Howard Lutnick’s Job Is in Question After the Nvidia Scandal Omor Ibne Ehsan Fri, November 13, 2026 at 7:26 AM EST 5 min read NVDA +1.22% Trade NVIDIA on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Nvidia (NVDA) lost CEO Jensen Huang overnight, leaving CFO Colette Kress as interim chief just days before earnings, and the stock fell 4%.
White House officials are reportedly weighing Howard Lutnick's ouster after he allegedly resisted blacklisting Megaspeed, a buyer of $5 billion in Nvidia chips.
Nvidia's guidance already excludes China data center sales, so a tougher Commerce Department threatens less revenue than the headlines suggest.
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On November 12, 2026, senior White House officials were reported to be discussing whether Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick should be pushed out over the NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) scandal. No decision has been made, and no departure has been announced.
The report came the same day Nvidia said Jensen Huang resigned as president, CEO, and director, effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress became interim CEO and keeps the CFO job. Huang cited being unfaithful in a Nov. 8 memo; the board opened an independent review, and espionage concerns have been alleged. Then, further affairs kept hitting Wall Street, and board members likely started concluding Huang was becoming a liability.
Nvidia closed at $166.19, down 4.34%, for a market value of $4.01 trillion. It then traded at $167.82 after hours at 7:59 p.m. ET.
Nvidia's leadership change is the only part that is signed and disclosed. The talk about Lutnick comes from unnamed people familiar with the matter. A White House official pushed back, saying Trump "maintains complete confidence" in Lutnick and calling him a champion of Trump's America First trade policy.
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The criticism centers on export enforcement. The U.S. has added no companies to the Entity List, a trade blacklist that blocks sales without a license, since October 2025. That includes holding off on DeepSeek, CXMT, and more than 100 other flagged companies.
Lutnick reportedly resisted adding Singapore-based Megaspeed to that list. Megaspeed has bought more than $4.8 billion of advanced Nvidia AI chips since June 2024. Rep. John Moolenaar says he is hearing that Trump directed Megaspeed to be banned three times.
The person who runs Commerce decides how much China-linked demand Nvidia can serve. A tougher replacement could close off buyers like Megaspeed, which is private and has no verifiable financials.
The direct damage to reported numbers looks limited. Nvidia's fiscal third-quarter guidance of $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, already excludes all Data Center computing revenue from China. The company has not disclosed how much of its revenue flows through intermediaries.
The bigger near-term risk is that the company has no permanent leader. Nvidia reports on Tuesday, November 17, at approximately 1:20 p.m. PT, and the interim CEO is also running finance.
Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott asked Huang to testify on Dec. 3 and Lutnick on Dec. 10. Both dates have not yet been scheduled as hearings, and Lutnick has not publicly agreed.
Sen. Thom Tillis called the episode disqualifying, and Sen. John Kennedy supported a subpoena if needed. Sens. Jim Justice, Rick Scott and Mike Rounds urged waiting for facts, and House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast still backs Lutnick.
Oversight likely gets tougher in January, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren takes over Senate Banking. She and Sen. Chris Coons asked the administration to keep all documents on Nvidia's AI chip exports to China.
The fundamentals look stronger than the headlines suggest. Shares are down 27.28% over one month, and the stock trades at 33 times earnings. Fiscal second-quarter revenue grew 105.8% with no China data center computing sales included.
A stricter Commerce Department would mostly limit sales that Nvidia already excludes from its forecasts. Supply commitments of $279.0 billion point to demand from buyers outside China, so whether customers keep ordering under interim leadership matters more than who runs Commerce.
This view fails if November 17 revenue comes in below the bottom of the guidance range. It also fails if Commerce adds Megaspeed and similar non-Chinese buyers to the Entity List before the requested December 10 testimony date. Keep an eye on whether the stock holds above its $166.19 close.
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