You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, November 12th, 2026. We are live from the CDPAN open on the temple of technology, the fortune of finance, the capital of capital, capital of capital. That's... Let's see if we can retain our voices across the show.
Are you struggling today? Would it kill you to put on some merch? Would it kill you to put on some merch?
I would love to put on some merch.
Launch day. Should I go change right now? Bring me some merch. The wait is over. If you're looking at the chat, merch.tbpn.com is live. The code chat will get you 50% off. Yes. Have at it.
Huge day. We're very excited for all of you. Thank you so much for supporting us. Thank you so much for hanging out in the chat. People don't understand how important the chat is to making the show great. Everyone in the chat brings us fact checks, breaking news, funny questions. Sometimes they just are messing with us, trying to get us to die, drink the Diet Coke with two hands. There's a whole language of inside jokes between us and the... trying to get us to flashbang at inappropriate times. Flashbang, never.
No, it's been a joy. It's been one of the most unexpected joys of building the show. We started this not live and I had no idea what going... I thought going live would just let us get the news, but it's actually this interactive thing that makes it very different from TV, very different from podcasting. And it's why when we talk to people about the show, we call it a show and we say we're a talk show, we're a live show, and it is something that is different than other media formats. And we've been really fortunate to have a bunch of hilarious and great people hanging out in the chat with us for years now. It's been a fantastic thing. So, thank you. Hopefully everyone got a chance to order. And maybe I'll put on a piece of merch later.
Let's pull up... Let's actually pull up the merch.
Yeah, pull it up. Let's walk through what we're working with.
I wear a size large in everything. I'm 6'1". I'm responding to the chat.
We get it, Jordy. You're 6'1". We get it.
I know, I know that makes me a short king in your world, John, but I'm doing my best.
Flight to China. Most underrated item in the drop. Yeah.
Oh, I thought you were going... since 1792.
This jacket, the construction of it, we worked with my dear friend, one of my oldest friends in the world, Sebastian, on this drop, who spent his whole career in the fashion industry, you know, as a founder. And I'm already losing my voice. This jacket just turned out amazing.
Well, while we're talking about the New York Stock Exchange, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
We also, of course, have to tell everyone about Ramp, our presenting sponsor. And you'll see Ramp all over the merch. Time is money. Save, use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.
Second item that I want to call out. Yes, because it is not just an item of clothing. It's a step forward for mankind because... part of the reason this drop took so long is that we were perfecting the plain white tee.
So you have the TBPN plain white tee.
People have been working on this decades.
Decades, generations, in some ways hundreds of years. And, you know, many, many brands before us have tried and failed to make the perfect white t-shirt. We could have, you know, come out with a bunch of apparel, you know, over a year ago, but because we were so deep in the lab perfecting this t-shirt, it just took time. So, thank you for your patience, but we finally did it. They said it couldn't be done, but we did it.
And it's literally a blank white t-shirt and it just says TBPN on the tag.
And obviously, sort of like really hard on that. Sebastian worked really hard on that. But I think we also put 9 million of compute behind that, working on that just... I don't think we were talking about the exact, but it was quite the swarm.
Everyone was quite the swarm.
No one had applied, you know, seven figures of test-time compute to the white t-shirt problem.
Yeah, yeah. But that's one of the benefits of our overall strategy here at TBPN.
Cornering the market. Anyway, I want to understand your mindset. I want to understand your mindset because you're losing your voice. How do you... How does that make you feel?
You think you might not be able to do the show tomorrow?
You have the opportunity.
I have the opportunity to do the show tomorrow.
You're feeling a little stuffy.
Yeah, I'm just... I think I got a frog in my throat.
You're a little stuffy. You're a little sleepy today.
You have the opportunity to get better at podcasting while sleepy. Good.
Yeah, we're in the Jocko Willink mindset right now. This is what will take you into the future, for sure, for sure. You know who needs to embrace the Jocko Willink mindset? Nvidia shareholders. Jensen Huang got caught with a second extramarital affair. Good. You have the opportunity to get a new job. Work.
