Today, Explained - Trump's new billionaire bestie

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world. Major parts of the economy hinge on its success. CEO Jensen Huang and President Trump have become inseparable. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Danielle Hewitt, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Noel King. President Trump speaking alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The biggest company in the world has been making the same product since 1993. GPUs, graphics, processing units, or chips. It was niche at first. If you were a really serious gamer back in like 1998, you'd be buying one of NVIDIA's graphics cards. In Video. Putting that into your high-powered gaming computer. In 2025, NVIDIA is still making chips, but now those chips are more important. advanced and they're being sold to people who are training AI models, your clods and your chat

GPs. AI has become such a big part of the American economy that the entire stock market can swing on whether NVIDIA releases a good earnings report or a bad one. Meanwhile, President Trump has developed a work bromance with NVIDIA's co-founder and CEO Jensen Wong. This is a smart cookie. Coming up on today, explain what does Jensen Wong really want? Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu, it's the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odu replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made. made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.

accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-F-Frey at O-D-O-D-O-O-D-com. Everything today explained. I'm Noelle King with Robbie Wielin of the Wall Street Journal. Robbie, we are gathered here today to talk about.

about Nvidia. Its importance is reflected in how much this company is worth. Tell me where it sits in the economic firmament. Is it bigger than Coke? Invita is the most valuable company on planet Earth today. Oh, damn. How much is it worth? Its market cap is currently $4.5 trillion. Wow. There's never been a company as big as NVIDIA. Tell me about Jensen Huang, the man behind the company. Jensen Wong is the co-founder and chief executive of NVIDIA. I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed and I work seven days a week. When I'm not working, I'm thinking about working. He was born in Taiwan. We're going to build the first giant AI supercomputer here for the AI infrastructure and the AI ecosystem of Taiwan. Which has really become

the mental, the intellectual epicenter of the AI boom. Technology industry depends very heavily on Taiwan. It continues to. And he moved to the U.S. when he was a young man, where he was a child, actually. We were in Thailand. I was just about almost 10 years old. And recently, Thailand had a coup.

Right. And my parents thought that it was unsafe for us to be there. He ended up going hilariously to a boarding school. It actually ended up being a reform school. There were a lot of difficult and very tough kids. My roommate was 17 years old. and I still remember that when we were getting ready for bed that night, you know, he took off his shirt and he had stab wounds all over his body.

Today, he is not only just the CEO of the largest company on planet Earth. He's also an incredible influential and powerful person in foreign relations in international diplomacy. Technology is now so important in politics and geopolitics. It is the single most important industry in America. It is our national treasure. He's a very good friend of President Donald Trump. Jensen's an amazing guy. Everybody knows Jensen.

You're taking over the world, Jensen. I don't know what you're doing here. And I think it's not a stretch to say he's one of the most important individual people on Earth right now, just given how much power and how much economic might he oversees. If you go back to Trump's inauguration and you think about who was on the podium with him that day, It was a lot of the president's favorite billionaires. Many of them were tech CEOs, but Jensen Huang was not among them. Why wasn't he there?

My understanding is that Donald Trump maybe didn't even know who Jensen was in January. Wow. He knew this was a guy who was a tech CEO, who had a very successful company. But when it came to sort of his style of management, his style of dealmaking, and more importantly, what Jensen could do for President Trump in terms of helping him negotiate international accords. You know, he's become sort of this almost like a show pony that Trump brings around to world leaders and talks, he brags about how successful Wong is. He says, this is a really example of American ingenuity and innovation.

Where are you, Jensen? Stand up. You have done such a good job. And you had a good two days, I understand. right? A good few days. How's Blackwell? He sort of brings him around with him, and they have a symbiotic relationship, for sure. But I don't think any of that existed when Trump took office in January. I think that was all to come. Tell me about how this relationship develops then and evolves.

So in order to explain that, I have to sort of go back to 2022. We're in the Biden administration, and basically what they did was they did was they They took certain products, certain classes of products, which generally meant very powerful microchips, and said, you can't sell these overseas to certain companies. We've got the U.S. Commerce Department rolling out sweeping regulations on Friday that restrict the sale of semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to Chinese customers. And this is more evidence that, of course, this tension on the technological front between China and the United States is ramping up.

