Prediction Markets Price Ian Buck at 37% to Lead Nvidia

By Marcus Bennett

Ian Buck leads the succession market at 37% odds on Kalshi, ahead of interim CEO Colette Kress at 19%, as bettors wager more than $1.5 million on who replaces Jensen Huang at Nvidia. The company announced Huang's resignation on Thursday and installed Kress, its finance chief, on an interim basis. The board is searching for a permanent successor and will consider both internal and external candidates.

For CFO practitioners, the immediate signal is governance, not operations. Kress retains the finance function while occupying the top seat, a dual-role structure that typically compresses decision cycles during a crisis but concentrates key-person risk in one executive.

Who is the market actually backing?

Buck, Nvidia's VP and general manager of its high-performance computing division, has been at the company since 2004. He sits at 37% on Kalshi. Kress follows at 19%, and Rene Haas, CEO of Arm Holdings (the British chip designer that licenses its technology to Nvidia), holds 9%.

Polymarket shows a similar lineup, with the same leading contenders drawing comparable odds and volume nearing $630,000. Madison Huang, Jensen Huang's daughter and Nvidia's senior director of product marketing, trades below 1% on Kalshi and near 2% on Polymarket — effectively priced out.

What triggered the turmoil?

The prediction-market activity follows Nvidia's announcement of an investigation into Huang, who told the board he had an intimate relationship with a business executive reportedly identified by U.S. intelligence officials as a Chinese spy. Scrutiny intensified Wednesday, when reports surfaced alleging Huang also had an extramarital affair with an Nvidia employee.

For finance teams, the episode is a live case study in how political-risk exposure converts into market prices with unusual speed. Contract trading on Huang's successor began generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in volume earlier this week, before the resignation was formalized.

What else are traders pricing?

Bettors are wagering well beyond the succession race:

• One Polymarket contract on when Huang would announce his departure generated more than $22.5 million in trading volume.
• A Kalshi contract asking when Huang will testify before Congress has drawn nearly $170,000.
• Traders put the odds of testimony before next July at 93%, versus roughly 91% before January and 86% before December.

Those probabilities matter for planning: a near-certain congressional appearance implies continued headline risk and potential disclosure obligations for quarters to come.

How is the stock responding?

Nvidia shares fell roughly 5% Thursday morning to about $165. Kalshi traders are also expressing views on that move through perpetual futures contracts — instruments that take positions on price direction without owning shares. Those contracts recorded $111 million in trading volume over the past 24 hours.

That figure dwarfs the succession market itself, a comparison worth noting: speculative flow on the stock's direction is running at roughly 70 times the volume on who will lead the company. Price risk, not personnel risk, is where the marginal dollar is going.

The practical takeaway for finance leaders: prediction markets are now pricing corporate governance shocks in near real time, and the implied probabilities — 93% for congressional testimony, 37% for Buck — offer a faster read on expected outcomes than traditional sell-side commentary. Boards should expect this pricing to accompany any future leadership crisis.