All the tech people rushing to defend Jensen are off base.

As a VC, I get it. He's a generational founder, and there's a deeply-ingrained lesson in tech that founders are almost always the best people to run their companies. I share that intuition.

But the board's call here was dead simple:

1. His credibility is shredded. Jensen said two weeks ago that his relationship with Alice Huang was "completely normal and not unusual." Ten days later he admitted the affair. Now there's a second affair, with an exec who reports directly to him. As others have said: "when you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate for the ants in your kitchen is not two."
2. He violated export controls and tried to quash the investigation into MegaSpeed, which could be an extremely serious crime. The Trump admin is already signaling that they are going to reverse course on export restrictions because of this scandal.
3. The politics has flipped. His relationship with Trump is no longer the asset it was. The Dems are in control of Congress now and there is furious anti-AI backlash that Nvidia will need to weather. Having been compromised by a Chinese spy and advocating for exports to China makes him totally disqualified on these questions going forward. There is going to be hell to pay over the next few years, and Nvidia needs a CEO who can walk into those hearings with legitimacy. Otherwise this cloud would always hang over him.
4. There's a business to run. The dude already wrote one apology letter. Was the board supposed to wait for him to write a second one? A third? You can't run a $4T company like this.

A CEO has to be reliable first and foremost. Once that’s gone, you don’t get it back.

Jensen will almost certainly have a second act. But just not as CEO of Nvidia.

And anyone calling this a psy-op or a coup should just look at the Polymarket on this. Before the second affair, Jensen was only at 15% to be out as CEO. He could've survived one scandal, and I agreed it'd be foolish to let him go at that point. Easy to argue he was duped and made a mistake.

But you don't get two.