If his personal security detained the person videoing them and offered them money to sign an NDA, it feels like something they had experience with. Could this just be the tip of the iceberg?
Slightly pedantic but I think in most US jurisdiction private security can detain you for theft under the doctrine of shopkeepers privilege but only long enough for law enforcement to get there.
Obviously not super relevant to this but that's where people get the idea at least.
Most likely. It's hard to imagine an ultra rich man who is already unfaithful to only be having sex with 2 women. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot more, including paid encounters.
truly, I think it's way out of proportion, unless it had an effect on Nvidia management, we should give the guy and his family space and privacy. Jepsen net effect on the world is hugely positive. hope he recovers a good life and fix whatever they decide makes sense
You don’t think helping your girlfriend circumvent export controls and score billion dollar contracts for GPUs that her shell company bought for China doesn’t impact Nvidia?
Shareholders like it though. Money is far more important to most people than which country "wins" AI. Huang also has a good relationship with Trump so enforcement is unlikely.
I don't really care that much about Jensen being an unfaithful husband. That kind of pales in comparison to hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars. And as far as "paid encounters" go - I would hope no one uses this as an opportunity to tell me prostitution is unethical.
Nobody cares about that. They care about Jensen being an unfaithful CEO and compromising Nvidia's share price with this naughty flings.
They're already being sued by shareholders over the first affair. The suit claims Nvidia's relationship with Megaspeed posed a "material risk" to Nvidia's reputation and business prospects. Of course sleeping with your own employees is also considered a bad business practice.
It does feel a bit like Jensen is being held to a very much unfairly higher standard than, say, elon, who does drugs, lies extravagantly, has an openly corrupt relationship with the goverment, build the world's biggest deepfake porn machine, etc etc.
I don't disagree that they are being held at different standards, however Elon should really be held far more accountable for his manipulations around Tesla stock, porn machines, Space X fraud etc.
>
I don't disagree that they are being held at different standards, however Elon should really be held far more accountable for his manipulations around Tesla stock, porn machines, Space X fraud etc.
Outside of his fan bubble, Elon Musk is really not well-reputed.
> That kind of pales in comparison to hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars
Unsurprising to see that the economic illiteracy that plagues reddit has made its way here, a place that is made by billionaires and tries to find and mint new billionaires
Yeah the moral angle of 'oh my god a billionaire was unfaithful' is just bizarre, given all the Epstein stuff at least he is cheating with adult women who consent.
> at least he is cheating with adult women who consent.
Well, he is her superior in a work setting, so there's that. There can be consequences for rejecting your boss's advances, which is the reason this kind of thing is usually heavily frowned upon!
What about the implication that these affairs are some how worse then Epstein trafficking underage girls. The mind boggles at what some of these people think, its been eye opening reading all the people who think he is the worst thing since sliced Hitler. Some have suggested their are various groups in the USA that want him gone (Government and/or AI labs) looking more and more plausible and I don't know if some of these outraged people are bots.
No, that's the point, we wouldn't. And if we would then we should not be in charge of an extremely large organisation.
Part of the point of all this is that he's supposed to be in control of his emotions and able to make the best decisions without letting his emotions interfere.
If he can't even make the very simple decision to keep his dick in his pants in this very clear breach of commitments he has publicly made, then what other terrible decisions is he making? What other commitments will he break because it feels good and he can't control himself?
You seem to imply there is a performance aspect here. Yet there are high performing people in all fields do this. Something like 20% of men have committed adultery.
> Quite frankly he has had an affair with consenting adult women not trafficked children why are the knives out for him when this is all he has done?
Because he made commitments to people to not do this.
If you promise to do (or not do) something, and then you break that promise, you should be held to account for it. It should be obvious that you cannot be trusted to keep promises in future. Nothing you say should be believed, because you are clearly an untrustworthy person. You should not be trusted to make decisions that involve other people's money.
And, in addition. If you're a manager, you are responsible for the people reporting to you. You're the adult in the room. If your idea of managing people includes having sex with them, then that is an indication that you are unable to manage people.
This is not about consent. It's a different set of concerns than e.g. Russel Brand. This is about Huang not living up to the professional standards that we expect from people in authority. It's about being a good, trustworthy, custodian of other people's money, and about being a good choice as CEO of this business. Not having enough self-control to avoid these situations is a really good indicator that he is not a good choice for this role, because of that lack of self-control. If he can't control himself, how can he be relied on to control the organisation?
> If you're a manager, you are responsible for the people reporting to you. You're the adult in the room.
> This is not about consent. It's a different set of concerns than e.g. Russel Brand.
My point was the president who has brought about an expensive war is an example of this times 1000. I think all we can infer from this is he is unfaithful to his wife, the inference you make about his commitment to his fiduciary responsibility is incorrect to me. They are different things and he has not shown he has been a highly effective CEO who actually has technical knowledge.
Perhaps I am overly cynical but I think a lot of CEO's (and other's for that matter) will engage in dishonesty.
Consider Aquinas on merchants (possibly quoting Chrysostom possibly mistaken)
> “He that buys a thing in order that he may sell it, entire and unchanged, at a profit, is the trader who is cast out of God’s temple.”
My claim is not that this practice is wrong per-say but even in this kind of business of arbitrage you can see at guile and cunning, that is hard to deny. Maybe he only lacked the ability to hide it.
I would ask you who would run a business better a man who is unable to use cunning, guile and manipulation (marketing) or one who does not. Their is times when the sort of morality you talk about is important and times where it is a hindrance and most people are evil, if you want the good Aristocratic souls you would do well not to look for it in the world of commerce.
Trump is a criminal, plain and simple. He cannot be trusted (as has been proven repeatedly). He does not consider past promises binding. It's not "guile and cunning", it's narcissism. Anyone with any sense does not do business with him.
If you get a reputation as someone who operates like this, then people stop doing business with you. I've watched it happen.
And it appears that Nvidia's shareholders agree. They don't see "guile and cunning", they see a man unable to control himself or his ego.
Plenty of leaders throughout the years, most notoriously royalty (leaders in an "extremely large organization" if there ever was one), have been doing this.
Or maybe it's inherent to power and the recent trend is against human nature. You cannot seriously say that this is a major concern in moving against monarchies. After all, the royals are just the most well known ones (because it involves succession). Plenty of non royal powerful people also do so.
People have always been ostracized for adultery, royalty or no. You need only look at stories from e.g. the Old Testament or similar to see how long this has been a thing in human society.
Infidelity is as old as the institution of marriage. Very few people are ever ostracized for it, and most of those were women. Among elites, it was usually expected to have lower-status women for fun and not to bother the nobly-bred wife for anything other than bearing legitimate heirs.
Even if you don't care about the adultery aspect, or the spying aspect(!), having sex with the people who report to you is a huge problem. First of all the power imbalance complicates questions of consent. Secondly, even if that's all fine, there are legitimate questions that could be raised by other employees about objectivity and favoritism. And for all of these reasons and more, it reflects very poorly on a leader in terms of their judgement and impulse control, which are reasonable traits to want a CEO to have.
I just find the pearl clutching on this particular topic hilariously naive. Especially with the Epstein files having been such a big topic for years and years now.
It’s clearly some kind of hit piece. Dumb of Huang to have stepped on whatever landmine he did, let alone allow himself to get this exposed, but whatever.
As someone who doesn't cheat on their spouse or have unethical relationships with subordinates, it's frustrating to see bad behavior from powerful people and have the reaction be "There's a lot more where this came from, so it's not a big deal. This is just a hit piece."
Is it that hard to keep your wiener out of people who report to you? Why is the reaction "this is really common and it's unfair to target this guy" and not "this is common, but at least one of them is finally seeing some consequences, now let's hope there's more to follow"? Apparently having and expecting basic ethics is "pearl clutching." Fuck that. If powerful people are commonly awful and I expect better from them, that's a problem with them, not with me.
The reality - at these levels - is that to rise to these levels typically requires that others involved feel comfortable they have enough leverage on you that they can force you out ‘quietly’ if they need to do so.
Which is what is happening.
I’ve seen some wild things that were allowed to continue because the math was paying out at the time.
Somewhere the math changed, and this is the consequence. ‘Should’ rarely has anything to do with it.
Post election ‘cleanup’ in approach?
Change in expectations on future growth trajectory?
Someone with their own interests (shorting the stock) got too much leverage?
This is already costing individual folks billions, and shareholders hundreds of billions.
that kind of thing often involves someone’s ‘chess moves’, even if it’s just them blowing up in their faces.
If keeping it hidden cost even billions of dollars (it wouldn’t), the math would obviously favor that compared to what is happening, eh?
I'm not sure I understand your point any better now. Are you saying that "should" is irrelevant to what actually happens and that it's all about what makes money? I'd completely agree with that. But I don't see what that has to do with "I just find the pearl clutching on this particular topic hilariously naive." or "If you think that is the only crazy/insane/bad thing involved in these situations, I have a bridge to sell you."
I’m saying this is the current leverage they are using, that the reason they are using it is not really related to the stated reason, and that it is likely very far from the level of actual dirt that is occurring.
I still don't get it. We can criticize the behavior that he's supposedly being ousted for even if the real reason behind it is something else. That's not "pearl clutching" nor does it imply it's the only bad thing going on.
Pedophilia is illegal, and that's not changing no matter how many grotesque articles are written. Adults having consensual sex with other adults is not illegal.
Sorry I see how my point can easily be missed as I brought this up kind of randomly in a thread about otherwise legal behavior. My point is the normalization of deviance.
In media for stories surrounding Epstein and that class of people, we often hear of 'underaged girls' instead of 'children'. That is part of the shift of the overton window. Modern media is replete with children being put into adult situations (not necessarily media targeted at children, mind you) and that only helps to blur the line.
> But one Kentucky teacher said her arrest for an alleged affair with a 16-year-old football player was unfair and untrue and has ruined her career, possibly her life. https://abcnews.com/US/story?id=8221857
Calling a teacher raping a kid an affair.
> According to a report on FOX Baltimore, the victim was a 12-year-old girl and met Laury on the playground of the Pikesville apartment complex where they both lived. The girl was reported missing by her mother in June and was located about a week later inside Laury's apartment, according to the report.
The whole point is reducing the care. You can't blackmail what people don't care about. Your response is pretty callous. Saying "next time you have a thought related to raping children" like what the fuck?
If I said "you can't blackmail people for littering because people don't care, but littering is still wrong.", would we be making the same point, or is there a connection between this and Epstein that I'm missing?
If there was an effort to downplay littering in media then yes but I'm not aware of it. There's no direct connection to Epstein beyond blackmail. I regret bringing it up, I thought it would make for interesting discussion.
It just seemed to come out of nowhere, and following that guy saying he doesn't care about adults having affairs, it sounded like you were trying to say that anyone who doesn't care about this is somehow condoning child abuse? Which is why I was sure there was an Epstein connection I was missing, and also why I had a hostile reaction.
Now that I know where you're coming from, yeah, that is interesting.
There's a saying, and I have no idea if there any truth to it, that you can't blackmail French CEO's and government officials this way. Their wives already know they are cheating on them and the public expects it.
Chinese also the same. Super rich Chinese typically expected to have mistresses with the legit wife controlling access. It is abnormal for super rich Chinese not to have mistresses. Historically only one Chinese emperor did that monogamy thing, but he died young, so that probably the real reason. Western kibgs are bizarre monogamous by Chinese culture standard even today.
I believe this is true yes, you would have a hard time getting anyone to care. You should be worried anytime you are in a union with a French man (or Lady). See Cardinal Richelieu and French alliances behind the backs of the Catholic League.
I say this as a Brit and we are the same, only we are just as perfidious (maybe worse) but hide it from are selves and others so we are easy to blackmail.
I had a feeling something damaging would happen to him sooner or later. My prediction was sometime before mid 2027.
My reasoning was that that he had become too powerful while largely avoiding politically charged positions, or other "stuff" that can be used to "control" him.
The political and intelligence establishment doesnt particularly like powerful individuals who remain politically independent.... outside of their control.
This explanation actually makes more sense. He was even invited to EU, ASEAN Goverment etc more often than any other elected individual or powerful figures.
That is why ancient wisdom said you should keep low profile if you are super rich.
Huang has had a noticeable shift in personality over time not unlike people such as Musk and other super rich. It doesn't take any external influence to cause bad character.
So many people here think character doesn't matter but it has now caught up with him as much as it has for Trump.
For years he was in the same anti-human AI hype club way too similar like Altman and he thought no consequences can catch him... it really doesn't take any conspiracy here. Everything he has chosen was all his doing.
And to bolster your point, people like Huang are surrounded by yes-men constantly. When you are a nobody, people criticize and keep you in line. Once you're running NVIDIA, people want power/money themselves, so they will tend to grovel and supplicate. Eventually, even the humblest begin to believe their own PR.
Those are "external influences", but your own gravitational field has warped them. Even the president wants your money and influence, and needs your company to do well, there is literally no one who will "give it to you straight", and it warps your mind.
The Roman commanders would sometimes hire someone to stand behind them and remind them they were only human for this reason (to avoid natural hubris), it was seen as naturally arising in these circumstances, and needed to be combatted to remain effective.
Musk is known for his ketamine habit. Maybe Huang uses something as well. Those high-powered careers are conductive to becoming a junkie. "The Wolf of Wall Street" exaggerated a bit, but not too much.
It's interesting how in the US, people will accuse the far right of engaging in conspiracy theories. In reality it seems to be just as common on the left, if not more common, as your comment illustrates.
I actually miss the old conspiracy culture where people would put together an entire documentary's worth of evidence for e.g. 9/11 being an inside job. Conspiracy theories just aren't the same nowadays.
Remember, the golden rule in evaluating the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of conspiracy theories is measuring their frequency in the real world! The internet is the only place where conspiracies spread by people who want to spread conspiracy theories can operate at scale.
On the right it's QAnon and Alex Jones and Jewish Space Lasers. If your example for the left is the claim that powerful politicians and the intelligence services manipulate people then I have to respectfully say sorry but you are wrong.
