An open letter asks Nvidia's board to put Jensen Huang back as CEO
Elon Musk, Tim Sweeney and Amjad Masad are among the signers of a letter demanding due process before Huang's ouster stands.
Two days after Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO, a petition went up asking the board to undo it. By Saturday it had more than 100,000 names on it, including some the board can’t easily ignore.
What does the letter actually ask for
The letter, posted at a site called Stand with Jensen, makes three specific requests of Nvidia’s board: reinstate Huang as CEO while an independent investigation runs, disclose that investigation’s scope and timeline and give Huang a chance to respond, then publish a timely explanation of the decision and the evidence behind it. It isn’t asking the board to drop the investigation. It’s asking the board to pause the outcome until the investigation finishes.
The line doing the most work in the letter is this one: “Jensen deserves due process, not mob justice.” That’s a framing choice, not a neutral description. Our November 12 post on the resignation covers what the board actually said when it accepted it, which was almost nothing about the affairs or the China memo.
Who signed it
TechCrunch named Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney as notable signers. The petition page itself shows more: Y Combinator’s Garry Tan, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, Cohere’s Aidan Gomez and a long list of people who list themselves as current or former Nvidia engineers and directors. Quotes next to the signatures range from measured (“Jensen deserves fairness in adjudication”) to pleading (“please bring him back”), and the page states plainly that signers speak only for themselves, not for Nvidia or for Huang.
A handful of signers used the moment to push their own read of the scandal rather than the letter’s due-process point. One described the whole episode as targeting people of Chinese descent. That’s a signer’s opinion sitting inside a petition, not something the letter itself argues, and readers should keep the two separate.
How many people, really
Here’s where the numbers get messy. TechCrunch reported “more than 115,000” signatures as of Saturday afternoon, broken down by the petition site as 5,965 current Nvidia employees, 1,108 former employees and 63,063 shareholders. When I opened the petition page directly, it showed a live count of 132,477 and a separate employee-only tally of 6,634, or about 15.8% of Nvidia’s roughly 42,000 staff.
| Source | Count | As of |
|---|---|---|
| TechCrunch (citing the petition site) | 115,000+ total | Saturday afternoon |
| Stand with Jensen (checked directly) | 132,477 total; 6,634 current employees | Live, later |
None of these numbers are independently audited. The site lets anyone sign without an account, and affiliations are self-reported. Treat the totals as what the campaign says, not a verified headcount, and expect the live number to keep moving.
Does Nvidia have to answer this
No, and nothing requires it to. A petition isn’t a shareholder vote or a legal filing. But 6,634 of Nvidia’s own employees adding their names, on top of shareholders and outside executives, is a different kind of pressure than a public letter alone. Nvidia wrote 105 startup checks this year, and some of those same investor and founder names are the ones calling for Huang’s return now.
My read: a petition like this rarely reverses a board decision once a resignation is signed and an interim CEO is named, which Nvidia has already done with Colette Kress. What it can do is set the terms for how long the “independent investigation” the board promised stays private. If Nvidia doesn’t say anything concrete about that investigation soon, this letter is the pressure that forces a timeline out of them.
A note on sources: I read TechCrunch’s report and the Stand with Jensen petition page directly, including the letter text and the live signer list. I didn’t verify any individual signer’s identity or employment claim, and neither has Nvidia, as far as I could find.
Related: our November 12 post on Huang’s resignation covers the board’s statement and the week leading up to it, and our November 13 post on the funding gap covers what his exit means for the startups Nvidia used to write checks for.