Nvidia's long-tenured board has no Huang successor, Semafor says

Three directors on Nvidia's board have served since the company's 1993 founding, the board's average tenure is nearly 15 years (roughly double the S&P 500 average), and Jensen Huang is the only current or former S&P 500 CEO in the room, according to Semafor. The 77-year-old lead director is a former law-firm executive. No board member has national-security experience.

The word 'succession' does not appear once in Nvidia's most recent annual report. Microsoft's uses it 25 times, Alphabet's 16. Huang runs the chipmaker with more than 50 direct reports, no president, no chief operating officer, and both of his adult children on staff.

'The board composition suggests this is… a CEO exercising effective control over the board,' Jill Fisch of the University of Pennsylvania Law School told the outlet. Former SEC chair Gary Gensler, discussing Huang's recent public statements, said 'It appears [Huang] did mislead the public.' Columbia Law's John C. Coffee Jr. told Semafor that 'other companies have fired the CEO [for infidelity],' before noting that 'those companies probably didn't have quite as important a figure as CEO.'

Nvidia shares fell roughly 5% as the scandal surfaced, erasing more than $200 billion in market value. The board has said it retains confidence in Huang, who has said succession planning is not something he subscribes to and that he would rather groom a new crop of executives. Our tracker has logged 31 Jensen Huang stories in the past 90 days, including the classified spring-memo report earlier this week.