Some on the right claim that 9/11 was done by Mossad, or COVID was a biolab leak. The Unz website has a lot of detailed right-wing conspiracies if you're interested. They're far more evidence-based and plausible than the conspiracy slop you see on HN.
“It is generally considered polite to address a woman by Ms. rather than Mrs., unless the preference of the woman in question is clearly known. This is especially true in written communication, as dictated by professional etiquette. […] It is normally considered correct to address a woman as Ms. [Lastname], regardless of her marital status.”
>It is generally considered polite to address a woman by Ms. rather than Mrs., unless the preference of the woman in question is clearly known.
Hm. Weird. Never seen that before. Let's check the source, emilypost.com:
>Mx. Is the universal title that can be used by anyone. It is gender non-identifying. Even if you identify specifically with a gender you may still use Mx. and you may see Mx. used when the sender is unaware of your title.
For a different regional reference point, my personal experience in California[1] has been to always use Ms. in a professional context, but this thread is the first time I've become aware that some portion of people default to Ms. for known-married women in other contexts. I understand the motive, it's just news to me as well.
[1] >25 years in San Diego, >10 years in SF. I'm 40.
I don't think so. In the UK the default is also Ms unless a preference has been expressed for Miss/Mrs.
Especially in a business context, it would be unprofessional to ask if a woman is married or not merely for determining which title to use. Unless you want to have an affair with her, of course.
Look, if you want to learn about social cues you’re going to have to draw from experience instead of links from the internet. Experience interacting with women will quickly teach you that Ms. is the safest option, if not preferred.
I semi seriously suggest we come up with neologisms to avoid gendered forms of address. We could take from Morrowind and replace Mr/Ms/sir/ma’am with “muthsera”.
> Hm. Weird. Never seen that before. Let's check the source, emilypost.com
This is taught to children in the United States. I didn't go to an especially good school and I remember it to this day. If you're not from the US the custom may be different.
Perhaps you will consider the advice from Grammarly [0] as a more acceptable source.
Oh my God are native English speakers okay?? Ms. is not miss it's pronounced like "miz" and it's always been a convention to refer to women with their full or last name regardless of marriage state. Mx is just a gender neutral honorific for full or last names.
No. He's out because he works in a professional environment and knows that the statement that Mx is a universal title that can be used with anyone is untrue. In the vast majority of workplaces in the world, you'd get a weird look for calling somebody with an obvious gender identity Mx.
Yes, I work in a workplace, so I've experienced people using personal titles first-hand. I've also read some studies about neo-pronouns and neo-titles, yes. Their prevalence is generally measured as being quite low.
I‘m sorry, but I don‘t believe you. The claim that “neo-pronouns and neo-titles [...] prevalence is generally measured as being quite low” is a completely different claim then your initial “you'd get a weird look for calling somebody with an obvious gender identity Mx.”
I think you have never called somebody Mx. to their face, and I don‘t think you have witnessed it either, and I don‘t think you have read any peer reviewed paper which explores people reactions to this title.
Just to make sure I have this right. You agree it's unusual, and your argument is that people don't give weird looks to other people who do unusual things?
Obligatory reference to Douglas Hofstsdter’s parody about gendered pronouns where he imagines an alternate reality in which English pronouns are race-based instead of gender-based, and they have the Miss/Mrs. distinction, but only non-whites have to use it, and it’s based on whether you have a job — because obviously only non-whites need to advertise this.
I looked at guardian's style guide (british) and some australian style guide I found and they both default to "Ms". Which specific anglosphere country did you have in mind?
> It is generally considered polite to address a woman by Ms. rather than Mrs., unless the preference of the woman in question is clearly known. This is especially true in written communication, as dictated by professional etiquette.[1]
> [Ms. is] intended as a default form of address for women regardless of marital status. [2]
You didn’t know, because it started with Gloria Steinem in the 70s.
Wikipedia tries to make it sound like it’s some old tradition, but it’s actually fairly new, with the prior historical references being obscure until it was resurrected. It’s right there in the article:
> “Ms. was another acceptable, but rarely used, abbreviation for Mistress in England in the 17th and 18th centuries.[12] During the 19th century, however, Mrs. and Miss came to be associated almost exclusively with marital status,[13] and Ms. was popularized as an alternative in the late 20th century“
Cant read it, but the title literally says “1986, ‘Ms’ joins the Times vocabulary”, so I’m guessing that, you know…1986 is when it became the Times’ standard. This likely corresponds to the campaign of Geraldine Ferraro, which is what I personally remember as the point where the term became widespread.
I don’t understand this need to rewrite history. Nobody in this thread is objecting to the use of the term. Even the wikipedia article says the term was resurrected in the 80s.
Hate to break it to you, but you’re arguing with me about something I never said. I said it was revived in the 70s.
The term is recent in a linguistic sense. Even if you personally think it’s ancient history, “my dude”, there are plenty of us alive where it was invented in our lifetime.
A teacher explained this to me in elementary school as some new fad.
> Skeletor will return next week with more disturbing reminders about passage of time...
It's recent both linguistically and culturally. It was a thing in my lifetime, to the point where I remember explaining it to other people in high school (which was itself about a decade after the term became "popular").
I realize that the average age on HN is quite young, but we're not talking about ancient history here.
> For what it's worth, the median human is 31.1 years old. I wouldn't call something older than the median human "very recently, culturally."
That’s cute. Now try searching for the median age in developed countries, where people care enough to make up revisionist history about minor culture debates? (nevermind, I did it for you; it’s around 50)
More to the point, what’s the human lifespan in first-world countries? (average lifespan in the US is almost 80)
(All this is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that perhaps disparaging people for being older than you is not such a bright idea. I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re not going anywhere for a while.)
The person you're responding to isn't disparaging you. They're simply stating their opinion. That's all a judgment about whether something is recent can be.
Fine, that’s fair. It’s not explicitly disparaging, it’s just implying that facts older than you, personally, can remember are irrelevant. I don’t know what to call this, but none of the words that come to mind are positive.
Someone on a parallel thread explicitly called the 1980s “ancient”, so whatever.
I said the word is recent, linguistically and culturally. I said it was "fairly new". I also said when it was popularized, in terms of actual decades (70s-80s).
You've chosen to die on this particular hill of whether or not something is "recent". I don't know why.
What? You had a whole thing about rewriting history because the parent said the NYT adopted 40 years ago, then you made a big deal about how it was in 1986 and resurrected in the 80s and talked about rewriting history.
What was that all about if you both perfectly agree on the timeline?
> Classy edit, btw.
Edit? I did not edit my post. I think you may not understand what that means. It is neither classy nor unclassy, it is a type of meme.
> What? You had a whole thing about rewriting history because the parent said the NYT adopted 40 years ago, then you made a big deal about how it was in 1986 and resurrected in the 80s and talked about rewriting history.
It's simply a fact that the term was revived in the 70s and popularized in the 80s. The person I replied to was trying to imply that was incorrect, by suggesting that the NY Times was some long-time holdout.
> So your argument is that anyone with a memory longer than yours, yet well within the median human lifespan, is “ancient”.
Deftly convincing my rhetorical opponent of my youthful vigor by misunderstanding what they wrote and getting noticeably worked up about being called ‘ancient’
Ms. vs Miss vs Mrs. "Ms." is kinda considered professional, if I can say so – and is used for either Miss (unmarried) or Mrs. (married). It's more like calling everyone a firefighter (instead of fireman and firewoman), or bartender instead of barman and barmaid – well, kinda.
But if someone prefers Dr, Prof etc then yeah that's what takes precedence.
I have always felt that Ms. is just the short form for Miss or even Mrs, but I suspect that's incorrect.
My personal style is using frist names – in personal and professional emails, and in rare sccenarios both first and last name. I almost never use Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss etc. So obviously I never head to write for a newspaper.
My friend once told me she saw Mx in UK in some Govt forms. Gender netural apparently. I have personally never seen this use. I guess that x is for "crossing off" the S's from other titles :)
Also use of "Master" for male children. I have seen in my country (even now) and of course in the good old England (or UK/Britain/GB? Sorry, not in the mood to check Wikipedia for these distinctions).
I always thought that it was Mrs. = missus, Ms. = miz, at least that’s how I would say them, but I now realize that a) that’s plainly incorrect and b) I’ve never actually ever seen them non-abbreviated.
If an abbreviation is never expanded, is it still an abbreviation? Personally I think it isn’t; I advocate for condensing i.e./e.g. to simply ie and eg, though this is a minority opinion.
Because Ms. Powell is an Nvidia employee who is not suspected of being a Chinese spy. You're thinking of Alice Huang (turns out Jensen was having multiple different affairs!)
Can someone explain how the CEO sex life is relevant? Is it because of the risk of a messy divorce that can both distract the CEO and eventually force voting share transfer since he’s also a shareholder? This isn’t really like the Chinese spy mistress thing after all.
Edit: honestly, this one feels like a moralistic freak out more than anything. Who cares about sex with the non-spy lady?
Yes, his actions carry potential shareholder risk and the board has a fiduciary duty to treat it as such. Nvidia (and Jensen) carry extra risk given their corporate structure which is flatter than most companies. Jensen has dozens of direct reports and is a cornerstone of the company. The recent changes to the stock price exemplify all of this.
> Can someone explain how the CEO sex life is relevant?
If it's true that he had the affair with the CCP spy or otherwise was encouraged to sell GPUs using loopholes that violate export bans, that would put him and NVDA into some hot water.
Investors do not like that and the implications for any rapid change in NVDA valuation would be immense.
I'm not defending Jensen, but it's kind of crazy. What do you do if you fall in love at work? Wait for your fiance to get a promotion so you're at the same career level?
So? He is a shareholder and CEO having sex with another consenting adult, who and why anyone would fire him. AFAIK Musk had kids with his subordinates and became a trillionaire afterwards.
Say your boss has two reports, you and someone else. You are the same gender as the someone else. They are sleeping with the someone else. They then promote the someone else while not promoting you. Now you have to ask yourself: do I need to have sex with the boss to get promoted? This type of situation is why most companies will fire you if you’re sleeping with someone you’re writing the performance reviews for. Also, all of Jensens reports now have a path to sue Nvidia for unfair treatment, he put the company at huge risk.
You can ingratiate yourself to your boss without having sex. I have seen people doing non-sexual favors to then successfully get promoted. Not saying that sex with subordinate is OK, but that you have to ban all kinds of personal favors.
Lmao. No, one of those is not like the other. At all. Sounds like someone wasn’t paying attention during the harassment training. Basically you have a right to a workspace free from sexual harassment. The behavior described above is either explicitly harassment or getting close enough to it for people to get uncomfortable (and you have a right to not be made uncomfortable due to inappropriate/sexual work situations.)
You don’t have a right to a workspace free of social discomfort or pressure though. Feeling some pressure to bring them a donut isn’t protected in the same way unless it’s becoming harassment.
I was not talking about bringing donuts. How about cooking especially for the boss and getting promoted as a result? This is not a sexual favor, does that mean it is a-ok? It should be banned because an employee is getting promoted not because of business outcomes they produced but because of their skills in kissing ass. Should other employees have to compete with this? If not, why not ban all personal favors, not just sexual ones?
If you only care about following the law then only banning sexual favors may be enough.
Because she's not actually able to properly consent if she feels her job is on the line, whether it actually is or not. When a supervisor comes onto their subordinate, that subordinate may feel that they'd be putting future work opportunities (e.g. promotions) in jeopardy if they say no. Or worse, they'd worry that they're putting their employment at risk. Even if Jensen had "pure" intentions and this affair in principle didn't affect their working relationship, he in fact can't know that.
For the same reason that, today, you're not considered a national security risk if you are openly gay, but you still are if you are closeted and trying to hide it. You can't easily blackmail an Elon type who has no shame and whose sex and drug addictions are part of his public reputation. Jensen presented himself as a faithful family man.
Also, if you cannot comprehend that there are issues of consent when it comes to having a sexual relationship with someone whose career you can destroy with no consequences, then I seriously hope you never get a management position. Elon's boards seem to be okay with this, but that is not the norm.
The problem is that you can't know. You can't read the minds of the people involved, so you can't know if there was pressure, coercion, or something else going on, and you can't be sure if either of them are telling the truth when they both insist it's fine and fully consensual.
So you prohibit it in all cases, punish in all cases, and then you don't have to wade into that mess.
Nobody should have sex with people whose livelihoods they have control over, it's not that crazy and its not a "men aren't allowed to flirt anymore" thing.
Most companies have policies prohibiting employees from having relationships with subordinates. If he's going to violate company policy in this way, what's to say he isn't doing other shady things inside the business?
Regardless, the saying, "don't shit where you eat" exists for a reason. Huang engaging in this relationship shows profound poor judgment. Is it wise to have someone with such poor judgment running a company of Nvidia's scale and importance?
Potential for blackmailing, messy divorce, corporate liability with regards to potential sexual harassment lawsuits, overall negative PR/image... and a dozen other reasons.
Morals are important. He could have used his position of power to do this. If you don't care about morals that's fine but don't get all tetchy when people who do have ideals care.
Let's say that we discover that he didnt use his position of power to advantage himself with Ms Powell. According to your reasoning, then it should be fine, right?
1. Legally this is highly problematic as it exposed Nvidia in a bunch of different ways.
2. A CEO who is so unconcerned about 1. may be engaging in other risky activities.
Yes, no one questions what he does with his wife (or used to...). That's sex life. Promiscuity and risky behaviors are that and have nothing to do with his sex life.
Because sleeping with someone at your company in secret while you are married can be incredibly destabilizing. Also, she reports to him. There is an inherent consent issue.
How is the CEO having a secret affair with somebody at his company not relevant to the company?
All of this also reflects incredibly poor judgment.
1. having sex with CEO of the company your are doing business with may affect the business itself, so you are not delivering best results for your own company
2. having sex with your own subordinate employee seems like potential abuse of power for starters and it is just calling for lawsuit, because while she can say today it was consensual, tomorrow she can say the other way
if he would be having sex with random girls he found in bars it would be certainly less problematic than having sex with people who are directly related to his company
btw. it also shows his character, if he was unfaithful once, he was unfaithful twice, do you really think these are only two cases and it ends just with his sex life?
