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LS Liron Shapira Liron Shapira Host of Doom Debates, the #1 show for high-stakes debate about AI extinction risk.

“Decapitation works reasonably well in the general case. In the case of NVIDIA, the market has spoken. They decapitated NVIDIA, and instantly you lost about a trillion dollars. It's down 20 to 30% in the last couple of weeks. That's kind of how much Jensen is worth. I am a believer in the great man theory of tech leadership.”

Doom Debates! · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026

“Decapitation works reasonably well in the general case. In the case of NVIDIA, the market has spoken. They decapitated NVIDIA, and instantly you lost about a trillion dollars. It's down 20 to 30% in the last couple of weeks. That's kind of how much Jensen is worth. I am a believer in the great man theory of tech leadership.” — Liron Shapira, Doom Debates!

Context

Robert Wright had argued that removing a leader rarely fixes the underlying problem. Liron Shapira disagrees, pointing to Nvidia's share price after Jensen Huang's resignation as evidence of what one leader is worth.

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Transcript

Doom Debates! Around 15:35 into the episode
Liron Shapira

…NVIDIA. Instantly, you lost about a trillion dollars. It's down 20 to 30% in the last couple of weeks. So that's kind of how much Jensen is worth. That must be pretty nice to be worth a trillion dollars, to have the market tell you that you're worth a trillion dollars. That's how much the market

Robert Wright

thinks is worth. We'll see, but go ahead. Yeah.

Liron Shapira

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I still expect NVIDIA to still have some value, but it is just very interesting because it's like the great man theory of tech leadership. I am a believer in the great man theory of tech leadership. I think when you decapitate NVIDIA, that is a serious setback. And I'm just looking at the stock market. I wonder if this is related to why Google has been surging a little bit. I think they've been up 10 or 20% over the last few weeks. Google is an NVIDIA competitor. They do have their own independent TPU supply chain. So yeah, so I'm a great man believer.

Robert Wright

Yeah, I mean, Google also finally came out with a couple of models that move it closer to the frontier. I have my own gripe about what it would take for me to get access to them. I was egregiously misled by Gemini about the consequences of switching to workspace, but I digress. I mean, it lied to…

Liron Shapira

I got to correct myself because I've been getting excited about the stock because I own Google. I've always been overweight, Google. I'm bullish on their business. I think it's undervalued, but it's not 10 to 20%. It's like 5% since the low of earlier this month. So, you know, I don't want to read…

Robert Wright

Yeah, and I suspect, I mean, as for the fall in NVIDIA's stock price, I think there's a lot of emotion running through the whole market for AI assets. I mean, on the market, it's like, you know, I don't think it's quite, it's not tulips, you know, the famous example of a run-up. The AI per se is…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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