Jensen Huang, the founder and former CEO of Nvidia, is forfeiting roughly $108 million in unvested equity after resigning from the chipmaker he built over 33 years. The departure follows a turbulent week in which reports of alleged affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and two Nvidia employees sent the company into crisis.
Huang, 63, holds a stake of more than 3.5% in Nvidia, making him one of the company’s largest shareholders. Nvidia’s stock has fallen nearly 13% this week alone as the scandal unfolded.
His personal fortune has dropped by about $11 billion in just a few days, falling from $154 billion to $143.3 billion on Thursday, according to Forbes. That decline knocked him to 13th on the global rich list, behind Walmart heir Jim Walton and his family.
The $108 million Huang is forfeiting as part of his resignation represents less than 0.1% of his total net worth, according to Bloomberg, since the overwhelming majority of his wealth sits in Nvidia common stock rather than unvested equity compensation. Because he owns those shares outright, crisis communications expert Patrick Riccards said it is highly unlikely Nvidia will attempt to claw them back.
“I think Nvidia just needed to be done with this,” Riccards said. “They’re not fools. They realize that all of them are very wealthy because of him and they don’t want him to be an enemy.”
Congress Wants Answers
Nvidia is expected to face congressional scrutiny in the coming weeks. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-Fla.) said Huang has already agreed to answer questions from three House committees behind closed doors before Congress breaks for Thanksgiving recess next Friday.
Riccards said Nvidia’s board has reason to be cautious about what Huang might say publicly. “It’s likely Huang is going to go up there, too, and this board has to be very wary of what he’s gonna say,” he said.
The Bigger Threat: Divorce
The largest single risk to Huang’s fortune may not come from Nvidia or Congress at all, but from his marriage. Huang has placed roughly 740 million Nvidia shares into a web of family trusts and limited liability companies, according to securities filings previously reported by The Post.
Legal experts say that if his wife of more than 40 years, Lori Huang, were to file for divorce, she could be entitled to about half of those shares — a sum worth roughly $60 billion.
Huang is also walking away from his Nvidia salary, which was about $7.5 million in each of the past two years.
Riccards said Nvidia’s real concern now is less about clawing back Huang’s compensation and more about whether he begins selling off his common stock, which could rattle other shareholders.
“I’m sure he’s sitting down with financial planners now to determine how much of his stock he should keep and how much he should drop,” Riccards said. “Once they find out that he’s dumping shares, it’s gonna devastate this company’s financial picture.”
Top executives are often bound by lock-up agreements restricting how quickly they can sell shares after an IPO, but those restrictions typically expire within a few years. Nvidia went public in 1999, meaning any such restrictions on Huang would have long since lapsed.
