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Today, we are talking about the long-awaited release of GTA VI and why it took nearly 13 years to make.
Also this week: All things Jensen Huang (as you def know, he resigned as Nvidia CEO amidst multiple extramarital scandals and became the subject of countless AI-generated video and image memes…powered by his Nvidia GPUs. Fate loves irony).
Grand Theft Auto VI is in the Hall-of-Fame for the most anticipated media products ever.
It joins the final Harry Potter “Deathly Hallows” book (2007, 8m copies sold), Avengers: Endgame (2019, which capped a $30B box office run for Marvel), Argentina vs. France World Cup Final (2022, Messi ends the GOAT discussion) and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005, the sequel to Rob Schneider’s original comedic masterpiece).
The wait for GTA VI has been next level, though.
When it finally drops next week (November 19, 2026), it will have been over 13 years since the release of GTA V (September 17, 2013).
To put that wait in context, Rockstar Games made the previous 5 standalone Grand Theft Auto games over a 12-year span: GTA III (2001), GTA: Vice City (2002), GTA: San Andreas (2004), GTA IV (2008) and GTA V (2013).
The reason we start the clock with GTA III is because that was when the game studio switched from a top-down 2D perspective to the iconic open 3D-world environment…where every single player had way too much fun committing random street crimes.
People were having so much fun with the franchise that the 5-year wait between GTA IV and GTA V resulted in the most lucrative media product launch in history.
In 2013, GTA V rang up $800m in its first 24 hours and crossed $1B after 3 days.
Fast forward to 2026 and GTA VI crossed $1B in pre-sales a week before the game’s release.
Strauss Zelnick — the CEO of Take-Two Interactive (which bought Rockstar Games for only ~$20m in 1998) — said on an earnings call that GTA VI pre-sales are “tracking far in excess of our initial expectations”, so the final number should be materially higher…and it should be for the investment that the studio has made.
Rumours are that Rockstar Games spent $1 to $1.5B to make GTA VI. Rockstar hasn’t given an investment figure but the company’s outlay is way more than the combined ~$250m cost to create GTA III, GTA IV and GTA V.
Either way, the wait has been palpable…and been the source of a classic internet joke over the past decade: “We got [insert something unlikely] before we got GTA VI”.
Here are two recent riffs. One after the mid-term elections and one after the Tesla Roadster launch event.
The joke — which I never get tired of seeing — has reached incredible levels of meta:
I’m sure Rockstar is happy (and sad) to see it end.
The main reason for GTA VI’s delay is that production for Triple-A games has gotten completely out of control.
Thousands of people working on 9-figure budgets with impossible demands have led to numerous delays for major blockbusters in the past decade including Assassin's Creed Shadows (2025), Hogwarts Legacy (2023), The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023), Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018, another Rockstar masterpiece).
Unsurprisingly, these 3D-sandbox-explore-the-world games have countless tiny details that will blow your socks off.
My favourite example: the horse testicles in Red Dead Redemption 2 shrink or expand depending on the temperature outside. Please read that last sentence again. It probably took a team of developers months and endless back-and-forths with equine veterinarians to perfect the game physics.
Also, it’s hysterical that someone took the time to make this YouTube video, which now has ~500k views. Anything for the algo.
In addition to the difficulty of making these Triple-A games, I subscribe to another popular theory as to why GTA VI has taken so long: two weeks after the launch of GTA V, Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto Online and it became such a cash cow that Take-Two had less pressure to get GTA VI out the door.
How much of a cash cow?
Earlier this year, some hackers broke into Rockstar Games corporate system and leaked internal financials…which Take-Two has (understandably) refused to verify.
Tech review site TweakTown broke down the leak and the headline is that GTA Online — which makes most of its money by selling Shark Cards (in-game currency that allows players to buy digital goods and unlock new missions) — made $5.1B between 2014 and 2025.
That is just GTA Online.
This is on top of the $5.2B that Rockstar made selling the actual GTA V games (over 230m copies lifetime) and other level add-ons.
Add it all up and Take-Two has made over $10.4B from GTA V since 2013.
That is more than any single media entertainment product ever (eg. we’re not including ~$35B for every Super Mario game or ~$50B for every Star Wars film, game, book and toy).
GTA Online has an estimated 4-5m daily users but almost all that spend comes from <5% of players…and the Shark Cards are almost entirely pure profit.