I need to, you know, transition because...
We can transition. This is the greatest business tragedy of my lifetime.
Yeah. And the whole thing is like so unfortunate, so disappointing, you know, irrespective of the fact that Jensen, you know, seemingly made the decision to have these affairs and bears, you know, responsibility for that. But it doesn't stop the situation overall from being like deeply, you know, tragic for pretty much everyone involved.
Yeah. You called me yesterday and I was a little under the weather still, and you said like, you know, a second affair has hit the timeline related to Nvidia, and I didn't put it together that it was Jensen and the vice president of healthcare at Nvidia. I just thought it was something else going on in the chaotic Nvidia world. It was in fact related to him. The news is Jensen Huang resigned as CEO this morning, less than 24 hours after it was reported that he had a second affair, this time with a colleague who reported directly to him. The New York Times says the relationship was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's chief VP of healthcare, and that the two were seen being affectionate at a San Jose hotel during GTC in March. And so Nvidia CFO Colette Kress will be taking over as interim CEO. We'll take you through her career and what this means for the company while the board searches for a permanent replacement. She's been at Nvidia since 2013. So a lot of people... there's some people in the timeline that are like, this is not that big of a deal, but it is of course an enormous deal because first it's a spy and second...
He's saying it's not that big of a deal.
Plenty of people that are in the timeline, Jensen. If you go through the timeline, his situation is not that big of a deal. I think the implications of Jensen being out, I don't think anyone...
Oh, true, true. But there are definitely people... shareholders.
Putting this into perspective, like Jensen has been running and building Nvidia longer than I have been alive.
My entire life up until this morning, Jensen has been CEO of Nvidia, running it day in and day out.
And coming from a different era where founders didn't have, you know, extreme control over their businesses, right, despite being founder-led this whole time, he doesn't have super... vote... not in that much of a different situation than like a hired gun CEO.
In that he had a board that has been incredibly loyal, and it's obviously very easy to be loyal when your stock has... when a CEO is leading the company through this sort of historic appreciation.
Yeah. But an affair with a subordinate is, I believe, like a very, very clear line in the sand in the Nvidia code of conduct. It applies to everyone. It's a legal issue immediately. It's not a complex morality debate or question about how does this impact his relationship with his family. None of that matters. It's cut and dry. The board has a job to do in this case because it's specifically with someone who reports directly to you at the company, which is against the rules that Nvidia has agreed to and put forward and created a whole structure around, like every company has.
But it's worth restating that this is... I saw someone as soon as the news dropped said, relationship with a subordinate, it's a done deal. He's out, and they were correct. And now Colette Kress is running the company. So she's been at Nvidia since 2013. She was always at the top of my list for the most powerful women in tech. There's been a whole push for powerful women in tech, and she's been still underrated. Her, Susan Lee, Sarah Frier, there's so many others. Anat Ashkenazi, Ruth Porat, there's so many powerful women CEOs.
Yeah, yeah. And she's been among them who they haven't a lot... like she has not been someone who's been talking at conferences constantly and going on the podcast circuit, but clearly immensely, immensely powerful, deeply entrenched in the business from going back to 2013. Clearly been there during multiple growth stages, multiple contractions, seen every piece of the business. So this personally gives me a lot of confidence to go forward with business as usual for Nvidia, the company. It is interesting that she's being framed as an interim CEO, not being framed as a potential successor. But we'll see where all of this goes. We have Dylan Patel from SemiAnalysis coming on the show at noon to break down a little bit more.
Business as usual in terms of the operations.
And just making sure that the trains run on time. Yes.
The big question is around like... deal on the supply chain side, on the customer side, and on the sort of like capital market side.
