Our message to Nvidia's board:
Do not fire Jensen Huang.
There is no clear replacement for Jensen Huang. We are confident that his departure would ultimately be a net negative for Nvidia, its shareholders, and the AI Revolution.
First, take a look at the data. History also suggests that removing a successful CEO will come with a significant cost.
A study of 187 forced CEO departures from S&P 1500 companies found that removing outperforming CEOs resulted in negative long-term stock returns. This case would be no different, in our view.
Jensen Huang is the definition of an outperforming CEO. Nvidia's board must not make a decision in the heat of the moment.
The board should take the time to conduct a thorough investigation and consult with shareholders, with a strong emphasis on the latter.
Quite literally, Nvidia's board should convene a special shareholder meeting and hold an advisory vote on this decision. This is the most consequential CEO controversy in world history. Shareholders deserve a say.
In addition, Nvidia's stock, $NVDA, is now down -35% in 26 trading days, nearly half of which is a result of the recent scandal.
We believe Jensen Huang's potential removal as CEO is now ~80% priced in.
Why take an action with massive downside potential when the market has already priced in much of that risk?
The downside of retaining Huang may be limited, while the potential upside is tremendous.
Lastly, history shows that retaining Jensen Huang could still lead to a favorable outcome. In 2019, Amazon retained Jeff Bezos as CEO after his extramarital affair became public, and the company's stock subsequently surged +108% by 2021.
Personal misconduct should not be ignored, but it must also be distinguished from corporate wrongdoing and weighed against the consequences of removing an executive who is instrumental to the company's success.
We believe Jensen Huang is an irreplaceable part of Nvidia and the AI Revolution more broadly.
Once the dust settles, firing Jensen Huang would prove to be a costly mistake.
It is time to pause and consult your shareholders.
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Let me lay out the unpleasant arithmetic of the replacement rate, and why a modern society finds it so hard to reach.
A population of 100 women in an advanced economy needs 210 children to replace itself. Why?
Absent sex-selective practices, roughly 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. Evolution overshoots male births because boys are more prone to early death from accidents and disease. Therefore, of 210 children, about 108 are boys and 102 are girls. Not all girls reach the midpoint of their fertile age: accidents, suicide, homicide, and illness take some. In an advanced economy, about 98% of them survive, leaving 100 women to replace the original 100.
Now consider the distribution of children per woman.
Imagine 15 women have no children. Five do so by choice, for various reasons (professional, affective, religious). Ten face unfixable fertility problems, theirs or their partner’s. The 10% figure is conservative: the medical literature points to around 13%, and that does not even count male fertility problems.
Of the remaining 85, 10 have one child, 60 have two, 10 have three, and 5 have four. I am stopping at four to keep the post concise; very few women in younger cohorts have five or more children, but I could adapt the example to account for them.
Hence, the 100 women in this population have 180 children, for a completed fertility rate of 1.8.
Interestingly, this is roughly the rate we saw in many advanced economies until the early 1990s, and in the U.S. until around 2008.
But we are still 30 children short of replacement! Voluntary childlessness is only 5%. Three-quarters of women have two or more children. Look around: most of your friends will have two, plenty will have three or four. And yet, we are well below replacement.
You would not look at this population and call it selfish (is having two kids hedonistic?) or accuse it of losing family values (only 5% of women are choosing voluntarily not to have children).
The point is simpler. To reach 210 births, you need a substantial share of women to have three or more children. Two as the “normal” pattern will not get you there. And modern society makes three or more a costly proposition for most families.
Of course, current fertility rates in most advanced economies are well below 1.8. But my point is that, under present social arrangements, we should not expect 2.1, even if (to humor last weekend’s debate) we banned smartphones and TikTok. We need many, many more families with three or four children.
More pointedly, there is no self-regulating mechanism that pushes a society back to 2.1. The market-clearing analogy many economists use is flawed; scarcity feedback does not work the same way. (Another post on this another day.) And, as I often read, the claim that “nature” somehow regulates current overpopulation is just childish mumbo jumbo.
So yes, the arithmetic of replacement rate is unpleasant.
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Google dropped Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite & 3.6 Flash
How they scored on AutomationBench👇
3.6 Flash scored 19.8% — the highest we've recorded
3.5 Flash Lite scored 10.8%
• Beats 3.1 Pro at less than half the cost
• Best for high-volume work (ticket routing, tagging leads, etc)
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