Nvidia stock falls on report of board meeting to discuss CEO controversies

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been synonymous with the company he founded 33 years ago and famously doesn’t believe in succession planning.

That could put his board in a tricky position as it meets to discuss his possible ouster.

“Our company was built so that I know how to run it,” he told Bloomberg in 2023. “So for as long as I’m running it, that’s all that matters.”

He expanded on that philosophy in a podcast interview with Lex Fridman earlier this year, saying that it’s not because he thinks he’s “immortal” but because he believes it’s best to prepare everyone at the company with the skills and information needed to lead. He added that he hopes he “dies on the job.”

Nvidia’s unusual corporate structure — with Huang famously having around 60 direct reports — does not lend itself to providing a clear No. 2 that would be an obvious choice to take over for the chief executive.

“It’s very unusual, I think, not to have a formal succession plan developed by the board in conjunction with the CEO,” David Larcker, director of the Corporate Governance Research Initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business, told CNN.

Still, he added, the board may have had little incentive to challenge Huang’s opposition to succession planning amid the meteoric rise of the company’s stock in recent years.

Larcker said that “virtually every company that’s well governed is going to have an emergency candidate,” and that specific details are often considered proprietary information. Nvidia, however, has shared less information about its planning with investors than other big tech companies.

Nvidia’s latest proxy statement mentions “succession planning” only once — compared to around a dozen times in Google and Apple’s most recent reports — in a risk disclosure noting the company is “highly dependent on the services of our longstanding executive team.”