Is bad news for Jensen Huang also bad news for the AI industry?

We didn’t see this coming. Or at least, I didn’t — a week ago, when I wrote about Nvidia’s board opening an investigation into then-CEO Jensen Huang, I assumed his job was safe.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan, Tim De Chant, and I discussed how Huang’s ouster went down and what it means for the larger AI economy. While Tim said he saw it coming (albeit not this quickly), Rebecca said, “I didn’t think it was going to happen at all.”

“Jensen is Nvidia, right?” she added. “And so much of this economy is riding on Nvidia.”

Similarly, I marveled at how quickly Huang’s support seemed to crumble, with more scandals seeming to emerge every day. (At the same time, there are many who’d still like to see him return.) And we also took a moment to wonder what will happen to Nvidia’s investments in the larger AI ecosystem.

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity; you can listen to the whole episode here.

Tim De Chant: I figured this was coming. I didn’t think it would happen this quickly. I thought there would be at least a few days. 

Rebecca Bellan: I didn’t think it was going to happen at all. I mean, Jensen is Nvidia, right? And so much of this economy is riding on Nvidia. And we’ve got nothing but the last few years of data to show us that billionaires can do whatever the hell they want. So it was surprising to me  — it almost restored my faith in humanity, that he resigned.

But someone said to me, “If this were Elon, nothing would happen.” He would not be resigning. Nothing would be going down

Anthony Ha: Which is interesting, because I would have said, as of a week ago, or even just a few days ago, that Jensen is in the same category as Elon. I mean, no one is quite as special as Elon is, but it’s a big, incredibly successful company. Like you said — in a lot of ways, the entire AI economy is built on top of Nvidia.