At the time, the AI race was just really heating up. But the fact that Invidia was not allowed to sell its chips in China in particular because there were serious national security concerns and serious concerns about competition and not letting China catch up with us was a big deal for Nvidia because it really limited how quickly it could expand around the world. Fast forward to this year and Donald Trump is back in the White House. for a second term. And Jensen Wong obviously needed to revisit this issue.

Our president wants America to win. And he also recognizes that this is an important market. It's a very large market. And the revenues that it could generate for the United States is significant. This is also an excellent way to improve our trade deficit. There were a number of influential people in the Trump National Security Council who successfully made the argument that is a good

the argument that it's a bad idea for us to be selling our most advanced technology to the Chinese. That's the latest or the greatest in the world. Nobody has it. They won't have it for five years. And that's the context that Jensen Wong starts building a friendship with Donald Trump, because it's going to be very important for him to be on friendly terms for the president, given, you know, how this war of ideas is shaking out. And in August of this year, he goes to Trump, He says, what do I have to do to get you to let me sell this chip in China again? And the deal they come to, after a lot of negotiations between NVIDIA and the Trump administration, the Commerce Department, is that the White House asks Jensen to let the government, the federal government,

in on their success. The U.S. government just gave two AI giants, NVIDIA and AMD, the green light, to sell chips to China. So I said, listen, I want 20%. He said, would you make it 15? So we negotiate a little deal. We don't sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best. I think fourth best is where we've come out that we're cool. So this is a huge win for Jensen Wong, but there's a problem.

And that is that the Chinese say to all the customers in their country, don't buy this thing. It's not safe. It has security concerns. The cyberspace administration of China or CAC, has directed companies like ByteDance and Alibaba to halt testing and cancel orders of NVIDIA's RTX Pro 6,000D chip. So he starts developing a new chip for China.

It's called the B30A. And this is too much. This proves to be too much for people in Washington who are concerned about national security, concerned about competition with China. I am gravely concerned that President Trump fails to appreciate what a permanent advantage he would be giving away if he used to green light the sale of invidia's advanced blackwell chips.

And they've actually decided, unbeknownst to Jensen Wong, that they're not going to approve the sale for it in China. And that's where we are. NVIDIA is still locked out of China. Invidia is still locked out of China. And yet Jensen Wong and President Trump have developed this friendship, relationship, where you see Wang joining Trump on international trips. All eyes are on the UK this week. It's a high-stakes tech summit, putting a spotlight on Britain's AI ambitions. Trump is set to bring a powerhouse delegation of tech and finance titans, including Jensen Huang, the head of Navidia.

He's now in South Korea. He's meeting with President Trump and other leaders there. Are you happy with that Jensen? If Jensen's happy, I'm happy. Consulting with the president on high-level issues? What has been going on with these two guys behind the scenes? There's a lot of speculation about, you know, is this another Elon Musk type situation? So President Trump always likes to have a tech billionaire who he can consult with and sort of bounce ideas off of.

One thing to know about Donald Trump, and I know this because I've spoken to him about it directly, is that one thing he really likes about people is when they're successful. He likes that successful people are on his team. And so when it dawned on Trump that this guy, Jensen Wong, was just a really successful, brilliant executive, and he was building something really special and big and powerful in NVIDIA, he really seized on that. It caught his attention. And he decided that he really liked Jensen Wong. And they now speak often on the phone. Trump will call Jensen Wong late at night, pick his brain about things. Jensen's a frequent visitor to the White House, which is something that he'd never done before this year, really. But in the last month, he has backed off of his, you know, seemingly unshakable commitment to let NVIDIA sell its products in China. And I don't think it's reflective of any kind of personality clash. I think that Jensen's been very good at managing the relationship, and he's pledging his support to the most powerful president on planet Earth using the language that that president loves to hear. The Musk analog or comparison is very interesting because Elon Musk, of course, came to Washington. and was essentially making policy for a time, right?

Does Jensen Wong have those kind of ambitions, or does the guy just want to sell his chips in China and do what's best for his business? I don't have any reason to believe that he does have those kinds of ambitions. I think that Jensen Wong, he's been thrust into this sort of role as an international diplomat and as a lobbyist and, you know, all these different roles that he's had to play. They're very new to him.