The profitability claim comes from a Scottish video game producer named Leslie Benzies, who lead production for GTA III to GTA V before falling out with management and suing Rockstar.
With the caveat that a lucrative financial settlement depends on making Rockstar look maximally profitable, here is what Benzies’s lawsuit said about GTA Online:
“These purchases have a nearly 100% profit margin. Subject only to nominal development costs and app store commissions. GTA Online has the potential to achieve the greatest profit margin of any game created in the GTA franchise.”
To cross-check those leaked financials, I did some deep analysis by spending a few seconds to prompt Claude and asked it to analyze Take-Two’s financials over the past decade and whip up a few charts.
Sure enough, the GTA Online money dripper is realer than real deal Holyfield.
Take-Two doesn’t actually break out the GTA Online component but we can still tease out how much of an impact the game has had relative to the rest of the company.
Let’s start with financials for the first full year of GTA V in 2014. The key part of this chart to eyeball is the yellow line showing GTA’s revenue contribution (from every part of the franchise, not just online).
Understandably, GTA took a massive chunk (70%) of Take-Two’s total net revenue in the first year. The franchise dipped to under 30% of Take-Two’s total revenue in 2015 before jumping to 50% in 2016 as the popularity of GTA Online Shark Cards took off.
GTA remained at ~40% of Take-Two’s revenue in 2017 and 2018. The 2019 figure is down due to the October 2018 release of Red Dead Redemption II (the other key pillar for Take-Two’s empire is the NBA 2K series…which comes out every year).
Still, GTA sales continued to be 20-30% of Take-Two’s entire business from 2020-2022, long after the original GTA V release (Take-Two acquired mobile publisher Zynga in May 2022 for ~$13B and that has since skewed the revenue mix).
According to the aforementioned leaked data, GTA Online was responsible for 50-80% of GTA’s entire revenue each year over the past decade.
We see GTA Online impacts by looking at one key metric from Take-Two’s financials: recurrent consumer spending (aka RCS aka them digital in-game purchases that only <5% of players go absolutely HAM on).
While GTA Online is not the only game that contributes to RCS, we know it has a stallion-testicle sized contribution to the company’s changing revenue mix: the share of Take-Two’s revenue attributable to RCS went from under 10% in 2014 (GTA Online’s first year) to 65% in 2022 (the year of Zynga’s acquisition).
In a May 2017 earnings call — just a few years into the GTA Online experiment — Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was amazed by its success: “It’s a remarkable achievement that…spending on Grand Theft Auto Online has grown every year since its release and reached record levels in fiscal 2017, more than three years after its initial launch.”
During the same call, Zelnick addressed the tension of milking an existing winner vs. investing more into long-term projects.
“How do you direct your resources?” he asked. “On the one hand, to supporting something that’s working mightily now. And on the other hand, to something that will — we hope — work mightily in the future?”
GTA Online has basically given Rockstar a ~$425m annual annuity that is PURE PROFIT since it launched. Just this income stream has been 14% to 28% of Take-Two’s entire revenue each year from 2015 to 2021.
What did Charlie Munger say?
Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.
If GTA VI couldn’t get out the door in time…Rockstar has had an incredible Plan B (there were two official recent delays: a Fall 2025 launch was pushed to May 2026 before we got this final November 2026 date).
Take-Two has just been milking users on that RCS. You can find people complaining about the Shark Card slowing down GTA VI development across relevant subreddits over the years (r/GTAOnline, r/GTAV, r/Rockstar, r/GTA6).
At a minimum, the success of Shark Card for GTA Online lead to Rockstar cancelling a bunch of downloadable single-player story expansions for GTA V…which peeved a lot of gamers.
Prominent Rockstar developers have talked about this dynamic:
In 2017, Rockstar director of design Imran Sarwar told Game Informer that GTA Online — coinciding with Red Dead Redemption II development — took resources away from GTA V add-ons: “We did not feel single-player expansions were either possible or necessary.”
In 2024, Rockstar camera artist Joe Rubino told SanInPlay that “when GTA Online came out, it was so much of a cash cow — and people were loving it so much — that it was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would outcompete that” even though they were quite good.
To be clear: I think the main reason GTA VI took so long is because Rockstar’s ambition is insane.
There is immense pressure to top GTA V. It’s a critical smash which has sold over 230m copies and cranked out $10B+ across all revenue streams.
