“All You Know How to Do Is Report”: The Mocked “Deer in the Headlights” Swallowed a 7,700-Trillion Empire After Jensen Huang Left

[Financial News]  It has emerged that former NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who left in disgrace amid a China espionage scandal and an affair, had once utterly dismissed his successor, interim CEO Colette Kress, saying that “all she knew how to do was report.”

In effect, he handed the throne of a 7,700-trillion-won AI empire to the very “deer in the headlights” he had mocked.
On the 12th (local time), the U.S. daily The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported in detail on how former CEO Jensen Huang treated Colette Kress when she was NVIDIA’s chief financial officer (CFO).
According to sources, the pair’s precarious relationship boiled over at a finance meeting held last summer. NVIDIA was then discussing a plan to provide billions of dollars’ worth of credit guarantees to companies that could not afford to buy its chips.
During the meeting, Jensen Huang abruptly interrupted Kress’s presentation and harshly berated her as “a deer in the headlights.” It was a humiliating metaphor for freezing up and not knowing what to do in a sudden situation. He went on to call Kress a “reporting CFO,” thoroughly belittling her as someone incapable of devising strategy or making major decisions.
But contrary to former CEO Huang’s disparagement, Kress was a key power player behind the scenes who had helped lead NVIDIA. After joining the company in 2013, she made numerous financial decisions as NVIDIA’s valuation climbed to $5.8 trillion (about 7,726 trillion won) as of last October.


A prime example was her close scrutiny of Vice President Nico Caprez, former CEO Huang’s son-in-law. When Caprez proposed last spring that NVIDIA provide credit support to cloud companies and share in the profits, Kress put the brakes on the idea, questioning in detail the criteria for selecting recipients and the investment returns. Colleagues said she worked tirelessly to keep her son-in-law Caprez from expanding his influence within the company.
Kress was also behind the decision to slash the financial support NVIDIA had planned to provide for OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, for its massive data-center project, reducing it to “half” the originally planned amount.
The intriguing twist is Kress’s “elegant revenge” after taking power as interim CEO. Although Jensen Huang, who had once belittled her, was forced out in disgrace amid a devastating scandal, Kress praised the former CEO as a “pioneer” in a memo she sent to all employees shortly after taking office. “We will continue to build on the remarkable foundation Jensen has laid over the past 33 years,” she said, displaying the poise of a composed victor.


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