Given the sort of like shakeup, I imagine that Nvidia will maybe pump the brakes on some of this like sort of wild deal making in terms of, you know, operating as that central bank of AI. You have to think that there's been a bunch of big deals in the works, things like NeoLabs inference platforms... there will be some motivation from Nvidia to like, you know, project confidence and hopefully not pull out of deals that are sort of on the finish line, right? But you can imagine like everyone that's been in the pipeline to raising capital from Nvidia is probably questioning like, can I really lean on this anymore? You know, if like two weeks ago it was like thumbs up, handshake deal, like let's get something done, and now I don't think you can really lean on that capital.
Yes. So, two sides of the Nvidia coin of the business model, of the role that Nvidia plays. One is make GPU, sell GPU, right? And Colette Kress is clearly completely able to go to all of the buyers, understand their demand forecasts, how many GPUs they want in what quantities, at what time scales, go to manufacturers, get them made and packaged on time, get them delivered on time. That is not the problem. Do you debate that or...
I mean, there's something about like TSMC, famously the relationship is very much like not set in stone. It's based off mutual respect or whatever. Yes. And that's like extremely important that they keep that, and it seems like more and more that's like kind of the main moat of Nvidia. CUDA is kind of maybe you can just use a... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To be able to push aside, and maybe Apple goes back to being the number one important one, or TPU, or Trainium. There's a whole bunch of other folks in the chip design and production world that would love to jump to the front of the line at TSMC. So I agree with you.
The other thing, the question of like, you know, can you still be the central bank of AI without the central banker of AI? That is your core contention. The other question is on talent. I think that there is a question like Jensen is a founder-mode CEO and he's an engineer, and if he's now going to be... if the new Nvidia CEO is going to be competing against the head of the TPU program, the head of AMD, the head of Trainium, the Jalapeno, I'm sure Anthropic is working on custom chips, and then we just talked to 12, you know, new chip companies on the show in the last month, you have so many different startups where if you're an elite-level talent...
Previously, Jensen could give you a call and say, 'Hey, I want you to come into this organization. I want you to work for me. We're the biggest. We're growing really fast. I can give you a 3x stock appreciation because I just did, and we can make a big grant for you, and I can play very aggressively. And fundamentally, you still are joining a founder company. So come here instead of going to Google or Amazon or somewhere else or even AMD.' Yeah. And that pitch becomes more difficult in the post-Jensen era when you could be looking at an Etched, at a Cerebras, Jalapeno program, at, you know, Fractile... like there's so many of these companies that offer the founder-led journey to a prospective hire. And so that is a big, big question. You know, on the other side, on the capital side, it's possible that you go from Jensen acting as the banker, GP, whatever you want to call it, to investment by committee.
Mhm. Yeah. Which is much... that's just going to be a lot slower, which slows things down. Yep.
The big question I think everyone has is like, I don't... I can't imagine Jensen just going dark and sitting back the sort of like next 5, 10 years.
He's going to have to go in front of Congress.
There's active DOJ investigations. He's going to be licking his wounds. But this is somebody worth, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars that could join any company, could, you know, invest a obscene amount of his own money in getting something new off the ground, and I think is going to be very, very motivated to make something happen.
And we'll have to wait and see how some of these investigations, you know, pan out. If there was real wrongdoing outside of the affairs, then we could be looking at a different situation. But I think Elon, if I remember correctly, is basically like, why don't you join TerraFab, you know...
Yeah, was that at what point in the saga did that happen? Because like this morning, did you guys... I don't...
This morning, that is a... that is a strong... But I mean, I would say that the tech community is divided on this question. As I read through the timeline, there are clearly folks who are in the pro-Jensen camp, whatever that means. Maybe that means he needs to apologize or step into a different role. But there's nuance there. And then there's people that are in the anti-Jensen camp. And it does align with business interests. You know, if you are a startup that was building on open source models and you just watched the biggest champion of open source go down, you're probably upset.
You know, having seen Jensen's schedule and been in the room with Jensen a number of times over the last couple years, he has the energy of a, you know, 25-year-old.
And I don't think he's going to be thinking, you know what, I would have been retiring in a couple years anyways. Like this is not somebody that I at least ever imagined retiring. He's apparently in The Information they say he planned to run the company for another 60 years.
