“We believe the board should avoid a rush to replace Jensen that undermines and thwarts the best interests of shareholders,” Brad Gerstner, the chief executive of Altimeter Capital Management, and Gavin Baker, the chief investment officer of Atreides Management, wrote in a letter sent on Friday. The investors, whose firms are Nvidia shareholders, asked the company’s board to consider “all options on the table, including the potential return of Jensen Huang.”
An open letter to Nvidia’s board, titled “Stand With Jensen,” asked the board to reinstall Mr. Huang as chief executive, to conduct an independent investigation and to explain its actions. As of Saturday morning, the letter had nearly 100,000 signatures, including by current and former employees of Nvidia, business partners like Mr. Musk, and start-up leaders and shareholders including Garry Tan, the chief executive of the venture capital firm Y Combinator.
Some executives and investors struck a more confrontational tone.
“Jensen made a rookie mistake,” Pavel Durov, the chief executive of the messaging app Telegram, said in a social media post on Friday. “Founders: Don’t have a board. Be the board.” (Mr. Durov’s app has been accused of enabling terrorism, crime and disinformation.)
Tim Sweeney, the chief executive of the video game maker Epic Games, said on Thursday that Nvidia’s board had “serious corporate governance issues” and that it had been “gaslit” into pushing out a “once-in-generation visionary.”
On Wednesday, before Mr. Huang’s resignation, Mr. Sweeney said that if Nvidia’s board removed Mr. Huang, the action would be “an Apple firing Steve Jobs level of idiocy.” Apple’s board ousted Mr. Jobs in 1985, and he returned to the company and became its chief executive again in 1997.