And I think that his primary concern is doing what's best for his company, selling as much product as he can around the world. And even more than that, in sort of a philosophical sense, getting the whole world hooked on his technology and making the long-term picture look more, making InVedia look more central to the long-term picture of how tech develops and how AI develops. That's the Wall Street Journal's Robbie Wheelan. Coming up, serious question, guys, what does all this mean for you? Support for today, explain, comes from Quince, Winter is here and winter is cold. How about some layers that last? Sweeters, outerware, everyday essentials that feel luxurious, look timeless, and make holiday

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Support for today explained comes from found. Running a small business is hard, says found. There's the sales. There's the hiring. There's the customer support. Found is a business banking platform that says They can let you effortlessly track expenses, manage invoices, and prepare for taxes all in one place. Fowland says they've identified the things that create the most hassle for small businesses, categorizing expenses, prepping for taxes, managing invoicing, budgeting. And they say that they have built an app that does it all directly from your business checking account. They say they can help you uncover tax write-offs and free up valuable time. Time you can put toward chasing new opportunities.

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What's the worry here? Well, Nvidia is kind of emblematic of the entire AI buildout. So every single tech firm from Microsoft to Meta to Amazon have based all of their future plans around NVIDIA. if you hear anything about circular financing, that's what that means. So Nvidia is just so wrapped into the broader market is such a big part of AI that if they sneeze, you know, everybody else catches a cold more or less. And so markets are a little bit nervous because the entire AI story, therefore the entire stock market, therefore the entire economy depends on Nvidia maintaining pretty impossible growth

metrics. It really sort of feels like this shouldn't happen, that there shouldn't be one company that's big enough, important enough to make world markets like quiver. What exactly happened here? I mean, NVIDIA just became so big, so quickly, and the U.S. economy decided to design itself around AI, you know, 40% of GDP growth is coming from AI buildout. And so NVIDIA, because, Because of that, because of that concentration, because of the bet that the U.S. economy is making on AI, they have become somewhat a macro variable. So you can kind of think of their earnings reports like you would, a jobs report that we get from the BLS or an inflation report that we get. I do feel like 24 hours from now, right? We're going to be all over at NVIDIA. That's a big one. After the bell today, all eyes will be on chipmaker giant NVIDIA as it reports its third quarter results.

So earnings day for NVIDIA is a test of the AI narrative and is therefore a test of the U.S. economy, and that just is because we've spent so much money on data center, CAPEX. Texas is in the middle of a boom, not in oil or cattle, but data. Massive data centers are popping up, powering everything from cloud storage to streaming services. More tech, more jobs are coming our way. Google announced they're building a new data center near Columbus, not one but two. Powerhouse data centers broke ground on its new facility today. Some would say it was a blast.

Rock beds were shot into the sky to officially kick off construction for a new 49-acre data center. So much money on, you know, these chips and these companies just building out continuously. So that's what happened. Are there any other companies that hold this kind of sway? Does Walmart have this kind of power? Does Chevron have this kind of power? No. So, NVIDIA is such a big part of the S&P 500, so it's almost 8% of the entire index.

Wow. Yeah, it's huge. And it's contributed, I think, a fifth of the index's total gain this year. So, like, Walmart is not that big of a percentage of the S&P 500, and it has not driven that much growth, that much earnings power, that much investment. And so NVIDIA is really special in that way because they have driven all of that investment. and investors are so interested in them. And, like, the S&P 500 has always been pretty top-heavy.

There's always been companies that are more important than other companies. But, yeah, without NVIDIA, the story of 2024-2020-5 would look like economic stagnation. You know the old saying, right, the stock market is not the economy. And I wonder, is NVIDIA just playing this enormous role in the S&P in the markets? Or does it represent an outsized portion of other parts of the economy? Like, if NVIDIA stumbles, do a million Americans lose their jobs? I don't think it would be something that extreme. Like, the stock market is definitely not the economy, but they are increasingly intertwined

because the AI narrative is so important. So if NVIDIA implodes, it wouldn't be that, like, people who are doctors and bus drivers and construction workers would suddenly be without work. It would just be that the stock market would collapse and kind of like the economic growth narrative would collapse. and you could see secondary effects. Like maybe the construction firm decides to start laying off people because NVIDIA leads to some sort of recession

if they do end up imploding. But it would not be like a direct correlation, no. Everybody's been asking, are we in an AI bubble? Yes. And lately I've seen people suggesting that NVIDIA will be one of the big signs. If it's going to pop, NVIDIA will tell us. So what do we know about the threat of an AI?

bubble and where Nvidia plays in. Yeah, I mean, if I did nickel for every time somebody talked about the AI bubble, you know, I'd have a, I'd be able to invest in Nvidia. I think that the way that you can think about it is, Nvidia is the entire AI thesis. And so if all of a sudden, Nvidia stumbles and there's increasing worries that they're going to because their growth path is like pretty impressive and pretty unsustainable because it is so impressive.