Rockstar needs to ace every detail to top that quality bar and also compete in such a different entertainment dynamic. In 2013, Netflix and YouTube were a fraction of their size now. Same with all the social networks (TikTok wasn’t even launched). Meanwhile, AI chatbots are eating into so much digital time usage.
GTA VI was always going to take a long time and had to come years after Red Dead Redemption II.
With that context, the GTA Online annuity not only bought Rockstar more time but also funded the additional hiring to make that happen.
Per a recent Bloomberg profile, Rockstar employed 2,441 people in 2018 when it completed Red Dead Redemption II. A lot of that talent jumped over to GTA VI and the headcount is now near 5,000.
Even with more headcount, GTA VI couldn’t be made at the same pace. Why? Through the 2010s, Rockstar had a reputation of a frat boy environment and had to clean up its excruciating “crunch” work culture, when staff in the gaming industry are expected to work 100 hours a week to keep a project on schedule.
As an aside, I only recently discovered that there are 1,000 key Rockstar employees in its Edinburgh office. I wish I knew earlier because I would have taken a photo near the building when I visited Edinburgh last year (anyway, enjoy this one of me in front of an Adam Smith statue after buying a Peaky Blinders hat on the Royal Mile).
What’s the future of GTA Online?
An online version of GTA VI won’t be available at launch but it’s def coming.
One Redditor asked the r/gaming subreddit if Rockstar would make a new online game and expressed disgust at the Shark Card. Here was an answer from u/Pjoernrachzarck that made me chuckle:
Let me quickly do the calculations. Let’s see.
The chances that a company will try to repeat exactly what they did last time when they made the highest grossing piece of media entertainment of all time are…
Oh would you look at that! 100%!
The single-player GTA VI will hold court for the foreseeable future, though.
Millions of people are already carving out 50+ hours at the end of November and start of December to get their fix:
Apparently, 12.5m in the US are expected to take the launch day off work. A Spanish economist (maybe jokingly) ran the numbers and said that could be $1B+ of lost economic productivity.
The Greenborough Police Department (maybe jokingly) said it was giving its officers November 19 off as it knows everyone in the city will stay home that day.
Houston Rockets Centre Steven Adams told reporters (maybe jokingly) that he expects player performance across the NBA to plummet after GTA VI drops.
Game hardware maker Logitech is giving a paid day off for all 7,000 employees to get their GTA VI on.
“One US Army unit is offering 4 bonus days off to play ‘Grand Theft Auto’ for soldiers who reenlist”
Seriously, be sure to check the timeline next week. There will be a steady drip of “saved 57 hours of PTO for this” or “just quit my job, worth it” or “knocked up my wife in February to be on paternity leave in time for GTA VI” gags.
Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden gave Polygon the perfect framing for how the game industry is looking at the GTA VI launch: “GTA is its own planet circling its own sun. We know that when it lands, it’s going to have a blast radius. Six weeks either side of when it comes out, it’ll take over everything that we know.”
The only person with the horse testicles fortitude to even try competing against GTA VI is Nintendo gaming legend Shigeru Miyamoto, who dropped a Zelda remake for the Switch 2 last week (it sold 5.2m copies in its first 4 days).
“Grand Theft Auto VI, coming to the world on November 19, promises to be not only highly engaging,” Zelnick said on this week’s earnings call. “But in fact, the biggest and most detailed groundbreaking experience that Rockstar Games has ever created,”
His belief is backed up by Take-Two’s financial projections.
The full Take-Two fiscal year runs from April through to March. There will be about 5 months of GTA VI left for fiscal 2027, which Zelnick guided to a high end of $8.2B. Take-Two’s ballpark revenue through the first 7 months of the fiscal year is a bit over ~$6B.
So, GTA VI will be at least a $2B revenue neutron bomb over the next 5 months.
These projections also seem to be supported by the INSANE gameplay videos that Rockstar has been dripping out.
Whatever the official budget, Rockstar and Take-Two will make it back real quick (they refuse to give a number but did say that it is “not quite as much as the Burj Khalifa”, which cost $1.5B lol).
The game will also be a boost to the console market (PS5, Xbox) — about 20% of all gaming revenue — which has been clobbered in recent years because of high memory prices (due to the AI boom) and supply chain issues.
Looking forward to another decade of “we got [X] before we got GTA 7” jokes.
