Tesla to Hire NVIDIA CEO? Musk Says It Would Be 'an Honor'

Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia, and Elon Musk sounds interested. When someone on X asked Musk if he could hire Huang, Musk replied, “That would be an honor.”

Musk didn’t say what role Huang might take or whether he’s actually making an offer, but our attention was immediately drawn to one obvious fit: Terafab.

Huang’s Exit From Nvidia

Nvidia’s board announced Thursday that Jensen Huang has resigned after 33 years at the company he built, and that CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO. Former Synopsys CEO and board member Harvey Jones was named Nvidia’s first-ever board chairman, and Huang is leaving the board as well.

The resignation followed a quickly growing scandal. The New York Times reported in late October that Huang had a close relationship with a Chinese woman at a Singapore-based company that was buying Nvidia chips. That relationship with an alleged Chinese intelligence agent triggered investigations by the FBI, the U.S. Congress, and Nvidia itself. China has denied the allegations, and President Trump said Huang told him he had no idea the woman was a spy. Then, earlier this week, reports emerged that Huang also had an affair with a senior Nvidia executive who reported to him.

Nvidia’s stock took a hit. Shares fell as much as 14% after the opening bell, erasing almost $600 billion in market value, before recovering to trade down about 7.3%. Nvidia has lost more than 25% of its valuation in the past month.

A Long History With Musk

Musk and Huang go back years. When Nvidia unveiled its first AI supercomputer, the DGX-1, in 2016, the broader tech industry wasn’t interested. Musk said OpenAI, the nonprofit AI lab he had just co-founded at the time, could put it to work, and Huang personally delivered the first unit to OpenAI’s San Francisco office in August 2016. Nvidia has since become one of the most valuable companies in the world thanks to the AI boom.

The two have often appeared on conference panels together and recently received the National Medal of Science from Trump. Huang also interviewed Musk at the 2015 GPU Technology Conference in California, where the pair discussed AI, self-driving, and more, which you can watch below:

Earlier this year, Nvidia became something of a competitor to Tesla when it announced Alpamayo, an autonomous vehicle platform to rival Full Self-Driving. More recently, SpaceX partnered with Nvidia for processors that will power the AI satellites it plans to launch into orbit.

Why Terafab Makes Sense

Tesla and SpaceX are building Terafab in Grimes County, Texas, a chip factory with more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space that aims to produce over 1 terawatt of compute per year for Optimus, Cybercab, SpaceX’s orbital data centers, and more. Tesla and SpaceX have partnered with Intel on the project and already hired Intel veteran Gary Jiang as a director.

Not a Tesla App

Huang has also been one of Terafab’s skeptics. “Building advanced chip manufacturing is extremely hard,” Huang said at a TSMC event in November 2025. After more than three decades running Nvidia, few people understand that challenge better than he does.

Someone on X even posted a parody job listing for “Chief Executive Officer, Terafab,” asking for a candidate who co-founded a GPU company in 1993, owns a black leather jacket, and once worked at Denny’s.

@engine_rich / X

Hiring Huang wouldn’t be simple, though. The now-former Nvidia CEO has agreed to testify before Congress as soon as next week, and the national security questions around him would be hard to ignore for a project building chips for SpaceX. For now, Musk’s reply is the only sign of interest, but we’ll be watching to see if it turns into an actual offer.