Looks to me like he has a target on his back, and people are just throwing stuff at it now. This could have come out years ago, if it is true. No reason not to. None, not in this day and age.
If by "this" you mean the affair with Powell, probably not much difference between Jensen Huang's affair with Powell and affairs that Gates, Bezos, and Brin have reportedly had.
But the extramarital affair with Alice Huang is quite different. NYTimes reports that Alice Huang is a Chinese spy, with whom Jensen Huang may have conspired to break the law, selling advanced NVIDIA chips to China. That affair puts the whole company at extreme legal risk. Gates, Bezos, and Brin have nothing like this on their records that I'm aware of.
As I write this, the top post on HN speculates that this is "the tip of the iceberg," indicating that there at least may be more affairs yet to be uncovered, and, plausibly, Jensen Huang may have committed even more enormous mistakes with serious consequences for NVIDIA.
He is very hands on. He has more direct reports than other other tech CEOs. I think close to 40. Someone else stepping up or stepping in has things to do.
In addition Nvidia is incredibly tech-heavy company. You need another EE with experience with AI chip design and business. Just having good experienced businessman looking at simplified powerpoints before making decisions of technical issues is probably not enough.
Without discussing the morality of his actions and what he should do as a person, I'm fairly convinced this is either a Chinese intelligence operation to destroy one of the last bastions of US dominance or a CIA operation to install a puppet in a powerful company who is not currently entirely subservient to the will of the US government.
And I'm pretty sure Jenson resigning without a suitable, almost identical successor will kill NVIDIA, the way Intel and AMD and IBM became mere husks of what they were, with no possible road to another western replacement in sight.
> I'm fairly convinced this is either a Chinese intelligence operation to destroy one of the last bastions of US dominance or a CIA operation to install a puppet in a powerful company who is not currently entirely subservient to the will of the US government.
It's odd that you seem to consider two /entirely opposed/ hypotheses as being similar to one another. Superficially, "I'm fairly convinced [this is an intel op of some kind]" makes the two seem similar, but each comes with an implicit set of consequences, right? So it's really "I'm fairly convinced [this is supposed to be really advantageous to the west because of these suspected consequences for the west] or that it's [really harmful to the west because of these other suspected consequences]". It seems odd to suspect two highly opposed set of consequences as both being reasonably likely and thus admitting to two diametrically opposed motivations for the same act.
Nvidia is incredibly valuable, in large part due to Jenson.
The US is aligned with Nvidia, but it does not have total control and so is largely beholden to its choices. Amung other things, the US is paranoid about the resource ever aligning with China (thus export controls). Jenson may refuse to cede more control.
China is misaligned with Nvidia, due to competition with the US. It will never have any control, and thus wants it removed from alignment with the US to mitigate their advantage.
Both superpowers have vast intelligence networks with a long history of causing untold human suffering in pursuit of their short-term, often meaningless goals.
Suddenly, Jenson is under attack from all angles over something relatively unrelated and meaningless to Nvidia - certainly disproportional to his role as arguably one of the most important people on the planet. Within a day, with no actual information of what happened, major media companies are calling for Jenson to be removed from his position.
This could benefit the US government, who can now get a replacement more amenable to, say, the surveillance state or more ideologically opposed to China. Destruction of Nvidia be damned, the CIA hasn't though more than 2 years ahead since the 60s.
This could benefit China, as this could cause a rapid decline in Nvidia's progress and therefore the West's ability to continue beating China - in particularly since there seems to be no one capable of filling the gap if it were to happen.
Occam's razor. We all saw the picture of Jensen signing the woman's breasts in Taiwan, his trademark leather jacket, etc. He very intentionally cultivated the rockstar CEO image. If your conspiracy is true (and I think it's much simpler than that), then Jensen was a huge flashing billboard saying to the world that he's absolutely down to be compromised.
> And I'm pretty sure Jenson resigning without a suitable, almost identical successor will kill NVIDIA
Maybe, but Nvidia bears responsibility for having such poorly de-risked corporate governance. It's actually shocking that the company propping up the entire AI industry (and thus the US economy) is led by a CEO with no COO and dozens of direct reports. Jensen thought he was invincible because he positioned himself to have total control of the company operations, which certainly didn't encourage him to think twice about making the mistakes he did. He acted out because he felt empowered to, and it's easy why.
> We all saw the picture of Jensen signing the woman's breasts in Taiwan
My argument isn't that Jensen didn't do it - I have no doubt he had multiple affairs. He already admitted to the first one!
My argument is that the President of the United States raped children and nobody even talks about it anymore. So Jensen fucking consenting 50 year-olds and suddenly having the CIA outing him (after knowing about it for a year apparently), and every major media company calling for his resignation over it, before any actual investigations finish and over something seemingly neither illegal or particularly related to his work is weird.
> Occam's razor.
In light of the above, I would say Occam's razor is someone is trying to get rid of Jensen.
Reporting by both NYT and WSJ has said there have been two opposing factions in the White House on China/AI policy since Trump was elected. The Model Hawks want to Keep America Strong by slowing China's progress in advanced AI models. They think the best way to do that is by stopping US advanced AI hardware going to China (as much as we can).
The Hardware Hawks wants to Keep America Strong by slowing the development of China's homegrown advanced AI hardware industry. They think the best way to do that is by ONLY selling US semi-advanced AI hardware to China that's slightly more powerful than what China could make on their own now.
Trump vacillates between the two factions (sometimes daily), as indicated by banning the sale of certain semi-advanced chips, then later reversing that ban. The argument to reverse the ban was because before any ban, NVidia had >90% of China's domestic market and after a couple years of ban that was down to ~50%, with the difference funding the development of China's AI hardware industry.
I think both factions actually have valid points and don't know which would be better. However, to your point about the reason for these leaks of >6 month-old intelligence reports now - it's that Jensen (and NVidia) have always been pro "Keep America Strong by slowing China's domestic hardware industry." Sure, that's in their interest but there are a lot of serious people who aren't at NVidia who are Hardware Hawks too. If China's domestic AI hardware companies are Mice, NVidia is the Cat saying, "I was keeping your mouse problem under 10% until you locked me out and now it's 50%. Let me back in and I'll get it under control again."
Jensen has developed a pretty good relationship with Trump and is able to sometimes sway his opinion. Whether this is good or bad depends on which kind of Hawk you are. For example, Jensen was invited to go on Trump's first China trip and the Model Hawks were not happy. On Trump's second trip, the Model Hawks managed to keep Jensen from being invited and the Hardware Hawks were not happy. Air Force One left Washington without Jensen, but then stopped in Alaska and picked up Jensen - which made the Model Hawks crazy. The Model Hawks made sure the intelligence report about Alice being a suspected asset for Chinese intelligence was included in briefing report sent to Trump back in May. But that didn't get Trump to stop listening to Jensen sometimes (Today, Trump claimed he "doesn't remember seeing the report, or if I did see it, it didn't make a big impression on me").
So who benefits by these old reports about Alice from May leaking now and blowing up all over the news? Maybe people upset that Jensen keeps unswaying Trump after he's been swayed?
BTW, Jensen and NVidia have consistently been Hardware Hawks since long before Jensen met Alice in March 2024. Arguably, any NVidia CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to be a law-abiding Hardware Hawk. Also, the WSJ has reported that Chinese intelligence first developed Alice into an asset because of her relationship with Jensen. Because export controls were bad for her data center company, Alice was obviously already on the Hardware Hawk side before being an info source for Chinese intelligence.
The under-reported story (dig a little on WSJ) is that after nearly two years of Commerce and Justice Dept investigating Megaspeed, the US govt still hasn't put Megaspeed on the blocked Entity List (which they can do anytime without explanation). No one knows why and congress is starting to ask about it. BUT, strangely, NVidia voluntarily placed Megaspeed on their own blocked list in June 2025 and hasn't sold any new GPUs to Megaspeed since then (they did ship a few repair parts and replacement components after June for warranty support). So... "Good Guy NVidia?" Well, maybe more like "Don't-want-to-go-to-jail-for-decades NVidia." You see, these export controls have the same severe penalties as selling cruise missiles and it's a 'strict liability' regulation on suppliers. That means if a supplier "knew, or should have known" that GPUs were being diverted, they would be guilty - and that's potentially serious jail time for every individual employee who knew and personal fines up to $1M per card. So... yeah, Alice banging Jensen didn't stop Megaspeed getting cut-off by NVidia just over a year after she met him. What do those confusing and conflicting bits mean? I have no idea - other than this whole thing is a shit show all around and it's not even a blue vs red thing. There are Model and Hardware Hawks in both parties.
In the case of Musk, the amount of equity they own in the company. In the case of Gates, the fact that it didn't come out when he was still an executive.
Musk is also very "out" about it. Kinda like how it's okay to be gay in the CIA, as long as you're out. Being in the closet gets you fired because it makes you blackmailable.
In principle I agree. But at some point there were many enough of them that anyone who gets involved with Musk has very little legitimate basis for claiming to believe there won't be others.
Is it worse or does it dilute the bad if there are a ton of baby mammas not just a "girlfriend who is also the mother of a couple of children"? I don't like the guy but it kind of feels like it somehow isn't as bad when it's just open, repeat behavior and nobody thinks he is even trying to be exclusively "with" these women. I have no idea what their shared understanding is but it might not be as bad as your framing makes it sound if that is openly known between them.
Not a lifestyle I could ever be proud of living personally but ymmv and elon seems to be enjoying himself.
I would think so. We can probably expect more to keep trickling out until he has no other choice but to resign. The spy thing was already bad enough. Now we find out he's hooking up with one of his direct reports? Seems like he runs a toxic workplace.
We have become a permissive society in regard to sex and extramarital affairs. What’s so wrong about having an affair with another employee in the company? I think they are making a big deal about this.
Boss-subordinate relationships are a lot like conflicts of interest. You can’t really rule out something nefarious without the ability read minds because coercion and self-dealing can happen at an unstated or even subconscious level.
propriety is a higher bar than what you're referring here. it IS inappropriate to date in that power dynamic. but it is legal. and it can even be ethical with mutual consent and management of consequences. dont confuse them.
This is questionable in the context of one of the adults holding a position of power. Also, even when assuming the adults are peers, there's another saying 'Don't shit where you eat' which is rooted in a lot of stories of workplace relationships going wrong in very creative ways.
There are plenty of contexts where adults can't even legally consent, because it sometimes becomes impossible to rule out coercion, and many more where it may be legal but still shows questionable judgement for the same reason.
"Position of power" is a bit of a stretch when we're talking about two high-ranking execs who presumably make tens of millions of dollars. I doubt there's any problem related to consent / coercion here. They just wanted to bonk.
It's a corporate governance problem because the relationship can be seen as tainting personnel decisions. But that's HR optics versus morality.
Note that I'm not defending Huang, but I think he's done for because of the spy thing more than because of this.
The Chinese spy who he was having sex with and probably helping break export controls and smuggle Nvidia tech into China through singapore is probably a bigger deal than this one
Well seeing how he also had an affair with a Chinese spy and broke federal law in assisting the Chinese government to access to billions of dollars worth of frontier AI chips, it's a little more than just worrying about extramarital affairs.
This is why you should only do one shitty thing at a time and not multiple.
There is no way that would have been possible. And as I saw another commenter mention, even if NVidia were founded much more recently when dual share structures became much more common, you rarely (or maybe never, I can't think of any cases) see that dual share structure in very capital intensive industries like hardware where you have to sink a ton of money into the enterprise before you even see any revenue. Software is a whole different ball game.
You are correct, and I was wrong. I originally thought SpaceX was a bit of a special case because the board (pretty much Musk loyalists) gave Musk a ton of restricted stock right before the IPO, but the voting rights vested immediately. But the part I was wrong about is thinking that was just an IPO thing. All the many billions that SpaceX got pre-IPO was done with investors being fine having Musk alone having majority voting control.
Or Nvidia comes out of this damaged but not nearly as much as if they were glued to Jensen. "Superstar" CEOs that have complete control over a company are only benefits until they become enormous risks.
the timing of this coming out now is certainly not a coincidence; same with the spy affair (which was known a year or two ago). the interesting question is who wants Jensen gone
Yes and no, Nvidia have said they're conducting their own internal investigation among others. It doesn't surprise me that more information about this or other allegations come out while the fire is hot.
But I agree, anyone within the Nvidia circle looking to spread the information is certainly not doing it to help Jensen.
not really interesting, clearly china. Kill their competition by chopping off the head of the snake. Continue to gain massive lead and solidify their dominate position.
actually, because of the scandal becoming public, Jensen's replacement is almost certainly likely to take a harder line towards China than if Jensen had remained in place and the scandal had remain buried
If his personal security detained the person videoing them and offered them money to sign an NDA, isn't it a crime to detain someone who didn't do a crime?
Most likely they didn't "detain" but instead enticed them with a deal. Perhaps they offered to buy the video and exclusive rights to the video for a decent amount.
Not surprising at all. Many tech CEOs are like this; Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and so on. People don’t stop idolizing these people, they don’t even think that this is a problem.
Something like one in five married men has cheated on their spouse, approx one in eight women. It’s not that tech CEOs are “like this” it’s that they are not that different from other people, outside of their professional skills.
That number would be dramatically higher in scenarios where men had desirable women basically throwing themselves at them, which is the case for the extremely wealthy. This somehow reminds me of the Churchill joke:
Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for $1 million?
Woman: Why Winston, yes I would.
Churchill: How about $10?
Woman: What sort of woman do you think I am?
Churchill: We've already established that. Now we're just negotiating the price.
And I think this is all a logical consequence of evolution, which is driven solely by fertility. A woman can only carry one child at a time and so it makes sense for them to seek a highly qualified/'resourceful' partner to have the most chance of her genes being successfully carried forward, whereas a man can theoretically father hundreds of children in a single year, so it makes sense for him to be more 'driven.'
