Nvidia Needs a Colossus to Replace Jensen Huang, and Eric Schmidt May Be the Only One Who Fits
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) needs a new chief executive, and 24/7 Wall St. co-founder Douglas A. McIntyre has a candidate in mind: Eric Schmidt.
Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO this week after reports that he had an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials considered a Chinese spy. Nvidia gave no reason for his departure. CFO Colette Kress is serving as interim CEO while the board looks at candidates inside and outside the company.
McIntyre calls Huang the greatest CEO in history and says his replacement has to be a colossus. In his view, only three or four people fit the bill, and maybe only one.
That one is Schmidt. He ran Google, now Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), as CEO for almost 10 years and then served as executive chairman. He has sat on the boards of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Princeton and the Mayo Clinic. McIntyre says Schmidt knows the head of China, the president, the important people in Europe and the CEOs who run the industry.
Why would Schmidt want the job? McIntyre offers a few reasons. He may feel a duty to the country and to the future of AI. He would have to be a bit selfless, McIntyre admits, though a little more fame would not hurt.
His closing ask is simple. Someone should call Eric Schmidt and ask him to take the job. With Huang gone, McIntyre says, the industry, and maybe the world, needs him.
Nvidia reports quarterly results on November 17, its first report since Huang’s exit. The board has not said who is on its list.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