Perhaps most importantly, the entire world can point its attention to the resolution of the next great and long-awaited entertainment question: When will Rob Schneider finally complete the Deuce Bigalow trilogy with a third film?
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Jensen Links & (So Many) Memes
Speaking of Gigolos and Charlie Munger quotes (“There is only three ways a smart person can go broke: liquor, ladies and leverage)…we need to talk about Jensen Huang.
As I’m sure you’ve heard, the Nvidia CEO resigned after he admitted to an affair with a vendor client named Alice Huang (who may or may not be a CCP spy and no relation as has been typed a million times my the media in the past week) and a direct report.
I have 30 minutes to type out my thoughts before heading into dinner. It’s 5pm PT Friday now. Need to type it out now or will be hungover tomorrow and everything will have changed by then.
If there are typos and grammatical mistakes. Sorry. I make it up to you by including 100+ tweets from the most absurd week of tech maybe ever (scroll down to see more).
This Jensen story has everything. AI. Sex. (Maybe a) Spy. (Maybe a) honeypot. Boardroom maneuvering. Trillions of dollars on the line. The most famous and powerful people in the world.
Jensen resigned as Nvidia CEO after multiple extramarital scandals hit the tape. He’s been replaced by CFO Collette Kress. The board is investigating his conduct and Jensen has a closed-door grilling with Congress over his efforts to export Nvidia chips to China (contrary to restrictions).
I’m going full bullet point mode here.
Am I disappointed? Or course.
Jensen is a beast. Parents sent him from Taiwan to America at 10. Went to a boys reform school in Kentucky that his parents mistakenly thought was a boarding school. Graduates from high school in Oregon before getting a BSc in Electrical Engineering (Oregon State) and Masters Electrical Engineering (Stanford).
Famously co-founds Nvidia at Denny’s — where he worked in high school — and builds the company from $0 to $4 trillion in 33 years.
So many investors benefitted from those gains. Not like these private AI startup deals happening now. SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic going public at $1T. Anyone could have invested in Nvidia in the past decade and gone along for the ride.
Currently employs 40,000+ people and built an entire ecosystem of suppliers in Asia.
Just in the weeds with every detail of the company and arguably the most important person in the current AI boom.
A super technical Asian CEO who became a rock star wearing Tom Ford leather jackets. I’d be lying if I wasn’t a fan. (I wrote this after Nvidia GTC earlier this year).
He has 60 direct reports and personally negotiates deals with hundres of suppliers.
Nvidia and TSMC don’t even have a contract. Jensen cold-called Morris Chang in the late-1990s. They operate by “rough justice”. Sometimes Nvidia wins. Sometimes TSCM wins. But it all nets out.
Being a beast doesn’t obviously doesn’t mean you can’t gaffe. He’s human. So so so human as we’ve found out. There’s no sugar-coating. Jensen effed up hard.
His two confirmed affairs are just colossally stupid:
1. one with Alice Huang, who runs Megaspeed, which operates shady network of data centre companies in Singapore and Malaysia (along with ties with Chinese finance firms etc…you can’t get to this level in China without somehow being invovled with the CCP…you don’t even have to be a trained spy)…even if she wasn’t a spy, the optics of the relationship look awful and provide ammo for anyone looking to bring Jensen down
2. one with Kimberly Powell, head of Nvidia healthcare and a direct report (literally, Corporate America 101…you can’t have a relationship with a subordinate because of the power dynamic and liability potential…a number of high-profile CEOs have been iced for this)
Let’s be adults here. I have idea what his arrangement is with his wife Lori. They have been married for 41 years. Everything he’s said about her is that she is smarter than him and was earning before him. Then, she took care for their two kids — who both joined Nvidia in recent years and have speedily come up the ranks (Jensen’s son-in-law is also a fast-rising exec) — and let him build his dream.
I lived and worked in Asia and these types of extra-marital scandals aren’t shocking.
I don’t condone but I’m just saying I’m not shocked.
I DON'T CONDONE but I’m just saying I’m not shocked.
Rule #1,2,3,4,5: Do NOT embarrass the family.
What is shocking — again — is the utter lack of judgement considering Jensen position and importance in the industry. A customer (might be a spy…at a minimum has ties to CCP) and a direct report (Corporate America 101).
In 98% of cases, this would be enough to get the axe.
Did Nvidia’s board do the right thing, though?