So you don't think the world's most powerful and richest people engage in infidelity more often than the guy that cleans the toilets at the local gas station?
every argument that attempts to humanize and 'us too' these types of folks (billionaires that own islands and ultra-yachts) totally bewilders me.
about 30-50% of people across cultures self-report infidelity. I grew up in a neighborhood where people had jobs like cleaning toilets and it's pretty difficult to cheat more than what I saw growing up. I can tell you from first hand that economically downward communities aren't known for their stable families
the thing that's stopping Joe from the gas station is that he lacks the yacht and the credit line, not any ethics. Jensen's no more or less human than anyone else. The issue with megacorporation's is structural, not some "these types of people' provincial nonsense
It’s an odd phenomenon alright. South Park covered it in the episode “Sexual Healing” where famous rich men kept cheating on their wives. We may never get to the bottom of it.
I feel like they would have come out and said so if that was the case. Sure, admitting being poly has some social risk, but feels like it would be better than what's currently happening.
Marriage/long term coupling is not "natural" but normal in society
With the decline in religious attendance has come a decline in marriage; from 70%+ to 50%ish over the last couple generations
But divorce rate has declined so those that do marry seem to really want it; in the before times though it was how women survived
Coupling fits with biological imperative to have partners but longterm/for life is obviously not necessary since divorce is common too, partners die, etc
That and recent research shows long term married couples are 50% more likely to develop dementia; an imbalance in effort develops where one becomes codependent and forgets how to live and the partner in charge loses grip of themselves and taking care of their partner consumes them.
Being primary caregiver to a spouse who has dementia does substantially increase the caregiver's risk of cognitive decline due to caregiver burnout. [1]
I'm not sure if this is what you were trying to express.
If you read that paper, they posit that a likely "cause" is that unmarried people tend to have cognitive impairments diagnosed later relative to when someone (i.e. a spouse) is living with them.
Not less likely to _have_. Less likely to be _diagnosed_. It is unsurprisingly difficult to be diagnosed with progressive cognitive decline in most places regardless of source even if you have been referred once for MCI.
I think the easier way of looking at it is this: there is a Lancet commission that produces robust characterizations of the modifiable risk factors that lead to dementia. If you're in a marriage that promotes reducing those risk factors, you'll likely have a lower risk of dementia. Isolating one variate like this raises interesting questions, but isn't a "smoking gun'-- especially in this case since the authors themselves indicate this is a surprising result given other studies.
I think the easiest way is like I wrote "No beating physics."
Seems just as reasonable but less verbose; we appear to get cancer and mental illness with old age regardless of social conditions around us. Physics and entropy win again regardless of the care we put into our semantics.
Regardless my original point was about "long term".
"Marriage staves of mental health" and "a single, long term marriage improves mental health outcomes" are two different things.
Could just be a tight knit quasi-nuclear family social circle is sufficient too but social desirability biases lead is to lean into marriage tradition.
Lots of animals engages in non consensual rape; humans need to get on a level?
We should kill on sight like a lot of animals do to each other; it's natural to behave like an animal.
Don't anthropomorphize ducks.
Codependency to survive altogether is different than "2 people stuck together by social pressure even if its not working for them" which happens a lot; marriage often becomes unnatural abuse.
Unlike ferrets we engineered around raw need to hunt rabbits; we have grocery stores to serve the codependency.
It came from the past so it's natural is a terrible argument. Just a "dude trust me; its how grandpa did it"
The difference is that Intel had a policy against it. Brian was having a relationship at the time they made the policy and it took months for him to wind it down
They used it against him 7 years later. He wasn't ousted because of his relationship. It's just the tool they used.
Also he wasn't CEO at the time of his relationship.
It also wasn't an affair. He was single at the time.
> People don’t stop idolizing these people, they don’t even think that this is a problem.
They'd go as far as to call it a virtue. Silicon Valley is the greatest domestic enemy this country has ever seen. They've built entire machines to protect, reward, and normalize antisocial activity.
Not much different from other industries, other than scale and reach. Took many decades to regulate out killing workers and customers for profit, some are still barely regulated.
The Jungle is famously about horrifying working conditions back in the day and was critical for gaining public support for legislation and regulations. "Capitalism" didn't improve the working conditions; regulations did.
Fire codes have been very beneficial, but they don't move the needle on overall life expectancy. Nor have historical communist societies shown any particular interest in workplace safety.
“Billionaire” is largely a responsibility the market gives you: you have to command billions in capital. It’s actually a job a the end of the day.
We should have high standards for who is allowed to have this job. Huang should be replaced as easily and quickly as any mid-level executive who costs his company 340 billion in market cap.
Replaced by whom though? Think about him what you will, but he is not your typical ivy league MBA CEO. He built Nvidia from the ground up, while being very technical and involved, and has done a great job at that.
This is the exact reason his should have been fired in the first place. What he does in his free time is a matter for his wife and divorce lawyers to deal with.
If, at the end of the day, it is moral merit that matters for leadership positions, why is the hiring and training paradigm solely focused on technical skills?
Isn't Jensen on record as saying he won't do 1 on 1 meetings with employees? He seems like a run of the mill sociopath that runs off the work other people do
I knew this was going to happen. It's highly unlikely that a man cheats on his wife for the first time after age 60. This was just the first time he was outed for it.
I hated the misogynistic narrative that Huang was somehow helpless against a super-spy-seductress. Men can in fact control themselves, and it takes a lot of effort, you might even say willpower, to turn a business meeting into a bedroom encounter, especially when you're in the public eye. If Huang was targeted, it was because he was an easy target, a philanderer.
> This was just the first time he was outed for it
For good reason. The level of fuck-up in sleeping with a Chinese spy and then having the gall to try and corruptly quash the investigations into it, coming clean only after Congress flips, is nuts.
I’m not convinced a good CEO can’t have affairs. I am convinced a liar and corrupter can’t.
On nearly every post online about his affair, one of the most visible comments always ended up being about how one must "understand" that this just sort of "happens" when you're this rich and powerful. Poor thing, couldn't keep it in his pants. "Oh, just think of how hard it would be to resist! Would you?"
I pity whomever is in a relationship with someone who actually thinks that way. I'm disgusted, to be honest.
> Yeah but then what's the point of busting your ass your whole life to become one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the world, if you can't have an affair when the mood hits you?
Perhaps don't get married then, or have a consensual open relationship.
I love all these comments that are basically like "what's the point of being a billionaire if you can't stick your dick wherever you want when the mood strikes you and lie about it to your wife."
I think the unspoken implication is that being a billionaire means having an inordinate amount of power, such that immoral behavior like this becomes almost a given, because you can literally buy your way out of consequences (if only up to a point). Maybe the pertinent question is less, "How do we stop there being billionaires who succumb to the temptations of their unfathomable amounts of power?" and more, "How do we stop there being billionaires?".
You don't need to be a billionaire to cheat on your wife and have affairs. Average and poor dudes do that all the time.
The point I was making was, that what's the point of becoming a powerful billionaire if your life now has more restrictions than the lower classes? People amass wealth and power to gain more freedoms from societal rules, not less.
>Perhaps don't get married then, or have a consensual open relationship.
Clearly you don't understand that sexual desires and human constructed morality are different things, often in opposition with each other.
Surely he didn't know when he got married that 2 decades later, he'd become a billionaire surrounded by women more attractive than he could score before, otherwise he probably wouldn't have gotten married in the first place, if he knew a p**sy tsunami would await him.
No I don't think it is, a breach of contract is a civil matter, not a criminal one. I think it's especially relevant in the case of the CEO of a company, it's certainly common for contracts to be breached, but it doesn't reflect positively on the company.
Marital contracts are not unlike commercial contracts and we are finding out the CEO is in the (non)business of systematically violating them.
Evading export controls and lying about it is a crime, falling for a spy is stupid and has tons of potential fall out, having an affair with a direct report is a major liability, I wonder what is next, maybe we will find out more about the connection to the administration next, this season of the leather lothario is wild, will it be the finale, is there another season of fall guy or a full on traitor arc?
Right? Why are we suddenly pretending like shareholders have such high morals? I really don't understand what's going on. Destroying the world is fine, but cheating, that's where I draw the line!
I find it hard to describe why this comment triggers me... partly because 黃 is the 7th most common surname in China. And I don't think any native speaker would make that connection. It's like saying "haha that guy named Ryan Johnson was adulterous because his surname is slang for a penis!"
You just made me have a flashback to the early 90s when there was a popular brand of t-shirts called 'Big Johnson' with the character E. Normus Johnson. The jokes wrote themselves and I am sort of shocked to see they are actually still in business!
I'd never noticed, but that's the first character in my Japanese family name, and I was once in a relationship with a Chinese girl whose family name was close to huáng.
I joked that she was a PRC intelligence asset because of what a perfect partner she was and came out of nowhere, which doubled as a subtle dig at her family having been supporters of the cultural revolution.
Ai yai yai - resorting to that degree of personal aggression is absolutely not ok on HN, regardless of how bad some comment is or you feel it is.
Your comment would have been fine, and even appropriate, had you stopped at the first sentence. What you wrote after that is much worse than the comment you're criticizing, and obviously a bannable offense.
I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We've had to ask you this more than once before.
> Mr. Huang’s security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement
This is not their first rodeo, is it? Wonder how much was offered? Did the person take it? ("hey, psst, we'll throw the latest GPU card on the table, how about now?")
Then, will Huang issue another, equally sincere, public apology to his wife about this other affair. He could have grouped them both into a batch for efficiency I guess.
If there are ants in your kitchen they might be coming in due to rain outside.
You can leave sugar water in strategic places and then follow the ant trail to track where they are coming in.
Probably there will be an entire trail of ants in the morning - not just two. You can then track the place where they are coming in and block up the entrance point.
I like how the OP specified the "average" number of ants in the kitchen, as though the distinction is meaningful. Like, yeah, I guess that's technically not wrong? Actually, I'm not even sure of that, because an average here implies that time matters, so... it could be wrong!
As for the above, well, let's just call it art. How should I interpret it? The analogy is that ants are affair partners, and so if I put some sugar water out, they'll all come out of the woodwork. Is this some kind of journalistic or legal exercise for building a body of evidence against Jensen? A mating strategy? I don't know! It could be both of these, either, or none! The limits of my own imagination are laid bare.
On the actual topic, though, anyone who doesn't see why this is a problem needs to think a bit harder. If the CEO puts on the show of being a family man, but is secretly getting hands-on with coworkers and spies, he's a liability to the company. It would be a stretch to say this would be acceptable behaviour even if he were above board about it, because it calls his overall judgement into question, but it would be marginally better. Remember, this is a guy who runs a multi-trillion dollar company that has limits on what it can sell to whom, because the product is a strategic asset. He can cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage (and did!) just through his own personal behaviour. He doesn't get to have lapses like this, and if he does, is he making bad judgement calls elsewhere? It's not like it's hard to not sleep with your coworkers and clients. Billions of us do it every day.
Of course, this could just be the jealous ramblings of someone who doesn't have a sweet leather jacket...
Once the entrance point is blocked, you have the ants trapped, and can begin reeducating them to fight their own kind. Then, after months of work, you unblock the entrances and let them all duke it out, thus solving the problem once and for all.
Uno was highly criticized in public not for having a Geisha mistress, as it was a traditional leisure practice expected of politicians and wealthy men but instead due to relating his poor financial habits in the Japanese Diet as compared and paralleled to the ungenerosity towards his former Geisha mistress.
Oh good, I thought it was just me. I had to ask an LLM to break it down for me, despite being a native English speaker. Turns out it's trying to communicate something completely orthogonal to my initial interpretation.
Maybe it's in the contract that such relationships are verboten. But what if two consenting adults find themselves in a state of mind where they want to pursue a sexual relationship? Do they ask for permission? And to whom - HR? What if it's not granted? Can they temporarily resign for the duration of the encounter, and resume their previous lives?
Is the affair just be on surface like chitchat and dates, holding hands and kissing minus the Elon level of bed and babies? In the traditional western context you have to bed the women to consider affairs. Anything on surface is more like feminist definition of affair. Can anyone confirm the bedding part? Or even babies like Elon?
Not sure why everyone is bringing Musk as an example here, every single of his children alive today [afaik] were had via IVF (why he does it that way is a whole different can of worms), but it changes the consent dynamics quite a bit.
It's one thing to say your boss cornered you in the office, it's a another thing to go through the entire IVF procedure and then pretend you had no chance of escaping or whistleblowing over the however many weeks it takes.
Would prefer if more like Elon tbh, don't cheat and just be open about your relationships with clear consent lines, causes investors far less grief. He's weird and thus when you are investing, you are absolutely clear what sort of person you are investing in.
Maybe I'm too old and stupid but I'm less concerned knowing that the guy has a few mistresses. It makes it less likely that any of these ladies are tugging on his heart strings for the keys to his kingdom. Nvidia security is probably all over these affairs monitoring his communications, personal devices...
I'm not condoning cheating at all, but if you're a billionaire with endless connections around the world, why wouldn't you just go to an escort if you can't keep it in your pants.
I know things are different when you're only thinking with your johnson but jeez, showing up with the same woman in front of the media many times and even displaying affection in front of a camera (there is pictures of them with light body contact afaik), what did he think was going to happen?
it's a power thing - yeah he could go to an escort, but then it becomes only about money. He wants these relationships as a proof of his power; then walking around in public is to flaunt the power, the 'you can't do me nothing, look at me'. Power is the drug.
Everyone is completely indifferent to the white guys who visited Little Saint James, yet a boring affair gets treated like the biggest news in the world.
He's kind of like 'scum bag lite' and now barely qualifies to join the rest of the mega wealthy and powerfull in there conspicuos imunity from censure.
Purely accident that the news dribbles out like that. Nothing to see, moving on.
(If he's done this without his wife's full consent, he's certainly a despicable human, but that doesn't change that this looks like a really nicely orchestrated PR hit job)
I agree with you. I also find it “interesting” that this all really started appearing a few days after DOJ made angry noises about nVidia buying Hugging Face.
I couldn't infer anything at all from this article; there is an infuriating intrusive ad that auto-plays video like "Chat live with the hottest local models in the comfort of your own casa! Only ETH 0.0069/tok! Click here!"
https://archive.is/9fQ6Y
If his personal security detained the person videoing them and offered them money to sign an NDA, it feels like something they had experience with. Could this just be the tip of the iceberg?
