No. 2 · Friday, November 13, 2026 · 7-minute read

The big one

Jensen Huang quit Nvidia with no successor in sight. Can anyone replace him?

He quit amid a spy scandal. Many on his staff want him back, and the board hasn’t even hired a headhunter.

Nvidia, the chipmaker at the center of the AI boom, this week lost the man who had run it for 33 years, and nobody is lined up to replace him.

Photo: Jensen Huang, in a black leather jacket, surrounded by students holding out laptops and phones after a talk at Stanford University in April 2026 — Huang after a talk at Stanford in April: the founder Nvidia was built around.Photo: Anders Eidesvik, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped

His fall took two weeks. It began on Oct. 29, when The New York Times reported that American officials had concluded that a Chinese businesswoman close to Huang was passing intelligence to Beijing. Ten days later Huang told his staff he had been unfaithful to his wife. By Thursday he was gone, amid reports that one of his affairs had been with that businesswoman. Even the Denny’s diner in San Jose where Nvidia was born has taken down the sign that honored the company.

Yet many of his own people want him back. An internal post asking the board to weigh their views has drawn more than 1,600 comments, mostly for his return, Wired reported. Tobi Lütke, who founded and runs Shopify, went further on X:

Tobi Lütke, founder and chief executive of Shopify: “there is no replacing a founder like Jensen. There never has been, and there can never be, a true succession for a founder like him. Nvidia ends today, and is replaced with a thing cosplaying nvidia. It will be run by custodians trying and failing to preserve the flame he …”

Not everyone mourns. Stephen Witt, Huang’s biographer, wrote in The New York Times that a “culture of omertà” inside Nvidia, a code of silence, “enabled Mr. Huang to be his worst self.” Witt had called his book “The Thinking Machine,” and now, he joked, he should write a sequel: “The What-Were-You-Thinking?! Machine.”

So who’s next? For now Nvidia’s finance chief, Colette Kress, is in charge until the board names a successor. On Friday the Financial Times reported that the board had approached Rene Haas, who runs the chip designer Arm and spent seven years at Nvidia; Arm declined to comment, and Reuters couldn’t confirm it. Hours later the board told CNBC it hadn’t even chosen a headhunter yet. Talk of candidates, it said, was “premature.”

Other boards plan for this day. When Steve Jobs resigned in 2011, Apple’s board named its chief operating officer, Tim Cook, to succeed him that same day. Nvidia’s list of its top officers has four names, and none is a chief operating officer.

Why it matters: Nvidia also invests in AI companies. Its last quarterly report valued those stakes, mostly in private companies, at $47.9 billion in July, up from $3.8 billion a year earlier, and bankers now worry that its investing will slow. “Nvidia is the central bank of A.I.,” one of them told The New York Times. “Imagine the Fed without a chairman.”

What’s next: Nvidia reports its results on Tuesday, Nov. 17, its first without Huang. Then come the lawmakers. House committees want him for a closed-door interview on Dec. 1, under threat of a subpoena, and a Senate committee for a public hearing on Dec. 3.

Timeline: Oct 29, The New York Times' spy report; Nov 8, Huang admits an affair; Nov 12, Huang resigns; Nov 17, Nvidia's results; Dec 1, a House interview; Dec 3, a Senate hearing

Your move

Nothing to do yet.

Sources: Wikimedia Commons · The New York Times, Oct. 29 · Jensen Huang · NBC News · Wired · Tobi Lütke on X · Stephen Witt · Nvidia · Reuters · CNBC · Apple · Nvidia’s officers · Nvidia 10-Q · The New York Times · Nvidia’s results notice · House letter · Sen. Tim Scott on X

In this edition

01Jensen Huang quit Nvidia amid a spy scandal; many of his staff want him back, and the board hasn’t even hired a headhunter.
02Microsoft’s business email was mostly down for 18 hours, so check that the orders sent to you since Thursday afternoon arrived.
03ChatGPT can now pay at your checkout, unless your own bot defenses turn it away; OpenAI’s guide says what to check.
04Amazon drafted a plan to collect data on nearly every product for sale, yours included, so that AI shopping agents have to come to Amazon.
05Nvidia’s stock fell 23% in the two weeks to Huang’s exit, while the Nasdaq fell 4%.
06Plus: Gödel’s hidden theorems, a doomsday that didn’t come, OpenAI’s robots, Nvidia chips in Chinese AI, a dip for Microsoft advertisers, Apify’s data warning, a Canadian ruling and the end of Google’s core update.

