AI sector's growth rests on its chips. The company has kept investing through the turmoil, agreeing this week to buy $10 billion worth of shares in Anthropic in a private placement ahead of the Dario Amodei-led firm's planned US IPO, which could come as early as next week. OpenAI, which is also eyeing an IPO, has up to $100 billion in planned financial agreements with Nvidia.