NVIDIA CEO Exit, China Scrutiny and the AI Chip Stock Fallout

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0:25Colette Kress: Get The Daily Show's ongoing coverage in Decision 2026. News you can trust because we're at a desk and I'm wearing a suit. It's the most trusted fake news in America. Comedy Central's The Daily Show. New weeknights at 11. You're listening to The Exchange. Here's today's show.

0:48Colette Kress: And welcome to The Exchange. I am Brian Kelly. We'll be back tomorrow. But Jensen Wong, he will not be back at NVIDIA. He resigned earlier this morning. CFO Colette Kress, now interim CEO, the board of directors furiously searching for a permanent hire, which, of course, could also be Colette Kress. President Trump weighing in, saying that former Apple CEO Tim Cook would be a great choice. Elon Musk making it known that he would hire Jensen Wang in a heartbeat. Welcome, everybody. We are going to get to all of that on a big news day. But we're going to begin with what is next. With Jensen Wong allegedly forced to quit, it does not mean the coast is totally clear for the company or you, the investor.

1:32Colette Kress: You've got congressional hearings, likely shareholder lawsuits or more. They could all be on the way. And let's be clear. Even if you don't care about NVIDIA as a company, it is a very important stock to the entire market. And as always, we have full team coverage of all of it. But let's begin with Seema Modi on what exactly we know right now and what there is still to learn, Seema Modi, because I think there's probably a lot still to learn. There is, Brian. What we do know at this point is that that report yesterday of a second alleged affair between former CEO Jensen Wang and a direct report that prompted NVIDIA's board to schedule a meeting Wednesday afternoon.

2:11Colette Kress: That's according to a source familiar. We're told that by evening, consensus was reached. Wong would resign and CFO Colette Kress would be interim CEO as a firm launched a search for a permanent chief executive officer. The team at Advidia then moved quickly to put together this communication strategy on how they would convey this message to employees, the public and the market, which came out this morning right before 9 a.m. Eastern. In a letter to employees, Kress saying she and the board recognize how this is an extraordinarily difficult period, adding, I want you to know how grateful we are for your resilience, professionalism and continued dedication.

2:46Colette Kress: She adds that there will be a company-wide meeting November 18th. That is next Wednesday to discuss the future of NVIDIA with all employees. Chris Bryant is well known on Wall Street. Been speaking to a number of investors today, seen as energetic, decisive, someone who doesn't shy away from making a decision. We're also told that she is convening with high-level executives internally today at NVIDIA's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, and that earnings will be top of mind with that report scheduled to be released less than one week away. Brian. Is it possible, and I'm going to put you on the spot a bit, Seema, so I know there may not be an answer to this.

3:23Colette Kress: Is anybody you're talking with suggesting the earnings may be in any way delayed or there's some change? I mean, this is a massive change at the top for NVIDIA. It is a massive change and such a move that happened on an acceleration timeline, accelerated timeline. You know, I think there was certainly questions about his leadership. But once that that a report came out of a second affair, from what I told, that that sort of moved things in motion a bit faster than was initially expected. But at this point, earnings scheduled for next Tuesday. That report is happening. I think the question really around earnings is what will be communicated on leadership and how Cress is able to communicate this message to shareholders.

4:11Colette Kress: That is, it is business as usual and that she has the relationships not just on the street, but with partners, vendors, with Taiwan Semi, which they rely on so much for fabricating chips. That will be something that will be watched very closely, Brian. She has been at the company 13 years and is reportedly a billionaire herself based on her stock ownership. I would imagine that she is either the front runner for the CEO job or at least in the top of the list. We do know NVIDIA is working with an outside firm to kickstart this leadership review process on who will be named as permanent CEO. So prior to this firm being engaged, we were told that, yes, Crest is one of the many executives internally that does play a very critical role.

4:57Colette Kress: Of course, yes, as chief financial officer. But there are others in the mix, Brian, including Ian Buck, who founded CUDA. that is the software stack that NVIDIA has, sort of a testament to how NVIDIA grew from just a company that manufactures and designs, because he designs the AI chips, but also has a software stack that gives customers sort of more end-to-end solution. He is known as someone who, when Jensen Wong would be traveling overseas or in meetings in Washington, partaking in conferences, Buck would very much play a role in taking those meetings in Santa Clara, as is Crest. So certainly a couple of names out there that people have been have been looking at.

