Nvidia · The board
Removing Nvidia’s founder takes six of the board’s 11 votes. Four directors have served beside him since the 1990s. The other six are exactly enough.
Updated Nov. 11, 2026, 10:45 p.m. EasternNo decision announced. Huang remains chief executive.
Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and has run it ever since. On Nov. 8, he told employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife. The same day, the board opened an independent investigation into reports that he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, and said it had confidence in him.
Three days later, The New York Times reported a second relationship, this one with an executive who reports to him. Neither Huang nor Nvidia has confirmed it. The Wall Street Journal then reported that the board was preparing to remove him, and Reuters and CNN reported that directors were meeting that night. What happens next is up to 10 people.
The rules
Nvidia’s board has 11 members. Ten are independent directors. The 11th is Huang, the chief executive since the company’s founding.
Six votes can remove him as chief executive. The bylaws require “a majority of the directors in office,” so an absence or an abstention counts as a no. Huang’s own vote cannot change the math.
The independent directors fall into two groups. Four have served with Huang since the 1990s. The other six joined in 2013 or later, and six is exactly what it takes.
The board has no chairman. Huang presides at its meetings. Stephen Neal, the lead independent director, can convene the other 10 without him, and any two directors can call a special meeting on 24 hours’ notice.
Three directors lead its committees. Neal heads governance, Brooke Seawell audit and Dawn Hudson compensation. A committee of independent directors is overseeing the investigation. Nvidia has not named its members.
The people
Two were there at the start. Tench Coxe, then of Sutter Hill Ventures, and Mark Stevens, then of Sequoia Capital, were the venture capitalists who backed Nvidia in 1993. Stevens left the board in 2006 and returned two years later at Huang’s invitation, Forbes reported. Each holds nearly $5 billion in Nvidia stock.
Two more arrived in the 1990s. Harvey Jones, a former chief executive of the software company Synopsys, joined in 1993. Huang has said the two met in Synopsys’s early days. In 1997, Jones recruited Seawell, who had been his finance chief there.
The lead director is a trial lawyer. Neal, who joined in 2019, is chairman emeritus of Cooley, the law firm that incorporated Nvidia and took it public. He has advised other boards on investigations. In June, he won 86.7 percent of the shareholder vote, the lowest of any director.
Two have been through a boardroom crisis. Suzanne Nora Johnson, a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, joined the board of A.I.G. two months before its 2008 bailout. She joined Nvidia’s in July. Melissa Lora was the lead director at KB Home in 2017, when its board docked the chief executive’s bonus over a recorded tirade and kept him on.
Three round out the newer six. Hudson, a former executive at Pepsi and the N.F.L., has served since 2013. Aarti Shah spent 27 years at Eli Lilly; her son holds a non-executive job at Nvidia, according to a company filing. John Dabiri, a Caltech professor, sat on the president’s science advisory council until last year.
Where the weight sits
The four veterans have about 125 years on the board among them. The board’s average tenure is nearly 15 years, roughly twice the norm at large companies, Semafor reported.
The six newer directors average about six years. If the four veterans stand by Huang, removing him would take all six.
The veterans also hold the money. Together, the four own about $11.3 billion in Nvidia stock. The other six own about $105 million. A falling share price costs the longest-serving directors the most.
Shareholders have one lever. They cannot remove a chief executive, but they elect the directors who can. In June, Neal and the four veterans drew the most opposition, and Huang drew the least. Nora Johnson has yet to face a vote.
The count
No director has taken a public position. What follows is an estimate drawn from the public record, with directors ordered from most to least likely to turn against Huang. It starts on Nov. 8, when Huang admitted an affair and the board said it had confidence in him.
A relationship with a subordinate changes the math. At Intel, McDonald’s and Nestlé, one cost a chief executive his job. If the board accepts The Times’s account, this estimate has all six newer directors voting to remove Huang, with no vote to spare.
If directors conclude that he hid it from them, the veterans start to break. For an audit chairman, candor is the line. Seawell goes first, and Jones, his former boss, follows.
If investigators find that national security or company secrets were compromised, the vote is unanimous. The board said on Nov. 8 that it had no reason to believe so.
Choose what the board comes to believe, then flip any vote to see what it would take.
Select a director to flip that vote.
Starting positions are an estimate, not reporting. No director has taken a public position. Removal takes six votes whether or not Huang casts one.
Share counts come from the March 2026 proxy statement, adjusted for sales and gifts disclosed since, and are valued at the Nov. 11 close of $173.73. Support is each director’s share of votes cast at the June 2026 annual meeting. Sources: Nvidia proxy statement and Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
The Journal, CBS News and Semafor have reported that the board is preparing to remove Huang, and Bloomberg has reported that it hired a firm to identify successors. Prediction markets put the odds of an announced exit by Dec. 31 near 89 percent.
This page’s estimate is lower, about three in four. Every report so far rests on unnamed sources. If the four veterans stand by Huang, there is no vote to spare. And a founder with the president’s support and no successor in place is the hardest kind of chief executive to remove.
Market figure is the average of Polymarket (88.5 percent) and Kalshi (89 to 90 percent) read at 9:25 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 11. Precedent figure: David Larcker and Brian Tayan, Stanford, 2016, covering 2000 to 2015.
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