Jensen Huang and the End of the Founder Fairy Tale

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It was July of 2024, and Jensen Huang was punchy.

I had agreed to travel to Denver, Colorado, to interview the Nvidia CEO at SIGGRAPH, the annual confab of computer graphics PhDs and practitioners. Early that year I’d conducted a lengthy sit-down interview with Huang for a WIRED magazine feature, which apparently went well enough—both for WIRED and for Nvidia’s executive communications team—that I had been asked to interview Huang again at this conference. Another opportunity to grill the CEO of the modern world’s most consequential company? Yes, of course. I began preparing.

What ensued was, in a word, bizarre. During the first prep call for the conference, the type of call in which PR handlers typically try to coax specific questions out of journalists to prevent an ambush, a youngish, vaguely familiar woman took the lead. This was Madison Huang, Jensen’s daughter. She was clearly intelligent, commanding respect. She...

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