With no succession planning.
60 years. He's going to run it until he's dead.
So that's what I'm saying. Like after some of these investigations get resolved, I think he will be extremely motivated. Yeah. Because I bet you he has a pretty good idea of like who's behind like the timing of why.
There's a lot of tinfoil hat on the timeline today. A lot of...
Yeah. Do we still have our tinfoil hat? We might need to pull it out.
We need to pull out the tin foil.
We should have released a tinfoil hat in the merch store.
Team's looking around for it.
Yeah. So, there was some speculation in the chat around the question of was Trump referring to Jensen in that 60 Minutes interview. That seems to be the consensus interpretation, but there's been no confirmation. There's been a lot of back and forth there. The Wall Street Journal is basically wall-to-wall Nvidia coverage today as Jensen steps down or is removed as the CEO of Nvidia. So, Colette Kress was named interim chief executive. She was a longtime lieutenant of the departing CEO Jensen Huang and oversaw the chipmaker's finances during its climb to become one of the world's most valuable companies. A veteran of the tech industry, Kress, I'm reading from the Wall Street Journal, Kress joined Nvidia in 2013 after holding finance roles at Cisco. See, let's give it up for Cisco, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments. Kress has overseen the aggressive expansion of Nvidia's balance sheet, which the company has used to provide financial backstops for customers in exchange for buying its artificial intelligence chips. So, she's definitely been in the room for the becoming the central bank of AI. Whether she's been driving that or not is a different discussion, but she's certainly overseen it and been...
Yeah, I would hope that when Jensen wants to rip, you know, 20 billion into something, he's getting, you know, the two thumbs up from Kress first.
Yeah. I mean, there's still some debate over like how much of that was central bank bailouts versus how much of it was just good deal making. Like Perplexity was sort of losing its luster for a while where people were like, oh, well, like if Perplexity's plan is to be a ChatGPT competitor, the ship seems to have sailed on that broadly because a lot of the hydrated UI that comes with Perplexity on the early stage... I know you were using the product for a little bit. Started when we started the show, I was like daily driving Perplexity.
Yeah, and it was nice stuff that you couldn't... Yeah.
All of that's been built into Chat and Gemini and Claude, and so that spot in the market felt like it was... you were going to only have a very small slice. You'd be like the DuckDuckGo of the category, and you were never going to be like a Google-sized entity. At the same time, I'm glad we're having Dylan Patel come on because he said he's using Perplexity Comet at SemiAnalysis like fairly often and using it to use different models and... Persistent agent. So, it'll just be interesting.
So, that's a... it was sort of a weird deal at the time because it felt like Perplexity was on a downswing in terms of overall vibes. It felt like there weren't many venture capitalists that were excited about leading another round in the tens of billions. Jensen came in and it was like, is he saving the company or is he actually just making a very sharp bet and has the only balance sheet that can actually make a smart bet at that time? So, we'll need to see the scorecard for Jensen's dealmaking is still very much out in the TBD. It could look genius. It could look like, oh, wow, he really was just backstopping everything, and a lot of those companies wound down over the next 5 to 10 years. So, it was really just this like, you know, scattershot attempt to keep the overall market healthy, which it clearly has done. But there's also the world where he just is able to clock a good company that VCs are seeing the right thing and they don't necessarily have the balance sheet to go after. So TBD.
