Jensen Huang petition passes 100,000 names as Musk warns Nvidia
A 'Stand with Jensen' petition asks Nvidia to bring Huang back, and Elon Musk says deals done on a handshake could be lost. What it can and cannot do.
Two days after Jensen Huang quit as Nvidia’s chief executive, an online petition asking the board to bring him back has gone past 100,000 signatures, and Elon Musk has added a warning: some of Nvidia’s biggest deals, he says, lived on a handshake with Huang. The board has not changed course, and the petition has no legal power over it.
This is the new turn in a story we explained on Friday. Huang resigned on Thursday, 12 November, while Nvidia’s board looks into whether he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. Finance chief Colette Kress is running the company for now.
What does the Jensen Huang petition ask for?
The campaign calls itself “Stand with Jensen”. According to TechCrunch, it had more than 115,000 signatures by Saturday afternoon, US time, including 5,965 people who said they are current Nvidia employees, 1,108 former employees and 63,063 shareholders. Business Insider, counting a little earlier, put it at over 108,000.
The petition says Huang was removed “without meaningful due process”. It asks the board to bring him back while an independent investigation establishes the facts, to make that investigation fair, and to tell the public more about it. Its sharpest line: “Jensen deserves due process, not mob justice.”
A caution on the numbers. Business Insider found joke entries such as “Tim Cruise, Hollywood actor” and “Xi Jingping” on the list, and the organisers said they were working to remove fake names. None of the counts has been checked independently.
Who has signed?
Musk wrote on X that he was signing it too. TechCrunch named Replit chief Amjad Masad, Epic Games chief Tim Sweeney and Y Combinator chief Garry Tan among the backers, and Business Insider added Boom Supersonic’s Blake Scholl. An Nvidia employee told Business Insider that a similar post had appeared on the company’s internal staff portal.
Separately, on Friday, investors Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Gavin Barker of Atreides Management wrote to the board asking for a “measured” approach to choosing the next leader, even if that means Huang returns, Business Insider reported.
What did Elon Musk warn about Nvidia?
In a post on X, Musk said Huang ran Nvidia’s supply chain brilliantly, but many of those deals were “a handshake with Jensen, not a written contract”. Without him, Musk wrote, at least some of those critical deals will be lost. He did not name a single deal or show that any had been cancelled, and Nvidia has not responded. Treat it as Musk’s opinion, not as a confirmed fact.
Our take: why this matters in Pakistan
A petition cannot reinstate a chief executive. Only the board can, and it has said it will look at inside and outside candidates. What the petition does show is how much of Nvidia’s value people tie to one man, and that is the real risk Musk is pointing at.
For Pakistani freelancers, AI start-ups and university labs, almost all serious AI work runs on Nvidia chips, usually rented through cloud services. A messy leadership fight at the company that supplies them could slow deals and keep GPU rental prices high. No customer has reported a lost deal so far. The thing to watch is the board’s investigation, Huang’s promised testimony to Congress and whether any big customer says out loud that a deal is in doubt.