5:36Colette Kress: All right. Seema Modi. Seema, appreciate it. Thank you very much. Now let's get to Megan Gazzella in Washington, D.C., where we are just learning that Jensen Wong will indeed testify in front of Congress in a few weeks. Megan, what's going on? That's exactly right, Brian. Possibly as soon as next week, we'll see Jensen Wong. That's according to the Republic, the Florida Republican Congressman Brian Mast. He chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and he was one of three House Republicans who last week had requested Jensen Huang to testify on Capitol Hill. So Mass Today told CNBC's Justin Papp that Huang has agreed to come and that he's in negotiations with Congress for which day.

6:13Colette Kress: The initial expected date was next Wednesday, the 18th. Mass says today it likely will not be Wednesday, but that it should be before Thanksgiving break. And next week is Congress's last week in town before the holiday. So we expect the hearing will be behind closed doors, but Mass says there could be additional public hearings with Huang or with others down the road. And we also know, Brian, that other lawmakers are now gearing up to investigate not only NVIDIA, but also the Trump administration's handling of export controls and other policies that may have benefited the company. The top Democrats on the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees today wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying that they are launching an investigation into the administration's scheme, as they call it, to approve and tax exports of NVIDIA chips to Chinese companies with links to the Chinese government, military and sanctioned entities.

7:01Colette Kress: Beyond that, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, he's also saying today that Congress must demand answers from Huang about NVIDIA, about how they may have put U.S. national security at risk. Yeah, based on your reporting, Megan, then I've got to imagine that that these hearings are going to be all about China. Right. Listen, whatever people think of it, Jensen Wong's private life is his private life. Right. His marriage, all that stuff. That's his business. The company, it is a it's a public stock, but it is a private company. But this, I assume, based on what you just said, is really all about China.

7:34Colette Kress: What did he know? Maybe what should the board have known? That's absolutely right. And there are huge policy implications at play here that will impact NVIDIA, not only NVIDIA, but all of these tech companies with stakes in China or potential stakes in China, potential sales to China. You know, Huang was really the forefront of this lobbying effort that we've seen really take hold in this administration of we should have as a country a looser export control policy. We should allow more sales to China. And I have talked to folks who are wishing, who have long wanted this looser policy and that feel that all of everything we've seen over the past week was because of China hawks leaking this because they wanted a tighter policy.

8:16Colette Kress: They feel like NVIDIA was just sort of collateral damage here, that the policy at play was the reason that we're learning all of this now. So that's sort of where the debate goes next is, was Jensen Huang advocating for some of these policies because he had other motives that we don't yet know about, profit motives? Was the government in on it or did they not know anything about this? That's what Congress is really focused on. But the view then, again, Megan, I assume based on what you just said, the view in D.C. is that somebody did leak this, right? This all came out like this is private stuff.

8:51Colette Kress: Somebody's talking. That's there's so much speculation about that right now. We don't know exactly what started all of this. But at least some folks that I've talked to who believe that the whole point of this news cycle was to change the U.S.'s policy. They believe it was a deliberate leak from China hawks who wanted the administration to change the policy, that it wasn't about the affair, that it wasn't even necessarily about an affair with an alleged spy, that this is all about changing the U.S.'s policy posture. I want to emphasize that is just one view inside this administration, but it is some people who think that's why we're learning about this stuff now.

9:29Colette Kress: Well, we are learning and somebody's talking. So there is that. Megan Casella in D.C. Megan, thank you very much. So putting all that together, folks, is Jensen Wong's exit, his, quote, resignation. If you're on the radio, I'm doing air quotes. Is that the end of NVIDIA's troubles or maybe just the beginning? Your first guest says this could be the start of massive problems for NVIDIA's board. With us now to kick things off is Stanford's Director of Corporate Governance Initiative, David Larker. David, welcome. I want to talk and I want to kind of introduce our audience to NVIDIA's board because I've been doing this 30 years.

10:02Colette Kress: And this board, even to me as a 30 year business journalist, is a collection of relatively unknowns. You got a couple of longtime venture capital investors. You got a couple of former executives at consumer products companies. You got a Wall Streeter, a lawyer and an engineering professor. Based on what we know and what we still don't, how much responsibility, if any, does this board bear in all of this? Yeah, I mean, I think the board, I think you've underestimated the board here a little bit. This is a pretty impressive board. And there's a lot of investors that are there. They've been there for a long time and have nurtured NVIDIA through this.