So Kress praised Huang on Thursday in a statement saying that she will continue, quote, 'building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.' In a note to staff, Kress thanked them for their dedication throughout an extraordinarily difficult period leading up to Huang's resignation on Thursday. Quote, 'We play a vital role in building the technology that is powering the AI revolution, and we have important work ahead of us,' she said. Kress will take over a company that has been badly shaken by the scandal surrounding Huang. Nvidia has shed more than $600 billion in market value this week. Huang's departure after two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee, is likely to leave lingering scrutiny of both Nvidia's dealings with China and its huge balance sheet. Nvidia has used its massive reservoir of cash to bankroll the broader AI industry, a practice Kress has defended. Critics have argued Nvidia's efforts to prop up demand across the industry has left it more vulnerable to a downturn, but Kress has characterized the deals as savvy investments. Quote from her, she said in August, 'We recognize the scale of this support, and we know that some will call this circular financing. We see it differently. The equity returns on our invested capital will be excellent.' And so she has been, you know, optimistic about their financing strategy, but again, a lot of these marks are TBD. We'll see where the companies land. But she has also been at times receptive to investors' concerns, pumping the brakes in August on a landmark agreement to help OpenAI secure data center projects after negative market reaction.
Kress joined Nvidia at the urging of her two sons, according to a 2023 interview she gave to an Israeli newspaper. At the time, Nvidia was working to broaden beyond its traditional market of PC gaming into new business lines such as chips for cars. Quote, 'The best thing I could tell any type of CFO coming in: be careful how much time you spend thinking about the trends that you've seen in the past, and have a good understanding of how quickly things could move going forward,' she told the journal in 2016, just three years after she joined. Kress said she was drawn to Nvidia because of Huang, whom she described as a visionary, and a culture she described as essentially egoless. 'We're a rather flat organization,' she said in 2018. 'We actually don't have org charts. We kind of know who works for who.' Nvidia's corporate governance has come under scrutiny this week as a scandal engulfed the company. Nvidia had no succession plan in place for Huang, and its board had no chair before Thursday, when it named longtime director Harvey C. Jones to that role. 'The board has full confidence in Colette to deliver on our commitments to shareholders, customers, partners, and to each of you,' Jones said in a note to staff. 'The board is starting to search for the company's next CEO.' I saw Doug over at SemiAnalysis throwing some names out there. There's a whole bunch of questions. Maybe they'll pull someone from Apple. Maybe someone from the Nvidia bench will step up. We'll see. What do you think, Jordy?
Chat is saying that a third... there's a third affair waiting right now, confirmation for it.
Well, if anyone can drop the link, that would be helpful. I just searched it. I'm not seeing it.
Okay. Well, we'll stay on top of it.
It was Nvidia's bet on AI that turned the company into a global behemoth. It also turned Kress into one of America's wealthiest self-made women, ranked higher than Beyonce in Forbes' latest list from June. Nvidia's recent stock slide has crimped her net worth, though Kress' holdings of Nvidia were still worth more than $800 million as of Wednesday's close. She received $14 million in total compensation last year. She graduated from the University of Arizona and received an MBA from SMU in 1996, according to her LinkedIn page. She married David Kress, a former Microsoft executive who got his start in the company's mailroom, and they have two sons.
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So Nvidia is all over the news. Jensen Huang has been ousted as Nvidia CEO, if you're just tuning in. Dylan Patel says Nvidia board needs to chase down Charlie Kawas and Johnny Srouji. They are the only somewhat viable replacements. And so there was some back and forth on this, whether or not they had the right chops. I think they have Apple DNA, but Broadcom. But we'll see. We'll see.
In other news, it sounds like Outlook is down.
Microsoft Outlook is down. Hacked or down?
Just users are reporting an outage.
Okay. Well, stream's still up. So, no time for email. You just have... Good. You can watch more TBPN, I suppose. Fabricated knowledge. Doug O'Flaherty over at something else. It says, 'Not going to lie, I know a lot of you are on X. If you're a big active manager, you should email the board tomorrow saying that it's a conduct violation, but it's in shareholders' interest he stays, make a transition plan. I don't know. The company's not set up to run without him. Like full stop email.' And so, this is what I'm talking about where there is this debate and there's people on both sides saying he should remain or he should depart. Although it feels like the departure has happened and he's out. So, we will see. We will see what happens.
