Did a leather jacket predict Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s downfall?

Every tech founder has a uniform. Steve Jobs had the black turtleneck. Mark Zuckerberg had the grey T-shirt. Jensen Huang had the leather jacket, and it may have been trying to tell us something.

Huang has resigned as president and chief executive of Nvidia, effective immediately. His exit follows an independent company investigation into his acknowledged affair with a Chinese business associate who, according to US intelligence, was gathering information for China. 

He has also left Nvidia’s board. 

That ends a 33-year run for the co-founder who took an idea sketched out at a Denny’s and turned it into the top supplier of the chips behind the global AI boom.

Over at New York magazine’s The Cut, writer Emma Childs has asked the question nobody in the boardroom apparently thought to ask: shouldn’t the jacket have tipped us off?

The case for the prosecution

Her piece is titled ‘Jensen Huang’s Leather Jackets Confessed Before He Did’. It sits in a section called 'cheaters'.

Childs makes her case like this. Silicon Valley is full of men in Patagonia vests, and Huang has long stood out among them for his love of luxury leather. The jacket is to him what the turtleneck was to Jobs. 

He wore one on the cover of Time in 2021. He wears them onstage at Nvidia keynotes, usually with the kind of thumbs-up normally reserved for dads at school pick-up. 

She writes:

"A $9,000 leather moto is not the outerwear of a man faithfully going home to his wife and kids after a long day of architecting the AI revolution. That’s a man in a midlife crisis with an active Raya profile and a Harley in the garage."

Oft.

The defence

Huang, for his part, has always blamed the women in his life for his wardrobe.

Business Insider reported on his appearance on HP’s online show The Moment, where host Ryan Patel asked how it felt to be a fashion icon.

“You got the infamous jacket,” Patel said. “Now, at Denny’s I’m sure you weren’t thinking you were gonna be the style star of the future, but now you are. What do you think? How do you feel?”

“Don’t give me that,” Huang replied. “I’m happy that my wife and my daughter dresses me.”

The less fashionable bit

Look, the wardrobe analysis is fun, but the substance is serious. 

According to The New York Times, US intelligence determined that the woman, former Megaspeed managing director Alice Huang, was gathering information for China. Megaspeed is a Singapore-based data centre company.

Beijing has denied the spying allegations. Nvidia said it had “no reason to believe” that national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised.

Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump confirmed the FBI was looking into the affair and described Huang as a “very honourable man”. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast said he expected Huang to testify to Congress within the next week.

Nvidia and Huang also face a proposed class action. It accuses them of defrauding shareholders by concealing Huang’s ties to Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen.

Chief financial officer Colette Kress, who joined Nvidia in 2013, will serve as interim CEO until the board appoints a permanent replacement.

“Nvidia’s strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years,” Kress said in a statement.

Newly appointed board chair Harvey Jones said he expected “the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption”. Nvidia thanked Huang for his “immeasurable contributions” to the company and the wider industry.

Trump already has a successor in mind. On Truth Social, he said Huang had “done a fantastic job” and should be replaced by “a legend”.

“There is only one man to take his place - TIM COOK of Apple,” Trump wrote. “A legend replaces a legend.”

Whoever ends up in the corner office, one modest suggestion for the induction pack: a nice cardigan. Nobody has ever been caught out by a cardigan.