US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said Nvidia needs “a dramatic shakeup” in its leadership and should look outside the company for its next chief executive. Speaking on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, he questioned whether Nvidia had pushed “seemingly illicit sales” of AI chips to boost its revenue. He also said he wanted answers from the board and its outside counsel within 10 days. His intervention puts the government at odds with a growing campaign, led by Elon Musk and Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, to bring Jensen Huang back. Nvidia has not publicly responded to Bessent’s remarks.
Huang resigned as president and chief executive on 12 November, and chief financial officer Colette Kress is running the company on an interim basis, according to Nvidia’s announcement. The board has said it is choosing a search firm and has not formally approached any candidates. Kress now faces her first earnings call as interim chief executive on Tuesday, with Washington, investors and some of the most prominent figures in tech pulling the board in opposite directions.
Bessent says the question is Nvidia’s culture, not Huang’s private life
Bessent made clear that the scandal around Huang’s relationships was not his main concern. “It doesn’t matter to me whether she is a spy or not,” he said of Alice Huang, the former Megaspeed executive at the centre of the affair. Instead, he said he kept coming back to “what was the culture at Nvidia” and whether the company had pressed questionable sales “to goose their revenues and their earnings”. He also wants to know whether Nvidia missed warning signs about shell companies, many of them based in Singapore, that moved chips to China.
He compared Nvidia’s position with that of a bank in a compliance scandal, where he said several executives would be removed rather than one. “Jensen Huang is an incredible innovator,” Bessent said. “But that does not abrogate their duties of compliance,” he added. In his view, any problem runs deeper than a single chief executive, which is why he believes the board should hire from outside.
His comments build on a week of damaging reports. The Wall Street Journal reported that Megaspeed arranged nearly $12 billion worth of advanced chips for Chinese companies, and US lawmakers are now advancing bills to tighten AI chip exports. Reuters reported that Huang told Nvidia’s general counsel his dealings with Alice Huang and Megaspeed were standard business. Megaspeed denies diverting chips to China, and Nvidia has said it complies with US export law.
Musk and Hansson lead the push to put Huang back in charge
On the other side, some of the best-known names in tech want Huang reinstated. Musk said on Thursday that a petition to reinstate Huang was under way and that he was signing it, and the Stand with Jensen petition has since circulated widely. A day later, he argued that many of Nvidia’s supply deals were “a handshake with Jensen, not a written contract”, and that some of them would be lost without him. Musk has already said hiring Huang himself “would be an honour”.
Hansson, the Danish programmer behind Ruby on Rails and a co-founder of 37signals, went further on Sunday. He wrote on his X account that “we need @JensenHuang back at NVIDIA”, because “the free world depends on it”. Inside the company, 88% of Nvidia staff who answered a Blind survey before his resignation said he should stay.
Nvidia’s investors are split on the question as well. Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner and Atreides Management’s Gavin Baker have asked the board to keep Huang’s return on the table and avoid a rushed replacement, which is close to the opposite of Bessent’s advice. Their funds hold a small fraction of Nvidia’s shares, however, and only the board can appoint a chief executive.
Nvidia’s board now has a Treasury deadline and Tuesday’s results to manage
The board is also running its own investigation into Huang’s conduct, led by Wachtell Lipton and former federal prosecutor Joon Kim, according to its statement. That review has not reported, and the board has not said whether it will cover the chip sales Bessent raised. Separately, filings show director Mark Stevens sold about $946 million of shares in August and September, before the scandal broke.
Nvidia reports its third-quarter results on Tuesday, 17 November, and the call will be its first since Huang left. Kress has said her focus as interim chief executive is on customers, partners and shareholders. Bessent’s 10-day window for answers from the board runs to around 25 November.