Shawn McGuire saying, 'Now that Jensen is out, my pick for his successor would be Nikesh Arora. My opinion: Jensen was so important for the AI ecosystem because he was technical, aggressive, and had the credibility required to be aggressive. What Nikesh did at Palo Alto the last eight years is remarkable and reflected in his stock, which is up 10x.' Multiple TBPN. 'He's one of only a handful of people who have the credibility required to be aggressive on day one. Nikesh has the three attributes listed above while being a world-class dealmaker and having all the necessary...' Losing my voice. The frog is rising up. '...to keep Nvidia at the center of the AI ecosystem. There's no easy choice, but he'd be my go-to.'
Tyler, what do you have for us?
Yeah. So, Reuters is reporting that he had a relationship with a second employee.
Do we have any more information on that?
Yeah, to be honest, my hunch at this point is that we'll see at least four or five more come out.
Yeah. Well, I mean, when you find an ant in your kitchen, the... what is it? The expected number of ants is not one.
Isn't that it, right? Something like that.
Well, we of course love Nikesh Arora and we love Koncise. Koncise builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Nikesh, of course, came on the show when he acquired our sponsor Koncise. So there's some other people that are making a name in the surrounding coverage of the Nvidia Jensen Huang saga.
The 31-year-old trader, he called out Jensen Huang's China problem and he shorted Nvidia six months ago. Six months. No one really noticed. Culper Research's report. All that changed this week. Ben Cohen has the story in the Wall Street Journal. Should I take everyone through this? Jordy?
So, when Christian Lamarre decided to start his own short-selling firm, he named it in honor of the spies who gathered intelligence for George Washington during the Revolutionary War. He had watched a television show about the Culper Ring, which secretly tracked the movements of British forces almost 250 years ago. Have you seen this show, Jordy? It's called Turn.
It's fantastic. It's such a good show. It's not on HBO or any of those like super premium things, so it feels a little like, oh, you're just watching a TV show. It doesn't feel like a movie yet, but it just gets better and better and better. And by the end, I was like, I should have been paying better, more attention at the start because it is a fantastic show. I highly recommend Turn. The whole Culper Ring is a fantastic story and I think it's pretty accurate about the history.
But that's what he named his hedge fund. Now he's caught up in his own story involving national security, the president of the United States, and spectacular allegations of modern espionage. Six months ago, Culper Research published a report outlining its case against Nvidia, which just today is down 5.65%. It opened lower at the open and has popped a little bit, but still down significantly over the last 30 days, after over the last six months. Nvidia had become the most valuable company in the world by making the chips that power the global AI economy. His investigation raised questions about Nvidia's business in China and what he called an uncomfortably close relationship between CEO Jensen Huang and a woman named Alice Wong, who was an executive at one of the company's major business partners in Southeast Asia. The 40-page report summarized the firm's short position in a simple thesis. 'This is not a bet against AI,' Culper wrote. 'We are short Nvidia for one reason: the company has a significant China problem.'
At first, nobody paid much attention to the 31-year-old short seller whose research typically focused on companies most people have never heard of. The day his report about one of the most important companies on the planet was published, Jensen Huang touched down in Beijing aboard Air Force One on a state trip with President Trump. And if you remember, that was a very, very odd trip because Jensen was not added to the guest list initially and then was added at the last second and actually boarded the plane in Alaska. I remember we were like, 'Why is he in Alaska?' We were making jokes about like, 'Oh, GPUs, maybe it's cold up there or something,' because we couldn't really put it together. Well, it was because we now know that there was a lot of back and forth on whether or not Jensen should be on that trip, whether it makes sense, whether it's good to have him on or off. There was a lot of debate going on internally. So, the next day, Nvidia stock hit a record high. So, this was like the peak. Jensen is in China with Trump. Everything, like if there's business to be done there, it's getting done.
'Sometimes people don't care about what you have to say. Sometimes people care, sometimes they don't,' Lamarre said in an interview. Good. In this case, they cared. Six months later. Six months later, questions about Alice Wong, her coziness. This was our... this again...
