33 Years of Leadership, Gone in One Week, and No One Knows What Comes Next

On November 12, 2026, Jensen Huang stepped down as the head of NVIDIA. He did not ease into it. He did not give a six month goodbye tour. He sent an email to his workers on a Sunday, admitted he was unfaithful to his wife, and within days he was out. Completely out. Gone from the company he started in 1993.

That is 33 years of leading one company. And it ended in less than seven days.

The board named Colette Kress, the person who handles the money side of NVIDIA, as the temporary leader. She will run things while they look for someone permanent. No one knows how long that search will take. No one knows who they will pick. No one knows if the company will feel the same after this.

And that is what sits heavy with me. Not anger. Not judgment. Just a quiet, steady sadness.

What 33 Years Actually Looks Like

To understand why this hits so hard, you have to look at what those 33 years actually held.

Jensen Huang started NVIDIA in 1993. The company almost died in the late 1990s. They were close to running out of money. Close to shutting down. He kept going. He shifted the company from making graphics tools for games into something much bigger. He bet on new kinds of computing before anyone else saw the need.

Over three decades, he turned a small chip company into the most important name in the world of smart computing. Every major player in the space of artificial intelligence needs what NVIDIA builds. Every big lab. Every cloud company. Every government project. They all rely on the same hardware. And that hardware came from the company this one man led for over 30 years.

He was not just a name on a building. He was in the product decisions. He was in the hiring choices. He was in the direction the company took every single year. You could feel his hand on every part of it.

And now that hand is gone.

The Email That Started Everything

On Sunday, November 8, 2026, Jensen Huang sent a message to every person who works at NVIDIA. The subject line was simple. It said,

A Message to Our Company

In it, he wrote:

"I owe my family and all of you an apology. I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse."

He also addressed reports about who the other person was. He confirmed it was a woman that news outlets connected to spying for China. That detail turned a personal failure into something much bigger. It brought lawmakers into it. It brought national security questions into it. It made the situation impossible to ignore or wait out.

Within days, people in government were calling for him to leave. News outlets were running stories nonstop. The board was reportedly getting ready to push him out before he could choose to go on his own.

He chose to go. He resigned on November 12. The board put out a short statement. And that was that.

The Money That Disappeared

Here is where it gets heavy for anyone who cares about the company itself.

The moment the news broke, the stock started falling. And it did not stop falling for days.

Here are the numbers in plain language:

  • Over two days, November 9 and 10, the stock fell by almost 10 percent. That wiped out roughly 430 billion dollars in what the company is worth. Read that again. Four hundred and thirty billion dollars, gone in 48 hours.
  • By Monday, November 11, the stock fell another 5.5 percent. Each share was worth about 168 dollars. The company sat at around 4.1 trillion dollars total.
  • Then he officially resigned on November 12. The stock dropped again. It went as low as 150 dollars a share. That is down from the 170s just days before.
  • Jensen Huang himself lost about 10 billion dollars of his own money in the process.

To put 430 billion dollars in context: that is more than the entire worth of most large companies. It is not just a number on a screen. That is real value that people counted on. Pension funds. Savings accounts. Retirement plans. All tied to this one company, all shaking because of what happened.

And the worst part is that nobody knows if the falling is done. The stock could keep dropping. It could level out. It could bounce back. But right now, in this moment, the ground is not steady.

Who Is Running Things Now

Colette Kress is the person in charge today. She has been at NVIDIA for a long time. She knows the money. She knows the numbers. She knows how the business runs on a daily level.

But she is not the person who started the company. She is not the person who shaped its identity over three decades. She is stepping into a role that was held by the same man for 33 years, and she is doing it under the worst possible conditions. The news is bad. The stock is down. The world is watching. And she is in charge only until the board finds someone else.

That creates a strange feeling inside a company. Workers do not know if their temporary leader will be their real leader. They do not know if the next person will change everything. They do not know if their projects, their teams, their roles will look the same in six months.

That kind of unknown is hard on people. And there are a lot of people at NVIDIA. Tens of thousands of them. All of them woke up this week and did not know who would be guiding the ship next month.

What This Means for the People Inside

I want to talk about the workers for a moment. Not the investors. Not the news channels. The actual people who go to work there every day.

These people built their careers under one leader. They joined NVIDIA knowing Jensen Huang was at the top. They made life choices around that. They moved cities. They turned down other jobs. They trusted that the direction they were heading in was steady.

And now that person is gone. Not retired after a long, planned goodbye. Gone because of a personal failure that became a public problem. Gone in days, not months.

I cannot imagine what the hallways feel like right now. I cannot imagine what the team meetings sound like. I cannot imagine trying to focus on your daily work when the entire top of your company just got cut off and replaced overnight.

These people did nothing wrong. They showed up. They did their jobs. And now they are carrying the weight of something they had no hand in.

What This Means for the Rest of the World

NVIDIA is not just a company. It is the backbone of the current wave of smart computing. Every major player in that space depends on NVIDIA hardware. The chips. The tools. The systems that make the models run.

If NVIDIA loses its direction, if the company slows down, if the next leader makes different choices, that ripple goes everywhere. It touches every lab. Every cloud provider. Every country building out their computing power.

The supply does not stop tomorrow. The chips already made will still ship. The contracts already signed will still hold. But the long term direction, the bets on what comes next, the five year plans that Jensen Huang would have made from his seat, those are now up in the air.

And that affects more than just NVIDIA. It affects everyone who built their own plans around what NVIDIA was going to do next.

The Part I Cannot Stop Thinking About

I keep coming back to the 33 years. Not the scandal. Not the politics. Not the stock price. Just the time.

33 years of waking up and leading the same company. 33 years of making choices, fixing problems, pushing forward. 33 years of being the one name tied to one place.

And then it is over. Not because the work was done. Not because he chose to rest. But because of a personal choice that broke trust and made it impossible to stay.

That is what makes me sad. Not the drama. Not the news cycle. Just the fact that something that long, something that steady, can end that fast. That a person can give 33 years to one thing and then lose it in one week because of a mistake they cannot take back.

I am sad about the loss without being angry at the person. Those two things can live in the same space. I can respect what he built and grieve that it is over and still understand why he had to go.

What Comes Next

I do not know. And I think that is the honest answer.

The board will search for a new leader. Colette Kress will hold things together for now. The stock will move up and down as the world processes this. The news cycle will shift to the next story in a few days.

But inside NVIDIA, things will change. They have to. A new leader will bring new priorities. New habits. New ways of deciding what matters. The company will still exist. The chips will still get made. The work will continue.

But it will not be the same company. Not in the way that mattered. Not in the way that came from having the same person at the top for over three decades.

And I think that is okay. Companies survive their founders. They survive their leaders. They adapt. They grow into new shapes.

33 years. And then it was over.