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Jen-Hsun Huang, who often wore a black leather jacket to attend shareholder events, once had it all. He was courted by leaders in Washington and Beijing, sought after by investors and viewed as a devoted family man. However, his rock-star indulgence in his private love life eventually led to his resignation.
Huang, 63, has maintained his marriage since getting married in 1985. At that time, it was still many years before he founded Nvidia and became a superstar in the technology industry with this company. He has also been portraying himself as a good family man.
Huang is known as a workaholic and a demanding manager who holds extremely high standards for his subordinates. A pair of his children also work in the company and have been promoted. However, the successive revelations of emotional entanglements have caused his personal reputation to plummet this week, and also raised questions about his focus and judgment.
After two extramarital affairs were revealed, Huang Renxun resigned on Thursday (November 12). The first to come to light was his close relationship with a businesswoman accused of being a Chinese spy. The news quickly spread around the world and attracted the attention of investors. Then on Wednesday, reports emerged that the head of the tech giant had an extramarital affair with a colleague.
Huang's departure adds uncertainty to global stock markets that have experienced recent turmoil. Nvidia is a key company in the U.S. battle with China for technology leadership.
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Jen-Hsun Huang's name may not be as well-known as Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.
However, his impact on the technology industry, especially during the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) over the past three years, may be even more profound. Nvidia dominates the chip market that powers this new technology.
Despite the recent turmoil, Nvidia's market value still exceeds $4 trillion. The company is at the center of an artificial intelligence race between the United States and China, two major technological and economic powers.
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Huang Jen-Hsun also enjoys extraordinary influence in the political world. Both US President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have actively courted him, giving him access to the highest power core in the world.
Jen-Hsun Huang's extraordinary rise in the technology world has earned him the title of "Taylor Swift in the technology world." His personal fortune is estimated at $145bn (£109bn), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Although Huang always wears his iconic black leather jacket, he has spent many years trying to cultivate the image of a good family man and present himself as a paragon of the "American Dream."
Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963 and moved to the West Coast of the United States with his family when he was nine years old. He earned a degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master's degree in the same field from Stanford University.
He met his wife, Lori Mills, while in college. The two were lab partners at the time and married in 1985, eight years before Huang founded Nvidia.
The two have a son and a daughter, Huang Shengbin and Huang Minshan, both of whom now work in their father's company.
Before co-founding Nvidia, Huang worked at American chip company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). He is known as "Papa Huang" in Taiwan and is known for having extremely high demands on his employees.
Nvidia initially became an important supplier of computer chips and circuits to the gaming industry, and later expanded its business into the field of artificial intelligence. Today, the company produces core processing chips that provide computing power for this rapidly developing technology.
Jen-Hsun Huang once hailed artificial intelligence as a "new industrial revolution" and believed that its importance is comparable to the emergence of electricity.
Stephen Witt, the author of Huang Jen-Hsun's biography "Huang Jen-Hsun: How the Founder of Huida Built the World's Most Popular Chip" (The Thinking Machine), said in an interview with the BBC: "Huang Jen-Hsun is a visionary technology leader like Steve Jobs."
He added that Huang Renxun single-handedly promoted the establishment of artificial intelligence hardware as we know it today.
The Nvidia co-founder's close relationship with Trump is widely known. At a recent artificial intelligence summit held at the White House, 42 senior executives from technology companies attended, and sitting next to Trump were Jen-Hsun Huang and Musk.
It’s not surprising that Huang is sitting at the main table. Companies using Nvidia chips include Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic.
In other words, Huang's customers include the world's largest companies, and these companies are spending huge sums of money to purchase Nvidia's products.
Such close ties between companies mean that negative shocks to Nvidia, such as a drop in its stock price, could further ripple out to other companies and the broader economy.
Witt told the BBC that Huang has worked very hard to portray himself as a good family man, which is "very important" to him.
"He often praised his wife and spoke of her with such praise," Witt said.
"This would be hurtful to any family. But for a man who worked so hard to portray himself as a family man and who maintained a very close relationship with his children, it was particularly devastating."
After the first extramarital affair was exposed, Huang admitted that he had been "unfaithful" to his wife and apologized for hurting his family.
Trump and other leaders in the artificial intelligence technology industry supported Huang to continue as Nvidia CEO. Trump even described him as an "upright man."
This article was originally written in English. We used artificial intelligence to assist in translation and was reviewed by BBC journalists before publication. Learn more about how we use artificial intelligence.
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