Nvidia ousting Jensen Huang is interesting for the implications for Nvidia's future. Nvidia is one of the few big players in tech which actually seems like a well run company and I think a lot of that probably comes from Jensen Huang, who founded the company as an engineer.

Nvidia reached the position they are in because they invested in CUDA many years ago. CUDA is an API that makes it relatively easy to run processing jobs on the GPU rather than the CPU. Because CUDA was there and ready to go, the cryptocurrency boom and subsequently the AI boom made huge use of CUDA, which by extension made Nvidia cards more valuable. Nvidia couldn't have predicted the rise of cryptocurrency and AI, but they were forward thinking enough that they could see people wanting to use the GPU for processing more general computing tasks than just graphics and invested in it, making their core product better.

In any case, I think that tech CEOs who ensure their company invests in making its core products better are the exception rather than the rule. Look at Microsoft, who seem completely oblivious to the fact that Office and Windows are on fire, and Google, who spent years prioritising low quality SEO garbage search results and are now surprised people are abandoning search engines and moving to LLMs. You can also look at Nike, whose new CEO decided to stop retailers selling their shoes, with results predictable to everyone but their CEO. There is also the example of Valve, who have consistently been working on big and small incremental improvements to their products for a long time. In a strong market this would drive competition, but, in reality, Valve has attained an effective monopoly simply because Valve is competent and Valve's competition is not.

A lot of big tech CEOs inherit a legacy monopoly and let the company flounder for a while until the core revenue dries up. HP, Sun, Yahoo, Nokia, BlackBerry/RIM, and even the once mighty Intel is on shaky ground. Jensen Huang is a much higher quality CEO than average I think it is unlikely Nvidia's next CEO will be of the same calibre.

I also think Nvidia has also made some big mistakes. Throughout the rise of AI, they have bolstered demand in their own products by investing their own revenue in their customers. In the current AI gold rush they should be making a lot of money just by being a shovel manufacturer, but they could end up being a large bag holder in a bubble pop. We'll see.