Walking a fine line

Foreword

Good morning,

Fortune Executive Editor Lee Clifford here, filling in for Alyson, who has been traveling this week to attend the ASEAN-GCC-China and ASEAN-GCC Economic Forums in Kuala Lumpur. Find our coverage of the events here.

Fortune 500 CEOs face a terribly tough balancing act at the moment. Criticize Trump about policies that meaningfully impact your business, and you risk becoming a target. Stay silent and you risk your business being decimated.

Only a few sitting CEOs seem to have managed to master the art of publicly pushing back against policies, while avoiding Trump’s ire. A case in point this week was Jensen Huang, on Nvidia’s (No. 65) earnings call, Wednesday after market close.

As Alexandra Sternlicht wrote in Fortune: “As Huang spoke to analysts and investors on the company’s earnings call, the CEO demonstrated an impressive feat of gymnastics, walking a fine line to critique the Trump policy that left a massive hole in his company’s income statement while being careful not to provoke the president.”

Huang certainly has ample cause to voice his concerns: Nvidia stands to lose some $10.5 billion in revenue in the first half of this year due to the Trump administration’s new export controls, which have meant Nvidia can no longer sell its H20 chips in China. Huang spoke directly about these policies without calling out Trump by name: “The U.S. has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips. That assumption was always questionable, and now it’s clearly wrong,” he said.

And when he did finally use Trump’s name, it was to praise him. “President Trump has outlined a bold vision to reshore advanced manufacturing, create jobs, and strengthen national security,” he said. “President Trump wants U.S. tech to lead.”

Anyone who has ever had to give tough feedback to a direct report can recognize a “compliment sandwich” when they see one. Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page called out GM’s Mary Barra for employing a similar strategy, writing: “Ms. Barra is no doubt backing the Trump tariffs, as she did the Biden EV policies, in hopes of preserving some influence with the White House and warding off worse policy harm.”

To some degree CEOs have always had to play politics. But there was a time when a giant Fortune 500 company could delegate much of that to a lobbying arm or quietly work behind the scenes for change. Now it’s up to CEOs themselves to advocate for what benefits their company and industry.

In the meantime, Huang gets bonus points for assuaging a call full of investors and analysts: Nvidia stock rose more than 3% the day after the call. —Lee Clifford

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