'People need to understand the ENORMITY of what we are living through': Liesman on Nvidia fallout

We are throwing out the script and staying with the breaking news that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has officially resigned. Joining the conversation, Steve Leisman, CNBC's senior economics reporter. Peter, Sam, David, still here. Steve, a week ago, the American people said the corruption is too much. One week later, here we are. Exhibit A here. This looks to me like a convergence of money, power, and politics. He knows how to get invited on this show. Yes. I don't know where I got that phrase from, but here's the deal. I think people ought to take a step back and understand historically the enormity of what we're living through at this moment. Thank you very much. Jensen Huang, as you know, stood astride the second largest company in the world. So let's think back. This would be the equivalent of. Jack Welch falling from GE at the pinnacle of GE. It would be the equivalent of Bill Gates falling from Microsoft at the pinnacle of Microsoft in the 90s. But even more powerful. Well, I want to get there. The pinnacle of Tim Cook falling from Apple, except the time we're living through right now is a moment of convergence of money and power at the White House. So there's dimensions to this story that I don't believe have been understood. Uncovered to this point, let's begin with the idea of the connection to the White House, that the twenty five million dollar donation of NVIDIA to the ballroom, along with several other companies. And getting back to where you started, Stephanie, it seemed to me the public sent a very clear message on Tuesday, which is that all of this had gone too far and we needed to step back from this. Yes. It's an incestuous relationship between these large companies and the White House. And one of the things that I hear or I'm seeing with Jensen Huang's resignation is there was perhaps a decision, and I say perhaps because I don't know, on the board that we cannot deal with this problem keeping Jensen inside the company. Because that is always the first instinct of a company. If you have a problem like this, keep it inside. Let's see if we can deal with it. which suggests to me, let me go back, 1985, Alexander Coburn, editorial writer for The Nation, wrote a thing during the Iran-Contra affair, and he said, the real definition of a scandal is when more than half of the harebrained rumors turn out to be true. I don't know why it does that. And I think we might be at a point where we've only heard half of the harebrained rumors, and many of them turn out to be true. Okay, but that's the thing. The fact that last May... Right. The president is taking there's a state visit. Peter, Peter, I'd love for you to weigh in on this. The president was headed to China. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, is on the plane. Marco Rubio is on the plane. Marco Rubio is warning them. It has been reported that there is a report out there that this woman involved with Jensen Wang could absolutely be a Chinese spy. And the president's next move was to say, Hey, Jensen, how about a last minute invite? Meet us in Alaska and come to China with us. Right. The next move from Howard Lutnick is to then allow 10 additional Chinese companies. To have access to these most valuable chips. Yeah, it doesn't suggest a great concern for national security out of it, does it? And except for Marco Rubio, obviously thought it was important the president know this. He made a point of collecting the intelligence so that the president could be told and warned of what was going on. The president didn't raise it as far as we can understand with Xi Jinping. Thank you. And then, of course, then has Xi Jinping to the White House in September. He's going there next week, by the way. He's going to be in Beijing on, I think, Tuesday for the annual... APEC summit where he plans, he hopes anyway, to have a three-way meeting with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, you know, at a very fraught moment. Thank you very much. We're talking about the power of individual corporate heads, by the way. What this reminds me of is what we learned just the other day about Elon Musk and the power that an individual corporate. Owner has in Ukraine, right? These are not just private businesses anymore. In some ways, they are, you know, stakeholders in our national security in a way I'm not sure that we ever fully have seen before, because they control in the case of Starlink. They control the skies. They control the ability to wage war, literally, for Ukraine as it fights for survival. In NVIDIA's case, it controls the ability to build the future technology that's going to basically govern our society and our economy. These are private companies, but they have such great public impact. I mean, they're private companies in the sense of being non-governmental, obviously publicly traded in the case of these companies. So important. And that's why this is not just simply a scandal for NVIDIA, but a scandal for the United States as a whole. This is just one other symbol, I think, of the total lack of government regulation in the digital age. We talked about this yesterday, but social media being a kind of ungoverned mess, there hasn't been any effort by the Congress and the president from both parties to successfully set just guardrails. All this should be done by the private sector. I'm not saying it should not be private companies, but this is the biggest consequence of that failure. But with smart regulation, right? We've had no regulation because the argument has been from the president, If we don't just go, you know. One hundred percent, a thousand miles an hour, we're going to lose this race and it's the most consequential race of our lifetime. Except when it came to donations to the White House. That was a certain exception there. I want to make a point, which has been polling for CNBC, our national poll, for like 24 years. My take is that America is pro-business. Absolutely. Half of them work at small businesses. The rest of them work. So I think there's a leash that they give to business. And what happened this time around, there were two things that we found in our most recent poll. The first was that... Corruption had really soared to the top of the list of concerns, and part of that corruption was the relationship of business to the political world. When we asked people about whether or not they thought it was appropriate for the president and Congress to be