Jensen Huang proves it: America's religion is the cult of the founder

On Wednesday afternoon, I stood on the sixth floor of Saks Fifth Avenue in a $10,000 black grained-leather Tom Ford jacket, the uniform of Nvidia cofounder and chief executive Jensen Huang, while Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant to tech founders and financiers, sized me up. "The attitude of the garment," he said, "This guy's got the get-up-and-go. He's like, 'If I see it, I'm gonna fuck it.'"

The following morning, four days after he admitted to an affair, reportedly with an executive at an Nvidia customer whom US intelligence officials suspected of spying for China, and hours after The New York Times reported a second affair with an Nvidia executive who reports to him, the company announced that Huang, the most important businessman of the past decade, had resigned. Later on Thursday, Reuters reported that Huang had had an affair with a second employee. Rosenfeld told me the jacket's "aggressive" lapels, meaty zippers, and "elegant weightiness" represented the "triumvirate of power, money, and sex" — a triumvirate that was Huang's armor until it became a weakness.

Consider the stack of load-bearing objects. The totemic jacket propped up Huang, who has said that his wife and daughter dress him. Huang propped up Nvidia, which had exactly one CEO in its 33 years and whose own filings flagged to shareholders that it was "highly dependent" on a small executive team — Huang had 60 direct reports and no direct successor. Nvidia, which reached a market capitalization of $5.8 trillion earlier this fall, props up the AI boom: It controls some 90% of the market for the chips that are essential for building the data centers that are the gray matter of AI's brain. And the AI boom has been propping up the American economy. Tug on that shiny leather from cows that had been pampered so well until it was time, and you might find out what was propping up everything.

Quick, quick: Name the current CEO of Walmart. Or ExxonMobil. Or UnitedHealth. Or CVS. Or Costco. Nearly all of the bosses of America's biggest non-tech companies are anonymous more or less by design. But then: Elon, Sam, Dario, Mark, Palmer, Satya, Jensen. With the most valuable and voluble tech founders, the prognosticators and progenitors of our future, just saying their first names, like Oprah or Jesus, conjures their companies, their vestments and iconography, their mantras and manifestos — cowboy hats and Aloha shirts, chains and chainsaws, swinging swords and swooping arms, smoking meats and smoking blunts with Joe Rogan. It's time to build. Move fast and break things. It's always Day One. It is right and just.

At the end of the 2010s, several publications wrote obituaries to the cult of the founder. We would learn, they wrote, from the fraud of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, Travis Kalanick and the superpumping of Uber, Adam Neumann and WeWork's "Cult of We," and we'd stop giving them unlimited power and treating them like gods. "We forgot that no matter how amazing these dudes seemed," Wired's Steven Levy wrote in 2019, "they were just human, with human frailties." He went on, "In the 2020s, new founders will also be pressed on a question they can no longer avoid by swerving their rollerblades: What can go wrong?"

A lot, it turns out. The cult of the founder wasn't just resurrected; it has become the most consequential religion in America, the one that our 401(k)s, our power grid, our foreign policy, the way we work and relate to one another, and, most recently, the future of the entire planet now quietly depend on. Jensen Huang was its most convincing saint, a generational computer scientist who made a generational bet and who led with generational gravitas and drive to dominate. His fall is a stress test of founder worship.

Huang's admirers behaved less like fans than like congregants. Mark Zuckerberg anointed him "the Taylor Swift of tech." CNBC's Jim Cramer named his dog Nvidia. Donald Trump called him "one of the most brilliant men" — and, last Sunday, after the first affair came to light, "an honorable guy" who "probably has an excuse for it." The faithful also collected relics. A signed jacket worn by Huang sold at Sotheby's in July for $960,000. The auction house's catalog entry transubstantiates the jacket into "the uniform of a 'first believer': a symbol of his leadership style embodying authenticity, ingenuity, persistence, courage, and joy." Knockoff "Jensens" go for $119, with product copy that reads like psalms: "The pitch black tone screams power and authority." Parents dyed their 5-year-olds' hair salt-and-pepper and made plastic GPUs for Halloween. At a tech conference, Huang sharpied a woman's breasts. I've never seen Ron sign a rack. (I'm obviously speaking of Ron Vachris, CEO of Costco.)

Other tech giant cults have opened gift shops. OpenAI's glowing green ChatGPT basketball sold out instantly. Anthropic's "Thinking" caps ran out at its West Village pop-up. Palantir's chore coat comes with a koan from its chief technology officer sewn into the lining: "Ask yourself constantly, am I winning? If the answer is yes, nothing else matters." Customers say it makes them feel like they're part of the AI boom; critics call it a form of "humanwashing," robing the people in streetwear to soften AI's image.

