"History doesn't repeat… but it rhymes." — Mark Twain
◉ THE PRESENT
Jensen Huang walked out of Nvidia on Thursday and didn't come back. The man who co-founded the company in a Denny's restaurant in 1993 and ran it for thirty-three straight years resigned as president, CEO, and board member, all effective immediately, after a scandal involving an alleged Chinese intelligence operative and a second extramarital affair left the board no room to keep him. Shares opened at $151, touched $148.80, and fought back to close near $166 — but the stock still sits 31% below its October 6th all-time high of $239.24, and the company has slipped below a $4 trillion market cap for the first time since summer.
NVDA close: ~$166 | ATH (Oct 6): $239.24 | From peak: −31% | Mkt cap: <$4T | Interim CEO: Kress | Earnings: Nov 17
This isn't new. One visionary founder. One company that defined an entire technological era. One board that decided the genius had to go. Cupertino lived this story forty-one years ago.
◉ THE ECHO — SEPTEMBER 17, 1985
The board voted. The founder lost.
The trouble started with a computer that stopped selling. The Macintosh had launched in January 1984 with a Super Bowl commercial that people still talk about four decades later, and for the first few months the machine moved. Then it didn't. By early 1985, monthly Mac sales had dropped to around 19,000 units — a small fraction of the 500,000 Steve Jobs had promised for the year — and Apple, the first personal computer company to crack a billion dollars in annual revenue, was watching the numbers shrink quarter by quarter.
Jobs blamed John Sculley, the Pepsi executive he had personally recruited two years earlier with the famous line about selling sugar water. Sculley blamed Jobs. On April 10th, at a board meeting in Cupertino, Sculley stood up and told the directors he would resign unless they removed Jobs from the Macintosh division. The board sided with Sculley. The vote was unanimous.
Jobs didn't accept it. On the night of May 23rd, while Sculley was scheduled to leave for China, Jobs tried to rally executives behind a boardroom coup to seize control of the company. A colleague found out and went straight to the board. The coup collapsed before sunrise. Over Memorial Day weekend, Jobs sat across from Sculley one last time, asking for any kind of operating role at all. Sculley said no.
For three months after that, Steve Jobs sat in a nearly empty building on the Apple campus with nothing to run. He was thirty years old. He had co-founded Apple in his parents' garage nine years earlier, built the most recognized personal computer brand on earth, and now he couldn't get a meeting with his own directors. On September 2nd, word leaked that he was selling 4.6 million of his 6.5 million Apple shares and starting a new company. On September 17th, he delivered a five-page resignation letter to the board. Apple's stock rose a dollar on the news.
Wall Street figured the company would be fine without him. For a little while, it looked like Wall Street was right.
◉ THE RHYME — WHAT'S IDENTICAL
Two founders. Two companies at the center of a technological revolution. Two boards that chose stability over the person who built the place. The same wager: that the machine runs without the machinist.
◉ THE DIVERGENCE — WHAT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME
The cause is personal, not strategic. Jobs was pushed out over a business disagreement — falling sales, a power struggle, honest differences about direction. Huang left because of a scandal involving alleged espionage and multiple affairs. Jobs was thirty and might have walked back in at any time. Huang is sixty-three, and the circumstances of his exit make a return almost impossible.
The scale is different by three orders of magnitude. Apple in September 1985 was worth roughly $1 billion. Nvidia the day Huang left, even after the crash, carried a market cap near $4 trillion. The stock makes up close to 7% of the S&P 500 by weight. When Apple stumbled in 1985, investors noticed. When Nvidia stumbles, the index moves.
The product pipeline is further along. Apple's problem in 1985 was that the Macintosh had stalled and there was nothing behind it but the aging Apple II. Nvidia has the Blackwell GPU architecture shipping now and the next-generation Vera Rubin already in development. The roadmap exists. The question is who builds the one after that.
The customer base is locked in. Apple sold to individual consumers who could walk into a store and buy a competitor's machine. Nvidia sells to hyperscalers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta — that have committed tens of billions in capital expenditure to AI infrastructure running on Nvidia chips. Those contracts don't disappear because the CEO did.
◉ THE RECKONING — WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
After Jobs resigned on September 17, 1985, Apple's stock climbed from $15.75 to $22 by the end of December — a 40% bounce in three months that convinced most of Wall Street the company had turned the page. Under Sculley, annual revenue grew from around a billion dollars to eight billion. It looked, from the outside, like the grown-ups had taken over and Apple was better for it.
It wasn't. Without Jobs driving the product roadmap, Apple started losing ground to Microsoft's Windows, slowly at first and then all at once. By the early 1990s, Macintosh market share was eroding and margins were getting thinner every quarter. Sculley was pushed out in 1993. His replacement, Michael Spindler, lasted about three years. Spindler's replacement, Gil Amelio, lasted seventeen months. Three CEOs in four years, each one searching for the thing that Jobs had provided — a clear picture of what Apple should build next — and none of them found it.
By the time Apple bought a small company called NeXT in February 1997 for $427 million — which happened to come with Steve Jobs attached — the company was ninety days from running out of cash. The stock sat at $16.25. Twelve years after the founder walked out, Apple's share price had gone essentially nowhere.
The pattern for Nvidia investors is not complicated. The products shipping today — the Blackwell chips, the data center contracts — were designed under Jensen Huang's Nvidia. Those numbers will probably look strong when the company reports earnings on Tuesday. But the real test comes in two or three years, when the current roadmap runs dry and someone who hasn't been hired yet has to decide what comes after Vera Rubin. That decision is the one that determines whether Nvidia stays at the center of AI or becomes the next post-Jobs Apple, rich in revenue and empty of vision.
Apple rallied 40% in the three months after Jobs left in 1985. The smart money sold that bounce. The real buying opportunity didn't arrive for twelve years, when the founder walked back through the door. Nvidia's founder is not walking back in.
◉ TOMORROW’S WATCH
Tuesday brings Nvidia's first earnings call without its founder — consensus is $2.49 a share. Apple beat estimates in its first full post-Jobs quarter too. It bought the board two years of comfort before the product pipeline ran dry and the real decline began.
