Jensen Huang is gone, and Nvidia has to explain itself on Tuesday

I've been following Nvidia for years and I still don't have a clean way to describe the last two weeks. So here's the plain version.
Jensen Huang resigned as CEO on November 12. Not a handover, not a planned transition, just gone, effective immediately, after 33 years running the company he co-founded in 1993. Colette Kress, the CFO since 2013, is interim CEO and is somehow still doing the CFO job at the same time.
What ended it wasn't a product miss or a bad quarter. It started on October 29, when the New York Times reported on Huang's relationship with a businesswoman, Alice Huang, whom US intelligence suspects of being a Chinese spy. More reporting followed: an affair with a senior Nvidia employee, and another with someone who reported directly to him. The board opened an independent investigation, and by November 12 it was done.
I want to be careful here. A suspected spy is not a proven spy, and an affair is not automatically a national security breach. Nobody has shown that anything was leaked. But the board decided it couldn't wait for that answer, and once the second relationship with a direct report surfaced, sentiment turned fast. Someone familiar with the decision told CNBC the board worked late into the night and made the call that morning.

What the market did

The stock got hammered. Nvidia shed more than half a trillion dollars in market value at the worst point and closed November 13 at $162.85. That's about 24% below where it sat before the first story, and roughly 33% off its 52-week high of $243.37 from October 6. November is now on track to be Nvidia's worst month since ChatGPT kicked off the boom in late 2022.
Nine investment houses downgraded it. Bernstein halved its price target to $200 and moved to market-perform; Stacy Rasgon called the stock cheap but warned more allegations could still surface. Oppenheimer went to perform and floated a "brain drain," naming AMD, Marvell and Broadcom as the beneficiaries. Stifel kept its buy rating but cut the target hard, from $315 to $205.
Meanwhile Elon Musk and a pile of other tech execs signed a petition asking Nvidia to bring Huang back. It passed 115,000 signatures. Two investors holding about $2.13 billion of stock are pushing the board to at least consider his return. And Trump, predictably, praised him and floated Tim Cook as the replacement.

Tuesday's earnings call is the real test

Nvidia reports its fiscal third quarter on November 17, after the close. The numbers will probably look great: revenue around $109 billion, up roughly 50% from a year ago, and earnings per share near $2.47. But this is the first earnings call in the company's 27 years as a public company that Jensen Huang won't run. Kress has to make the case five days into the job, while still being the CFO.
I don't envy her. The quarter itself is almost beside the point. Everyone wants to know who runs Nvidia next, what happens to the roadmap over the next year or two, and whether the "Jensen premium" was a real thing that just got deleted. UBS also flagged that Nvidia might pause part of its funding of AI companies, which would pull something like $50 billion out of the ecosystem, plus the risk of tighter chip export rules on top.

What actually matters underneath

Huang has said he's willing to testify before Congress before Thanksgiving. Senator Elizabeth Warren's reply was blunt: resigning doesn't absolve him or the company of responsibility for putting national security at risk. There are already two congressional investigations into Nvidia's China sales. Separately, a former OpenAI researcher claims GPU fingerprinting shows models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant were trained on Blackwell chips, despite the export controls meant to stop exactly that.
Take those together and the headline isn't really one CEO's personal life. It's whether the most important company in the AI supply chain can answer hard questions about who it sells to and what it knows. The leadership mess just dragged the question into the open earlier than anyone planned.

Where I land

I'm not going to pretend I know what the stock does next. The bulls have a real case: a forward P/E around 11 is cheap for a company growing this fast, and demand for AI compute hasn't gone anywhere. The bears have a real case too: no obvious successor, a board that didn't even have a chair until last week, and a national security cloud that one good earnings report won't clear.
What I'll actually watch on Tuesday isn't the revenue line. It's whether Kress sounds like a caretaker or a CEO, and whether she gives a straight answer about the roadmap and the buyback. That's the first real signal of what Nvidia is for the next two years. Everything else this month has been noise, just noise with an unusually large price tag.