investing in public company, they thought it was wrong. When they asked them about, on a bipartisan basis, when we asked them about whether they thought it was right for... Members of the president's family to be getting contracts from the government, they thought it was wrong on a bipartisan basis. And one other thing to tee up your discussion about Mississippi, we also found that approval of the president in the south had fallen from. Plus 20 to minus 2. Okay, but here's the thing. When you say the American people are pro-business, we keep asking the wrong question. Because right now, people are saying... Well, hang on. Let me take notes for the next poll. No, no. Because people keep saying... I need your help. I'm here to help. Are you for capitalism, against it? It's not that people aren't for capitalism. It's that they're against corruption. And, for example, when the country invests a stake in a specific company, then that perverts... How that company can operate and not just that company, but all the other companies in that industry are now at an extreme disadvantage. And now you have an administration, right? You now have a commerce secretary whose family runs an investment bank that likely is the arranger for many of these deals, right? Where the government is investing in these companies. So it's this false question when we're saying, well, is the country pro-business or Democrats pro-business? No. The country is obviously pro-business. It's one of the greatest parts of American exceptionalism. What we're against is lack of transparency and massive corruption. And we've been through these moments before. You can clap on that if you want. Thank you. We've been through these moments before. There was a moment when we had the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century. We had another oligarchy out there, and America rejected that. America rebelled from that, and we had a president who took them on through antitrust, and we had journalists who took them down. And I think this is perhaps a moment where What's happening, if it can even be believed, what's happening with Jensen on an individual basis is much bigger than that. And it could be a moment of reckoning for the United States where we say, hey. There was a reason we had a separation between these things. And maybe there was a good reason for it. It's time to rethink that. But the American voter, Jason Johnson, I want you to weigh in on NVIDIA. But the American voter told us last week this this brologar culture that was being created. Right. These tech CEOs. Did you make that up? I didn't. I wish I liked to buy the website. But just a week ago, remember, Elon Musk, who spent almost five hundred million dollars. And let's be clear. We do not know what he specifically wanted in exchange for that $500 million. He spent $500 million on the midterms, and the American people said, no oligarchy here. That is not how we operate. And now here we are with the Jensen Wong situation. And to Steve's original point, we don't even know the half of it. And we won't know the half of it. We won't know the full of it because the FBI director, Kash Patel, is grotesquely incompetent. Stephanie, politically, this should be a slam dunk for the Democratic Party. Once they take over in January, there is a short list of people who need to be impeached. And it starts with Pete Hegseth and it ends with Kash Patel. His failure to not only inform Jensen Huang the way he was supposed to, his failure to investigate this case, he is behind the eight ball on everything. And this is what the American people are asking for. They don't want revenge. They want accountability. They don't want to push Donald Trump out. I mean, I don't really think even impeachment is the number one thing, but they want these incompetent officials who are supposed to keep us protected out of their positions of power. And I hope the failure to get rid of Hegseth this week is not indicative of Democrats' inability to address something like this in the future, because NVIDIA is just the beginning. Once we see some real oversight and investigations, there's going to be some serious consequences for the people who haven't done their job in protecting our economy, our security. And the president of the United States, believe it or not, when he fails like this. But it goes one step further, right, in terms of putting country over party. We have another element with this, Peter, and it's self-enrichment. NVIDIA specifically, but many of these AI companies, Donald Trump is personally a massive investor in their stock, which has been before a few days ago, which has been one of the greatest performers in the market over the last 10 years, 15 years. Yeah, I mean, the obvious conflicts here are pretty, pretty blatant, right? I mean, you know, the president is doing so many stock trades in any given time. He obviously has so much invested in the market. Now, he will say, I don't control the trades. I have managers who do that. You know, but it's not a blind trust in the traditional sense. His traders, the people who are making the trades, know what his policies are, know where he is going in terms of government actions that can affect. Private businesses and they can invest accordingly. And so I think that's one of the reasons why you saw the voters also last week do what they did. The idea of self-enrichment, the idea of monetizing the presidency has has always been an issue in American politics, but never like this. The president of the United States made 2.2. A billion dollars himself last year, not even counting the rest of his family, his friends, the family of his friends and so forth. And much of that through this crypto business of his where he gets a lot of money and not everybody knows where it's coming from. So I think that that, you know, to your point about the oligarchy, the oligarchy, the tech, I've lost track of the phrase, but the tech bros, you know, You know, I have definitely raised concerns about who's running the country and where the... Right lines are or ought to be between private interest and public interest. Hey, it's Rachel. I am so glad to see you at the end of that clip, because this is where I get to tell you about a new way to watch all our clips and all of our shows and everything on MSNOW on your phone or your tablet or your laptop. You can watch things live or recorded. Plus, you can ask me and all the other hosts and reporters questions in our weekly live chats. You can go to ms.now slash membership. Or just click below. Thanks.