Jensen Huang and the end of the unchecked CEO

In today’s CEO Daily: A cautionary tale plays out at Nvidia.

The big leadership story: Anthropic’s new Claude models undercut OpenAI on price.

The markets: Up globally, with Nvidia shares rebounding in premarket trading after Monday’s slide.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning from Washington. I’m here for the B20 USA Summit, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is also partnering with us for the Fortune 500 Innovation Forum in Detroit next week. I’ll bring you insights from conversations with leaders here tomorrow. Today, let’s look at the fallout of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy. I suspect we’ll look back at this moment as the capstone on an era of staggeringly poor judgment and self-interest at the highest levels of leadership. 

The cautionary tale starts with the CEO, a former dishwasher at Denny’s who created one of the most consequential and valuable technologies in history, only to tarnish that legacy with a colossal failure of judgment that put his company, career, and possibly the security of both his countries at risk. (Huang is a dual citizen of Taiwan and the U.S.) It also includes board members who expressed “confidence in Jensen” when announcing their independent review. Add in the political leaders who’ve reportedly known about this potentially catastrophic conflict of interest for at least six months.

In any other period, at almost any other company, Huang would likely have been fired or put on leave for a lapse of this scale. Investors are no doubt furious as the stock dropped 4.3% yesterday and has lost more than a fifth of its value over the past month. The board is trying to find out the extent of the deceit. And tech CEOs may find Washington now demanding the kind of oversight that defense contractors take for granted. The........

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