Maybe a state actor knew this already and then based on this knowledge devised a plan for a targeted spy operations.
At least in the US you're not allowed to just detain people for having a camera
and private security isn’t allowed to detain anyone for any reason. they’re not cops
Slightly pedantic but I think in most US jurisdiction private security can detain you for theft under the doctrine of shopkeepers privilege but only long enough for law enforcement to get there.
Obviously not super relevant to this but that's where people get the idea at least.
yes that is true!
"If there are two ants in your kitchen then there are probably hundreds more"
Most likely. It's hard to imagine an ultra rich man who is already unfaithful to only be having sex with 2 women. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot more, including paid encounters.
If you see two ants in kitchen, actual count is not 2!
This is actually an instance of the German Tank Problem.
Are you implying his partners bear serial numbers?
Presumably so. Evidently he is a serial philanderer.
I see no evidence that he doesn’t have parallel affairs.
The actual SIMT architecture of his affairs is more complicated but achieves higher throughput.
golf clap
In Jensen's case, probably the clap.
I am pretty sure CCP assigns serial numbers to its spies…
Check with Ludacris for an example of this phenomenon.
"Beware of the camel's nose"
2! = 2
Seems likely the board is aware of more instances than has been currently exposed. Given a second, a third seems highly likely.
Then given a third, then a fourth is highly likely. When does it stop?
At certain island, I guess.
Reuters reports a third
https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...
What else do you do with $100+ billion other than have sex with whomever you want?
Also see our friend Elon Musk,
Bill Gates,
Jeff Bezos,
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
> What else do you do with $100+ billion other than have sex with whomever you want?
Finance fundamental research since it is well-known how precarious the job situation in academia is.
this is normal stuff, the guy is takin it for the tech billionaire team
I dont think this is sex level. A date or kissing seems more likely. You can see all reports including rumors didnt talk about sex part.
Just a failed training run, right?
Jensen isn’t a Mormon and doesn’t wear magic underwear. In fact those leather jackets he wears tell you everything you need to know.
What do they tell?
I believe, as the fellow kids say, that he fucks.
So that's why these are always expensive then, hmmm.
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really? right in front of my leather jacket?!
Oh hun
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Oh the horror! Let's hope he doesn't enjoy it while he's doing it too. I can only bear so much.
truly, I think it's way out of proportion, unless it had an effect on Nvidia management, we should give the guy and his family space and privacy. Jepsen net effect on the world is hugely positive. hope he recovers a good life and fix whatever they decide makes sense
> Jepsen net effect on the world is hugely positive.
Until the medical advances come raining from the sky, that is yet to be proven.
The net effect of the data centers filled with his cards is not positive.
> Jepsen net effect on the world is hugely positive.
I would have to agree. Also at least three top 40 songs in the US and 7 in Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Rae_Jepsen
I thought this was about the aphyr database consistency tests!
> The net effect of the data centers filled with his cards is not positive.
You of course are doing your part by not using any of the data centres with his cards right ?
You don’t think helping your girlfriend circumvent export controls and score billion dollar contracts for GPUs that her shell company bought for China doesn’t impact Nvidia?
Shareholders like it though. Money is far more important to most people than which country "wins" AI. Huang also has a good relationship with Trump so enforcement is unlikely.
given that he is dating adult women and was never implied in the epstein files, i'd say, give the man a medal!
Trump will give him a medal :)
I don't really care that much about Jensen being an unfaithful husband. That kind of pales in comparison to hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars. And as far as "paid encounters" go - I would hope no one uses this as an opportunity to tell me prostitution is unethical.
How do you know he is hoarding hundreds of billions of US dollars?
Is it possible you are conflating USD with Nvidia shares that he hasn’t sold? Is he not allowed to have 3.5% of the voting power for Nvidia?
Nobody cares about that. They care about Jensen being an unfaithful CEO and compromising Nvidia's share price with this naughty flings.
They're already being sued by shareholders over the first affair. The suit claims Nvidia's relationship with Megaspeed posed a "material risk" to Nvidia's reputation and business prospects. Of course sleeping with your own employees is also considered a bad business practice.
It does feel a bit like Jensen is being held to a very much unfairly higher standard than, say, elon, who does drugs, lies extravagantly, has an openly corrupt relationship with the goverment, build the world's biggest deepfake porn machine, etc etc.
> unfairly higher standard
I don't disagree that they are being held at different standards, however Elon should really be held far more accountable for his manipulations around Tesla stock, porn machines, Space X fraud etc.
> I don't disagree that they are being held at different standards, however Elon should really be held far more accountable for his manipulations around Tesla stock, porn machines, Space X fraud etc.
Outside of his fan bubble, Elon Musk is really not well-reputed.
Elon doesn't really hide anything though. He's very public with his drug use and harem. Really hard to blackmail someone who's proud of what he does.
I'm not talking about blackmail.
I'm talking fraud. The SEC should be getting involved.
Things that are illegal.
He denies the drug use. Although his behaviour makes it very obvious.
cf Matt Levine, "Everything is Securities Fraud"
> That kind of pales in comparison to hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars
Unsurprising to see that the economic illiteracy that plagues reddit has made its way here, a place that is made by billionaires and tries to find and mint new billionaires
It didn't start that way and honestly has gotten worse every passing year.
Yeah the moral angle of 'oh my god a billionaire was unfaithful' is just bizarre, given all the Epstein stuff at least he is cheating with adult women who consent.
> at least he is cheating with adult women who consent.
Well, he is her superior in a work setting, so there's that. There can be consequences for rejecting your boss's advances, which is the reason this kind of thing is usually heavily frowned upon!
The infantilization of adult women is disgusting.
The repetition of redpill cliches is tiring
What about the implication that these affairs are some how worse then Epstein trafficking underage girls. The mind boggles at what some of these people think, its been eye opening reading all the people who think he is the worst thing since sliced Hitler. Some have suggested their are various groups in the USA that want him gone (Government and/or AI labs) looking more and more plausible and I don't know if some of these outraged people are bots.
Just because some people have done worse things, doesn't mean you can do whatever you want
But it does make you wonder why we let some people can get away it while we hold others to account.
I think you just proved the point that people's stance on morality is not universal.
Morality is not a binary. Some things are more immoral than others.
Some of us think all of these things are bad.
Different scales, but all should be considered negative and penalised.
The potential security costs are far more significant than any nominal market fee for services rendered.
People with oodles of money and power are pretty depraved
https://www.justice.gov/age-verify?destination=/epstein/file...
Page 7
NEWS FLASH: Man accused of acting like a man. More at 11.
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No, that's the point, we wouldn't. And if we would then we should not be in charge of an extremely large organisation.
Part of the point of all this is that he's supposed to be in control of his emotions and able to make the best decisions without letting his emotions interfere.
If he can't even make the very simple decision to keep his dick in his pants in this very clear breach of commitments he has publicly made, then what other terrible decisions is he making? What other commitments will he break because it feels good and he can't control himself?
You seem to imply there is a performance aspect here. Yet there are high performing people in all fields do this. Something like 20% of men have committed adultery.
> he's supposed to be in control of his emotions and able to make the best decisions without letting his emotions interfere.
I agree but that ship sailed a long time ago and this action is being blown out of proportion.
Look at the president of the US that is a guy who has to go (and all the people around him) and is still in office.
Quite frankly he has had an affair with consenting adult women not trafficked children why are the knives out for him when this is all he has done?
> Quite frankly he has had an affair with consenting adult women not trafficked children why are the knives out for him when this is all he has done?
Because he made commitments to people to not do this.
If you promise to do (or not do) something, and then you break that promise, you should be held to account for it. It should be obvious that you cannot be trusted to keep promises in future. Nothing you say should be believed, because you are clearly an untrustworthy person. You should not be trusted to make decisions that involve other people's money.
And, in addition. If you're a manager, you are responsible for the people reporting to you. You're the adult in the room. If your idea of managing people includes having sex with them, then that is an indication that you are unable to manage people.
This is not about consent. It's a different set of concerns than e.g. Russel Brand. This is about Huang not living up to the professional standards that we expect from people in authority. It's about being a good, trustworthy, custodian of other people's money, and about being a good choice as CEO of this business. Not having enough self-control to avoid these situations is a really good indicator that he is not a good choice for this role, because of that lack of self-control. If he can't control himself, how can he be relied on to control the organisation?
> If you're a manager, you are responsible for the people reporting to you. You're the adult in the room.
> This is not about consent. It's a different set of concerns than e.g. Russel Brand.
My point was the president who has brought about an expensive war is an example of this times 1000. I think all we can infer from this is he is unfaithful to his wife, the inference you make about his commitment to his fiduciary responsibility is incorrect to me. They are different things and he has not shown he has been a highly effective CEO who actually has technical knowledge.
Perhaps I am overly cynical but I think a lot of CEO's (and other's for that matter) will engage in dishonesty.
Consider Aquinas on merchants (possibly quoting Chrysostom possibly mistaken)
> “He that buys a thing in order that he may sell it, entire and unchanged, at a profit, is the trader who is cast out of God’s temple.”
My claim is not that this practice is wrong per-say but even in this kind of business of arbitrage you can see at guile and cunning, that is hard to deny. Maybe he only lacked the ability to hide it.
I would ask you who would run a business better a man who is unable to use cunning, guile and manipulation (marketing) or one who does not. Their is times when the sort of morality you talk about is important and times where it is a hindrance and most people are evil, if you want the good Aristocratic souls you would do well not to look for it in the world of commerce.
Trump is a criminal, plain and simple. He cannot be trusted (as has been proven repeatedly). He does not consider past promises binding. It's not "guile and cunning", it's narcissism. Anyone with any sense does not do business with him.
If you get a reputation as someone who operates like this, then people stop doing business with you. I've watched it happen.
And it appears that Nvidia's shareholders agree. They don't see "guile and cunning", they see a man unable to control himself or his ego.
He said he wouldn’t do a thing, and then he did it anyway.
He’s already proven himself to be untrustworthy… what else is he lying about, hmm?
Plenty of leaders throughout the years, most notoriously royalty (leaders in an "extremely large organization" if there ever was one), have been doing this.
Royalty are also notoriously bad leaders a lot of the time.
Yes, and they were eventually held accountable for shit like that, and we moved away from monarchies.
It's a sign of a really bad leader that they do this.
Or maybe it's inherent to power and the recent trend is against human nature. You cannot seriously say that this is a major concern in moving against monarchies. After all, the royals are just the most well known ones (because it involves succession). Plenty of non royal powerful people also do so.
People have always been ostracized for adultery, royalty or no. You need only look at stories from e.g. the Old Testament or similar to see how long this has been a thing in human society.
Infidelity is as old as the institution of marriage. Very few people are ever ostracized for it, and most of those were women. Among elites, it was usually expected to have lower-status women for fun and not to bother the nobly-bred wife for anything other than bearing legitimate heirs.
squints really hard, looks at US president, laughs.
Maybe eventually. After they have been doing it for decades. When it’s inconvenient for folks now.
Notably, every senior woman leader I worked for had something similar going on too.
I'll believe you when you're a powerful billionaire and you don't get caught.
No.
Would you?
Yes. :3
Better question: who cares?
Even if you don't care about the adultery aspect, or the spying aspect(!), having sex with the people who report to you is a huge problem. First of all the power imbalance complicates questions of consent. Secondly, even if that's all fine, there are legitimate questions that could be raised by other employees about objectivity and favoritism. And for all of these reasons and more, it reflects very poorly on a leader in terms of their judgement and impulse control, which are reasonable traits to want a CEO to have.
If you think that is the only crazy/insane/bad thing involved in these situations, I have a bridge to sell you.
Notably, it does get folks incensed, and it’s a good way to take out a senior leader if all other leverage fails.
Who said it’s the only one? We can criticize them all.
I just find the pearl clutching on this particular topic hilariously naive. Especially with the Epstein files having been such a big topic for years and years now.
It’s clearly some kind of hit piece. Dumb of Huang to have stepped on whatever landmine he did, let alone allow himself to get this exposed, but whatever.
I wonder if it’s someone trying to short Nvidia?
As someone who doesn't cheat on their spouse or have unethical relationships with subordinates, it's frustrating to see bad behavior from powerful people and have the reaction be "There's a lot more where this came from, so it's not a big deal. This is just a hit piece."
Is it that hard to keep your wiener out of people who report to you? Why is the reaction "this is really common and it's unfair to target this guy" and not "this is common, but at least one of them is finally seeing some consequences, now let's hope there's more to follow"? Apparently having and expecting basic ethics is "pearl clutching." Fuck that. If powerful people are commonly awful and I expect better from them, that's a problem with them, not with me.
Oh you’re wildly misunderstanding my point.
Of course he should be fired for this.
The reality - at these levels - is that to rise to these levels typically requires that others involved feel comfortable they have enough leverage on you that they can force you out ‘quietly’ if they need to do so.
Which is what is happening.
I’ve seen some wild things that were allowed to continue because the math was paying out at the time.
Somewhere the math changed, and this is the consequence. ‘Should’ rarely has anything to do with it.
Post election ‘cleanup’ in approach?
Change in expectations on future growth trajectory?
Someone with their own interests (shorting the stock) got too much leverage?
This is already costing individual folks billions, and shareholders hundreds of billions.
that kind of thing often involves someone’s ‘chess moves’, even if it’s just them blowing up in their faces.
If keeping it hidden cost even billions of dollars (it wouldn’t), the math would obviously favor that compared to what is happening, eh?
I'm not sure I understand your point any better now. Are you saying that "should" is irrelevant to what actually happens and that it's all about what makes money? I'd completely agree with that. But I don't see what that has to do with "I just find the pearl clutching on this particular topic hilariously naive." or "If you think that is the only crazy/insane/bad thing involved in these situations, I have a bridge to sell you."
I’m saying this is the current leverage they are using, that the reason they are using it is not really related to the stated reason, and that it is likely very far from the level of actual dirt that is occurring.
I thought it was pretty obvious.