What's new isn't that founders are worshipped — Edison and Ford had their devotees — but that they now say out loud that they want and deserve to be worshiped. "The most successful founders do not set out to create companies," Sam Altman wrote in 2013. "They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion." Alex Karp has called Palantir "a rare cult with no sex and very little drugs." "The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults," Peter Thiel wrote in "Zero to One," founderdom's most sacred text. Brendan Foody, the 23-year-old billionaire CEO of the AI training company Mercor, who speaks in messianic proverbs ("Do you think George Washington would support working from home?" he recently tweeted), told me "the best companies start cults," and that he thinks of the cult of Brendan and the cult of Mercor "as synonymous." The cover of 1999 book "Corporate Cults" features an office worker with a company logo tattooed to his forehead, a visual gag playing up the book's subtitle, "The Insidious Allure of the All-Consuming Organization." In 2026, the gag is now a sacrament: At the AI insurer Corgi, two-thirds of the first 30 employees have reportedly had the company logo tattooed on their bodies. Huang himself has the Nvidia logo tattooed on his shoulder.

Founder worship has also gone professional. "If you are a tech startup today, you do need to create a cult to succeed," says Lulu Cheng Meservey, a communications strategist who has worked with cultic founders like Anduril's Palmer Luckey, Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, and Cognition's Scott Wu. The comms firm First Principles helps "leaders craft their lore and build (good) cults." Cult Holdings — a brand consultancy whose clients include Polymarket and the legal-services startup Harvey and which helped "build religions for Bryan Johnson," the longevity influencer — has developed what it calls an "indoctrination iceberg." More and more founders, says its CEO, Will Mayer, arrive with a single request: "Can you make me into a cult leader?" Mayer says he's looking to buy the site of a former cult compound in Montana for client gatherings.

And the gospel no longer needs the press to spread it. Founders have their own pulpits. Quarterly earnings have become occasion for encyclicals ("It is and was a mistake to casually proclaim the equality of all cultures and cultural values," Karp wrote in a recent shareholder letter), S1's have become scripture (Anthropic hopes to "bring forth an age of miracles" it wrote in its financial prospectus). There are the apostles: All-In, Dwarkesh Patel, Molly O'Shea, Lex Fridman, David Senra, Pirate Wires, Andressen Horowirtz' Monitoring the Situation, glossy, groveling magazine profiles in Colossus that quote founders' mother and father on how brilliant and good and very special their sons are. Then there's TBPN, Silicon Valley's daily prayer circle, which OpenAI bought this spring.

Every founder is now a cult leader in waiting.

The seminaries are under construction. Founders School, a Manhattan high school, promises eligible families their $150,000 a year tuition back if their child hasn't become a "philosopher builder" whose business has reached at least $1 million in profit by graduation. The freshman reading list includes "Zero to One," "The Fountainhead," "Thinking in Bets," and "The Book of Elon." Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship invites high school graduates to "skip the indoctrination" of college and earn a "Palantir degree." The Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a two-year college alternative from Silicon Valley's most powerful venture firm, welcomes its first class in San Francisco next fall. Classes include "The Math of Getting Rich" and "The Geometry of Luck," and announced lecturers include Sam Altman, Travis Kalanick, and Jensen Huang. "If you want to be a main character," Ben Horowitz said, "the academy can help you do that." For founders who arrive unpolished, Slow Ventures runs an etiquette finishing school, caviar tasting included.

The congregation is swelling accordingly. LinkedIn says the number of American users adding "founder" to their profiles jumped about 70% in a year. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that rising ranks of 20-somethings are skipping entry-level jobs to start companies — trading the wobbly career ladder for a pitch deck. Foody and his cofounders were billionaires at 22. Talk your book, promise investors and customers the world, and generational, post-economic wealth is on offer. Every founder is now a cult leader in waiting.

Part of the call to become a cult is because the product demands it. "Frontier" AI is too secret and too strange to inspect, Meservey argues, so employees, investors, and customers "can't trust but verify, they just have to trust and keep trusting." The founder becomes "a totem for their trust." Partly because the economy demands it. "We need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work," James Bort, a DePaul professor who studies "cultic startups," told my colleague Henry Chandonnet. And partly because America was born primed for it. Sara Reinis, who studies tech and religion, hears in founders "a lot of the same teleology, a lot of the same eschatology" as the evangelical world she grew up in — abundance and apocalypse, two halves of one sermon. "If something can damn you, it can bless you," she says.

And the other pews were empty. Americans' faith in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the news media, the medical system, higher education, and organized religion sits at or near record lows — just as AI threatens to upend how people work and what they're worth. Founders have gleefully stepped into that lacuna of trust, promising certainty, purpose, a story about the future in which you might be saved. And, buttressed by their ever-rising power and bajillions, sermons on when you should eat and sleep, how many children you should have, and when the antichrist is coming. Jane Borden, author of "Cults Like Us," put it more bluntly: "I think we're a nation of marks."