10:49But, yeah, the board is going to become under tremendous scrutiny with regard to what they've been doing. I mean, I think, you know, they were put in a tough position. You know, they were enforcing the code of conduct internally. And I think the second alleged affair was probably something they had to deal with.

11:12Colette Kress: deal with now okay so i'm not saying by the way david i'm not saying they're not impressive people they're on the board of nvidia i'm not you're not so they've done they've done a pretty good job because they're all going to get rich being on that board as well i'm saying i just don't know who they are i don't know how tough they're going to be yeah that said do you and i'm going to ask you to speculate here we're now seeing all the pictures and videos coming out there's the alleged second affair with an employee you think the board really knew nothing well it's it's hard to know i I mean, you know, there's things coming out now about the short seller knew about this.

11:47You know, maybe that information went across their desk, things like that. I mean, we don't really know until these investigations are concluded. But, yeah, I mean, if the board knew about this, you know, months ago, you know, that raises lots of questions as to what they were doing. And it also raises questions about should it have been disclosed? So there's lots of issues. I mean, I think the most telling part to me is the apparent absence of a succession plan. Now you've got a situation where if you had a plan, you would have some sort of map about going forward. If you don't have one, you're starting from scratch.

12:25And then at that point, you're trying to assess, you know, what internal candidate might work or, you know, maybe an external candidate. But it's just that I don't think it's just many people in the world that could step in and run NVIDIA. So it's going to be a very, very tough task. This is an important point. Years ago, years ago, I interviewed Larry Ellison of Oracle.

12:47Colette Kress: I think I think it might have been his last TV interview for a reason. And at the time, he had three co-presidents. And I pressed him about which one would be the CEO. And he kind of hemmed and hawed. And then on the air, I said, Mr. Ellison, respectfully, if you don't have somebody named, then your board is negligent. and then he kind of yelled at me, it's Safra Katz who became the CEO. My point is not to tell some anecdote about my career. It's more that the boards have to have this. I mean, things happen, right? It's not that, oh, we think you're going to have an affair and get forced out. Bad things happen to people.

13:21Colette Kress: Airplanes go down. Things occur. You need to be prepared. Yeah, Brian, you're absolutely right. I mean, look, the boards do basically two things. You know, they vet and approve the budget for corporate strategy, and they hire, fire, and evaluate the CEO. But part of that job is who's going to be next in line. And, you know, Jensen is on the record as saying, you know, they don't have a succession plan. Well, it's just hard to imagine that that's a good idea for a company that's$4 or$5 trillion for the reasons you just mentioned. Yeah, it's easy, I guess, to pick out an emergency candidate. And the CFO is sort of fine, but it's unlikely that person is going to be somebody that's going to be tapped to run the company.

14:07But you would think you would have had discussions, evaluations of the C plus one, C plus two suite, as well as potential external candidates. But again, you're sampling from a very small set of people that you can plug in there and run an organization like this.

14:25Colette Kress: You think Tim Cook, I know President Trump floated Tim Cook. It's the president saying Tim Cook's a legend. Maybe Tim Cook is watching this right now on some giant yacht somewhere. He's thinking no freaking way. But you never know. Do you think the board should go to him with a giant sack of money and a couple hundred million in stock and say, Tim, we're not asking for a decade of your life here. Come in, settle the ship, give us a year or two. We'll pay you. You're already rich. We'll give you another fortune. And then everybody calms down. Well, I think, yeah, look, maybe. But you want to step back and say, we don't have a plan.

15:01Let's see if we put one together. Let's bring in some outside experts that will quiz people about their acceptability, but also would they take a job. And again, that should have been done ahead of time. And, but the other thing that I think has been talked about that much, it's a very flat organization. I mean, Jensen has 50, 60 direct reports. I mean, that's a very unusual organization. And it's not like you're going to be able to just plug somebody in that organization and run it the way Jensen ran it. So there's going to be some strategic trauma that's going to go on. So this was a very, very difficult task for the board.

15:44But I think the board probably made the right decision. But, you know, there were some breaches, and I think it was a good idea to do that. But on the other hand, they're looking at saying, you know, if we push Jensen out, all of a sudden, the company goes down 15%, 30%, whatever. I mean, you're trying to balance those things off on the board, and that's just not an easy roadmap for how to go forward on something like that.

