Jensen Huang spent 33 years as the leather-jacketed prophet of Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), turning a graphics-chip maker into the engine of the AI boom and himself into tech royalty.
On Thursday, he walked out the door. He resigned effective immediately and handed the keys to CFO Colette Kress, as his affair scandal kept growing.
- NVDA stock is sinking. Get all the latest details here.
Wall Street has seen this movie before. Investors fall for a visionary, the board stops asking hard questions, and the company starts to look like an extension of one person’s ego. Sometimes the business outlives the fall. Often it does not.
Here are 13 companies whose leaders faced ousters, legal trouble or business setbacks.
1. Uber and Travis Kalanick
Kalanick ran Uber Technologies Inc. (NYSE:UBER) like a street fight, and for a while it worked. Then the workplace scandals piled up, and investors showed him the door in 2017. Under the far calmer Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber eventually learned how to make money.
2. Barstool Sports and Dave Portnoy
Barstool was always Portnoy with a logo. Penn Entertainment Inc. (NASDAQ:PENN) paid hundreds of millions to learn what that meant, then sold the whole operation back to him for $1 in 2023 to chase an ESPN deal. Few buyers have exited more humbly.
3. Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes
The black turtleneck. The baritone. The promise of hundreds of tests from a single finger prick. Holmes nailed the Steve Jobs costume, but the machines never did what she claimed. A fraud conviction and an 11-plus-year prison sentence closed the show.
4. WeWork and Adam Neumann
Neumann talked about elevating the world’s consciousness while running an office-leasing company. Investors bought it at a $47 billion valuation, right up until the 2019 IPO filing laid bare the losses. He was gone within weeks, and WeWork hit bankruptcy court in 2023.
5. Nikola and Trevor Milton
Milton sold Wall Street on hydrogen-powered big rigs. A jury convicted him in 2022 of misleading investors about the company’s progress. Nikola went bankrupt in February 2025, and Milton then received a pardon from President Donald Trump. Nikola got no such reprieve.
6. Tyco and Dennis Kozlowski
No list of corporate excess is complete without the $6,000 shower curtain. Company money paid for it, along with plenty more, before a jury convicted Kozlowski of looting Tyco International Ltd. He spent more than six years in prison.
7. American Apparel and Dov Charney
Charney stamped his provocative sensibility on every billboard and storefront. Harassment allegations trailed him for years until the board fired him in 2014. Two bankruptcies later, Gildan Activewear Inc. (NYSE:GIL) scooped up the brand.
8. Abercrombie & Fitch and Mike Jeffries
Jeffries built an empire on shirtless greeters, dim lighting and an unapologetically exclusionary vision. He left in 2014 and now faces federal sex-trafficking charges, which he denies. Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF) reinvented itself without him, and the cologne fog has mostly cleared.
9. FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried
Cargo shorts, messy hair and big talk about giving it all away. Bankman-Fried played the reluctant billionaire flawlessly until FTX imploded in November 2022. A 2023 fraud conviction and a 25-year prison sentence followed.
10. Enron and Jeffrey Skilling / Kenneth Lay
Enron Corp. was once hailed as America’s most innovative company. Its most creative work happened in the accounting department. The company collapsed in 2001, Skilling went to prison, and Lay died before sentencing.
11. WorldCom and Bernard Ebbers
A former basketball coach and motel owner, Ebbers built WorldCom Inc. into a telecom giant through a buying spree. An $11 billion accounting fraud brought it crashing down in 2002. Ebbers got 25 years.
12. Frank and Charlie Javice
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) paid $175 million for Javice’s student-aid startup and its millions of users. Most of those users turned out to be fiction. CEO Jamie Dimon called the deal a huge mistake, and a jury convicted Javice in 2025.
13. Fyre Festival and Billy McFarland
Supermodels on yachts sold the dream, but guests landed in 2017 to disaster-relief tents and a sad cheese sandwich. McFarland pleaded guilty to wire fraud, and Fyre became a documentary goldmine.
What Comes Next for Nvidia
Nvidia holds one big advantage over most of this list: the products are real, and customers still want them.
New board chairman Harvey C. Jones said the board expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption.
Elon Musk has endorsed warnings about the damage ousting a founder can do. Prediction markets are less sentimental. Polymarket traders give Huang a 31% chance of returning by the end of 2027.
Photo: QQMinh88 / Shutterstock – ejk
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