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American billionaire Elon Musk, the world's richest person and chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla Inc., has thrown his public support behind Jensen Huang after the Nvidia Corp. co-founder resigned as chief executive, saying it would be "an honor" to hire him.
Musk first made the remark on X earlier this week, replying to a post that urged him to bring Huang on board as Nvidia's board moved toward removing him. Huang stepped down on Thursday, Nov. 12, after 33 years running the chipmaker he co-founded in 1993, following reports of extramarital relationships, including one with a senior Nvidia executive. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress has taken over as interim CEO.
After the resignation, Musk reposted a two-minute clip from "Air," the 2023 film about Michael Jordan, Nike Inc. and the birth of the Air Jordan brand. The monologue in the clip includes the line: "Can you summon the will to fight on, through all the pain, and rise again?"
Musk also endorsed a warning from investor Naval Ravikant that pushing founders out of the companies they built can hurt those companies, a debate that has drawn comparisons with Apple Inc.'s 1985 ouster of Steve Jobs and Uber Technologies Inc.'s removal of Travis Kalanick in 2017.
Talk of a SpaceX role
Musk did not say what job he had in mind. His comments set off speculation that Huang could join SpaceX, which is spending heavily on artificial intelligence data centers built on Nvidia chips. SpaceX shares rose as the talk spread, and traders on prediction markets began betting on whether Huang would join the company.
The two men have a long business relationship. In September 2024, Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison described a dinner with Musk and Huang at Nobu in Palo Alto, California, where he said he and Musk had begged Huang for more of Nvidia's scarce AI chips.
Musk was not the only billionaire to come to Huang's defense. Leo KoGuan, the Singapore-based investor and Nvidia shareholder, said on Friday that he would stop adding to his stake in the chipmaker after Huang's exit. KoGuan, who has a $13.2 billion fortune according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, began buying Nvidia shares in March.
A costly week for Huang
Huang's departure capped a turbulent stretch for Nvidia. The company lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value after the scandal broke, and Huang forfeited about $108 million in unvested stock awards by leaving.
His fortune stood at $138.4 billion after the resignation was announced, down from about $144.5 billion before it, and he has dropped out of the world's 10 richest people. He owns about 3.5% of Nvidia.
Huang was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States as a child. He co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and turned a maker of graphics cards for video games into the dominant supplier of chips used to train and run AI models. Nvidia is due to report third-quarter results on Nov. 17.
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