16:13Colette Kress: No, it is not. And you do wonder who was the leaker? Was this somebody on the board, somebody outside, somebody in government? Maybe we'll never know. David Larker of Stanford, really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. All right, so let's get to the stock. And your next guest was the only major Wall Street analyst with a sell rating on NVIDIA even before, long before we found out about Jensen Wong's affairs, the alleged spy scandal. But this analyst also believes that Wong maybe should have stayed at the company. Let's bring in Jay Goldberg. He is senior analyst at Seaport. Jay, you're not here to do a victory lap, and there's no joy in this.

16:50Colette Kress: Nobody wins. This is bad for investors, Wong's family, the board, whatever you make of them. What is your take right now? Do you think this is the bottom for the stock? Is this a buying opportunity finally? No. Short answer is no. I think we're not out of the woods yet. I put out a note yesterday where I pointed out that the board was faced with two very bad options. They chose the harder one. They removed Jensen. And they had their reasons for doing that, I understand. But now the problem is still there. Who's going to replace them? Your last guest put that pretty well. There's no obvious replacement out there.

17:26Colette Kress: And they're going to have to go through a massive transition. And at the same time, their troubles aren't over, right? We still don't have good answers to what Megaspeed was doing, how they're able to get so much business from NVIDIA, how they're able to get those parts, what's going on in Southeast Asia, is there smuggling going on? There's all kinds of questions still out there that it wasn't just Jensen running it on his own. This is an important, you're bringing up an incredibly important point because I'm old enough to remember like a few months ago or maybe a year ago, Jay, time is becoming a flat circle.

18:00Colette Kress: I feel you. Which is that, you know, there was, I remember Christina Parsinevelis, my colleague, was reporting on people smuggling NVIDIA chips through Singapore, through Malaysia, into China. They were in, you know, cargo crates. And we're talking about how big they were and how you would hide them. This shouldn't be the smuggling aspect, the China aspect. Why are we acting like this is new? Like this is not a new story. The affair is new, but the China potentially buying illegal NVIDIA chips, at least illegal to them, that is not new. Yeah, it's not new. It's not new. We've all known there's something gray area, let's call it, going on with regards to GPUs and NVIDIA GPUs in particular around Southeast Asia.

18:50Colette Kress: Chinese companies, Chinese AI labs have some great talent. They really want NVIDIA GPUs, not able to buy them directly in the quantities they need. So here's a nice loophole. They can access that compute in Malaysia or Korea or Japan. And I think part of the responsibility, obviously, is on NVIDIA, right? And they're going to come under a lot of scrutiny about whether or not they were adhering to the export laws. Yeah. But a lot of the scrutiny should go on the government, too, right? The BIS, the inspectors, right? Woefully understaffed. There aren't enough inspectors by orders of magnitude to keep up on all the smuggling that's taking place for lots of these products, I think.

19:31Colette Kress: So there's a responsibility in D.C. as much as in NVIDIA. So let's talk about, though, NVIDIA and its products, because all the stuff that we just said, let's somehow we're going to push that to the side. Right. Like your institutional clients, the hedge fund guys, they're thinking a different way. What they're thinking is, are there other companies that can do what NVIDIA processors can do either as well or enough closely as well that we can buy them? AMD stock that has been soaring the last few days on this news. The market clearly believes they're going to win a bunch of business that may or may not have gone to NVIDIA.

20:12Colette Kress: Does NVIDIA's product, are NVIDIA's chips so superior to everything else that you're going to have to, if you're a customer, hold your nose, whatever you think of Jensen Wong, and buy the product and you don't care about any of this? No. AMD's products, the ones that are coming out right now and going into production next year, are fully competitive with what NVIDIA has offered. right same thing with uh the hyperscalers google amazon design their own chips and they make them with broadcom broadcom also a big beneficiary here those chips are highly highly competitive with with what nvidia offers now part of jensen's strategy was to broaden the field of competition and bring in all kinds of adjacent product areas tie it bundle it all together bring in his balance cheat.

21:04Colette Kress: He was somewhat visionary in that regards, very, very aggressive. And that was part of their advantage. With him gone, I think they lose a lot of that energy and the competition gets a lot more shots on goal. Are you bullish then on AMD or Broadcom? I am bullish on AMD. I have a buy on AMD. Broadcom looking pretty good. I got to take a hard look at my neutral rating on that one. And you're still keeping the buy on AMD even with the, I think, 25 % gain in the last couple days? It's been a busy week, so I haven't gone through all my stocks yet. But A &B is a good company. They're executing solidly.

