“If you are not a world-class computer scientist, over the long term, you cannot be the CEO of NVIDIA or really any microchip company. The CEO of the company has to be an electrical engineer. They have to understand computing from the level of the transistor, scaling all the way up to the level of the data center.”

Hard Fork (NYT) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

Context

Asked about Colette Kress, the CFO named Nvidia's interim CEO, Witt says she can only ever be a temporary pick. His argument is that a chip company needs a technical leader long term.

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Transcript

Hard Fork (NYT) Around 23:55 into the episode

Ryan Mac

…man of that key company. And so now that he has gone, you know, what comes next? I think we're all wondering. And that is kind of what's at stake here. You know, he is in many ways irreplaceable. And the impacts of that will be felt on the global market, you know, for days, if not weeks to come.

Max Read

What do we know about Colette Kress? So she was the CFO and is now the interim CEO that they've just announced this morning. Stephen, did you interview her for your book?

Stephen Witt

You know, I did not. She was kind of declined to be interviewed. Colette is great from what I hear, but she can only ever be a temporary or interim CEO. And the reason for that is, although she's a very good executive, she is not a world-class computer scientist. She's a finance person. And so if you are not a world-class computer scientist, over the long term, you cannot be the CEO of NVIDIA or really any microchip company. The CEO of the company has to be an electrical engineer. They have to understand computing from the level of the transistor, scaling all the way up to the level of the data center. And this was something the board really told me. This is the reason they believed in Jensen so much right from the beginning. He actually didn't have that many business skills at first, but he was a world-class computer scientist. And that was the bottleneck. That was the thing that was hard to find. If you look at people like Lisa Tzu, the people who leave other competing microchip companies…

Ryan Mac

was also just doing some research, and there's like kind of a precinct for this. Intel CEO Brian Krasanich stepped down in 2018 after having an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate at the company and upstepped the company CFO, Bob Swan, into the CEO role. He lasted less than three years.…

Max Read

Yeah. One question I have about Colette Kress is: I mean, she's the CFO. Surely she knew something about Megaspeed. I have to imagine this is also on the minds of everybody in Washington right now.

Ana Swanson

Yeah, I agree. I think that is naturally where people's minds here will go. You know, how much, if anything, did she know about the business with Megaspeed? So, again, MegaSpeed was accused of allegedly diverting chips into China. The U.S. government has been investigating it for that. It was also…

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

More from Hard Fork (NYT)

“The administration bans chip sales directly to China, but it hasn't banned Chinese companies from using data centers just right outside that fence in Southeast Asia. So there's just a booming industry there. And officials right now are discussing how much to regulate that. They've struggled with that question for over a year now.” — Ana Swanson, Hard Fork (NYT)

“I think also Jensen created a reality bubble around himself. Inside the company, it was almost like a cult leader when he got up and talked. He was like a prophet. But the thing was, everything he said actually came true. And then when something he said came true, everybody in the room made a billion dollars. So you couldn't even disagree with Jensen inside the company, and he wouldn't let you anyway.” — Stephen Witt, Hard Fork (NYT)