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By Shane Croucher
Senior Editor
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It’s perhaps time for Jensen Huang to retire the leather jacket.
The Nvidia board is considering his position as CEO of the chipmaker that he co-founded more than three decades ago, which is at the center of the great power AI race between the U.S. and China.
If Huang’s extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy wasn’t enough, a report in The New York Times of a second relationship, this time with a subordinate at Nvidia, might be. He has admitted to being unfaithful but has not confirmed either of the alleged affairs.
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Huang’s ever-present leather jacket was a symbol of his cool, confident style of leadership. It certainly takes a certain kind of confidence to wear a leather jacket as a man in his 60s in 2026.
He, like many tech leaders, carries a certain mystique. Apple’s Steve Jobs is the best example. The eccentric Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX is another. Their unique qualities and quirks are vital to their success.
Nvidia investors bought heavily into Huang’s personal style—his aura, to use Gen Z-speak—seeing it as a core component of the company’s value. That’s part of why the California-based tech giant is valued at around $4 trillion.
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As tech stock analyst Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives & Co. put it in a note this morning, “the reality is that the old Jensen is now gone in the eyes of the public, customers, and technology world.”
Ives said that Huang is the “hearts and lungs” of Nvidia, but “its leading edge GPU technology will go on” without him, and will retain its “entrenched position” in the AI chips arms race.
That will, however, come at a cost. Huang’s troubles have already dragged down Nvidia’s stock. Shares closed at $173.73 on Wednesday before falling more than 8 percent in after-hours trading when The Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to oust him.
Yorkville Ives & Co. has a target price for Nvidia stock of $300 with Huang as CEO. Without him, it’s just $225. According to Nvidia’s most recent quarterly SEC filing, it has 24.1 billion shares of common stock outstanding.
So, on Ives’ targets, Huang’s presence accounts for 25 percent of Nvidia’s hypothetical $7.23 trillion valuation. Or, put another way, it makes the company 33.3 percent more valuable than the $225 no-Huang scenario.
The implied market value of Huang’s leadership would be roughly $1.8 trillion.
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Wall Street has priced a founder before. In 2018, when the SEC sued Musk over his “funding secured” tweet, Barclays analyst Brian Johnson estimated a “Musk premium” accounted for about $130 of Tesla’s share price, representing nearly half of the company's market value.
Musk kept his job. In November 2025, Tesla shareholders approved a pay package worth up to $1 trillion after the board warned he might otherwise leave.
SpaceX’s IPO prospectus calls the company “highly dependent” on Musk, while conceding he gives it less than his full-time attention. Investors valued SpaceX at more than $2 trillion on its first trading day in June anyway.
But leader aura is a currency that can depreciate. Yale economists estimate Musk’s partisan activities cost Tesla 1 million to 1.25 million U.S. vehicle sales between October 2022 and April 2025—up to $62 billion in lost revenue.
The founder premium can be overpriced, too. When Jobs resigned as Apple CEO in 2011, its shares fell about 5 percent after hours. Apple was then worth $349 billion. Under his successors, it is worth around $5 trillion.
Even Ives’ no-Huang scenario values Nvidia at roughly $5.4 trillion, well above what the market says it is worth today. Huang is “not replaceable by another CEO or group of interim executives” in Ives’ view.
But Nvidia can live on without him and his leather jackets, which have lost their shine.
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