21:44Colette Kress: They've just had a great quarter. They're ramping their new GPUs into volume next year that look very good. They have a lot of good design wins and business at the hyperscalers. So I'm still pretty positive on that. Yeah. And I want to be clear. I want to be clear. Since the peak on October 6th, this is before the affair stuff. NVIDIA has lost$1.8 trillion,$1.8 trillion, multiple ExxonMobil's five Intel's worth of value in the matter of a month. And you still think that it's not a buy? I don't. I think there's still problems to come. Chief of which is who's going to be the next CEO and how can they ever fill Jensen's shoes or fill Jensen's...

22:25Colette Kress: Would Tim Cook change that? If he was named CEO, would that be a name that might make you revisit at that rating? Look, I have a buy rating on Apple. I'm a big fan of Tim Cook, but this is different, right? You can't have Steph Curry, Go Warriors, replacing Shohei Otani. They're both the greatest players in their sports, but they're different sports. And so I don't think it's an automatic, easy fix to just bring in a great CEO from another industry to run a semiconductor company. Very, very different businesses. Especially one Wong built from kind of a sleepy video game graphics processing company to the global powerhouse that it is.

22:59Colette Kress: Jay Goldberg, Seaport Securities, convicted and standing by it. I like the conviction. Jay, thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Coming up, President Trump, he is not just tweeting about NVIDIA or Jensen Wong. He's also out there on Iran. We'll tell you what he said and Jeff Curry's take on everything that happens now with oil, energy, and the commodity markets. Founder and see a real macro next.

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25:03Colette Kress: NVIDIA stock down about four and a half percent right now. I guess the good news is that it was down about 14 percent earlier today on that Jensen Wong resignation news, but we've lost$1.8 trillion in market value. At some point, NVIDIA stock will be a buy. And Jeff Kilburg thinks that point might be right now. He is CEO of KKM Financial. He is a CNBC contributor. Jeff, do you think this is the right time to be buying NVIDIA? Oh, Sully, it is so hard to determine what is the right time. But let's talk about the facts. Remove Jensen Wong. Obviously, he got removed today. I'm not sure who's going to be wearing the new black leather jacket.

25:43If anyone can replace Jensen. But what I do know is that they have about a trillion dollars between Blackwell and Rubin through 2028. And what we did hear from Jensen prior to that, that they can only fulfill about 70 % of that demand. So this supply-constrained company, which is down 31 % from all-time highs, which, by the way, Sully, was just in October when we saw that market cap at$5.8 trillion. This morning, when it was 12 % lower, it traded at$148 trillion. It was traded at$3.8 trillion. So that$2 trillion evaporation, I think, presents an opportunity. I want to use options, though, to define that because there's so much complexity.

26:19There's going to be so many layers that still are coming out in this. The lack of a succession plan, the lack of who's the leadership, all these moving parts with earnings next week, I think there's an opportunity. And that's why I bought options yesterday, and I bought options on the open this morning.

26:32Colette Kress: That's interesting. I love this. This is why we love you here, Kilberg, which is, you know, there's a lot of people watching that are that are thinking, well, I just heard what Jeff Kilberg had to say and stocks down, you know, one point eight to two trillion dollars. It must be a buy. We don't know because there's more that could come out here. So tell us then more about the option strategy. How are options maybe a better way to enter this NVIDIA story without, you know, putting the family home mortgage up at risk? Well, a lot of people use cash-covered puts. That's selling with the risk to owning it.

27:05However, with all the uncertainty, I wanted to be a buyer of calls. So I looked 64 days out, Sully. That takes us to January 15th. Hopefully, there's some resolution and more clarity. But January 15th, those calls yesterday, when the stock was trading around 168, I bought those for$4.75. I bought those same calls, those 200-strike calls, this morning for$2.30. So therefore, I've defined what I'm willing to risk. It may go lower. But right now, the Ford PE on NVIDIA, you have your seatbelt on? It's trained at 17 times. Ford PE, that's the lowest it's been in five years. The average is 33 times.

27:39So when you talk about the opportunity to get into NVIDIA, which has all this commitment, yes, we have so much uncertainty out there. I think there's an opportunity. We still own it as well. Just about every other American, there's 800 different ETS that own it. But this type of haircut we've seen, I think the risk reward is to own it. But using options, defining what your risk is, not catching the falling if it goes down another 20, 30 percent. That's why I opted to use call options.

