Unless you’ve taken the last week off from the news, you know that Nvidia announced Jensen Huang’s resignation yesterday, four days after he admitted to an affair (reportedly with a woman US intelligence alleges to be a Chinese spy) and one day after The New York Times reported a second relationship, this one with an executive who reported to him.

Between the previous Friday’s close and Thursday’s, Nvidia lost nearly $500 billion in market value.

Before the announcement, analyst Dan Ives valued Nvidia at $300 a share with Huang and $225 without him. That $75 gap is what one analyst thinks investors lose when they can no longer count on Huang's strategy, his relationships and his ability to execute. Investors pay for what they believe a company will deliver and the moment they’re less sure you’ll do what you said you would, your company is worth less.

It works the same way well beyond the stock price. Investors decide how much to believe management's forecasts, customers decide whether a company will deliver before they sign or buy, and partners decide whether its word is good enough to put money behind.

Nvidia's board is now asking the market to believe in continuity

Last Sunday, the board said it had confidence in Huang and his team on the exact same day it opened an independent investigation into him. On Thursday, announcing his departure, it said the company expected operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue "without interruption."

Those are two very different promises.

In the first one, the board vouched for the leader before its own investigation had even found anything out. Then, on Thursday it vouched for the business without that same leader. Investors get their first look at whether that holds up on Tuesday’s earnings call.

I don't know what advice the board received or what evidence supported either statement. But this is where communications judgment is worth real money, in helping leadership work out what it can back up, what it still doesn't know, and what people will do because they believed it.

If that were my company's promise, I'd want the people responsible for deliveries and the product roadmap to tell me where the CEO's departure could change a decision or a date before we repeated it. Which commitments have they checked? What would make us update what we've said?

Starbucks Korea gave us a second number on trust this week

Also yesterday, Starbucks Korea reported its second straight losing quarter, a ₩45.3 billion operating loss, about $34 million, for July through September, against a ₩60 billion profit a year earlier. Revenue fell 16.2 percent.

The results follow the backlash over its May "Tank Day" promotion, which fell on the anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising and which I've covered here before. The company says part of the hit came from suspending its summer e-Frequency rewards promotion after the backlash.

Now we can't pin the entire financial loss on Tank Day, and the company says monthly results are starting to improve. But the business you give up while you're recovering is a cost your risk model should capture. Pulling a promotion may be the right decision, but it also still has a price.

Between Nvidia and Starbucks Korea, that’s nearly $500 billion in market value lost and a $79 million swing in quarterly profit, both in the wake of breaks in trust.

Here’s what I’d do next if I were you

Take them to your CFO and put your own numbers next to them. Pick a situation that could reasonably happen to you something like a product failure, misleading assurance or leadership scandal, and work through what customers, employees or partners might do differently. If renewals fall by one, three or five percentage points, what happens to profit? If you have to suspend a promotion, what contribution disappears? If customers start demanding discounts or stronger guarantees, what does that cost? Model a short disruption but also a recovery that takes several quarters.

Then work backwards. What would help you detect the problem earlier or limit the number of people affected or shorten recovery? What would that capability cost, and how much would it have to improve the outcome to justify the investment?

That gives you a much better budget conversation than “reputation matters.” We can show which business assumptions depend on people continuing to believe us, how much deterioration we can afford and where an investment could reduce the downside. We should also know which warning signs would trigger action before the quarterly results confirm the damage.

That’s the commercial contribution I want communications to make: help the business understand what confidence is allowing it to earn today, and what it could lose if that confidence weakens.

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