Jensen Huang’s Leather Jacket Isn’t Helping Him Right Now

Just before Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley chip juggernaut he founded three decades ago, an uncanny photo of him made the internet rounds: Huang, in what appeared to be a haute-punk Saint Laurent jacket.

It wasn’t strange to see Huang in a leather jacket. After all, rare is the public appearance where Huang doesn’t wear one. He wore one on the cover of Time in 2021 and at Nvidia’s keynote in March. In a 2016 Reddit AMA, he described himself as “the guy in the leather jacket.” (A flat descriptor that sounds as if it could be applied to a video game avatar or a cartoon character.)

But this one was well beyond his typical style: drenched in studs, with fat flapped lapels. It was also, to fashion collectors, a coveted jewel, stemming from Hedi Slimane’s tenure at the French luxury house.

Alas, it was an artifact of A.I. fakery. (Nvidia confirmed that the photo had been doctored.)

To the many gawkers who followed the chronicle of his affairs this week, the executive’s more over-the-top Billy Idol-esque leather simmered with midlife crisis energy — the clothing equivalent of a new Porsche. The studded jacket in the A.I.-generated image seemed to declare “you can’t tame me!” as his company’s stock price, and reputation, crumbled. People ate it up, even as it was debunked.

Still, the photo brought into focus how perhaps even Huang’s leather jackets — the real ones — were an indication of a man branding himself as too much of a renegade.

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