I still don't get it. We can criticize the behavior that he's supposedly being ousted for even if the real reason behind it is something else. That's not "pearl clutching" nor does it imply it's the only bad thing going on.
whoosh
Those who care about good judgement and not having unnecessary surface area for blackmail or other exploits.
No one is calling him a sinner.
Can't blackmail if nobody cares.
I think that's what the pedophiles are trying to do, move the overton window so it's not such a big deal.
Pedophilia is illegal, and that's not changing no matter how many grotesque articles are written. Adults having consensual sex with other adults is not illegal.
Sorry I see how my point can easily be missed as I brought this up kind of randomly in a thread about otherwise legal behavior. My point is the normalization of deviance.
I'm struggling to understand what you are trying to say. Why did you bring up pedophiles?
In media for stories surrounding Epstein and that class of people, we often hear of 'underaged girls' instead of 'children'. That is part of the shift of the overton window. Modern media is replete with children being put into adult situations (not necessarily media targeted at children, mind you) and that only helps to blur the line.
> But one Kentucky teacher said her arrest for an alleged affair with a 16-year-old football player was unfair and untrue and has ruined her career, possibly her life. https://abcnews.com/US/story?id=8221857
Calling a teacher raping a kid an affair.
> According to a report on FOX Baltimore, the victim was a 12-year-old girl and met Laury on the playground of the Pikesville apartment complex where they both lived. The girl was reported missing by her mother in June and was located about a week later inside Laury's apartment, according to the report.
> The report says the girl admitted to having consensual sex with Laury after telling him she was 22-years-old. https://www.fox5dc.com/news/baltimore-city-school-teacher-ch...
"Consensual" sex with a minor. There are many more examples.
Edit: I'm sorry, that was rude of me. I've deleted the rest of what I said here, but I am sorry about what I said.
The whole point is reducing the care. You can't blackmail what people don't care about. Your response is pretty callous. Saying "next time you have a thought related to raping children" like what the fuck?
If I said "you can't blackmail people for littering because people don't care, but littering is still wrong.", would we be making the same point, or is there a connection between this and Epstein that I'm missing?
If there was an effort to downplay littering in media then yes but I'm not aware of it. There's no direct connection to Epstein beyond blackmail. I regret bringing it up, I thought it would make for interesting discussion.
It just seemed to come out of nowhere, and following that guy saying he doesn't care about adults having affairs, it sounded like you were trying to say that anyone who doesn't care about this is somehow condoning child abuse? Which is why I was sure there was an Epstein connection I was missing, and also why I had a hostile reaction.
Now that I know where you're coming from, yeah, that is interesting.
Many people, maybe even most people.
There's a saying, and I have no idea if there any truth to it, that you can't blackmail French CEO's and government officials this way. Their wives already know they are cheating on them and the public expects it.
Chinese also the same. Super rich Chinese typically expected to have mistresses with the legit wife controlling access. It is abnormal for super rich Chinese not to have mistresses. Historically only one Chinese emperor did that monogamy thing, but he died young, so that probably the real reason. Western kibgs are bizarre monogamous by Chinese culture standard even today.
I believe this is true yes, you would have a hard time getting anyone to care. You should be worried anytime you are in a union with a French man (or Lady). See Cardinal Richelieu and French alliances behind the backs of the Catholic League.
I say this as a Brit and we are the same, only we are just as perfidious (maybe worse) but hide it from are selves and others so we are easy to blackmail.
Are you saying you don't? I would if I'd done that. If you don't you might want to start doing.
Those of us with a moral compass?
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same this is actually a bullish signal
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Somebody have an agent go back and look at that Coldplay concert footage.
It's the tip of something, at least.
I had a feeling something damaging would happen to him sooner or later. My prediction was sometime before mid 2027.
My reasoning was that that he had become too powerful while largely avoiding politically charged positions, or other "stuff" that can be used to "control" him.
The political and intelligence establishment doesnt particularly like powerful individuals who remain politically independent.... outside of their control.
This explanation actually makes more sense. He was even invited to EU, ASEAN Goverment etc more often than any other elected individual or powerful figures.
That is why ancient wisdom said you should keep low profile if you are super rich.
I hope Jensen can get through this.
Politically independent? Jensen is not politically independent.
Huang has had a noticeable shift in personality over time not unlike people such as Musk and other super rich. It doesn't take any external influence to cause bad character.
So many people here think character doesn't matter but it has now caught up with him as much as it has for Trump.
For years he was in the same anti-human AI hype club way too similar like Altman and he thought no consequences can catch him... it really doesn't take any conspiracy here. Everything he has chosen was all his doing.
And to bolster your point, people like Huang are surrounded by yes-men constantly. When you are a nobody, people criticize and keep you in line. Once you're running NVIDIA, people want power/money themselves, so they will tend to grovel and supplicate. Eventually, even the humblest begin to believe their own PR.
Those are "external influences", but your own gravitational field has warped them. Even the president wants your money and influence, and needs your company to do well, there is literally no one who will "give it to you straight", and it warps your mind.
The Roman commanders would sometimes hire someone to stand behind them and remind them they were only human for this reason (to avoid natural hubris), it was seen as naturally arising in these circumstances, and needed to be combatted to remain effective.
Musk is known for his ketamine habit. Maybe Huang uses something as well. Those high-powered careers are conductive to becoming a junkie. "The Wolf of Wall Street" exaggerated a bit, but not too much.
I knew things would go wrong when I saw the bra signing https://mothership.sg/2024/06/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-signs-...
Unrelated, but it's a nice signature.
This is an awfully generous characterization of the situation.
It's interesting how in the US, people will accuse the far right of engaging in conspiracy theories. In reality it seems to be just as common on the left, if not more common, as your comment illustrates.
I actually miss the old conspiracy culture where people would put together an entire documentary's worth of evidence for e.g. 9/11 being an inside job. Conspiracy theories just aren't the same nowadays.
Remember, the golden rule in evaluating the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of conspiracy theories is measuring their frequency in the real world! The internet is the only place where conspiracies spread by people who want to spread conspiracy theories can operate at scale.
On the right it's QAnon and Alex Jones and Jewish Space Lasers. If your example for the left is the claim that powerful politicians and the intelligence services manipulate people then I have to respectfully say sorry but you are wrong.
Some on the right claim that 9/11 was done by Mossad, or COVID was a biolab leak. The Unz website has a lot of detailed right-wing conspiracies if you're interested. They're far more evidence-based and plausible than the conspiracy slop you see on HN.
> Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people
Dumb language question: if Powell is married, why isn’t she referred to as Mrs. Powell in this article?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs.#Modern_usage
“It is generally considered polite to address a woman by Ms. rather than Mrs., unless the preference of the woman in question is clearly known. This is especially true in written communication, as dictated by professional etiquette. […] It is normally considered correct to address a woman as Ms. [Lastname], regardless of her marital status.”
I've never heard of this in my life. I'm not doubting you or the Wikipedia article. I just have no idea how you're meant to keep up with this stuff.
You’re not meant to keep up with it, it’s a means of control.
>It is generally considered polite to address a woman by Ms. rather than Mrs., unless the preference of the woman in question is clearly known.
Hm. Weird. Never seen that before. Let's check the source, emilypost.com:
>Mx. Is the universal title that can be used by anyone. It is gender non-identifying. Even if you identify specifically with a gender you may still use Mx. and you may see Mx. used when the sender is unaware of your title.
https://emilypost.com/advice/guide-to-addressing-corresponde...
OK, im out. I'm immediately out.
You've never seen Ms. before? This isn't some 2020s invention. My high school teachers went by Ms. in the nineties. Ms. Magazine is from 1972.
For married women no. Where did you go to high school?
Yes, for married women.
Miss indicated that a woman was unmarried. Mrs indicated that she was. Ms was added to behave like Mr in that it doesn't indicate marital status.
Isn't Ms just a contraction of Miss? I've never heard of a distinction between the two.
No, there is no contraction of Miss and no expansion of Ms. (which is pronounced “mizz”).
Does it stand for something? Just it stand for Mizz?
Just "Mizz". Yeah, it's a strange case because it's written with a period after it "Ms.", but unlike "Mr.", it's not a contraction.
Edit: Huh, I just learned after some searching that having a period after "Ms" and "Mr" is not a universal practice!
They're distinct in American English.
Is it a regional thing? I've lived in the Midwest mostly and never heard of this.
For a different regional reference point, my personal experience in California[1] has been to always use Ms. in a professional context, but this thread is the first time I've become aware that some portion of people default to Ms. for known-married women in other contexts. I understand the motive, it's just news to me as well.
[1] >25 years in San Diego, >10 years in SF. I'm 40.
I'd guess that an explicit "Miss" had less historical use on the west coast? That feels like more of an eastern thing.
I don't think so. In the UK the default is also Ms unless a preference has been expressed for Miss/Mrs.
Especially in a business context, it would be unprofessional to ask if a woman is married or not merely for determining which title to use. Unless you want to have an affair with her, of course.
I've always used Miss as the default when I don't know. Maybe everyone else has been using Mizz and I just didn't hear the difference.
It was invented to hide the distinction between married and single women. How do you know all the women you’ve met as Ms X are single?
What do you think the word invented means
Do you think words are naturally occurring?
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We were taught to use Mrs. unconditionally, and it was explained as a modern PC-rooted shift in formal written English. This was 30+ years ago.
Like latinx, a straight insult for us latinos.
Look, if you want to learn about social cues you’re going to have to draw from experience instead of links from the internet. Experience interacting with women will quickly teach you that Ms. is the safest option, if not preferred.
I semi seriously suggest we come up with neologisms to avoid gendered forms of address. We could take from Morrowind and replace Mr/Ms/sir/ma’am with “muthsera”.
Yes, what could be more offensive than someone noticing your gender.
How does one pronounce Mx?
Mail eXchanger
Just for the record!
this is the way
I've generally heard it pronounced like the word "mix".
Mexter
"mixter"
Start by learning to pronounce Mister Mxyzptlk from the Superman comics.
"Mexico"
It's Mexic@
> Hm. Weird. Never seen that before. Let's check the source, emilypost.com
This is taught to children in the United States. I didn't go to an especially good school and I remember it to this day. If you're not from the US the custom may be different.
Perhaps you will consider the advice from Grammarly [0] as a more acceptable source.
[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/commonly-confused-words/ms-mr...
Primary school in the UK, I had a teacher who went by Ms. and was married.
I think they were referring to Mx, which is indeed hilarious!
> This is taught to children in the United States.
No doubt, in today's absurdly woke school system.
I learned this as a child in elementary school in the 90s in a mostly blue collar area of Long Island. This is not some new woke thing.
Oh my God are native English speakers okay?? Ms. is not miss it's pronounced like "miz" and it's always been a convention to refer to women with their full or last name regardless of marriage state. Mx is just a gender neutral honorific for full or last names.
Sir this is not an airport, you don’t need to announce your departure
Your reddit is leaking.
You're out because you don't think non-binary people are real and you can't imagine a situation where you'd want an ambiguous honorific?
No. He's out because he works in a professional environment and knows that the statement that Mx is a universal title that can be used with anyone is untrue. In the vast majority of workplaces in the world, you'd get a weird look for calling somebody with an obvious gender identity Mx.
Really? The “the vast majority of workplaces”? “In the entire world”???
Have you experienced this first hand? Have you done any research? Have you read any peer reviewed papers on the matter that concluded this as a trend?
Yes, I work in a workplace, so I've experienced people using personal titles first-hand. I've also read some studies about neo-pronouns and neo-titles, yes. Their prevalence is generally measured as being quite low.
I‘m sorry, but I don‘t believe you. The claim that “neo-pronouns and neo-titles [...] prevalence is generally measured as being quite low” is a completely different claim then your initial “you'd get a weird look for calling somebody with an obvious gender identity Mx.”
I think you have never called somebody Mx. to their face, and I don‘t think you have witnessed it either, and I don‘t think you have read any peer reviewed paper which explores people reactions to this title.
Just to make sure I have this right. You agree it's unusual, and your argument is that people don't give weird looks to other people who do unusual things?
The source discredits itself by claiming Mx is some sort of conventional title
There is man,
there is woman,
and there is Klinefelter's.
(worth the karma hit)
And you’re nonethewiser.
I personally think there should be a signifier that indicates whether a man is married. How convenient for people like Mr. Huang that there isn't.
Once that's in place, I would feel better about the use of Mrs.
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Obligatory reference to Douglas Hofstsdter’s parody about gendered pronouns where he imagines an alternate reality in which English pronouns are race-based instead of gender-based, and they have the Miss/Mrs. distinction, but only non-whites have to use it, and it’s based on whether you have a job — because obviously only non-whites need to advertise this.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
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I looked at guardian's style guide (british) and some australian style guide I found and they both default to "Ms". Which specific anglosphere country did you have in mind?
It was just an opportunity to throw in some low effort /r/AmericaBad shade
What value did second paragraph contribute to discussion?
This is an American news paper reporting on an American CEO of an American company...
Are venting that the most culturally influential English-speaking country in the world influences English?
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Ms. is the not-so-new address that is agnostic about the married status of the woman.
Many people find it demeaning to address women differently depending on whether or not they are married, especially when we don't do the same for men.
>especially when we don't do the same for men.
I was always taught it was 'Master' for unmarried and young men.
> I was always taught it was 'Master' for unmarried and young men.
I remember when I was a kid, bank correspondence would address me as MASTER. I found it amusing.
I don’t think they do that anymore though??? I think our son has always been MR to them, even when he was a 5 year old
I'm in the UK. Letters from healthcare providers regarding my minor son is addressed as "Master <name>".
Which country? Never heard of it in the US but feels like a commonwealth or UK thing?
Australia
I see it used a ton in an airline context.
Commonly abbreviated as Mstr. I believe.
I knew someone with the surname Bates, that was amusing when things like his bank sent him letters when he was under 18.
You're damn right it is
And when was the last time you heard someone called master in a newspaper or actual life?
"Master" is for a male child. (And has, unsurprisingly, fallen out of favor.)
And when did you last use that instead of Mr?
Even when the last name is "Bates"?
