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SW Stephen Witt On Hard Fork (NYT)

“There's Jensen. There's nobody in the second tier. And then there's 60 people who report directly to him. … If he is compromised, if he has to step down, if in some way he can't do his job, that's uniquely damaging for NVIDIA. NVIDIA has grown so large that it's now like a linchpin of the American economy. So there's this giant key man risk, not just for NVIDIA, but actually to some extent for the entire U.S. economy around this guy.”

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

“There's Jensen. There's nobody in the second tier. And then there's 60 people who report directly to him. … If he is compromised, if he has to step down, if in some way he can't do his job, that's uniquely damaging for NVIDIA. NVIDIA has grown so large that it's now like a linchpin of the American economy. So there's this giant key man risk, not just for NVIDIA, but actually to some extent for the entire U.S. economy around this guy.” — Stephen Witt, Hard Fork (NYT)

Context

Asked why Jensen Huang's role makes the spy scandal uniquely damaging, Witt describes Nvidia's flat structure with no second layer of management, and argues the company's size makes its CEO a risk for the wider economy.

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Transcript

Hard Fork (NYT) Around 06:09 into the episode
Stephen Witt

…is a story about NVIDIA and all that's a story about kind of smuggling and affairs and stuff, I think Jensen Huang himself on the wrong side of the China hawks here. And I think that's where a lot of kind of the reporting on this went. It went to the China Hawks who had an axe to grind with Jensen.

Speaker 2

…story is we don't have that many examples of CEOs who are as powerful as Jensen Huang. So can you just briefly, for our listeners, describe his role at NVIDIA in the greater AI ecosystem and explain maybe, you know, why it's sort of uniquely damaging for him to be involved in a scandal like this.

Stephen Witt

Jensen is the founder, CEO, and basically king of NVIDIA. He's been in that role for 30 plus years. You know, NVIDIA is an unusual organization. Typically, you'll have in a corporate org chart like the CEO and then like kind of, you know, a second layer of management of maybe six to eight people who assist the CEO in various roles. That doesn't exist in NVIDIA. There's Jensen. There's nobody in the second tier. And then there's 60 people who report directly to him. So it's a very unusual arrangement. NVIDIA is Jetson to a degree that I've almost never seen it any other corporation, except maybe some of Elon Musk's stuff. It's really just this one guy in control managing and running everything. So if he is compromised, if he has to step down, if in some way he can't do his job, that's uniquely damaging for NVIDIA. NVIDIA has grown so large selling AI…

Speaker 2

I understand this is going to take a little while to play out, but given his importance as you've described it, I mean, would you be surprised if he was ousted?

Stephen Witt

I would be surprised if the board fired him. I don't think that would be in the best interest of NVIDIA shareholders. And that's their job, right? I think that would make NVIDIA stock go down a lot. So I don't think the board will do that. The real risk to me to Jensen comes from what Democrats and…

Speaker 2

let me ask. You wrote, you have sort of literally written the book on Jensen. You spent a lot of time sort of in his head. What do you think was going on there? Was it just a total lapse in judgment?

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

More from Hard Fork (NYT)

“His point of view is he's looking at it from the microchip up. He's saying, I have complete control over each individual component here. And so if I'm losing control somewhere along the system, that just means it's an engineering failure and we know how to fix engineering failures. … Dario and Sam and the other people who are more worried, they're looking at it from the top down and they're saying, I don't know how this thing works. It's extremely powerful and I might lose control of it.” — Stephen Witt, Hard Fork (NYT) “Of the sort of 45 gigawatts or so of total energy that's supposed to come online next year, 10 to 15 gigawatts of that could now be in danger of not coming online because it's in Texas, because they all expected that the moratorium that was put on for building data centers in Texas up through the elections would just be removed… This is going to slow down a lot of the AI development. This is going to make compute capacity much more constrained and ergo much more expensive.” — Erin Griffith, Hard Fork (NYT)