After signing letter to bring back Jensen Huang, Elon Musk tells how he struck deals

Musk: Nvidia deals were handshakes (Picture: Reuters)Elon Musk has signed an open letter asking Nvidia’s board to reinstate Jensen Huang as CEO, and he has offered a reason the board may not have weighed yet. In a post on X, the Tesla and SpaceX chief said Huang ran Nvidia’s supply chain “brilliantly,” but many of the deals he struck were “a handshake with Jensen, not a written contract.” Without Huang, Musk warned, “at least some of those critical deals will be lost.”The campaign, called Stand with Jensen, crossed 115,000 signatures by Saturday. Its organisers, who say they have no link to Nvidia or Huang, want him brought back while an independent investigation establishes the facts. They argue the board removed him “without meaningful due process” after 33 years at the company he co-founded. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan are among the other tech names who have signed.Huang, 63, resigned on November 12 after acknowledging a romantic relationship with Alice Huang, a former top executive at Singapore-based data centre firm Megaspeed whom US officials believe was spying for China. He also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, an Nvidia executive who reported to him. China has denied the espionage claims, and chief financial officer Colette Kress is now interim CEO.Musk’s handshake remark points to billions in Nvidia deals now in limboMusk’s point has numbers behind it. At the end of July, Nvidia held $48 billion in stakes across 229 private companies, according to securities filings. It has also extended about $165 billion in lease guarantees and other backstops to help start-ups and cloud firms get AI chips they would struggle to buy on their own.Several of those deals were still being negotiated when Huang walked out. Some venture investors now expect Nvidia to pull back on backstopping smaller cloud companies.Musk’s own business sits inside that web. Nvidia holds a stake of roughly $21 billion in SpaceX, which began as a $10 billion investment in xAI before SpaceX absorbed the AI company. SpaceX builds its AI data centres only with Nvidia chips.The two men’s dealings go back a decade. In 2016, while Musk was funding OpenAI as a nonprofit, he emailed Huang asking for Nvidia’s then-new DGX-1 AI supercomputer. Huang delivered the first unit to the lab himself.The open letter that Elon Musk signed with 40,000 others has no binding power over Nvidia’s boardNeither Nvidia nor Huang has commented on the petition, and the letter cannot force a decision. Under Nvidia’s bylaws, the board controls executive appointments. Calling a special shareholder meeting requires investors who have held at least 15% of voting shares for a full year.The signature count comes with caveats too. The campaign site lists over 5,900 signers as current Nvidia employees and more than 62,000 as shareholders, but those affiliations are self-reported and unverified. Entries such as “Xi Jingping” also appeared on the list, and organisers said they were working to remove fake signatures.The letter asks the board for three things: reinstate Huang pending the probe, give him a fair hearing and explain its decision publicly. “After thirty-three years pouring his heart and soul into NVIDIA, Jensen deserves due process, not mob justice,” the organisers wrote.Huang’s troubles go beyond the boardroom. The Senate Banking Committee has asked him and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to testify on December 3, and has threatened a subpoena. Kress inherits Nvidia’s contracts. If Musk is right, she does not inherit every handshake that came with them.