That's funny, I've met men who think it isn't fair and wish we got a title change too!
We could start using Mrr. for that (pronounced “misterer”).
You can get a PhD and have a title change to Dr!
Then you’ll trigger the “it’s not appropriate for PhDs to use the title Dr outside of academia” people
That, in turn, will trigger the "Dr Jill Biden" people
You can also buy a parcel of land in Scotland and be addressed Lord.
IIRC that's not really true and basically just made up by a company that sells souvenir land plots in Scotland
"Ms" didn't just happen, it was an effort. Those dudes should be the change they want to see in the world.
Maybe they can start by taking their wives' last names xD
I offered, but my wife was like "hell no"! So I offered that we create a new last name instead of using either. She declined that as well.
I wanted to give our kids hyphenated names, with both my wife's surname and mine.
She insisted they get my surname only. So that's what they have.
Many cultures the last (and first) names differ by the gender of the name holder, so it makes it even more confusing if you try that.
Notably, both my (now ex) wives insisted on taking my last name. I didn’t really care either way.
Some do.
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> It is generally considered polite to address a woman by Ms. rather than Mrs., unless the preference of the woman in question is clearly known. This is especially true in written communication, as dictated by professional etiquette.[1]
> [Ms. is] intended as a default form of address for women regardless of marital status. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms.
Wow, I truly had no idea and thought Mrs. was always supposed to be used for married women. Thanks!
You didn’t know, because it started with Gloria Steinem in the 70s.
Wikipedia tries to make it sound like it’s some old tradition, but it’s actually fairly new, with the prior historical references being obscure until it was resurrected. It’s right there in the article:
> “Ms. was another acceptable, but rarely used, abbreviation for Mistress in England in the 17th and 18th centuries.[12] During the 19th century, however, Mrs. and Miss came to be associated almost exclusively with marital status,[13] and Ms. was popularized as an alternative in the late 20th century“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms.
Fairly new? Using "Ms" has been standard practice in the New York Times for 40 years, and it was regarded as a holdout at the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/insider/1986-ms-joins-the...
Cant read it, but the title literally says “1986, ‘Ms’ joins the Times vocabulary”, so I’m guessing that, you know…1986 is when it became the Times’ standard. This likely corresponds to the campaign of Geraldine Ferraro, which is what I personally remember as the point where the term became widespread.
I don’t understand this need to rewrite history. Nobody in this thread is objecting to the use of the term. Even the wikipedia article says the term was resurrected in the 80s.
Hate to break it to you my dude but 1986 is 40 years ago.
Skeletor will return next week with more disturbing reminders about passage of time...
Hate to break it to you, but you’re arguing with me about something I never said. I said it was revived in the 70s.
The term is recent in a linguistic sense. Even if you personally think it’s ancient history, “my dude”, there are plenty of us alive where it was invented in our lifetime.
A teacher explained this to me in elementary school as some new fad.
> Skeletor will return next week with more disturbing reminders about passage of time...
Classy edit, btw.
It’s recent linguistically, but not culturally, which I think is more important here.
It's recent both linguistically and culturally. It was a thing in my lifetime, to the point where I remember explaining it to other people in high school (which was itself about a decade after the term became "popular").
I realize that the average age on HN is quite young, but we're not talking about ancient history here.
For what it's worth, the median human is 31.1 years old. I wouldn't call something older than the median human "very recently, culturally."
> For what it's worth, the median human is 31.1 years old. I wouldn't call something older than the median human "very recently, culturally."
That’s cute. Now try searching for the median age in developed countries, where people care enough to make up revisionist history about minor culture debates? (nevermind, I did it for you; it’s around 50)
More to the point, what’s the human lifespan in first-world countries? (average lifespan in the US is almost 80)
(All this is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that perhaps disparaging people for being older than you is not such a bright idea. I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re not going anywhere for a while.)
The person you're responding to isn't disparaging you. They're simply stating their opinion. That's all a judgment about whether something is recent can be.
Fine, that’s fair. It’s not explicitly disparaging, it’s just implying that facts older than you, personally, can remember are irrelevant. I don’t know what to call this, but none of the words that come to mind are positive.
Someone on a parallel thread explicitly called the 1980s “ancient”, so whatever.
Read the thread again. I think you've misdirected anger at GP (Skeletor guy) towards me and others.
I hope your day looks up.
The only thing I was "disparaging" was your grasp of the standard meaning of phrases such as "very recently, culturally".
You could have avoided the issue entirely by using clearer language like "in the last 40 years."
The idea that I was claiming things older than me are "irrelevant" is nowhere near orbit of anything I wrote.
(Also I don't know if you are American but I am and the median American is around 39.4).
I didn't use the phrase "very recently". You did.
I said the word is recent, linguistically and culturally. I said it was "fairly new". I also said when it was popularized, in terms of actual decades (70s-80s).
You've chosen to die on this particular hill of whether or not something is "recent". I don't know why.
As far as I can tell this conversation has gone on because you've also chosen to "die on this hill". Have a good day.
What? You had a whole thing about rewriting history because the parent said the NYT adopted 40 years ago, then you made a big deal about how it was in 1986 and resurrected in the 80s and talked about rewriting history.
What was that all about if you both perfectly agree on the timeline?
> Classy edit, btw.
Edit? I did not edit my post. I think you may not understand what that means. It is neither classy nor unclassy, it is a type of meme.
> What? You had a whole thing about rewriting history because the parent said the NYT adopted 40 years ago, then you made a big deal about how it was in 1986 and resurrected in the 80s and talked about rewriting history.
It's simply a fact that the term was revived in the 70s and popularized in the 80s. The person I replied to was trying to imply that was incorrect, by suggesting that the NY Times was some long-time holdout.
The 70s was 50 years ago. You may have been alive then, but that doesn't make it "recent".
Given the magnitude of more recent shifts in language around equity, 50 years is ancient.
> Given the magnitude of more recent shifts in language around equity, 50 years is ancient.
So your argument is that anyone with a memory longer than yours, yet well within the median human lifespan, is “ancient”.
Okay, then. Good luck with that.
> So your argument is that anyone with a memory longer than yours, yet well within the median human lifespan, is “ancient”.
Deftly convincing my rhetorical opponent of my youthful vigor by misunderstanding what they wrote and getting noticeably worked up about being called ‘ancient’
It was actually Sheila Michaels in the 1960s who initially started the push for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Michaels
Gloria Steinem cofounded Ms. Magazine in the early 70s which helped popularize it further.
Anyway, how old are you that well over half a century is “fairly new” to you? Do you still wear galoshes and use a mimeograph?
We really should bring back galoshes, if only because it's a fun word to say.
Ms. vs Miss vs Mrs. "Ms." is kinda considered professional, if I can say so – and is used for either Miss (unmarried) or Mrs. (married). It's more like calling everyone a firefighter (instead of fireman and firewoman), or bartender instead of barman and barmaid – well, kinda.
But if someone prefers Dr, Prof etc then yeah that's what takes precedence.
I have always felt that Ms. is just the short form for Miss or even Mrs, but I suspect that's incorrect.
My personal style is using frist names – in personal and professional emails, and in rare sccenarios both first and last name. I almost never use Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss etc. So obviously I never head to write for a newspaper.
My friend once told me she saw Mx in UK in some Govt forms. Gender netural apparently. I have personally never seen this use. I guess that x is for "crossing off" the S's from other titles :)
Also use of "Master" for male children. I have seen in my country (even now) and of course in the good old England (or UK/Britain/GB? Sorry, not in the mood to check Wikipedia for these distinctions).
A married woman may not have taken her husband's name. Mrs. implies it while Ms. is neutral.
In many places, the law doesn't allow for the woman to take the man's name. Only children's family name can be decided.
Ms. is just a safe neutral default.
"Mrs." is falling out of style. I kind of get it. "Mistress" is a loaded word, if you think about it.
I'm 55 years old and never thought about that, because the link never occurred to me.
But when Mrs first stood for Mistress, the word Mistress wasn't "loaded" at all.
I always thought that it was Mrs. = missus, Ms. = miz, at least that’s how I would say them, but I now realize that a) that’s plainly incorrect and b) I’ve never actually ever seen them non-abbreviated.
If an abbreviation is never expanded, is it still an abbreviation? Personally I think it isn’t; I advocate for condensing i.e./e.g. to simply ie and eg, though this is a minority opinion.
Missus is a contraction of mistress (the feminine form of master/mister)
I never knew Mrs. stood for "mistress", I always thought it just came from "Mr's", as in, the wife of some mister
That's what "mistress" means.
Is it? Etymonline says it's not
https://www.etymonline.com/word/mistress
Originally shortened from Mistress, their meaning and pronunciation diverged bc of mistresses associated taboo.
I think Mistress is primarily used in erotica or fetish communities.
> "Mistress" is a loaded word
Only in English.
Is english word
> if Powell is married, why isn’t she referred to as Mrs. Powell in this article?
Because she is about to be single?
This thread accounts for almost a quarter of all comments in this thread, btw.
Dumb profiling question, why isn’t Ms. Powell referred as a “spy” in this article?
Because Ms. Powell is an Nvidia employee who is not suspected of being a Chinese spy. You're thinking of Alice Huang (turns out Jensen was having multiple different affairs!)
Ms ≠ Miss ≠ Mrs
Can someone explain how the CEO sex life is relevant? Is it because of the risk of a messy divorce that can both distract the CEO and eventually force voting share transfer since he’s also a shareholder? This isn’t really like the Chinese spy mistress thing after all.
Edit: honestly, this one feels like a moralistic freak out more than anything. Who cares about sex with the non-spy lady?
Yes, his actions carry potential shareholder risk and the board has a fiduciary duty to treat it as such. Nvidia (and Jensen) carry extra risk given their corporate structure which is flatter than most companies. Jensen has dozens of direct reports and is a cornerstone of the company. The recent changes to the stock price exemplify all of this.
> Can someone explain how the CEO sex life is relevant?
If it's true that he had the affair with the CCP spy or otherwise was encouraged to sell GPUs using loopholes that violate export bans, that would put him and NVDA into some hot water.
Investors do not like that and the implications for any rapid change in NVDA valuation would be immense.
Sure, the spy lady sex story is relevant but this is a different non-spy woman.
He slept with a subordinate employee, which is a fire-able offense in essentially any corporate environment I have ever worked in.
I'm not defending Jensen, but it's kind of crazy. What do you do if you fall in love at work? Wait for your fiance to get a promotion so you're at the same career level?
So? He is a shareholder and CEO having sex with another consenting adult, who and why anyone would fire him. AFAIK Musk had kids with his subordinates and became a trillionaire afterwards.
Say your boss has two reports, you and someone else. You are the same gender as the someone else. They are sleeping with the someone else. They then promote the someone else while not promoting you. Now you have to ask yourself: do I need to have sex with the boss to get promoted? This type of situation is why most companies will fire you if you’re sleeping with someone you’re writing the performance reviews for. Also, all of Jensens reports now have a path to sue Nvidia for unfair treatment, he put the company at huge risk.
You can ingratiate yourself to your boss without having sex. I have seen people doing non-sexual favors to then successfully get promoted. Not saying that sex with subordinate is OK, but that you have to ban all kinds of personal favors.
Lmao. No, one of those is not like the other. At all. Sounds like someone wasn’t paying attention during the harassment training. Basically you have a right to a workspace free from sexual harassment. The behavior described above is either explicitly harassment or getting close enough to it for people to get uncomfortable (and you have a right to not be made uncomfortable due to inappropriate/sexual work situations.)
You don’t have a right to a workspace free of social discomfort or pressure though. Feeling some pressure to bring them a donut isn’t protected in the same way unless it’s becoming harassment.
I was not talking about bringing donuts. How about cooking especially for the boss and getting promoted as a result? This is not a sexual favor, does that mean it is a-ok? It should be banned because an employee is getting promoted not because of business outcomes they produced but because of their skills in kissing ass. Should other employees have to compete with this? If not, why not ban all personal favors, not just sexual ones?
If you only care about following the law then only banning sexual favors may be enough.
Because she's not actually able to properly consent if she feels her job is on the line, whether it actually is or not. When a supervisor comes onto their subordinate, that subordinate may feel that they'd be putting future work opportunities (e.g. promotions) in jeopardy if they say no. Or worse, they'd worry that they're putting their employment at risk. Even if Jensen had "pure" intentions and this affair in principle didn't affect their working relationship, he in fact can't know that.
That was the policy at the company he runs. It's hypocritical, if nothing else (and it is much else).
For the same reason that, today, you're not considered a national security risk if you are openly gay, but you still are if you are closeted and trying to hide it. You can't easily blackmail an Elon type who has no shame and whose sex and drug addictions are part of his public reputation. Jensen presented himself as a faithful family man.
Also, if you cannot comprehend that there are issues of consent when it comes to having a sexual relationship with someone whose career you can destroy with no consequences, then I seriously hope you never get a management position. Elon's boards seem to be okay with this, but that is not the norm.
Are you really trying to use musk as an example of normal social behavior that we should accept (encourage…?)
Having an extramarital affair in and of itself isn't a fireable offence. Having sex with a subordinate is.
It's actually illegal in 16 states ....
https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-16-states-where-its-illeg...
That doesn't necessarily make it a fireable offense, though.
Shouldn't be if the other person is an adult and there were no high pressure tactics.
Having sex with a subordinate is the high pressure tactic.
No its not, quite literally. It can can come with pressure but doeant have to.
It is basically the difference between impropriety and appearance or possibility of impropriety
The problem is that you can't know. You can't read the minds of the people involved, so you can't know if there was pressure, coercion, or something else going on, and you can't be sure if either of them are telling the truth when they both insist it's fine and fully consensual.
So you prohibit it in all cases, punish in all cases, and then you don't have to wade into that mess.
Thats a crazy approach. By that standard no man should ever have sex with a weaker woman, because you cant rule out physical fear entirely.
Nobody should have sex with people whose livelihoods they have control over, it's not that crazy and its not a "men aren't allowed to flirt anymore" thing.
Married couples often have control over each other's livelihoods. Tremendous Leverage.
His other subordinates will wonder if they have to do the same to get promoted.