Is it actually in the interest of Nvidia shareholders to get rid of Jensen.
Again, he demonstrated some awful judgement and lied about it.
No one else can run Nvidia, though. I’m not saying this is enough to keep him around…just devil’s advocate with me.
These scandals wouldn’t take down Zuck because he has full control of Meta.
Jensen owns ~4% of the company ($150B) and the board was full of lifelong Nvidia investors … so he looked pretty protected. But it wasn’t Zuck protected and 6 of 11 board members was all it took to take him out.
Jensen having 60 direct reports and no real succession plan was probably his way of protection (did he harm Nvidia by doing this? Well, he described Nvidia as an F1 car built for him to drive and probably thought he’d be there until he died). This is literally the board’s job. Have succession plan in place. They were too pliant and let him bulldoze them.
So Nvidia is down from $5T to under $4T since the rumblings heated up.
But uncertainty is also not good. Putting Jensen on leave for 3-6 months while the investigation is ongoing doesn’t seem ideal.
Is CFO Collette Kress in the best interest of Nvidia long term?
They’ll probably replace. Top candidates include Ian Buck (Nvidia’s head of hyperscaler and data centre) or Rene Haas (ARM CEO and former Nvidia exec).
YOLO candidates include Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO, already hooks up with everyone in SF so there’s no honeypotting threat because everyone know), Lisa Su (AMD CEO and Jensen’s cousin)…Tim Cook was floated but dude is in full retirement mode.
Jensen has Nvidia set up real well for next 3-4 years but what about later?
AI is such a fast-moving field.
He’s made huge bets on open-source AI ($20B on Hugging Face and Poolside) and is the strongest proponent of the industry.
Without him, Nvidia could lose technological leadership.
Now, does this excuse his behaviour?
Many will say the infidelities are enough…and — Corporate 101 — it probably would be but this is such a unique situation.
Which brings up the real bomb: if investigations find out that Jensen knowingly diverted chips to China.
He may very well have turned a blind eye to Alice Huang — again, stupid for sleeping with — sending $7B of chips to China.
This takes us to a major philsophical debate.
Jensen has been pro sending chips to China with the argument that it is good for the Chinese chip ecosystem to become reliant on the American chip stack.
Jensen believes the biggest threat to Nvidia (and by extension America) is if China’s Huawei develops a full chip ecosystem and becomes a global competitor.
How you feel about this argument is probably mostly how you feel about Jensen.
If you think America should completely cut off China from the most advanced chips … because a lot will end up with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) due to China’s tight civil-military fusion…then you really don’t agree with him.
Marco Rubio oversaw the memo about Jensen being involved with Alice Huang (and the framing of her as a “spy”). Rubio is a huge China hawk. Taking out Jensen — and Jensen’s lobbying for chip sales to China and the open-source (mostly Chinese) models — is a win from this angle.
Another Winner is Anthropic. Dario is also a China hawk.
In the lead-up to Anthropic’s IPO next week, the company also announced the Claude was able to port over the entire model to AMD chips in 3 days with kernel code written entirely by Claude (this would have taken dozens of engineers in 6-12 month a few years ago).
Anthropic clearly signalling that it doesn’t NEED Nvidia (not to say its unimportant but Anthropic’s compute pool is increasingly fungible between Nvidia, Google TPUs, AMD and Amazon Trainium chips).
OpenAI would also benefit if Chinese models get clapped. But OpenAI is much more tied to the Nvidia chip ecosystem.
Speaking of chip ecosystem, Jensen has deployed $100B+ across 100+ AI startups and also made financial guarantees in the ~$500B range to back neoclouds and AI data centre buildouts.
Without him at the helm juggling these deals in his head and lending his clout, the entire industry will lose a massive source of funding (remember, Nvidia is printing like $150B+ of cash flow a year now to redeploy).
The counter here is that Nvidia will have more short-term financial discipline and that means more buybacks for shareholders. Good for now….but lack of hardcore bets could be existential the fast moving AI race.
Back to the board, it also has to protect itself. If there is something truly incriminating with the Chinese chip export evasions…all bets are off. Cause it sounds like Jensen’s relationships at Nvidia (there was a 2nd employee apparently) was an open secret. The board did nothing for years…but the heat too much now?
Why not finish the investigation first?
The mid-term elections also diminished Trump’s capital. He is obviously very pro-AI and pro-Jensen.
