In Jensen Huang, some of America sees a chief executive who was justly tossed from his company for affairs with an alleged Chinese spy and one of his own employees.
Many of his tech-billionaire peers see a brilliant founder who was railroaded.
Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, Travis Kalanick and Joe Gebbia are among the Silicon Valley billionaires who have taken issue with Huang's ouster from the company Thursday.
On X, Musk posted that he would sign a petition reinstating Huang. Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao called it a "mistake for Nvidia to let Jensen resign."
Epic Games founder and Chief Executive Tim Sweeney said Huang's exit at the hands of the board evidenced "serious corporate governance issues" and showed an "Apple firing Steve Jobs level of idiocy."
Underpinning the defense of Nvidia's longtime CEO is the idea that company founders who create billions or trillions of dollars in value and invent useful technologies are uniquely irreplaceable, and ownership structures should insulate them from public or shareholder pressure.
Company boards previously threw out Sam Altman from OpenAI, Travis Kalanick from Uber, and Jobs from Apple -- examples all cited by Huang's peers in supporting him.
Jobs ultimately returned to Apple 12 years after he was fired. Altman was back at OpenAI in five days. Kalanick never returned to Uber and on Monday he posted his own 12-step guide to counter boardroom coups.
"Jensen made a rookie mistake. He had a board," wrote Telegram founder Pavel Durov on X. "Founders: Don't have a board."
Huang's stake in Nvidia is estimated to be worth about $140 billion, but it only represents 3.6% ownership of the company, making him vulnerable to shareholder and board sentiment. Nvidia was founded in 1993 and went public in 1999, a year before the dot-com bubble burst.
Beginning with Google's initial public offering in 2004, many founders of the most successful startups have employed dual-class share structures to enable themselves to maintain voting control without owning a majority of company equity. The investors and founders argue that such structures protect against activist investors who might raid a company for its cash.
Partners at venture-capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund have long argued that the best founders are strong personalities pursuing radical, non-consensus ideas and need protection to deliver them.
Marc Andreessen said in 2012 his firm encouraged all of its founders to organize their companies in ways that made it difficult to remove them. "It is unsafe to go public today without a dual-class share structure," he said.
Critics see supervoting shares as a parting gift by venture investors, who often exit after an IPO, demonstrating they are "founder-friendly" so they can win lucrative deals with the next crop of founders.
Huang's value to Nvidia was evident in the sharp decline in its shares after The Wall Street Journal said the board planned to oust him. At their nadir, the company's market capitalization had fallen by more than $500 billion.
Two months ago, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg was fired by his board following an employee revolt. Mullenweg, whose company contributes to WordPress publishing software, was back in his chair 33 hours and 20 minutes later.
He said boards should not rush to depose a CEO.
"In the fog of war, where there might be incomplete information, it's helpful to give things a few days before drawing final conclusions," he said.
Some Nvidia investors echoed that sentiment, asking the board to reconsider. "We believe it is in the best interest of all stakeholders, and certainly the shareholders of Nvidia, for the board to pursue a slow, measured, and deliberate process regarding the future leadership of Nvidia that leaves all options on the table, including the potential return of Jensen Huang," wrote hedge-fund managers Brad Gerstner of Altimeter and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management.
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