28:04Colette Kress: You're a Chicago guy. It was a company in Chicago briefly named Boeing. They make airplanes. You remember that? Their CEO got whacked because of kind of the same thing, right? An alleged sort of relationship with an underling or whatever it might have been. I know it's a different situation. Everyone is. But my point is, I don't think any customer said, well, we probably shouldn't buy Boeing jets because the CEO just got let go or resigned or whatever term they used back then because of this. And I do wonder, you might have heard my previous question to the analyst. How much do customers really care?

28:36Colette Kress: They may think it's distasteful. They may not like the story. They may not like anything about it, nor should they. But at the same time, do they stop buying NVIDIA chips because of it? I don't know. I think you're right, Sully. Infidelity is not a 2026 story. It's been taking down top emperors thousands of years ago. So here we are trying to get visibility of what will this company do moving forward. There's 40 ,000 other employees that have done a tremendous job here. And I think when you talk about what their short-term path, and I'm talking two, three years, that seems quite solidified. What happens after that?

29:07Do they fall the way of maybe being a Microsoft, not as important, maybe AMD, Broadcom, pick your other semi that starts taking market share. But right now, they are the winner. They have 90%. They have such a lead on everybody else. I think this market has the ability to go back above$200 and prove a lot of naysayers wrong. But we are on for a wild ride. Buckle that chin strap. It is going to get ugly before it gets worse. But I think the price, the$148 price, I think is a short-term bottom.

29:33Colette Kress: Yeah. By the way, I just looked at the – God, I'm old. The Boeing CEO was let go in 2005 for the relationship. So 21 years ago, and Boeing stocks up two and a half times since then. It's not the same situation. I get it. But to your point, headlines, they do go away. Jeff Kilburg, thank you. See you, buddy. All right. On deck. Why NVIDIA's board may now be costing shareholders, maybe like you, billions more by not moving fast enough.

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31:51Colette Kress: Welcome back to The Exchange. I am Frank Holland with your CNBC News update. President Trump said today that he's pulling Vice President J.D. Vance from engaging in potential peace talks with Iran and instead wants him to focus on what he claims is massive corruption and crime in Democrat-run cities and states. However, according to the New York Times review of federal data, there is no evidence suggesting that fraud is more prevalent in democratically run areas as opposed to Republican ones. Sales of existing homes slumped to their slowest pace in more than 16 years last month. The 5.5 percent drop in October represented the slowest pace since 2010 when the market was trying to recover from the housing crash.

32:28Colette Kress: And Pope Leo was greeted by record crowds in Peru as he returned to the South American country, where he served as a missionary for 20 years. Local officials say an estimated 3 million people greeted the pope on the final leg of his trip. The pope, who holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and Peru, told the huge crowds that he was returning to his homeland. The Exchange is coming back right after this. All right, welcome back to The Exchange, everybody. Kelly will be back tomorrow. And believe it or not, there is news outside of NVIDIA and Jensen Wong. And a big part of that involves energy, because while oil isn't moving a lot right now, this is, make no mistake, a very tense time for the global energy market.

33:06Colette Kress: Because there's also some real hope for some sort of deal or peace deal with Iran. President Trump posting on True Social earlier today, quote, we don't need to deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We've got their money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we've got theirs straight. Maybe a lot of that is up for debate. I think people forgot to maybe tell the Houthis. Anyway, let's talk more about all of this and more with Jeff Curry. He is the CEO of Real Macro. There's ships that are still being hit in the region, Jeff. Do you think dealings with Iran are over? absolutely not if anything they just got a lot more difficult yeah i like to call the straight the schrodinger straight remember the schrodinger cat you don't know if it's alive or dead we don't know if it's open or closed and i think what that does because we do have a lot of volumes coming out it caps the prompt barrel um but it makes the the next one um doesn't make it any cheaper so you're kind of stuck in this limbo land of let's call it 95 you know let's say 85 to$100 range without really any ability to escape to the upside or any ability to really drop much lower.

34:19So, you know, the market is in this holding pattern because it's very unclear how we're going to get a resolution here.

34:26Colette Kress: Well, without getting into theoretical physics problems and that cat, let's talk about Iran, because right now there's a lot of barrels moving through the strait. We know that. But they're moving through the strait with huge help from the United States Navy. That will not or cannot last forever. Iran keeps kind of changing who's in charge. We don't need to go into Iran politics because they're a mystery to me as well. But Iran could restart hostilities at any time because they think they need to be paid for ships to go through safely. Yeah. I mean, you're seeing it. I mean, they're taking hits.

