Nvidia employees petition board to bring back Jensen Huang
Less than a day after Jensen Huang resigned, Nvidia employees are pushing back: an internal post urging the board to reinstate him has drawn more than 1,600 comments, and a staff survey showed 88% wanted him to stay.
- The petition: an internal suggestion-box post by a longtime Nvidia engineer, submitted before the resignation, asking the board to weigh employee sentiment and share its findings; it has drawn more than 1,600 comments, most of them backing reinstatement.
- The survey: a Blind poll of 232 Nvidia employees on November 9–10 found 88% wanted Huang to stay as CEO, 11% backed a voluntary exit, and 1% supported removal by the board.
- Public backing: about two dozen employees have posted on LinkedIn in support of Huang; WIRED could not identify a single employee post supporting his resignation.
- The signal: the story surfaced on Reddit's r/LocalLLaMA at 11:03 p.m. ET on November 12, climbing to 377 upvotes and 120 comments within about an hour and a half.
- The context: Huang resigned on November 12 after admitting infidelity; Colette Kress is interim CEO and Harvey Jones is board chair, and Nvidia has lost about $1 trillion in market value since the allegations surfaced.
- Core vocabulary: a task is one test with defined inputs and success criteria; a trial is one attempt; a grader is logic that scores some aspect; the transcript is the complete trial record; the outcome is the final environment state.
- Grade transcript vs. outcome: a booking agent may announce 'your flight is booked,' but the outcome is whether a reservation actually exists in the database — most serious suites grade both.
- Sandboxes: each trial starts from a clean, isolated environment; shared state creates correlated failures and can inflate scores (one internal eval's model gained an advantage by reading git history left by previous trials).
- Graders: code-based (fast, cheap, reproducible, brittle); model-based LLM judges (flexible, non-deterministic, need calibration); human (gold standard, expensive, doesn't scale). Key lessons: grade what the agent produced, not the path — and calibrate LLM judges against humans, giving the judge an 'Unknown' way out.
- Success criteria: capability evals start at a low pass rate; regression evals sit near 100%. Use pass@k (at least one success in k attempts) vs. pass^k (all k succeed) deliberately, and always write a reference solution that passes every grader — one frontier model scored 42% until researchers fixed the eval, then 95%.
Nvidia's board moved fast to replace Jensen Huang. Its employees are now asking it to move just as fast in the other direction.
Less than a day after Huang resigned, an internal post urging the board to reinstate him has drawn more than 1,600 comments, most of them in support, according to internal correspondence reviewed by WIRED. The pushback surfaced on Reddit late Thursday, where the thread sharing the report climbed to 377 upvotes within about an hour and a half — and the comparison employees keep reaching for is Sam Altman's return to OpenAI in 2023.
What the petition says#
The campaign started before Huang's resignation. A longtime Nvidia engineer posted to the company's internal suggestion box urging the board to weigh employee sentiment before acting — and to share its findings with staff and formally ask how they felt “about Jensen's continuing as our CEO.”
After the resignation was announced on Thursday morning, the post became a rallying point. “If you believe in the mission, bring back THE boss,” one anonymous commenter wrote. Another: “We are all humans and can make mistakes. Jensen did so many good things and he needs a second chance.”
One employee went further, sending a companywide email demanding transparency about why Huang left. “I stand by Jensen,” the employee wrote, “not because I believe any person is infallible, but because I refuse to believe that standing for fairness must mean standing at a distance from someone whose leadership has meant so much to us.” The same email added: “If America fails the man who helped build its future, then this world does not deserve Jensen Huang.”
WIRED reports that the engineer behind the suggestion-box post declined to comment, and the employee who sent the companywide email could not be reached. Nvidia and its new board chair, Harvey Jones, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The numbers behind the push#
The petition is not just a loud minority. A Blind survey of 232 Nvidia employees taken on November 9 and 10 — before the second-affair report and the resignation — found 88 percent wanted Huang to remain chief executive, 11 percent backed a voluntary exit, and 1 percent supported removal by the board. A broader Blind poll of 1,689 professionals put support for him staying at 60 percent.
Public support is visible too. About two dozen employees have posted on LinkedIn backing Huang, one describing their faith in his leadership as unwavering. WIRED says it could not identify a single post from an Nvidia employee supporting his resignation.
Why staff say they were blindsided#
The other thread running through the petition is process, not just loyalty. Many employees had expected the board's independent investigation to run its course before any big change; instead, Huang left just as the inquiry had begun, and staff want the board to explain why and share what it found.
Huang, 63, who has led Nvidia since its founding in 1993, wrote to employees on Sunday admitting he had been “unfaithful to [his] wife” and that there was “no excuse.” The board announced his resignation on Thursday morning after reports of an alleged second affair with a direct report; Reuters has since reported an alleged affair with yet another Nvidia employee. Huang has not commented publicly since the Sunday email.
The background is messier still: reports of an affair with a woman described as a suspected Chinese intelligence asset, an allegation whose underlying intelligence assessment is itself disputed in public reporting. The crisis has cost Nvidia about $1 trillion in market value since the allegations surfaced, drawn investigations from US lawmakers and the FBI, and raised the prospect of new export controls. The board that made the call is largely made up of early Nvidia investors and Huang's longtime confidants.
A second Sam Altman moment?#
The Altman comparison deserves a straight look. In November 2023, OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman; within days, nearly all of the company's staff threatened to quit unless he was reinstated, and the board reversed course. Nvidia's employees are now trying the same play — public pressure, internal organizing, and a demand for the board to explain itself.
The differences matter as much as the parallel. Altman's firing was a governance fight; Huang's exit sits on top of admitted infidelity, reported affairs, and a federal investigation backdrop OpenAI never faced. And where OpenAI's staff threat was near-unanimous and immediate, Nvidia's campaign so far is a heavily commented internal post, a survey, and two dozen LinkedIn posts — real, but not yet a walkout threat. The board has given no sign it intends to reverse course: it named chief financial officer Colette Kress interim chief executive and former Synopsys chief Harvey Jones as its first-ever chair.
What to watch#
Three things will show whether the petition is a moment or a movement: whether the board answers the transparency demand — so far it has not responded to WIRED at all; whether internal support hardens into something the board cannot ignore, the way OpenAI's staff letter did; and the calendar, with Nvidia's quarterly earnings on November 17 and Huang's agreed testimony before Congress keeping the questions coming.
Sources: Techie Mag — ‘Bring Back THE Boss’: Nvidia Employees Petition for Jensen Huang’s Return (Nov. 13, 2026, syndicating WIRED’s original report); AI Weekly — Nvidia Employees Petition Board to Reinstate Jensen Huang (Nov. 13, 2026); r/LocalLLaMA — ‘Bring Back THE Boss’: Nvidia Employees Petition for Jensen Huang’s Return (Nov. 12, 2026, 11:03 p.m. ET). Prior coverage: Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO; CFO Colette Kress named interim chief; Reuters: Jensen Huang had a third affair — and has agreed to testify before Congress.