Elon Musk has backed the campaign to bring Jensen Huang back as chief executive of Nvidia, saying he is signing a petition that asks the chipmaker’s board to reinstate its former boss.
“A petition is underway to reinstate Jensen and I’m signing it too,” Musk wrote on X on Friday, 13 November, in a reply to Tesla engineer Yun-Ta Tsai. The Washington Post and The Hindu BusinessLine were among the outlets to report his post.
The petition, called “Stand with Jensen”, is hosted on a volunteer-run website. It asks Nvidia’s board to bring Huang back while an independent investigation establishes the facts around his departure. The campaign says tens of thousands of people have signed, including current and former Nvidia employees and shareholders. The count is self-reported by the petition’s own tracker and has not been independently verified.
Other signatories named in reports include Epic Games chief Tim Sweeney, Y Combinator chief Garry Tan, Replit chief Amjad Masad, Cohere chief Aidan Gomez, Shopify chief Tobi Lutke and Fundstrat’s Tom Lee.
Huang resigned on 12 November after 33 years leading the company he co-founded in 1993. His departure followed a board investigation into his reported affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman whom some US intelligence officials suspect of links to Chinese intelligence. Nvidia named chief financial officer Colette Kress as interim chief executive and began searching for a permanent successor.
Musk’s backing carries no formal weight. He holds no seat on Nvidia’s board and has no vote on who runs the company. Bringing Huang back would be a decision for the board, which would need a majority of its directors to agree. An internal Nvidia post urging Huang’s return drew more than 1,600 comments, according to the Washington Post.
Separately, a letter circulating online that purported to show Nvidia employees threatening mass resignations unless Huang was reinstated has been exposed as fake. South Korean broadcaster SBS reported that the document copied a 2023 protest letter by OpenAI employees, with names and references changed. It is not the same as the “Stand with Jensen” petition Musk signed.
Nvidia shares fell more than 2% in Friday’s trading as the leadership crisis continued.