This is a question we've been asking this week to ourselves, is like, why did it take so long for this story to come out in this way? Because again, in The New York Times in October, as early as October 10th of last year, you had me, you had Alice, you had all these names in The New York Times. It was obviously a suspicious situation, and so it feels strange that a lot of this information you could have found out at any point over the last year. Why did it break, you know, over the last week?
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it does time up with the midterms. People are thinking that maybe there's more power in Washington to actually go after something like this. There's a lot of theories and we'll get to many of them.
This week, those questions turned into revelations that Nvidia's CEO was having an extramarital affair with a woman who's now suspected of working for Chinese intelligence services. Culper's report went from being ignored to becoming a rare piece of security analysis to go viral. 'I've never seen anything quite like this,' he said. As his research blew up, so did his phone. He muted notifications from X, where his Nvidia posts have racked up millions of views, and turned down TV interview requests. Nvidia has lost more than $1 trillion in market value and the stock is down 20% since Culper's report, but it's unclear if the epic corporate fiasco has made Lamarre money. He declined to say how much he's earned from the most prescient call of his career or if he's still shorting the company.
Of course, the stock had traded down through June and then rallied to basically all-time highs October 5th, October 6th. So, as a short seller, timing is everything. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. So, Lamarre grew up in upstate New York and discovered the world of investing as a finance major at Grove City College, a small Christian school in Pennsylvania. One day, Lamarre drove to Carnegie Mellon for a stock-picking contest where he would compete with Ivy Leaguers. His goal, he said at the time, was to prove that Grove City students can compete with students from the best schools in the country. Lamarre said he and his teammate went long Nexstar Media Group and won second place and a $100 prize. Since finance recruiters weren't in the habit of visiting Grove City College, Lamarre knew he...
Does that count as sort of achieving his goal?
No. Oh, yeah. You got second place. Good. You have the opportunity to go long or short Nvidia.
Since finance recruiters weren't in the habit of visiting Grove City College, Lamarre knew he would have to be creative and aggressive to get attention, and he emailed his own research to hedge funds and got a job at a long-short firm in Chicago where he worked from 2017 to 2019. Then he moved to Pittsburgh with a few months of savings and struck out on his own. His firm needed a name he remembered. Turn: Washington's Spies. It's an AMC show. That's right, an AMC show that he first watched in high school in a high school friend's basement. He thought the Culper Ring's work monitoring British troops in occupied New York had something in common with his own. Similarly, he wrote, 'We take an exhaustive investigative approach to investment research.' Before long, he moved to New York himself and began working out of a Brooklyn apartment while his Shiba Inu begged for treats. He's on the Doge train. I like it. Like a Shiba Inu.
Like other short sellers, the sleuths at Culper say they are out to expose deception, financial irregularities, and all the ways companies scam investors, and of course make a profit. Since its founding, Culper has targeted dozens of public companies, mostly small-cap stocks. But Lamarre and his two analysts have taken on powerful forces before. Last year, a window and glass manufacturer hired Elon Musk's attorney and sued Lamarre for defamation after he alleged the company had links to the Sinaloa drug cartel. He also tried to make a $1 million wager with Jimmy Fallon, offering in his report to pay up if the late-night host flew in electric air taxis made by Archer Aviation, a company whose CEO appeared on the Tonight Show and a company that Culper was betting against. He never heard back. So, he was trying to get some money on the line with Jimmy Fallon over Archer, which has been a controversial company for a long time because a lot of excitement and promotional videos, but they have yet to properly ship or, you know, have customer usage reports.
Let's get more into some of the reactions.
Even Tay Kim last night said, 'You can't have an affair with a direct report. It's over.'
It's over. Yeah. And that is coming from one of the strongest defenders of Nvidia throughout every up and down over the last few years.
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What else is going on? People are talking about whoever bought Jensen's jacket for $960,000. Of course, the proceeds went to charity. I think, like it or not, this jacket is now worth more in my opinion.
