Nvidia has lost about $490 billion in market value and its chief executive, Jensen Huang, after an affairs scandal. Bitcoin has meanwhile fallen below $70,000. Both declines have several competing explanations, and the two stories are now intersecting.
The same week has seen two of the biggest stories in financial markets lose their simple explanation. Nvidia, the world's most valuable technology company only a few weeks ago, has seen chief executive Jensen Huang resign after a scandal over his affairs grew into a broader crisis over the company's business practices and possible breaches of US export rules on China. Bitcoin, meanwhile, has fallen below $70,000, down nearly 20 per cent in a month, driven by a mix of macro factors, technical signals and politics that no single explanation captures alone. The two stories are not just concurrent — they are also starting to intersect.
Nvidia's market value fell from $4.498 trillion a week earlier to $4.005 trillion on Thursday, a drop of around $490 billion. The stock is now heading for its sixth straight weekly decline, its longest losing streak since 2012, and has lost roughly $1.6 trillion in market value since early October — enough to push the company below Apple in total value.
Jensen Huang resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately, after reports of his affairs grew into a broader company crisis. Chief financial officer Colette Kress takes over as interim chief executive while keeping her finance role, while former Synopsys chief Harvey C. Jones becomes the company's first-ever board chair. The board says it has full confidence in Kress and expects no interruption to operations. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on 17 November.
Kress has 30 years in the industry, with earlier roles at Cisco and Microsoft. – She has stood alongside Huang on every single earnings call, says eToro analyst Josh Gilbert, who describes her as a voice the market already trusts. Whether she keeps the role permanently is less certain — Nvidia may instead want an engineer in the chair.
Reactions across tech, AI and crypto circles have been divided. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao called the ouster a mistake, Erik Voorhees dismissed the spying allegations as unproven, Tim Sweeney called it a sad day, and Elon Musk said hiring Huang himself would be an honour.
The breadth of the reactions is not just about Huang as a person, but about how much of Nvidia's position — and by extension the AI boom's — has been tied specifically to him. A TechCrunch analysis points to five roles Huang has played at once: political shield for the industry, champion of open-weight models, driving force behind a self-regulation pact among more than 100 companies, counter-voice to "doomer" narratives about AI, and the salesman of Nvidia's financing and AI-PC strategy to Wall Street. No successor has yet stepped up with the same influence on any of these fronts.
Several business leaders have described Huang in almost existential terms: former Cisco chief executive John Chambers says crisis response is decisive for a company's future, while Michael Dell goes further: – He is a visionary of the AI age, says Dell. Huang joined Trump's China trip in May and brought together six major Wall Street names behind a $500 billion AI buildout plan in August — deals and relationships that now sit with an organisation without him.
What makes the story more complicated than a personal scandal is what has emerged since. The Wall Street Journal reports that Huang called Kress "a deer in the headlights" during an internal clash this summer over Nvidia's financing deals with AI customers — the so-called circular financing in which Nvidia invests in companies that then buy back its own chips. Kress is reported to have pushed for more caution and clarity, while Huang pushed back against internal resistance to his own sales strategy.
Meanwhile, an independent analysis has found numerical traces of Nvidia's export-restricted Blackwell chips in six Chinese AI models, among them from DeepSeek and Ant Group. The findings are technical evidence of possible access to advanced US processors, but do not establish where the hardware was located, or whether export rules were actually broken. In Washington, political pressure is building at the same time: House speaker Mike Johnson says there is a "developing consensus" in Congress for tougher export restrictions on China, possibly attached to this year's defense authorisation bill. Senators from both parties are meanwhile demanding that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explain why the department never acted against the Singapore-based firm Megaspeed — the company at the centre of the Huang affair — while the White House says Trump retains "complete confidence" in Lutnick.
Bitcoin fell below $70,000 this week, down from around $86,000 a month ago, after breaking its 200-day moving average with no visible support further down. No single explanation dominates. Among the factors cited are the turmoil at Nvidia, hotter US inflation data, continued outflows from listed bitcoin funds, and a reported $100 billion Anthropic IPO pulling capital out of risk assets.
A stronger dollar is also a factor — the Dollar Index is at its highest level since April 2025, driven by rising bets on a December rate hike from the US Federal Reserve — alongside geopolitical unease after Iran's Revolutionary Guard claimed to have destroyed a US radar in Bahrain the same day. More than $1.3 billion in crypto futures were liquidated over the past 24 hours. Technically, moving averages are pointing towards what is called a "death cross", where the 50-day and 200-day averages cross, with the RSI indicator deep in oversold territory. $70,505 is highlighted as a key support level; a break there could open the door to further declines towards $67,292 and then $62,345.
Politics plays a role too: the Democratic sweep in the midterm elections has, according to one analysis, weakened the near-term outlook for the CLARITY Act, the bill that would classify certain digital assets as commodities. Combined with the hot inflation data, that has added a political layer to bitcoin's fifth straight week of outflows from listed funds, totalling around $1.28 billion.
Nvidia's crisis is reaching the crypto market through more than price moves alone. Former bitcoin miners have built AI-hosting businesses on Nvidia's chips specifically, and it is in delivery agreements and financing terms — not just share prices — that the actual damage will eventually show. Core Scientific reported $215.4 million in third-quarter colocation revenue, and IREN is running a multi-year deployment for Microsoft on Nvidia's GB300 systems.
MSCI, meanwhile, has this week removed Strategy (MSTR) and Japan's Metaplanet from its indexes, judging the companies to be "non-operating". That sent Strategy's shares to their lowest level in almost three months. Strategy disputes the classification and says passive funds hold just 3.1 per cent of its shares, but the bigger question is whether the Nasdaq 100 follows suit — an index where JPMorgan has previously estimated that $8.8 billion of Strategy's value sat in passive funds.
While bitcoin dominates this week's headlines, a fresh analysis from Grayscale points to a different movement beneath the surface: correlations between crypto sectors have fallen in recent years, and returns increasingly vary in ways bitcoin's own price does not explain. Grayscale's analysts conclude that holding bitcoin alone is an increasingly incomplete way to gain exposure to the asset class — and that investors may want to consider sector and asset selection, not just bitcoin's price direction.
That is a fitting end point for a week in which two of the biggest stories in financial markets have had more explanations than answers. Today's Kaupr Daily collects the stories the newsletter itself draws on, precisely because the editorial team believes readers should be able to weigh each source for themselves: today.kaupr.io/p/nvidia-beyond-sex-bitcoin-under-70k-altcoins-decouple-fri-13-nov.
Sources: NVIDIA, Yahoo Finance, CNBC, BBC, Decrypt, AP, TechCrunch, Moneycontrol, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The National, BiGGo, CoinDesk, FXStreet, StoneX, crypto.news, Investor's Business Daily, Grayscale
You have read what you can read for free. With an account you get unlimited access to all news and articles on kaupr.io — and become part of the network of investors, professionals and builders following onchain finance.
