Nvidia billionaire Jensen Huang falls to 13th richest after $6.4 billion loss

Taiwanese-American billionaire Jensen Huang has fallen to 13th place among the world's richest people after his resignation as chief executive of Nvidia Corp. wiped $6.4 billion off his fortune in a single day.

Forbes now values Huang at $144.7 billion. The one-day drop was the largest suffered by any billionaire on its real-time ranking that day, and it left the Nvidia co-founder just behind Walmart Inc. heir Jim Walton, whose fortune stands at about $145.6 billion.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracks wealth differently, puts Huang's net worth at $138.4 billion. On that measure he has lost about $10 billion since the scandal that ended his tenure deepened, and has been overtaken by Zara founder Amancio Ortega and by Walton heirs Rob and Jim Walton.

Huang was among the world's 10 richest people as recently as last week. Nearly all of his wealth comes from his roughly 3.5% stake in Nvidia, the chipmaker he co-founded in 1993 and ran for 33 years, so his ranking now moves with a stock that has shed about $600 billion in market value since late October.

Trump calls Huang

President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Huang was "going through hell." Trump has defended Huang throughout the crisis, calling him "a legend" after his exit. The Daily Beast reported that Trump phoned Huang and pleaded with him not to step down.

Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc. and SpaceX chief executive, has said it would be "an honor" to hire Huang. Musk also backed a warning from investor Naval Ravikant that pushing founders out of the companies they built can hurt those companies.

Nvidia said on Nov. 12 that Huang had stepped down as president, chief executive and director, effective immediately. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress is running the company on an interim basis while the board searches for a permanent replacement, and longtime director Harvey C. Jones was named its first chair. Huang is forfeiting about $108 million in unvested stock awards.

How the crisis unfolded

The turmoil began with an Oct. 29 report that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, one of Nvidia's biggest customers in Southeast Asia, was passing information to Beijing. Jensen Huang was not accused of knowingly taking part in any intelligence activity, and China's Foreign Ministry has called the spying reports "a groundless accusation."

On Nov. 8, Huang told staff he had been unfaithful to his wife, Lori, and apologized. "There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry," he wrote. A second relationship, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, was reported days later, and a third relationship with another Nvidia employee came to light this week. The board has hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to run an independent inquiry.

Forbes has said the third alleged affair has fueled speculation about the couple's marriage, and estimated that Lori Huang could receive about $70 billion if they were to divorce. No divorce has been filed.

A long run at the top

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 artificial intelligence models, taking its market value past $4 trillion.

Nvidia reports results for its fiscal third quarter on Nov. 17, its first under Kress, after guiding to revenue of about $108 billion.