35:06In fact, there was one today, a big BLCC got hit by some mines. So, I mean, that's the point here. Yes, you're getting the volumes out, but the cost of those volumes are extraordinarily expensive. Everything from logistics to the insurance involved, the ability to refine them. I like to argue that historically, these commodity markets were relatively simple. The constraint was in the upstream, and that's all you really had to look at. I like to call this thing a bubbling cauldron of supply and demand and balance. Is it insurance this week? Is it refining this week? Is it upstream? Is it the tankers?

35:42I don't know which one's going to be the constraint. The one thing I definitely know, a delivered barrel of oil to a consuming part of the world is far more expensive today than it has been at any other point.

35:53Colette Kress: But is there a supply, demand imbalance for oil? Because you've got Qatar pumping a lot. You've got Iraq pumping a lot. You know, he's allegedly talking about a third pipeline. Saudi Arabia is pumping back to pre-war levels. Who knows what the rest of OPEC may do? What's the barrel counting on the physical barrel right now, Jeff? I would put the market as relatively balanced. And that's the way it's pricing right now. The front end is relatively flat. It's relatively tame. But let's not forget, while it caps the prompt barrel, it does nothing to cheapen the next one, which is why you can't get bearish here, nor can you get really bullish.

36:36So you have really expensive barrels of oil being put out onto the global market to keep it in a tenuous balance, but it does nothing to shift the forward outlook for the price. In fact, we put out a piece recently where we talked about we want to get the war trade is over. Any type of upside in price is over, but the regime trade is still there. You want to own things like the drillers. The long-term structural story here is very much intact. So we like the structural story, long-dated oil, drillers, producers, anything that's very much tied to replacing that future barrel. because replacing it is very expensive, but we don't want to own the very front end of the curve.

37:23Okay.

37:24Colette Kress: Own the drillers, own the producers, own the long-dated trade on oil. I want to switch gears. What about gold? Gold has took a big drop in the last couple of months, kind of found some buyers after the election. I'm not that bright, Jeff, but I do know that the deficit is not going anywhere. Debts not going anywhere. That's not just here. That's globally. I wonder what happens with the U.S. dollar. There's not more gold necessarily being mined in quantity. Is now the time to rebuy gold? Yeah, I would like to be stepping in cautiously. And why do I say cautiously? Give me three to six months, I'm going to be very strongly bullish.

38:09The reason why I'm a little cautious, the dollar is really strong. We have liquidity problems right now. and that liquidity problem creates downward pressure on gold. Actually, what's going on here is gold goes below 4 ,000, the Chinese step in and buy it. So that keeps you afloat. But it's another kind of one like oil near term. The ability to rise higher right now is constrained by the fact that there's not a lot of dollars out there. And the way I like to think about commodities more broadly, there's a scarcity theme, the fear of running out of commodities, And then there's a debasement theme, the fear of running out of money.

38:42We're right now in that liquidity issue. By the way, this is very negative to markets like copper. Look at copper. It's down like 6%. Why? Because if you have a liquidity squeeze, the way you raise cash is like metal inventory sitting around in your plant or whatever. You liquidate that. You create a destocking cycle that puts downward pressure on prices in the manufacturing sector to be able to raise that cash. We also have central banks. Well, yeah, let's go back to the Middle East. It looks like they're selling gold. And that's part of the reason why we're just bouncing it around, you know,$4 ,000.

39:17Look past this liquidity hiccup right now in the dollar. You know, I want to own gold. You know, the de-dollarization story hasn't changed. If anything, it's been turbocharged by everything that we've seen. You know, diversify. You want to own hard, hard assets in your portfolio. You know, debasement reasons. High debt. You know, look what's going on in France. You know, the debt to GDP ratio. So none of this change. And, you know, gold, you know, is it a seven thousand dollar commodity? Is it a ten thousand dollar commodity? We look out a few years. I'm not sure. But one thing I definitely want to be long gold.

39:51All right. Right now, it's a little bit, you know, let's be a little cautious.

39:55Colette Kress: Well, I like it. We got a little bit of like an amuse-bouche from Jeff Curry's thoughts. I think that means like small thing before dinner. They don't have that at Chick-fil-A. Jeff Curry, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Take care. Great. Thanks for having me. All right. Coming up, NVIDIA shares. Yeah, they're still down. And coming up, though, we've actually got a tech story that's not about NVIDIA. It's about OpenAI's latest funding round not going exactly as planned. All about a week ahead of Anthropics IPO, the exchange. Back right after this.

