As Nvidia Board Weighs Firing Jensen Huang, Elon Musk Signals Readiness to Bring Him on Board, says 'Would Be an Honour'

San Francisco: Tech billionaire Elon Musk has publicly signalled his willingness to bring Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang into his business empire if the embattled chipmaker co-founder is ousted from his post, calling the prospect "an honour" amid an escalating leadership crisis at the world's leading artificial intelligence firm.

The remark came on social media platform X late Wednesday in response to a user who urged Musk to hire Huang following reports that Nvidia’s board of directors is preparing to remove its long-time CEO. "That would be an honour," Musk replied, lending high-profile backing to one of Silicon Valley’s most influential executives at a moment when his career faces unprecedented uncertainty.

Escalating Crisis at Nvidia
Huang’s future at Nvidia has been thrown into turmoil over revelations of two separate extramarital affairs. The controversy first erupted after reports emerged that U.S. intelligence officials had scrutinised a romantic relationship between Huang and Alice Huang, a businesswoman linked to Singapore-based data centre company Megaspeed, whom American authorities suspected of ties to China’s Ministry of State Security. While Beijing has dismissed the espionage allegations as "groundless speculation", U.S. lawmakers have demanded briefings over whether sensitive AI chip technology or export policies were compromised.

Although Huang apologised to employees for being unfaithful to his wife in an internal memo—and Nvidia’s board initially stood behind him while launching an independent investigation led by law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz—momentum shifted sharply on Wednesday. The New York Times reported that Huang had also engaged in an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reports directly to him. Hours later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s board was preparing to remove Huang.

Longstanding Ties Between Musk and Huang
Musk’s public support builds on a decade-long professional alliance with Huang. Earlier this week, after Huang acknowledged his infidelity, Musk endorsed a post describing the Nvidia chief as someone who had done "something incredibly dumb" with "no bad intention", while praising him as "irreplaceable for America's AI leadership".

Their partnership dates back to 2016, when Huang personally hand-delivered Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk at OpenAI’s San Francisco office. Today, Musk’s companies—including Tesla, SpaceX, and his AI startup xAI—rank among Nvidia’s largest customers, relying heavily on hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs to power autonomous driving neural networks, humanoid robotics, and massive AI supercomputing clusters.