So companies might pull back on. spending tens of billions of dollars on data centers, you know, cloud providers would delay expansion and startups built around, you know, AIs the future would face funding problems, stock market would lose double-digit percentages. The regional construction booms tied to data centers would slow, so places like in Iowa where they've helped to revive local economies to a certain extent, everything from, you know, steel plants to electrical workers to construction workers, land developers, would field the shock. And then, of course, if the stock market goes down, ultimately the broad economy does suffer because then the Federal Reserve would have to come in with some sort of emergency funding plan.

President Trump might have to come up with a fiscal policy plan to sort of prevent the bottom from going out and having a massive blow up. So that is kind of, yeah, the worry is like if NVIDIA does go, the entire AI supply chain becomes wobbly. And because the economy and stock market are so tied up into that, it could really lead to some other repriments. questions. One reason we love talking to you is that you are a critic of the economy in addition to being a commentator on the economy. And I wonder at the end of the day what you think a company like Nvidia means for the American economy. It is a beast. It takes up a huge share of the market. On the other hand, you spend a lot of time thinking about young people, Gen Z. Most of them, I imagine, are not really in the market in a lot of ways, unless they have a

bit of retirement in. So what kind of position are we in here that we have a company that is this influential? Well, Greg Ipp from the Wall Street Journal wrote a great piece calling NVIDIA the joyless tech revolution, I believe. Artificial intelligence might be the most transformative technology in generations. It is also the most joyless. The very thing empowering the stock market to records might be gnawing away at American's sense of well-being. And I think that is like a really good way to think about it, where the AI trade, if it works, the benefits are going to be accrued to a select few people, right? So companies like NVIDIA, people invest in NVIDIA a little bit, companies like Open AI, companies like Anthropic, they're going

to really benefit if all of this ends up working out. But the losses, from AI are socialized. So if all of a sudden the data centers don't work, if the AI trade totally blows up, you know, you're going to have people's retirement accounts really suffer because the S&P 500 is what most people invest in for the retirement account and VITDAs a lot of the S&P 500 as we discussed. And then if the data centers don't work out, you're going to have a lot of local communities that have pinned hope on these things and have dreamed that they work and add jobs, etc. And so that's the data. And so that's That's kind of the issue with AI and Nvidia taking up such a big part of the economy.

And that's why Greg is calling it the Joyless Tech Revolution because a lot of people don't like this. I think that's like a really important thing to consider. I believe his statistic was six out of ten Americans essentially don't want all of this. They don't like what the AI companies are promising, especially when the CEOs come on and say that they're going to take people's jobs. And then there's also a chart from the FT that I think encapsulates this broad conversation that we kind of keep having really well, too, where it's like AI could either be the end of scarcity, meaning it solves everything, the end of humanity, meaning it kills everybody, or it could add 0.2 percentage points to GDP and it's just like how the internet was to a certain extent. So I think that's kind of how we can think about how it's impacting the economy. It's like huge massive risks, you know, all this money going towards data centers could be going towards. It's something else.

And then rippling out from that, it seems like there's the potential here that this problem of inequality that we've been dealing with now for about a generation could really be exacerbated. The frustrating thing about the AI conversation is that, you know, everybody's talking about it, but there's no policy solution yet. So we don't have any idea of how we're going to reskill people. We don't know if we need some form of UBI, universal basic income, to help people out during a time of transition. We have so many lessons that we could learn from things like what happened to the Rust Belt when manufacturing went overseas and how that devastated local communities. We could see something like that happening with AI over time. And so I think that's the other problem is that we're talking about this and talking about it and talking about it, but there is no big policy moving through the government right now to help people. Kyla Scanlan, she's an educator, a commentator, and author of In This Economy.

Hadi Muagdi produced today's show, Jolie Myers, edited, Patrick Boyden, Adrian Lilly, engineered, and Laura Bullard and Danielle Hewitt check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Thank you.