{"text":[[{"start":6.14,"text":"The fall of Jensen Huang is the ultimate indictment of founder mode, the system of tight personal control that has long been Silicon Valley’s preferred way of doing business."}],[{"start":16.76,"text":"By giving entrepreneurs free rein over all aspects of a business, founder mode has served the tech industry well, particularly when promising companies are still in their early, formative years. The risks of the culture at the biggest tech companies, however, are now clear when AI is at the heart of the economy, national security and just about everything else."}],[{"start":38.12,"text":"A counterbalance to this system of personal control that now sits at the heart of US capitalism is very much needed, but the Nvidia debacle provides few reasons for optimism."}],[{"start":49.16,"text":"Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, did not exert his influence through the sort of super-voting stock held by tech founders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. However, he played the game of founder dominance as well as anyone, starting with a compliant board that didn’t require a designated successor or even elect a chair."}],[{"start":71.62,"text":"The Nvidia chief was able to build an industry-wide tech ecosystem around his company, with himself at the centre. President Donald Trump has said his first instinct was to break the company up, but his administration proved itself more than willing to be co-opted. Wall Street, as usual, supplied the cheering section."}],[{"start":90.88,"text":"The full story of how Huang wielded his unchallenged power at Nvidia has yet to be written, but it’s easy to see how his overnight elevation to rock star status in the tech world would have bred a sense of invulnerability. For years, he had been a tech contrarian labouring in relative obscurity. It took an overpowering self-confidence in his own rightness to get through the near-death moments and emerge as the tech leader most identified with the generative AI boom."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":117.26,"text":"With Huang’s fall, every other board in Silicon Valley is now on notice. Inevitably, there will be the sound of stable doors being bolted as other companies seek to project a sense of good governance. Who, though, is going to challenge an Elon Musk or a Zuckerberg?"}],[{"start":132.6,"text":"We saw a version of this movie three years ago when Sam Altman was temporarily fired as chief executive of OpenAI. His return days later was proof of how the system unites around a powerful founder. From the OpenAI employees who stood to get rich from tech’s hottest start-up, to outside investors such as Microsoft and influential tech allies including Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, too many people had too much riding on Altman for his leadership to be challenged."}],[{"start":163.42,"text":"The obvious lesson that other aspiring tech moguls will take from Huang’s fall: make sure you don’t give your board enough power to force you out, no matter how badly you behave. The tech world’s latest outré experiments in corporate governance seem geared to that end, from the way Musk has entrenched himself at SpaceX to the byzantine system of group control that Anthropic’s seven founders have woven around their company."}],[{"start":188.5,"text":"One potential counterbalance might be expected to come from Wall Street. A $1tn wipeout in Nvidia’s market capitalisation in two weeks after all, sounds like a salutary lesson. History suggests, though, that investors usually forget this kind of thing when greed next takes over."}],[{"start":206.18,"text":"Another potential counterweight could come from Washington. The centrality of AI and the technology’s dependence on a few giant corporations have given rise to a group of businesses that may, in economic terms, be “too big to fail”. Huang’s departure has shone a spotlight on the extent to which those companies are often the domain of a single man. But in Trump’s Washington, at least, there has been not much of an attempt to exert more control."}],[{"start":230.88,"text":"The danger now is that one tech founder’s fall will lead to a consolidation of power by his rivals. Huang had been busy building a “rebel empire” of AI around himself that represents something of a counterweight to the dominance of Big Tech. It involved backing a collection of start-up data centre companies, known as neoclouds, while also promoting open-source AI and seeding a burgeoning system of AI applications and robotics."}],[{"start":255.8,"text":"Without Huang’s dealmaking, expansive vision and personal influence at the centre, this will now be at risk. Any vacuum is likely to be filled by other tech empires whose founders already loom large in the public imagination."}],[{"start":268.56,"text":"They include people such as Zuckerberg, whose company recently agreed to pay up to $18bn to settle its blockbuster legal battle with US states over alleged failures on child protection and social media addiction. They also include Musk, who agreed in 2018 to step down as chair of Tesla for three years to settle charges from regulators over a series of tweets. There is also the new duopoly of frontier AI labs led by Altman, who lost the trust of his own fellow directors, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who fought with the Pentagon over who should be in control of the most powerful AI."}],[{"start":305.46,"text":"Founder mode looks like it’s here to stay. For better or worse, it will shape the course of AI — and the world — for a long while to come."}],[{"start":317.28,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1794533953_1296.mp3"}