Elon Musk pushing for Nvidia board to reinstate Jensen Huang as CEO

Elon Musk and Jensen Huang.

The plot thickened on Friday, a day after Jensen Huang resigned as the CEO of chipmaking giant Nvidia after reports of multiple affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy surfaced. Elon Musk said in a post on X that a petition was under way to lobby the Nvidia board of directors to reinstate Huang as the company's CEO.

"A petition is underway to reinstate Jensen and I’m signing it too," Musk said in a post on Friday afternoon. Many in the tech industry, particularly those in the A.I. space, have come to Huang's defense amid the scandal and the board's push to out him. Indeed, reports surfaced Friday indicating that Nvidia employees were moving to persuade the board to reinstate Huang as CEO.

Musk's post came in response to a post made by a senior engineer at Tesla, who said, "If NVIDIA employees want Jensen back, they should start with 'NVIDIA is nothing without its people' - resign and chill. Good GPU engineers are very hard to find and even harder to replace than ML engineers. Engineers should take their destiny into their own hands if they love the company. They shape and deliver the company mission, not the boards."

The call for an employee uprising comes a day after the board appointed Colette Kress, the company's longtime CFO, its interim CEO while a seach for a new CEO was expected to begin. Nvidia's stock price continued to slide another 2% Friday, adding to significant losses throughout the week. Meanwhile, a report from Bloomberg, revealed Huang's dramatic last day at Nvidia, the company he co-founded in 1993, as the board told him he would be fired if he didn't resign. The report said Huang seemed despondent, with sources saying the despondent tech titan described himself as "a piece of sh**t."