Ousted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was prone to wild temper tantrums at the office, according to company insiders — cruelly dressing down employees and even once hurling a water bottle at a top executive in a fit of rage, The Post has learned.
The 63-year-old chip magnate famously cultivated an affable, laid-back public persona, sporting black leather jackets and doling out TV interviews about his humble beginnings washing dishes and cleaning toilets.
But as Huang pushed to relentlessly grow Nvidia’s business, employees lived in fear of their boss skewering them with vicious outbursts at marathon meetings in front of their peers, according to sources close to the company.
Last February, at a closed-door powwow with more than 30 company executives in attendance, Huang zeroed in on Jay Puri, Nvidia’s then-executive vice president of worldwide field operations, sources told The Post.
“I hope you get the flu and I hope it gets worse,” Huang told Puri in front of stunned onlookers — including Puri, who endured the sudden attack in silence, according to a source familiar to the incident.
“I hope you die and put us all out of our misery,” Huang added.
At the time, Puri oversaw Nvidia’s sales and business development operations. He has since transitioned to a role as senior adviser for Nvidia. It couldn’t immediately be learned what had been at issue during the meeting.
“It’s very typical for Jensen to yell at people, but when he said that specific thing to Jay, it was extremely tense and quiet,” one of the sources said. “Everybody was a little bit shocked.”
Puri couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
The confrontation with Puri was part of a pattern with Huang – who oversaw an unusual corporate structure where more than 60 of Nvidia’s top executives reported directly to him.
Indeed, Huang’s outbursts are so well-known at Nvidia that some employees have expressed surprise that they didn’t leak prior to his public downfall, one source said.
During a tense, three-hour meeting in 2025, Huang directed harsh words at a senior sales leader with about 40 staffers in attendance, the sources said.
“You don’t know dick about my business,” Huang allegedly told the sales executive.
Elsewhere, sources briefed on the matter described a well-known clash in which Huang lost his temper with a senior leader who was attending a meeting with the mercurial boss for the first time.
“Are you smirking at me? I see nothing but dead faces … Get out!” Huang shouted before kicking the executive from the room, according to sources.
The sources also described a now-infamous incident inside the halls of Nvidia’s Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters — in which Huang allegedly threw a water bottle at a top executive during a meeting.
Huang resigned on Thursday after admitting he had an extramarital affair with suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang. The pair are not related. In total, Huang is alleged to have had affairs with at least three women, including Nvidia’s vice president of health care Kimberly Powell, according to reports.
As The Post reported, Huang misled top Nvidia executives for more than a year about his affair with Alice Huang, leaving them with egg on their faces when he was finally forced to admit the truth after days of public denials.
A spokesman for Huang declined comment. Nvidia did not immediately respond to The Post’s inquiry.
Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress has taken over as interim CEO while the company’s board searches for a permanent successor.
In yet another reported instance of Huang flying off the handle, the Wall Street Journal reported on an August meeting in which he interrupted Kress in the middle of a presentation, calling her “a deer in the headlights.”
Stephen Witt, the author of “The Thinking Machine,” a biography of Huang, wrote in a New York Times article on Thursday that Huang liked to appear humble, always praising his employees, reminding others of his time spent as a dishwasher and leaving a huge tip at their visits to Denny’s.
But it was all “to cloak his arrogance,” Witt claimed. “He had little tolerance for disagreement and almost no capacity for open discourse. When you contradicted him, even over the most trivial matter, it was like lighting a fuse. Stick to your position, and soon he exploded, screaming at you for your idiocy.”
Huang could also be tough with executives outside his company, according to the report. At a conference in Berlin, Huang told half a dozen tech CEOs who were Nvidia customers a story that sounded like a fable about a soup vendor in Japan.
Huang told the CEOs gathered at a table that after waiting in line for a long time, he had one of the most delicious bowls of soup he’d ever tasted. When Huang asked for another bowl, the soup vendor refused, saying there wouldn’t be enough left for the rest of the customers who were waiting.
“He’s a better businessperson than all of you,” Huang reportedly told the cloud computing CEOs, noting that the soup seller kept his prices high and his customer base diverse.
“You are not establishing the value of my products,” Huang said, according to the paper.
Nvidia’s press release that revealed Huang’s resignation did not include any statement from Huang, who has retained the white-shoe law firm Paul Weiss while preparing to testify on Capitol Hill about the “spy” affair.
Lawmakers want more details about Nvidia’s dealings with Megaspeed, the Singapore-based AI firm led by Alice Huang. US officials have long suspected that Megaspeed is involved in smuggling advanced AI chips to China, though Megaspeed has denied wrongdoing.
They also want Huang and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to explain their respective roles in impeding strict export controls that might have otherwise stopped Megaspeed from gaining access to the AI hardware.