We are already seeing fights in the cabinet. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was slow to clip MegaSpeed even as investigators warned him about Alice Huang. Treasury Secretary actually put the Commerce department on blast for being asleep at the wheel.
I definitely land on the more hawkish side on China but also can admit they have serious cards to play.
If America cuts off all chips, China can keep playing the rare earth card…and, also, we forget how much cross pollinations there still is between both nations.
AMD and Nvidia employ a ton of Chinese engineers. 50-60% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese and many work for American labs and Big Tech.
China has its hands all over the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain and — if it’s clear America is completely closing the door on it — then the CCP could also pull some powerful cards.
The CCP is also currently letting 600k Nvidia chips sit in HK. It doesn’t want its domestic ecosystem reliant on Nvidia chips. It wants every single company across the local AI industry working on building an indigenous AI chip industry.
BUT, American chips are clearly better now and the ship has been leaky enough that they are getting through to China…all those loopholes will assuredly be closed now.
Remember that last month was called Black October with all those crazy AI agent cybersecurity hacks. Maybe the models are so good now that the argument to allow China on American chips (and distilling American models) is no longer tenable. The weaponization factor is no longer hypothetical.
Cui Bono with Jensen? Who benefits? These stories were known for over a year and they have been steadily leaked out. It’s clearly coordinated.
What’s next for Jensen?
A lot of investigations. If the worst-case scenario doesn’t come out — there is a paper trail that he allowed evasion around Chinese chip exports — I definitely could see him finding his back to Nvidia within a few years. Even now, there are employee petitions to bring him back.
Elon said it would be “an honor” to hire Jensen. The YOLO bet here for them to turn SpaceX’s Terafab into a monster business. Super longshot…but I dunno…you can convince me of anything right now. If you told me a month ago that Jensen would be out at Nvidia, I would have laughed in your mug.
Anyway, some pods and posts below…and scan through all the 100+ tweets below…I bookmarked them and they are posted in chronological order and you can get a view into how my dopamine receptors got fried.
Think Jensen scandals may have been the peak usage of AI-generated image and video memes for any tech story yet…all thanks to Nvidia GPUs. Absurd, tragic, sometimes hilarious, wild, sad.
Pre-2025: Since the AI boom has taken off, a solid gag has been that if you’re a AI researcher and an attractive Asian girl hits on you…she’s probably a CCP spy. But for real, OpenAI and Anthropic security team actually conduct honeypot training. Maybe not specific to Asians but in SF the gag makes sense.
This one made me LOL during the week in January 2025 when the DeepSeek dropped and people were shocked at how competitive Chinese models were with American AI labs.
Here’s another one that went nuclear viral (and will have a payoff when you scroll down later):
October 9, 2025: The New York Times started writing about MegaSpeed and Alice Huang (and her close relationship with Jensen) in October of last year. Jensen was so livid about the article that he hired one of America’s top PR crisis communication firms (Heller). The info has been out there.
May 13, 2026: A short-seller research shop run by a 31-year old wrote a now famous report on Nvidia. It identified MegaSpeed and SuperMicro as companies that looked to be facilitating Nvidia chips into China (contrary to export laws).
“This is not a bet against AI. We are short Nvidia for one reason: the Company has a significant China problem.” (namely, that ~20% of revenue looked to be diverting chips to China and if that door fully closed, Nvidia would have some huge problems).
Nov 7, 2026: On October 29th, the NYT published an article titled “Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot”. The drumbeat picked up on November 6th, when the Financial Times came out and called it a “romantic relationship”.
Nov 8, 2026: On Sunday, Jensen wrote a memo admitting he was “unfaithful to his wife” and the Nvidia board said it was “initiating an independent investigation in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.”
The speculation turned into reality the and memes went into overdrive from there.
Nov 9, 2026: It’s Monday. First trading day after the insane weekend news. Basically every tech stock rallies — following what had been a rough post-mid-term elections sell off — except for Nvidia.
Nov 10, 2026: Tuesday. Everyone wondering if Jensen is going to be able to hang on to the job.
Nov 11, 2026: Wednesday. Jensen looks buried after the NYT drops an article about his affair with an Nvidia employee and director report.
this video is insane btw…must watch
Nov 12, 2026: Nvidia board removes Jensen as CEO. Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO.
November 13th: lets keep the party going