It's like the craziest story in technology history, in many ways you could argue business history. Like we've never seen a fall from grace like this. And I think the jacket is just... Jensen owns that jacket forever.
DA, who was on the show last week, says it's interesting that almost no one in the tech sector seems to think that lying to shareholders and cheating on your wife, presuming she was unaware, are fireable offenses, but yet Nvidia's board members did. Everyone's hot take on this began with, of course it is bad, but the unspoken part is money over everything, sign of the times.
Shawn McGuire disagrees. She says this has nothing to do with money. This is about America winning in AI. Which is interesting. Because then you have to make the argument that selling chips to China is part of America's strategy of winning in AI, which is again, you know, there are arguments for, but strong arguments against.
Yeah, the jacket discourse is very interesting. I agree with you that I think the jacket is a piece of history, probably more valuable, but maybe finds its way into a museum at some point.
What's interesting is that it feels like people are maybe trying to front-run Jensen stories to promote limited items and limited jackets. Did you see this thing in Vanity Fair? So, Vanity Fair just posted yesterday, 'Jensen Huang did have an ill-advised affair. He did not wear vintage Saint Laurent,' which I think is how you say it. There was a viral post where I think somebody used AI.
Yes. But why are you putting him in a different jacket? Because you own a lot of those jackets and if it goes up in value, you can sell them. Is that why?
I just think he looked pretty good in Saint Laurent.
So the news of the affair filled X with memes about Chinese spies and mistresses in a variety of configurations. By Monday evening, it had reached the fashion world. Stylish netizens, the Instagram account Hidden NY, an anonymous digital mood board and cultural platform, posted a series of images in studded leather jackets. The caption read, 'Jensen in Hedi Slimane SLP studded leather jacket after admitting to an affair with Chinese spy.' It is well known that Huang is a leather jacket enthusiast. One sold for $960,000. But despite Huang's penchant for a black leather moment, it appears that he was not wearing this particular jacket as previously shared by Hidden and a variety of other accounts. A quick run through an AI image detector debunked Huang being a Slimaniac, what Hedi Slimane's fervent fans often call themselves, at least in this particular case. SynthID, the SynthID detector created by Google DeepMind to identify AI-generated or enhanced media by OpenAI, Google or others, detected the images posted by Hidden and others used online appeared to be edited with AI image generation. So people are swapping the jacket out.
I've never seen somebody memed this hard outside of maybe Charlie Kirk.
Yeah. And the irony in this situation is that all the generations are powered by Nvidia GPUs. The thing that, you know, his creation...
Bern Hobart says, 'On one hand, boards have to do what they have to do. On the other hand, he's a guy who's worth 150 billion, knows everyone in hardware, named his company after the Latin word for spite, and he lives in a state where you can't enforce non-competes.' So...
Like I said earlier, you know, after... I'm sure that Jensen is already plotting his next move.
There's always, you know, there's always a world where you have a situation like with, you know, Sam, where there's some sort of comeback, but I think it's harder to pull off with active congressional, DOJ investigations with a public company.
Much, much different situation. And so, I would expect after he gets through this period, there's a comeback story that could involve joining, you know, SpaceX.
Yeah, working on TerraFab could involve something net new, but he's probably one trip away, one visit from Taiwan away from having a pretty like viable... like it'll be interesting if he can, like, if everything he's ever said about Nvidia's moat he can sort of... I take it back, take it back and just show that like it really, the moat was him all along.
Interesting. I, you know, it's not hard to imagine a world where he can, you know, rally the right group of people to go and be very competitive again in this category. And it's not like he's going to be like, you know what, I'm actually going to get into the harness business. I always wanted to, I always wanted to build a sort of a light wrapper around the frontier labs. It's just there's one thing this guy's going to do. And there's billions of people that would happily back up the truck.
Yeah. What is the Chinese stock market doing? Are they reacting positively to this or negatively to this? We know we discussed that the AI trade in China was falling off a cliff. I'd love to know a little bit more on are there any correlations because I saw one post that was like the index...