Also big

Microsoft’s business email was mostly down for 18 hours. Check your orders.

If your business email runs on Microsoft 365, Microsoft’s office suite, some orders and messages sent to you since Thursday afternoon may still be on their way. On Friday afternoon Microsoft’s status page still warned that delivery “may be delayed.”

The trouble began at about 12:35 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, when traffic to Microsoft’s email service, Exchange Online, plunged. Kentik, a firm that tracks internet traffic, measured it at about 85% below normal for some 18 hours, until it began climbing back early on Friday.

Dot grid: 15 of 100 dots filled. 15% of its usual traffic reached Microsoft's email service for some 18 hours, about 85% below normal, by Kentik's measure of Exchange Online, Nov 12 to 13 — Data: Kentik. Chart: Recrawl.

On Friday morning Microsoft apologized, and its status page named the cause: “an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade.” It has promised a full report.

Why it matters: orders, leads and sign-in codes arrive by email, and a day of missing mail can look like a quiet day for business.

Your move

Check that order and contact-form emails sent since Thursday afternoon have come in.

Sources: Microsoft · Doug Madory on Bluesky · Microsoft on X

How to

ChatGPT can now pay at your checkout. Make sure it gets in.

Two weeks before Black Friday, a new kind of shopper can reach your checkout: ChatGPT, buying for its user.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Wallet on Friday. It lets ChatGPT’s agents, the assistants that carry out tasks for users, pay with a user’s card once the user approves. For now only some U.S. subscribers to ChatGPT Pro, a paid plan, can use it, TechCrunch reports. You don’t have to build anything, OpenAI’s guide for shops says, because Wallet works with the checkout you already have.

The catch is your own bot defenses, the settings that stop automated buyers. The agents shop through ChatGPT’s own browser, which OpenAI runs, and the guide warns that this browser can trip those defenses:

Screenshot of OpenAI's guide for shops, under the heading Handling risk: Risk systems are often tuned to detect bots and rely on observed signals like IP addresses or details about the connected browser. Highlighted: ChatGPT's cloud browser can set off these systems by accident and cause purchases to fail. — OpenAI’s own guide for shops: the browser its agents shop with can look like a bot.Screenshot: OpenAI, highlight by Recrawl

Your move

Many shops screen visitors through a service such as Akamai, Cloudflare, HUMAN or Vercel. Those four recognize ChatGPT’s browser on their own, but your bot defenses there can still block it. On Cloudflare, find “dots, OpenAI” under Personal Agents (OpenAI calls its agents dots) and set it to Allow.
If your bot defenses run somewhere else, follow OpenAI’s steps for recognizing its browser: each of its visits carries a digital signature, a code that proves it comes from OpenAI.
If an outside service screens your orders for fraud, ask it to read the details about the real shopper that OpenAI is starting to pass along with each visit.

Sources: OpenAI · TechCrunch · OpenAI’s payments guide · OpenAI’s agent access guide

Explainer

Amazon drafted a plan to collect data on every product, yours too

If you sell online, your product pages may one day feed Amazon’s catalog, whether or not you sell on Amazon.

Amazon has drafted a plan to collect data on virtually every item for sale on Earth, whether it stocks the item or not, Reuters reported on Friday. Some brands would send their data in, and for the rest Amazon would crawl other retailers’ websites, reading their product pages with its own software. The draft, which calls the plan World Product Graph, aims for October 2027, and Amazon said such a “brainstorming document ... doesn’t necessarily reflect our current plans.”

The reason is AI shopping agents, which shop for people across the web. Amazon’s executives worry that agents such as Meta’s Muse will steer customers to sites with fuller data, Reuters’ sources say; with every product on file, the agents would have to come to Amazon. How, when Amazon keeps outside agents out of its own store? The report doesn’t say. Amazon blocked Muse in September, and its robots.txt file, the list that tells bots what they may read, turns away 99 bots by name:

Screenshot of www.amazon.com/robots.txt, four entries: User-agent: GoogleAgent-Mariner, Disallow: /; User-agent: GoogleAgent-Shopping, Disallow: /, highlighted; User-agent: ClaudeBot, Disallow: /; User-agent: meta-externalagent, Disallow: / — Amazon’s own robots.txt: the company that would crawl every shop tells 99 bots, Google’s shopping agent among them, to stay out of all of its pages.Screenshot: Amazon, cropped, highlight by Recrawl

Why it matters: Amazon already lists some products from other shops’ websites through two services, Buy for Me and Shop Direct, and buys them for its customers. Employees describe World Product Graph as the start of a bigger version of both.