Business models can be changed, Meservey told me; supply chains can be fixed. "The thing that is very hard to change is the magnetism and the moral authority of the leader. And if that is lost, there is no amount of tweaking the business model you can do to salvage that business." Nvidia learned that this week.

We're a nation of marks.Jane Borden, author of "Cults Like Us"

Borden draws the line between a true cult and the groups we merely call cults — the Marines, Alcoholics Anonymous, Trader Joe's — at checks and balances. "Cultism is autocratic," she says. Nvidia named its first board chair ever on Thursday. As for tech's winking embrace of the c-word, it's "done intentionally to kind of make it into a joke and to dispel resistance," Steven Hassan, a cult researcher and author of "The Cult of Trump," tells me. "But that's not how the mind works." The joke is the inoculation.

Elizabeth Holmes was supposed to be the cautionary tale. Patrick Thomas O'Neill, Theranos' former creative director, describes the logic that drew him in: "You have to believe in something you can't see." It's the same faith Sotheby's sold with the Jensen jacket, a "relic of a simple belief: that the future is built by people brave enough to journey into the unknown before anyone else can see what they see."

Theranos collapsed, O'Neill says, when "the promise got ahead of the proof." The lesson the industry took was that Holmes was a fake, a founder in a turtleneck borrowed from the canonical cult leader founder, Steve Jobs (who not coincidentally was taught the Reality Distortion Field tactics from the onetime counterculture commune leader Robert Friedland, now a billionaire industrialist). "She was trying to channel somebody else," Rosenfeld, the image consultant, told me. Huang "was just channeling himself." His chips worked, better than anyone else's. His company was the most important industrial enterprise of our time. None of it mattered. Nvidia's vulnerability was never Huang's acumen or authenticity — it was his centrality.

"If you doubted everyone, nothing would happen," O'Neill says. One obsessive leader can bet a company on a decade-long vision and turn a graphics-card maker into the foundation of a new economy. Nvidia is the strongest case for founder worship ever made. As of this week, it is also the strongest case against it.

Elizabeth Holmes may have lied, but her lie tells a deeper truth. "You Can See Everything," the hall-of-mirrors documentary about Holmes and her husband, opens with an epigraph from a 2023 New York Times interview. In it, Holmes says of the actors who have portrayed her on screen: "That's not me they're playing. That's a character I created." The movie spotlights dispute over one word: whether she said "I" or "they" — "they" meaning the press and the public, us. Whatever she actually said, both versions are true. Elizabeth Holmes the visionary founder was a joint creation of her, her disciples, and the rest of us. The same goes for Jensen Huang. His fall indicts him, and it also indicts everyone who raised him to the status of a deity. That is the danger at the heart of founder worship. We turn people into gods, and then we act shocked, again and again, when they turn out to be human. Usually we find out only after the money is gone, the lives are thrown into the meat grinder, and the damage is done.

Founder cults rarely die. They wait for resurrection, not in the tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre but on Sand Hill Road. Adam Neumann is back: His residential real estate company, Flow, has raised some $450 million since 2022, and he's become a fixture on the tech podcast circuit. "Travis is Back," an Andreessen Horowitz sizzle reel announced this summer, as Kalanick's AI startup, Atoms, came out of stealth with $1.7 billion in funding. Soon after, Kalanick went on TBPN to brag about jet-skiing to the office every morning. "It's a fucking notch on the belt," he said. "Who else do you know who is jet-skiing to work? Nobody. I'm the guy." And Elizabeth Holmes is back in the forefront of America's imagination. "She's never going to go away," O'Neill says.

Founder cults rarely die. They wait for resurrection, not from a tomb in Jerusalem but from a term sheet on Sand Hill Road.

Rosenfeld assumes Huang won't, either. At Saks, I asked him what he'd advise if Huang were his client. He said he'd tell Huang to stand his ground and keep the jacket on. By Wednesday night, after the report of a second affair came out, he had a new prescription: a defiant exit, a period of reckoning, then a comeback, "a new impression of himself." Keep the jacket, but soften it. "We would move into suede," Rosenfeld said.

It's tempting to read the suede as penance, the prophet in sackcloth, or at least in something with a bit more give. More likely it's the next chapter of the gospel — but the faithful aren't waiting for it to be written. As of today, there are more than 130,000 signatories of an open letter demanding that Nvidia's board bring Huang back. They include Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, more than 70,000 shareholders, and 6,000 current Nvidians, as employees call themselves. Shopify's CEO, Tobi Lütke, called the ouster a "generational blunder": "There can never be a true succession for a founder like him."

The letter is less a petition than a creed. Its signatories admit they haven't seen the board's deliberations or the evidence against Huang. They still want him reinstated, "unless and until" the board can prove that removing him serves the company. The letter doesn't argue that Huang did nothing wrong. It argues that he built the company, and that this should be enough. It closes the way a hymn closes: "Thank you, Jensen. We stand with you."