The Million Dollar Question: When McDonald’s fired Steve Easterbrook in 2019, it called the firing “without cause,” which let him keep his severance and stock. After the company sued him the next year, how much did he agree to hand back?
Read on for the answer.
On Wednesday, November 11, 2026, Nvidia’s board accepted Jensen Huang’s resignation. The next day the company announced it: Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for its entire life, was leaving as president, chief executive and director, effective immediately. The company gave no reason. The reporting around it has been about his private life, and Huang himself had apologized days earlier for being “unfaithful to my wife.”
This piece is not about the affair. It is about the money, which follows rules that do not care why a chief executive leaves. A founder pushed out of the top job loses some things immediately, keeps others entirely, and finds a few quietly changed. The filings say which is which, and four earlier cases show how the pattern usually ends.
What happened, in the company’s own words
The documents are short. Nvidia’s Form 8-K, filed November 12, says the board “accepted the resignation of Jen-Hsun Huang” on November 11. Colette Kress, the chief financial officer, becomes interim chief executive “while the Board conducts a search for a new Chief Executive Officer,” and keeps the finance job. Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993, becomes the company’s first board chair. The press release adds nothing on why.
Everything else comes from reporting. CNBC reported, citing a person familiar with the matter, that the board pushed him out after reports of a second alleged affair. Other outlets have linked the departure to a wider investigation, and CNN reported that three House committees have asked Huang to sit for a closed-door interview on December 1. None of that is in a company filing, and none of it changes the arithmetic below.
Note what the 8-K does not say. There is no separation agreement, no mention of “cause,” nothing on what happens to his unvested stock, and no consulting or advisory role. When a departing chief executive gets a package, it usually appears in this filing. Here there is nothing to report, partly because, as the next sections show, there was very little package to begin with.
What he keeps: the stake, all of it
The stake does not depend on the job. On his most recent Form 4, from June 2026, Huang reported 812,004,746 Nvidia shares: about 70 million held directly, 468 million in the Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Living Trust, about 140 million in two irrevocable trusts for the next generation, and 133 million across six LLCs. We went through those structures in detail in One Fortune, Explained: Jensen Huang. Not one of them is affected by a resignation.
What the resignation did change is the price. Nvidia closed at $173.73 on November 11 and at $166.19 on November 12, down 4.3% after falling as much as 14% during the day. Applied to 812 million shares, the closing drop alone is about $6.1 billion of paper wealth in one session. The stock fell another 2% on November 13, ending a week down 12.75%. At the November 12 close the stake was worth roughly $135 billion, against $169 billion in late August. Those are our calculations from the reported share count and closing prices; ranking sites count slightly differently and land a few billion higher.
This is the structural fact worth holding on to. Nvidia has one class of stock. Huang never had super-voting shares, a founder’s veto or a holding company that controlled the board, so there was never a mechanism that let the shares protect the job. The board re-nominated him every year, and on November 11 it accepted his resignation. Founders with dual-class stock, such as Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, are close to impossible to remove. Huang was a 3% shareholder with an enormous reputation, and in a company that size, reputation is what the job rested on.
What he loses: the job, the pay, and the unvested awards
The pay is the smallest part, and it stops. Nvidia’s 2026 proxy statement shows total compensation of $36.3 million for fiscal 2026: a $1.5 million salary, a $6 million cash incentive, $24.8 million of stock awards and about $4 million of other compensation, almost all of it company-paid security. Against a $135 billion stake, a year’s pay is less than one day’s typical price move.
There is no severance to replace it. The proxy is unusually direct: Nvidia’s executive officers are “at-will” employees, and the company says it does “not have employment, severance, or change-in-control agreements.” Its list of things it does not do includes agreements “providing for specific terms of employment or severance benefits.” So there was no contract that defined “cause,” and nothing for a board and a departing executive to negotiate over, of the kind that made the McDonald’s case below so expensive.
The larger loss is the stock awards that had not yet vested. At the start of fiscal 2027, the proxy counted 1,411,679 unvested restricted and performance stock units for Huang, valued at $264.9 million at the January price. The proxy says these vest “subject to the NEO’s continued service,” and that executives must serve four years to vest fully. It does not spell out what happens on a resignation, but on those terms, units still unvested when he left would ordinarily lapse. Some have vested since January, and at the November 12 price the original block would be worth about $235 million, so the real figure is lower. It is the one part of this story where leaving costs him nine figures, and it is still under 0.2% of his stake.
