Jensen Huang and the End of the Founder Fairy Tale

It was July of 2024, and Jensen Huang was punchy.

I had agreed to travel to Denver, Colorado, to interview the Nvidia CEO at SIGGRAPH, the annual confab of computer graphics PhDs and practitioners. Early that year I’d conducted a lengthy sit-down interview with Huang for a WIRED magazine feature, which apparently went well enough—both for WIRED and for Nvidia’s executive communications team—that I had been asked to interview Huang again at this conference. Another opportunity to grill the CEO of the modern world’s most consequential company? Yes, of course. I began preparing.

What ensued was, in a word, bizarre. During the first prep call for the conference, the type of call in which PR handlers typically try to coax specific questions out of journalists to prevent an ambush, a youngish, vaguely familiar woman took the lead. This was Madison Huang, Jensen’s daughter. She was clearly intelligent, commanding respect. She told me about the slides Jensen would be presenting on stage at SIGGRAPH and offered suggestions for key moments when I might tee him up to talk about the slides.

Slides? Tee up Jensen? What kind of “interview” was this?

I raised my concerns with both my editors and Nvidia. We agreed that I would ask the questions I intended to ask him, which included questions about the environmental impact of data centers, and that Huang would also be referring to slides. Let’s just say the interview didn’t go smoothly. (It’s on YouTube.) To this day, former and current Nvidia workers sometimes tell me that I “handled” the whole thing well. Huang was domineering, evaded some of my questions, and, immediately after our session concluded, did an impromptu Q&A session with a much more adoring crowd than me. Then I was guided offstage, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopped on, where he and Huang had a lovey-dovey fireside chat.

WIRED: It seems like an important part of building a business, being able to tell its story effectively.