Prof Justin Robinson
The inevitable news broke during the morning of Thursday November 12, 2026, and the board of Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang had resigned as its president, chief executive and director, with immediate effect. It was also announced that the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, would take over as interim CEO.
For the last week, the headlines have been filled with juicy and salacious, made-for-television details, about Huang’s personal life. The first was a blast from the cold war past with Huang admitting infidelity to his wife with a person whom American officials suspect is a Chinese spy. This week Huang admitted to a more garden-variety type of infidelity with an executive who reported to him.
As juicy as these details are, the question that interests me is a rather different one. What does it say about finance capitalism, the model we are all supposed to be aspiring and evolving to, when one of the most valuable companies on earth lose something like US$1.4 trillion of market value in two weeks because of the conduct of one man? This is not a trivial issue as many of us across the world, yours truly included, are exposed to the value of this company through our pensions and other investments.
The market was never pricing a company
The reality of finance capitalism is that it seems to price persons and their salesmanship rather than companies. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993, he was not only CEO for 33 years, he was the strategist, the salesman, the diplomat and the brand, down to the leather jacket. Investors did not just buy chips, they bought him the way they are buying, or not buying Elon Musk, or the other avatars of finance capitalism.
My academic specialty, Behavioural Finance, calls this phenomenon the halo effect, where one man’s brilliance in one domain is assumed to cover every domain, including his judgment about himself. Western financial markets valorise and pay a premium for heroes on the way up, but these supposedly efficient and sophisticated markets never set aside a reserve for the day the hero turns out to be human.
In business school we teach and are taught about “key-man risk,” where a hero is a single point of failure and every engineer at Nvidia knows you do not design a system that way. However, our supposedly efficient and sophisticated markets with the army of analysts and commentators seem incapable of pricing in this elementary insight.
The revelation that matters
Buried in Thursday’s announcement is a revelation that should have been the headline. In a spectacular admission of a basic corporate governance failure, the board announced that it has appointed a chair, and that it is the first chair the board has ever had. Now, Nvidia is covered by an army of sophisticated financial analysts and firms across the planet and yet this basic corporate governance failure did not factor into analyst recommendations and the pricing of this company.
The reality of the western media and culture is that it promotes the myth of rugged individualism and we are taught to worship a hero rather than focus on a spreadsheet with a process. How else can we explain the fact that a company worth trillions, at the centre of the most important technology of the age and of the sharpest geopolitical rivalry of the age, went three decades without anyone in the chair whose job was to run the board that oversees the chief executive.
We know this structure well
It would be easy to watch all this from the Caribbean and dismiss it as Silicon Valley theatre, those Americans again, with their wild and crazy ways. I suggest that those in glass houses avoid throwing stones as we are the authors of the god complex in leaders. Lloyd Best called it “Doctor Politics” where the party, the state and the future gathered into one indispensable man. If we take an honest look at our region the same pattern runs through much of our corporate life. The Caribbean is full of major businesses that are really a founder and his family. I am sure we all know the credit union or statutory body where one long-serving manager is the entire institutional memory or the board stacked with the founder’s family and friends. Can board members or political party members raise the question of a succession plan without being accused of disloyalty.
The test of a builder
Huang built an incredible company but institutions are meant to outlive the people who build them. The real test of a builder is whether the house stands on the morning he walks out of the door.
Professor C. Justin Robinson is principal of The University of the West Indies’ Five Islands campus
