The Saga of Former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Fake Leather Jacket

Benjamin Fanjoy2 min readThere are several ways to respond when you've admitted to an affair, your company's shares are tumbling, and even the White House is discussing your private life. Turning up in a spectacularly studded Saint Laurent leather jacket is one of them. Resigning is another.For a while, it seemed like Jensen Huang, the 63-year-old former CEO of Nvidia, had opted for the former. A photograph showing the tech billionaire in an archival Hedi Slimane YSL biker jacket went viral this week. The internet was delighted. There was just one problem: The photograph was fake.The resignation, which came just this morning, was real.As CNN reported, the image had been doctored from a genuine photograph taken at a Seoul airport in June. Nvidia, which one might imagine has other things to deal with right now, confirmed it wasn't real.Getty.Huang at Seoul airport in June and a different jacketBut perhaps the reason so many people believed it was that Huang already dresses like this. Leather jackets are his uniform. He reportedly owns 30 or 40 of them, including a snazzy reptile-effect number worn to deliver his company's keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show.PATRICK T. FALLONHuang delivering a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, Jan 2025And Hedi Slimane was the perfect designer to bring into the fantasy. The Frenchman, who ran Saint Laurent from 2012 to 2016, made his name dressing skinny rock stars and turning their disheveled, devil-may-care attitude—later rebranded as so-called “indie sleaze”—into expensive luxury fashion. His leather jackets were practically a uniform for men who were determined to look as though they didn't care what anyone thought and/or having a midlife crisis.For a billionaire in the middle of a spectacularly public scandal, it was quite a look. One Instagram commenter described Huang as the first person to achieve "negative aura" in archival Hedi.eBay.A Saint Laurent originalThere's another irony. Huang has previously said his wife Lori—i.e., the wronged party in all this—helps choose his clothes.And then there's the technology itself. Nvidia makes the chips that power the AI revolution, including the tools capable of ... producing convincing fake photographs.In conclusion then, the image wasn't real. But as a portrait of a billionaire in the middle of a spectacularly public crisis, we so wanted it to be.