Reported by Reuters from an internal document; Amazon hasn’t confirmed the plan.

Your move

Nothing to do yet.

Sources: Reuters · Amazon’s robots.txt

The number

Bar chart: Nvidia's stock fell 23% between Oct 28 and Nov 12, 2026; the Nasdaq Composite fell 4%

Nvidia’s stock lost 23% in the two weeks to the day Huang quit, counting from the day before The New York Times’ first report. Not all of that was the scandal: over the same two weeks the Nasdaq Composite, an index of the stocks traded on the Nasdaq exchange, fell 4%.

Quick hits

Gödel’s hidden theorems. Kurt Gödel, the logician whose theorems reshaped mathematics, left 1,009 pages of notebooks in an obsolete shorthand. Jan von Plato, a Helsinki logician and one of the few people who can read it, had transcribed them, but working out the mathematics went at about a page a week. In September he gave his transcripts to Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, which wrote a 650-page explanation of all of it in a couple of days. He checked it page by page, and it showed that Gödel had proved hundreds of theorems nobody knew about, he told The Guardian. The researcher’s own account; no paper yet. Recrawl itself is written with Anthropic’s Claude. Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Doomsday, postponed. In 1960 the physicist Heinz von Foerster titled a paper in the journal Science “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.” That’s the date on this edition. His curve of world population raced to infinity on that date, and people, he wrote, would be “squeezed to death.” As Ars Technica tells it, the curve matched the past, but then birth rates fell. Remember him the next time someone draws AI’s growth curve out to infinity.
OpenAI’s robots. OpenAI has broken up its stand-alone robotics team and moved the researchers onto its main research and product teams, it told Fortune. The company says its general-purpose models, including GPT-6 Astra, can now run robots directly. That’s a bet against the startups that raised billions on the idea that robots need AI brains of their own, Fortune notes.
Microsoft’s ads. If you advertise with Microsoft, Thursday’s outage may show in your spend. Microsoft Advertising says its platform kept working. But some of its ads run inside Outlook, Microsoft’s email app, and while people couldn’t load their mail, Outlook may have shown fewer of them.
China’s banned chips. Six AI models from Chinese labs, among them DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, contain number patterns that match Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which the U.S. bars from sale to China. Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher, found the patterns in the models’ published files, and says they support, without proving, that the banned chips did the training. One researcher’s analysis, published on Thursday and reported by TechCrunch on Friday. Photo: Javils00, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
Apify’s warning. If you run scrapers on Apify, a service for collecting data from websites, set your stored data to Restricted. An intruder got into its systems this week and reached some customers’ data, so on Friday Apify asked every user to restrict theirs: stored data left open can be read by anyone who knows its ID.

In court

OpenAI in Canada. Canada’s biggest news publishers, among them the public broadcaster CBC and The Globe and Mail, can sue OpenAI at home over their claim that it copied their journalism to train ChatGPT. In a ruling on Friday, Ontario’s Court of Appeal rejected OpenAI’s argument that the case belongs in the U.S., the trade publication Broadcast Dialogue reports. One outlet has reported the ruling so far. We couldn’t open the ruling itself. Photo: Mikerussell, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped

On the record

“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents.”
Microsoft, on its status page, ruling out an attack or AI as the cause of Thursday’s outage

What to watch

Nov 16The government files draft terms for how Google must share its search index, its copy of the web, with rivals, in its search monopoly case
Nov 17Nvidia’s results
Nov 24Google’s core update, the broad re-ranking it began Nov 10, should be finished
Nov 27Black Friday
Nov 30Google’s deadline to rewrite its dismissed suit against SerpApi, which sells Google’s results to other tools
Dec 1House committees want Huang for a closed-door interview
Dec 3The Senate Banking Committee wants Huang at a public hearing
Dec 3In the UK, Google must let publishers keep their content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, its two kinds of AI answers, without a penalty in Search

How this edition was made

Every fact links to where it came from, and a note marks anything short of confirmed. We read 46 items from 5 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Eastern on Friday. The company or court involved confirmed 14 of them, and 25 came from press reports. Five were a company’s or a researcher’s own figures that no one else had checked, and 2 were sightings no company had confirmed. Seventeen of the 46 run here.

Corrections: none. This edition was reissued on Friday evening with more stories and pictures; nothing in the first version needed correcting.

No picture in this issue is made with AI: the photos, the post and the screenshots are real, and the timeline and the two charts are drawn from the dates and figures in the stories.