Then there are the things that were never money. The company-paid security, which the board justified by “the exceptionally high public profile and prominence of our CEO,” was tied to the role. So was the board seat, and so was the platform: the keynotes, the leather jacket on stage, the ability to speak for a company that briefly became the most valuable in the world.
What changes about selling
This is the part most coverage skips, and it matters more over time than the pay does.
While he ran the company, Huang sold through pre-arranged trading plans, and Nvidia’s insider trading policy barred him from pledging Nvidia stock as collateral or holding it in a margin account. That policy is written for employees, directors and others covered by it. He is now neither an employee nor a director.
Securities law does not let go as quickly. Under SEC Rule 16a-2(b), a former officer or director stays exposed to the short-swing profit rule for up to six months after leaving, but only for trades that can be matched against an opposite trade he made while still an insider. A Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner memo on post-departure trading adds that Form 4 reports can still be due for those trades, that insider-trading law still applies to anything he knows that the market does not, and that his status as an “affiliate” for resale purposes may not end right away. With about 3.3% of the company he is far below the 10% ownership that would keep him an insider on size alone.
In plain terms: for a while, any large sale will be careful, slow and closely lawyered. After that, the founder of a $4 trillion company will be an ordinary, very large shareholder, free to sell, diversify or borrow on terms his old employer no longer sets. Nobody outside the family knows what he will do with that freedom. It is still the most consequential thing the resignation changed about his money.
The succession question
A company worth trillions with one founder at the top for 33 years is an obvious key-person risk. What did Nvidia say about it?
Very little. The 2026 proxy never uses the word “succession.” The closest passage, on senior management development, says the leadership structure “presents the Board with a pool of excellent candidates for future promotion,” and that the CEO gives the board “periodic updates” on management development. Fortune reported in 2024 that Nvidia “declined to comment” on its succession plan. And in an interview recorded on October 14 and released the day of the announcement, Huang told Bloomberg he was “really hoping that the next CEO of the company’s already at the company.”
That is not proof there was no plan. Boards rarely publish succession plans, and an interim chief executive from inside, the CFO who has run Nvidia’s numbers since 2013, is what a contingency plan usually looks like. But the market’s reaction suggests investors had priced Nvidia as a company with Huang in it: a 14% intraday drop on a leadership change, at a company that size, is a measure of how much of the valuation sat with one person.
How other pushed-out CEOs fared
Huang’s departure is unusual in scale, not in kind. A PwC study found that in 2018, misconduct was the leading reason chief executives of the world’s 2,500 largest companies were forced out, ahead of financial performance. And a 2025 study of about 400 CEO scandals, summarized by the University of Denver, found personal scandals end CEO tenures far more often than financial ones. Four cases show the range of outcomes.
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| CEO | Left | Stated reason | What happened to the money |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mark Hurd, HP | August 2010 | Breach of business-conduct standards, including inaccurate expense reports, after a harassment complaint HP did not substantiate | $12.2 million cash severance, part of a package reported at roughly $35–40 million. Joined Oracle as co-president within a month; HP sued, and he gave up about 346,000 restricted units worth about $14–15 million, keeping the cash |
| Travis Kalanick, Uber | June 2017 | Investor pressure after a string of scandals | Kept his board seat and his stake; after Uber’s IPO he sold it all, reportedly about $2.5 billion or more, and left the board at the end of 2019 |
| Brian Krzanich, Intel | June 2018 | Breach of Intel’s non-fraternization policy (a past consensual relationship with an employee) | No severance and no 2018 bonus; forfeited some unvested units, but kept vested equity and, being retirement-eligible, his performance shares stayed in play. Became CEO of CDK Global later that year |
| Steve Easterbrook, McDonald’s | November 2019 | Consensual relationship with an employee, in breach of company policy | Fired “without cause,” so he kept severance and stock. McDonald’s sued in 2020 alleging he had concealed other relationships; in 2021 he returned more than $105 million. The SEC later fined him $400,000 and barred him from serving as an officer or director for five years |
Sources: CNN on Hurd; CNBC on Kalanick; Fortune and Intel’s 2019 proxy on Krzanich; CBS and the SEC on Easterbrook.
