Mic Check: Podcasts turned harder on Nvidia than on Jensen Huang
Who podcasts called in to explain the Nvidia story, and what they think happens next
On Thursday, October 29, the New York Times reported that Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive who had grown close to Jensen Huang, was suspected of working for Chinese intelligence. On Sunday, November 8, Huang told Nvidia staff in an email that he'd had an affair with her. This Thursday, he resigned as Nvidia's CEO, and the board named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO.
Since November 9, 1,600 podcasts have talked about him across 3,506 episodes. This is the second issue of Mic Check, where we pick a news story and look at what podcasts are saying about it.
1. How big it got, and how fast
In October, podcasts mentioned Huang about 60 times a day. On November 9 they mentioned him 1,476 times, and on November 12, the day he resigned, 3,343 times.
From November 9 through the morning of November 13 there were 10,518 mentions on 1,600 shows, compared with 242 mentions on 84 shows in the days just before. 661 of this week's shows hadn't said his name once in the previous three months. Nvidia, which already came up about 600 times a day, was mentioned 7,798 times on November 12 alone.
2. The first report came and went
None of this was new on November 9. The Times story ran on October 29, and a few shows went deep on it right away. Valley Morning Briefing led with it the next morning. China Insights spent most of a November 1 episode on it, including a question that came back as one of the biggest threads this week, which is why nobody warned Huang: "But Jensen Huang never received any such briefing." Zhenfei, China Insights · ► Listen
Most podcasts let it pass. From October 29 to 31, 78 episodes connected Huang with spying, and by November 3 it was down to four a day. October 30 was Huang's busiest day of the month, at 132 mentions, and it's barely visible on the chart above. Then on November 9, the day after his email to staff, 505 episodes made the connection.
3. Who got brought on to explain it
Before this week, a lot of the guests who talked about Huang worked in tech or business. This week the booking sheet looks more like a national security story.
Guests from politics and society went from 5.8% of the conversation to 16.0%, and lawyers more than doubled their share. Tech guests fell by almost half, and business guests by more than half. Economists held at about a fifth the whole time, mostly talking about the stock.
Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, was on The Arena with Kasie Hunt walking through what's known about Alice Huang: "There are photographs of her with Jensen Huang at NVIDIA events or conferences or something here in the United States." Andrew McCabe (guest), The Arena with Kasie Hunt · ► Listen
Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under Obama, went straight to the chips: "We're talking about Jensen Huang, a man who had increasingly advocated to provide those chips or to sell those chips to China, or people suspected him of selling them to countries in Southeast Asia that could then pass him on to China." Ben Rhodes (guest), Inside with Jen Psaki · ► Listen
4. How the tone shifted, for Huang and for Nvidia
Most of what podcasts said this week was neutral, hosts reading the news and walking through the timeline. When people did pick a side, they were harder on the company than on Huang himself.
Negative mentions of Huang more than doubled, from 2.9% in a typical week to 6.3%. Nvidia's went from 4.4% to 10.6%. A fair amount of the criticism of Nvidia was about how the company is run, and how much of it rested on one person: "And by the way, their governance structure is pretty shady because they do not have a board chair because they've always just assumed that Jensen Huang can handle everything." Ed Elson (guest), Better Offline · ► Listen
Huang himself still got plenty of credit, mostly from people who follow the stock, and some of them kept the man and the company apart. On Prof G Markets on November 11, Gil Luria said the big risk was an investigation finding "that Nvidia knowingly sold chips to compute providers they knew would provide access to Chinese companies." About 40 seconds later he said, "Let's not forget that Jensen Huang is a big reason we have this AI ecosystem." Gil Luria (guest), Prof G Markets · ► Listen
5. The China question
A lot of the sharpest criticism of Huang this week wasn't about the affair itself. It was about the years he spent arguing that Nvidia should keep selling chips to China. "For years, Jensen Huang was the leading China dove in the AI industry." Kevin Roose, Machine Gods · ► Listen
Representative John Moolenaar, who chairs the House committee on China, said on the BBC's Newshour that he thinks there are "credibility issues for Jensen Huang because everything now he has advocated" on China policy is in question (► Listen).
Patrick McGee floated a different reading on Great Question with Tony Dokoupil, while making clear it was a theory: "There is really good reason to believe that this story is revenge of the China hawks, that once the midterm blue wave election happened, they saw an opportunity to start leaking certain material about Jensen Huang and this affair to basically silence or bench the most vocal advocate of the China dove approach." Patrick McGee (guest), Great Question with Tony Dokoupil · ► Listen
6. Anthropic's IPO, in the same breath
All of this landed during Anthropic's IPO roadshow, the other big tech story of the month. Anthropic didn't get any quieter. Podcasts mentioned it between 1,369 and 2,093 times a day this week, about where it was the week before. But the two stories kept ending up in the same episodes: of the 967 episodes that discussed Anthropic's IPO from November 9 to 13, 482 also talked about Huang.
The overlap went past scheduling. Anthropic has long argued for tighter limits on chip sales to China, the opposite of Huang's position, and John Coogan on TBPN made that connection while moving from one story to the other: "Really rough timing because Jensen is sucking a lot of the air out of the room. At the same time, it is sort of a vindication of their positioning that the geopolitical conflict with China is extremely high stakes, extremely serious." John Coogan, TBPN Live · ► Listen
7. What happens next, according to podcasts
Plenty of people made predictions about where Nvidia goes from here. They didn't agree, and they weren't all equally sure of themselves.
Listen to them here: ► Rob Black, ► Kyle Rodda, ► Ian Bremmer.
How we put this together
Podcasts had the spy story on October 29, ten days before most of them picked it up. If Nvidia had been your client, an alert on Huang's name would have flagged the Valley Morning Briefing and China Insights episodes the morning they came out, with a link to the minute he came up.
That's one part of Particle Podcast Intelligence. The rest of this issue came from the same data: we know what each guest does for a living, which is how the shift toward national security experts showed up.
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