Jensen Huang just handed Wall Street its first $4.5 trillion CEO scandal

Wall Street has priced plenty of CEO scandals. It has never priced one at a company worth $4.5 trillion that makes up nearly 7% of the S&P 500 (^GSPC).

Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang admitted in a Nov. 8 memo to employees to an affair following reports of a relationship with Alice Huang, whom US intelligence officials believe worked for China’s Ministry of State Security. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he wrote. The board has opened an independent investigation.

Nvidia stock fell as much as 8% shortly after the bell on Monday, briefly dropping to its lowest point since March before heading higher.

The scale is hard to overstate. At Friday’s close, Nvidia was worth about four times the nine biggest companies ever hit by CEO personal-conduct scandals combined, by Yahoo Finance calculations. The largest, Intel (INTC), was worth $249 billion when Brian Krzanich resigned in 2018 over a past consensual relationship with an employee. Nvidia is about 18 times that.

This is key-person risk — the danger that a company’s value rests on one person — at its most extreme. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has run it ever since, with no named successor.

Adjust for a bigger stock market, and the gap narrows but doesn’t close. No earlier scandal-hit company made up more than about 1% of the S&P 500, a mark only Intel in 2018 and HP (HPQ) in 2010 reached. Nvidia is about seven times that.

History puts a price on it. A 2018 study in the Journal of Financial Economics found stocks fell about 4% on average when the CEO was the one caught. At Nvidia’s size, that’s roughly $185 billion, more than McDonald’s (MCD) was worth when it fired Steve Easterbrook in 2019.

So far, Wall Street has treated Nvidia like the safe chip stock.

Through Friday’s close, Nvidia had fallen about 13% since Oct. 28, the last close before The New York Times’ first spy report. The PHLX Semiconductor Index (^SOX) dropped about 20% over that stretch, which included a post-midterm rout.

Spy stories can hit hard. Super Micro Computer (SMCI) lost 41% in a day in 2018 on a report of Chinese spy chips in its servers, a report that was never confirmed.

The closer precedent may be Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan. In August 2025, President Trump said Tan should resign over Tan’s China ties. Within a month, Washington had taken a stake in Intel, and the stock was up about 20%.

This time, Trump is in the CEO’s corner. “I think he’s an honorable guy,” he told reporters Sunday.

That could become its own problem. The bigger questions in Congress “are going to be about Nvidia’s relationship with Trump and Trump’s relationship with Nvidia,” Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and author of “Chip War,” told Yahoo Finance on Monday.

“If it’s true that the president had this intelligence for some time, but declined to act on it, that will be a focus of investigation,” he said.

Options traders are bracing for more. Nvidia reports earnings Nov. 17, and the next day the Republican chairs of three House committees want Huang at a closed-door briefing. Friday’s prices for options expiring Nov. 18 implied a swing of about 11% either way by then. Over a similar stretch around its last eight earnings reports, Nvidia moved about 4% on average, by Yahoo Finance calculations.

Nvidia isn’t blinking.

“Today’s news will not slow NVIDIA,” spokesperson John Rizzo said. “Jensen is committed to continuing to lead NVIDIA as CEO without interruption.”

Internal AI tools helped analyze interview transcripts, research, and draft this post. Humans reviewed, edited, and fact-checked this post before publication.

Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at [email protected].