That last row is the answer to the question at the top: more than $105 million, D. The stock he kept on leaving was estimated at around $42 million; by the time he settled, the stock had risen and the value he handed back had grown with it.
The pattern across all four is consistent. Founders and long-tenured chief executives almost never lose their stake; they lose the job and whatever pay depends on staying. The fights, when there are any, are over packages: severance, accelerated vesting, consulting fees. Huang has the biggest stake of anyone on this list by a factor of fifty, and almost none of the package that made the HP and McDonald’s cases expensive.
What people get wrong
“He’ll lose his fortune.” The fortune is the stake, and the stake is untouched. What moved it this week was the market, not the resignation: about $6 billion on November 12, from a stock that also moves billions on ordinary days.
“Nvidia will claw his pay back.” Clawback has a narrower meaning than it sounds. The SEC’s Rule 10D-1, and Nvidia’s own policy built on it, require companies to recover incentive pay only after an accounting restatement. Misconduct is not a trigger. Recovering pay for conduct takes a contract term or a lawsuit, as McDonald’s showed, and with no severance agreement there is very little here to recover.
“He walked away with a golden parachute.” There is no parachute. No employment agreement, no severance agreement, no change-in-control deal; the proxy says so in as many words. If anything, the resignation costs him the unvested awards he would otherwise have collected.
“A divorce would hand Lori Huang half of everything.” Possibly the most repeated claim of the week, and nobody knows. No prenup has been disclosed either way, about 140 million shares already sit in trusts for their heirs, and the foundation’s shares are not theirs. We set out what is and is not known in the prenup section of our Huang profile.
“Nvidia had no succession plan.” It had no published one, which is normal. Whether it had a private one is exactly what the coming CEO search will reveal.
Bottom line
A founder who loses the top job keeps what he owns and loses what he was paid. For most executives that is a real loss. For Huang it is a rounding error: a $36 million pay package and perhaps $235 million of unvested awards, against a stake still worth around $135 billion after a week in which the stock fell nearly 13%.
What actually changed is quieter. For 33 years his wealth and his job were the same thing, governed by one employer’s trading rules, one board’s annual vote and one company’s story. Now they are separate. The job belongs to a search committee. The shares sit, as they always did, with him, the living trust he shares with his wife, his heirs’ trusts and six LLCs. And the rules on what he can do with them are, after a six-month tail, mostly his own.
The cases before him suggest the end of the story is rarely poverty, and occasionally a lawsuit. The difference here is that there is no package to fight over. Whatever comes next for Jensen Huang will happen in the stock market and in a congressional interview room, not in a severance negotiation.
Methods and sources. The board’s acceptance date, the interim arrangements and the absence of any severance or separation terms come from Nvidia’s Form 8-K of 12 November 2026 and its press release. Pay, the at-will and no-severance language, the unvested award count and value, the vesting conditions, the compensation recovery policy and the management-development passage come from the 2026 proxy statement. The share count is from Huang’s Form 4 for 17 June 2026. Closing prices are from CBS and CNBC; the $6.1 billion and $135 billion figures are our arithmetic on those prices and the Form 4 share count, not reported numbers. The reason for the departure is as reported by CNBC and is not stated by Nvidia. That unvested units would ordinarily lapse on resignation is our reading of the proxy’s continued-service condition; the 8-K does not address it. Post-departure Section 16 treatment follows Rule 16a-2(b) and the cited law-firm memo. The precedent figures are as reported by the outlets and filings linked under the table; Hurd’s total package and Kalanick’s sale proceeds are press estimates. Facts are as of 13 November 2026, and this is a developing story.
Related reading:
- One Fortune, Explained: Jensen Huang — the trusts, LLCs and foundation that hold the stake, and what is known about a prenup.
- Borrowing Against Wealth — the route to cash Nvidia’s policy closed to him while he was CEO.
- Billionaire Rankings — why the lists disagree about fortunes like this one by billions.
- One Fortune, Explained: Warren Buffett — the opposite case: a founder who has published his succession and his plans.
