Nvidia lost $600B in value as the Jensen Huang scandal exploded — but insiders had already sold $1B+. Lucky or illegal?

In fact, Nvidia stock is down roughly 33% from its Oct. 6 high of $239 a share, trading Friday midday at around $161.

But some company insiders sold off more than a billion dollars in Nvidia stock in the months leading up to the Huang affair revelations, raising questions about who, if anyone, knew this scandal — and the hit the stock could take — was coming.

For example, board member Mark Stevens sold off $946 million worth of stock in the months before the scandal broke, without a trading plan. Overall SEC filings show he sold $1.35 billion worth of Nvidia stock over the last six months, with one report noting the sales were done through a family trust and could simply be a trimming of his company investment. Stevens still owns more than 27 million Nvidia shares.

Other insiders also sold off millions of dollars worth of shares since late August, like interim CEO Colette Kress, who unloaded shares worth $7.6 million, while Timothy Teter, the company’s executive vice president and general counsel, sold stock worth $13.3 million. Some of the aforementioned sales were pre-arranged.

Lucky timing, legal trading

In total, Nasdaq reports 18 Nvidia share sales and one buy in the last three months by company insiders. But simply making such trades around the same time that the bombshell Jensen Huang news dropped doesn’t constitute illegal insider trading.

U.S. law says illegal insider trading involves buying, selling, or tipping someone off to a security “on the basis of material, nonpublic information about the security.” And that can include “corporate officers, directors, and employees who traded the corporation’s securities after learning of significant, confidential corporate developments.”

While Huang’s affairs certainly qualify as significant corporate developments, simply having executed trades before the news became public doesn’t mean that anything illegal occurred. There is no evidence of intentional fraud or breach of duty or trust — elements investigators must establish in illegal insider trading cases.

Nvidia didn’t return a request for comment, while an SEC spokesperson told Moneywise that they declined to comment on the matter.

A more immediate legal headache

While there’s no evidence of insider trading, Nvidia isn’t off the legal hook just yet. The Huang scandal already resulted in a proposed securities class-action lawsuit alleging Nvidia “failed to disclose material facts to investors who bought from October 9, 2025 through November 8, 2026” in relation to the company’s relationship with Megaspeed, the cloud-computing company where the woman with whom Huang admitted an affair worked.