Nilay Patel
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.
“This is just a story about male hubris, right? The products are good, the chips are good. … You can't do anything to dent demand for NVIDIA's products. And around that is potentially a financial house of cards built of hubris and personality. And we're going to find out how house of cardsy that house of cards is.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Comparing Jensen Huang's exit to other possible tech CEO collapses, Patel argues Nvidia's products are not the problem. Demand for the chips is intact, but the financial structure around them depends on one personality.
Transcript
…Zuck as a CEO every year, and it doesn't pass because he has the controlling share of the stock. Yeah, so like there's just like some dynamic there where like, we will make you stop spending money on VR is a thing that meta shareholders would like, yes, would like to say. And it is definitely
true that a week ago, Jensen Wong's overall approval rating among everyone was very high, much closer to 100% than wherever Mark Zuckerberg is hovering in the low teens somewhere. Yeah, and
I, I mean, what is this story? I do my Kara Swisher impression. This is just a story about male hubris, right? The products are good, the chips are good, the market has reacted to the existence of NVIDIA's GPUs and CUDA in particular as a software remote around them and an ecosystem around them and said these are good products and the demand for them is 100%. You can't do anything to dent demand for NVIDIA's products. And around that is potentially a financial house of cards built of hubris and personality. And we're going to find out how house of cardsy that house of cards is. Because without this personality just insisting that everything's fine and that what did he say to Dorkesh Patel? He said you have loser mentality if you talk about restricting exports to China. Without that, maybe this house of cards fall. And if you have that much hubris and self-regard, of course they're going to bang a Chinese spy. What's she going to do?
There we go. Right. Like,
that's where you're at.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think that's a good place to leave it for now. Why wouldn't you bang a Chinese spy? Me, like Patel took a lot of money. All right, let's leave it there for now. We're going to have lots more about this on tomorrow's show. I think for tomorrow's show, we'll…
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