40:40Colette Kress: All right, welcome back. Let's get back now to what could be the biggest story of the year. That is not what you just saw. It is Jensen Wong being out as NVIDIA CEO. Now, he technically quit the company, but I mean, let's just talk as adults. He was likely to be forced out, according to reports, if he did not quit. And your next guest says that no one at NVIDIA likely knows what happens next. The fact that management schedules an all-hands meeting in about one week does not exactly scream, we got this. Joining us now to talk about this is Axios Business Editor, Dan Permick. Dan, I want to be clear.

41:14Colette Kress: Listen, there's a lot here we still do not know. Based on what we know, what you know, what do you think is the next or best course of action for NVIDIA right now? Well, obviously, they need to have a search, whether that's internal or external. and they need to put somebody in charge. And really, I know they have some complications when it comes to talking to employees because they have earnings coming up. The timing really for them couldn't be worse. There are restrictions on what they can say, but they need to talk to the rank and file, right? I mean, Jensen personally hired some of these people or there was a one degree of separation and he kind of was the North Star for this company beyond being a good technologist and founding it.

41:53They basically need to calm everybody inside the company. There's been so much talk about how this impacts shareholders. Ultimately, shareholders are going to be impacted by the thousands of people who still work at NVIDIA after Jensen. And they really need to talk to those folks. The fact that it's going to take six days, that just seems remarkable to me.

42:10Colette Kress: Well, I would imagine. And again, I don't want to speak for the thousands of women and men at NVIDIA. But they're probably frustrated. They're probably angry. They're probably sad. They're probably confused. There's probably a variety of emotions. What should the board be doing right now to try to calm that? And also, listen, the board's got another job here. which employees aside, they got to convince customers. If I was the head of sales or one of the heads of sales at NVIDIA, I'd be on the phone as much as I could be awake the next number of days saying, hey, listen, are chips still the best in the world?

42:44Colette Kress: We still can make them. We still can sell them. We still can support them. There are a number of jobs here, but keeping customers from defecting to AMD or Broadcom or others, that I imagine also needs to be at least at the top of that list. Yeah, it is. I mean, one benefit that NVIDIA has is for the relative short term next year or so, they're basically sold out, right? So this isn't who are they selling chips to next month. This is really who are they selling chips to in a couple of years from now. So there's a huge benefit to that, but agreed. And they need to be able at some point to say who's going to be running the ship.

43:18But you're right. Customers are an enormous piece of this.

43:23Colette Kress: So does Dan Primack have a thought on who should be the next CEO of NVIDIA? I mean, Carlette Kress, CFO, been there 13 years by most reports, also a billionaire, wildly successful, been there a long time, dealt with Jensen Wong. But CFOs don't always make the best CEOs because let's be clear, the skill set is very different. CFOs tend to be more financial minded. Maybe they're not as customer facing. Should she be the next CEO? Should Tim Cook, perhaps, at President Trump's urging, consider taking this job, at least in the short term? I think a question NVIDIA has to decide is what it wants its CEO to be, right?

43:59Because Jensen not only was a visionary and understood how to run an organization, and he drove people very hard and he knew how to do that. He was also a technologist at heart, right? He wasn't a financial person. He wasn't an organizational person first, technologist second. So I think NVIDIA has to decide if it feels it needs someone with those technical chops, not because the person's going to be sitting in there literally designing the chips, but because they're actually going to understand what those designs are. And then finally, someone who's got political connections. I mean, that was a huge piece of Jensen.

44:29Colette Kress: That's it. I got to go quickly. You break a lot of news. You know how it works. Who was in your mind? Who do you think was leaking this information? Somebody somebody was talking for a reason. It seems that some of it was definitely leaked on the political side. And I don't know if that's under the White House or somebody who had information. If you look at those original stories, right, it was all about the Rubio memo. That's not coming from Silicon Valley. Dan Primap, Axios. Dan, really appreciate your time. Thanks for rolling with everything. Appreciate to see you again soon. Thanks. All right.

45:01Colette Kress: That is it for us here on The Exchange. I will be joining Contessa Brewer for Power Lunch right after this quick break. See you in two minutes. With a good source of protein, Quaker protein products offer a variety of delicious flavors and options from breakfast time to snack time. Think about it. You shower, get dressed, head out to drop off the kids, log on to meetings, follow up after meetings. Hit the gym, pick up the kids, and you realize it's already time for dinner. From oatmeal and granola to bars and rice snacks, Quaker protein products have options for the whole family. Get your protein with Quaker.

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