Most companies have policies prohibiting employees from having relationships with subordinates. If he's going to violate company policy in this way, what's to say he isn't doing other shady things inside the business?
Regardless, the saying, "don't shit where you eat" exists for a reason. Huang engaging in this relationship shows profound poor judgment. Is it wise to have someone with such poor judgment running a company of Nvidia's scale and importance?
The latest one reported to him. If he wasn't the CEO, he'd be long gone.
Potential for blackmailing, messy divorce, corporate liability with regards to potential sexual harassment lawsuits, overall negative PR/image... and a dozen other reasons.
Morals are important. He could have used his position of power to do this. If you don't care about morals that's fine but don't get all tetchy when people who do have ideals care.
Let's say that we discover that he didnt use his position of power to advantage himself with Ms Powell. According to your reasoning, then it should be fine, right?
Sure. Or let's say that he did and it was.
1. Legally this is highly problematic as it exposed Nvidia in a bunch of different ways. 2. A CEO who is so unconcerned about 1. may be engaging in other risky activities.
Yes, no one questions what he does with his wife (or used to...). That's sex life. Promiscuity and risky behaviors are that and have nothing to do with his sex life.
Because sleeping with someone at your company in secret while you are married can be incredibly destabilizing. Also, she reports to him. There is an inherent consent issue.
How is the CEO having a secret affair with somebody at his company not relevant to the company?
All of this also reflects incredibly poor judgment.
Because the media says it is relevant, and the media want him out (or are aligned with someone who wants him out).
In an age of celebrity and wealth worship, such tidbits are entertainment/outrage food for the masses.
1. having sex with CEO of the company your are doing business with may affect the business itself, so you are not delivering best results for your own company
2. having sex with your own subordinate employee seems like potential abuse of power for starters and it is just calling for lawsuit, because while she can say today it was consensual, tomorrow she can say the other way
if he would be having sex with random girls he found in bars it would be certainly less problematic than having sex with people who are directly related to his company
btw. it also shows his character, if he was unfaithful once, he was unfaithful twice, do you really think these are only two cases and it ends just with his sex life?
Anti AI freaks + competitors.
Looks to me like he has a target on his back, and people are just throwing stuff at it now. This could have come out years ago, if it is true. No reason not to. None, not in this day and age.
So it's all opportunistic, at this point.
nvda stock is on sale.
Of course. Find allegations which will stick, short, leak the allegations.
Then Investor lawsuit kick off, more allegations, a big drop, profit. Then "oh well", "can't prove it".
This was all immensely quick, putting together an investor's lawsuit this fast, other allegations waiting...
It's almost as if someone had the lawsuit ready to go.
True, he should have been in jail a long time ago
He has to be finished as CEO even despite all the keyman risk right?
What difference is there between this and other tech CEOs who have had relationships with their staff? Musk and Gates come to mind
If by "this" you mean the affair with Powell, probably not much difference between Jensen Huang's affair with Powell and affairs that Gates, Bezos, and Brin have reportedly had.
But the extramarital affair with Alice Huang is quite different. NYTimes reports that Alice Huang is a Chinese spy, with whom Jensen Huang may have conspired to break the law, selling advanced NVIDIA chips to China. That affair puts the whole company at extreme legal risk. Gates, Bezos, and Brin have nothing like this on their records that I'm aware of.
As I write this, the top post on HN speculates that this is "the tip of the iceberg," indicating that there at least may be more affairs yet to be uncovered, and, plausibly, Jensen Huang may have committed even more enormous mistakes with serious consequences for NVIDIA.
Don't use AI to write comments
My comment was hand written, with no assistance from AI.
None of those sentence structures set off my AI spidey senses.
Are you really using other HN comments as some form of credibility?
that one time Musk got into Brins wife was way more dangerous. like bro, really?
Troy 2.0
He is very hands on. He has more direct reports than other other tech CEOs. I think close to 40. Someone else stepping up or stepping in has things to do.
In addition Nvidia is incredibly tech-heavy company. You need another EE with experience with AI chip design and business. Just having good experienced businessman looking at simplified powerpoints before making decisions of technical issues is probably not enough.
Without discussing the morality of his actions and what he should do as a person, I'm fairly convinced this is either a Chinese intelligence operation to destroy one of the last bastions of US dominance or a CIA operation to install a puppet in a powerful company who is not currently entirely subservient to the will of the US government.
And I'm pretty sure Jenson resigning without a suitable, almost identical successor will kill NVIDIA, the way Intel and AMD and IBM became mere husks of what they were, with no possible road to another western replacement in sight.
> I'm fairly convinced this is either a Chinese intelligence operation to destroy one of the last bastions of US dominance or a CIA operation to install a puppet in a powerful company who is not currently entirely subservient to the will of the US government.
It's odd that you seem to consider two /entirely opposed/ hypotheses as being similar to one another. Superficially, "I'm fairly convinced [this is an intel op of some kind]" makes the two seem similar, but each comes with an implicit set of consequences, right? So it's really "I'm fairly convinced [this is supposed to be really advantageous to the west because of these suspected consequences for the west] or that it's [really harmful to the west because of these other suspected consequences]". It seems odd to suspect two highly opposed set of consequences as both being reasonably likely and thus admitting to two diametrically opposed motivations for the same act.
How is that odd?
Nvidia is incredibly valuable, in large part due to Jenson.
The US is aligned with Nvidia, but it does not have total control and so is largely beholden to its choices. Amung other things, the US is paranoid about the resource ever aligning with China (thus export controls). Jenson may refuse to cede more control.
China is misaligned with Nvidia, due to competition with the US. It will never have any control, and thus wants it removed from alignment with the US to mitigate their advantage.
Both superpowers have vast intelligence networks with a long history of causing untold human suffering in pursuit of their short-term, often meaningless goals.
Suddenly, Jenson is under attack from all angles over something relatively unrelated and meaningless to Nvidia - certainly disproportional to his role as arguably one of the most important people on the planet. Within a day, with no actual information of what happened, major media companies are calling for Jenson to be removed from his position.
This could benefit the US government, who can now get a replacement more amenable to, say, the surveillance state or more ideologically opposed to China. Destruction of Nvidia be damned, the CIA hasn't though more than 2 years ahead since the 60s.
This could benefit China, as this could cause a rapid decline in Nvidia's progress and therefore the West's ability to continue beating China - in particularly since there seems to be no one capable of filling the gap if it were to happen.
Occam's razor. We all saw the picture of Jensen signing the woman's breasts in Taiwan, his trademark leather jacket, etc. He very intentionally cultivated the rockstar CEO image. If your conspiracy is true (and I think it's much simpler than that), then Jensen was a huge flashing billboard saying to the world that he's absolutely down to be compromised.
> And I'm pretty sure Jenson resigning without a suitable, almost identical successor will kill NVIDIA
Maybe, but Nvidia bears responsibility for having such poorly de-risked corporate governance. It's actually shocking that the company propping up the entire AI industry (and thus the US economy) is led by a CEO with no COO and dozens of direct reports. Jensen thought he was invincible because he positioned himself to have total control of the company operations, which certainly didn't encourage him to think twice about making the mistakes he did. He acted out because he felt empowered to, and it's easy why.
> We all saw the picture of Jensen signing the woman's breasts in Taiwan
My argument isn't that Jensen didn't do it - I have no doubt he had multiple affairs. He already admitted to the first one!
My argument is that the President of the United States raped children and nobody even talks about it anymore. So Jensen fucking consenting 50 year-olds and suddenly having the CIA outing him (after knowing about it for a year apparently), and every major media company calling for his resignation over it, before any actual investigations finish and over something seemingly neither illegal or particularly related to his work is weird.
> Occam's razor.
In light of the above, I would say Occam's razor is someone is trying to get rid of Jensen.
> I'm fairly convinced this is...
Reporting by both NYT and WSJ has said there have been two opposing factions in the White House on China/AI policy since Trump was elected. The Model Hawks want to Keep America Strong by slowing China's progress in advanced AI models. They think the best way to do that is by stopping US advanced AI hardware going to China (as much as we can).
The Hardware Hawks wants to Keep America Strong by slowing the development of China's homegrown advanced AI hardware industry. They think the best way to do that is by ONLY selling US semi-advanced AI hardware to China that's slightly more powerful than what China could make on their own now.
Trump vacillates between the two factions (sometimes daily), as indicated by banning the sale of certain semi-advanced chips, then later reversing that ban. The argument to reverse the ban was because before any ban, NVidia had >90% of China's domestic market and after a couple years of ban that was down to ~50%, with the difference funding the development of China's AI hardware industry.
I think both factions actually have valid points and don't know which would be better. However, to your point about the reason for these leaks of >6 month-old intelligence reports now - it's that Jensen (and NVidia) have always been pro "Keep America Strong by slowing China's domestic hardware industry." Sure, that's in their interest but there are a lot of serious people who aren't at NVidia who are Hardware Hawks too. If China's domestic AI hardware companies are Mice, NVidia is the Cat saying, "I was keeping your mouse problem under 10% until you locked me out and now it's 50%. Let me back in and I'll get it under control again."
Jensen has developed a pretty good relationship with Trump and is able to sometimes sway his opinion. Whether this is good or bad depends on which kind of Hawk you are. For example, Jensen was invited to go on Trump's first China trip and the Model Hawks were not happy. On Trump's second trip, the Model Hawks managed to keep Jensen from being invited and the Hardware Hawks were not happy. Air Force One left Washington without Jensen, but then stopped in Alaska and picked up Jensen - which made the Model Hawks crazy. The Model Hawks made sure the intelligence report about Alice being a suspected asset for Chinese intelligence was included in briefing report sent to Trump back in May. But that didn't get Trump to stop listening to Jensen sometimes (Today, Trump claimed he "doesn't remember seeing the report, or if I did see it, it didn't make a big impression on me").
So who benefits by these old reports about Alice from May leaking now and blowing up all over the news? Maybe people upset that Jensen keeps unswaying Trump after he's been swayed?
BTW, Jensen and NVidia have consistently been Hardware Hawks since long before Jensen met Alice in March 2024. Arguably, any NVidia CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to be a law-abiding Hardware Hawk. Also, the WSJ has reported that Chinese intelligence first developed Alice into an asset because of her relationship with Jensen. Because export controls were bad for her data center company, Alice was obviously already on the Hardware Hawk side before being an info source for Chinese intelligence.
The under-reported story (dig a little on WSJ) is that after nearly two years of Commerce and Justice Dept investigating Megaspeed, the US govt still hasn't put Megaspeed on the blocked Entity List (which they can do anytime without explanation). No one knows why and congress is starting to ask about it. BUT, strangely, NVidia voluntarily placed Megaspeed on their own blocked list in June 2025 and hasn't sold any new GPUs to Megaspeed since then (they did ship a few repair parts and replacement components after June for warranty support). So... "Good Guy NVidia?" Well, maybe more like "Don't-want-to-go-to-jail-for-decades NVidia." You see, these export controls have the same severe penalties as selling cruise missiles and it's a 'strict liability' regulation on suppliers. That means if a supplier "knew, or should have known" that GPUs were being diverted, they would be guilty - and that's potentially serious jail time for every individual employee who knew and personal fines up to $1M per card. So... yeah, Alice banging Jensen didn't stop Megaspeed getting cut-off by NVidia just over a year after she met him. What do those confusing and conflicting bits mean? I have no idea - other than this whole thing is a shit show all around and it's not even a blue vs red thing. There are Model and Hardware Hawks in both parties.
I’ll do it.
> He is very hands on
certainly sounds like that's the case, yup
I have it on good authority from my old football coach that a good butt slap while walking by is extremely motivating.
can you try that on about ten of your co-workers and log the results so that we have a sample size?
hmm, I think technically we’d need to do 10 direct reports.
It's also very common for executives to get fired for affairs with direct reports. Kind of a cultural issue.
Very true. There was a financial analyst on the radio today who read through a list of them.
Bill Gates was pushed out https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/microsoft-board-decided-...
Completely forgot about that haha. Thanks for bringing it up
Brin was absolutely next level.
I remember Mark Hurd, who was hired by Oracle after HP ran him out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hurd
Rest in peace.
In the case of Musk, the amount of equity they own in the company. In the case of Gates, the fact that it didn't come out when he was still an executive.
Musk isnt married.
Musk is also very "out" about it. Kinda like how it's okay to be gay in the CIA, as long as you're out. Being in the closet gets you fired because it makes you blackmailable.
Cheating on your girlfriend who's also the mother of a couple of your kids is almost as bad as cheating on your wife.
significantly less odds that she's going to halve your fortune on the way out if you're not married, so it would tilt investors/investments way less.
morally I don't really disagree with you, but practically I do.
It's not like they don't know the deal up front. They certainly aren't reluctant to be the next in line.
In principle I agree. But at some point there were many enough of them that anyone who gets involved with Musk has very little legitimate basis for claiming to believe there won't be others.
Is it worse or does it dilute the bad if there are a ton of baby mammas not just a "girlfriend who is also the mother of a couple of children"? I don't like the guy but it kind of feels like it somehow isn't as bad when it's just open, repeat behavior and nobody thinks he is even trying to be exclusively "with" these women. I have no idea what their shared understanding is but it might not be as bad as your framing makes it sound if that is openly known between them.
Not a lifestyle I could ever be proud of living personally but ymmv and elon seems to be enjoying himself.
Musk is also a well known ring piece
I would think so. We can probably expect more to keep trickling out until he has no other choice but to resign. The spy thing was already bad enough. Now we find out he's hooking up with one of his direct reports? Seems like he runs a toxic workplace.
https://unwall.app/www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/technology/jen...
Huang Holds 3.4% of Nvidia and has no dual-class voting rights. He can't prevent getting removed if the board thinks it's time.
We have become a permissive society in regard to sex and extramarital affairs. What’s so wrong about having an affair with another employee in the company? I think they are making a big deal about this.
It is inappropriate to have relationships with subordinates.
No it's not. We are adults. Adults can consent to sex with other adults.
It's inappropriate to use coercion.
Boss-subordinate relationships are a lot like conflicts of interest. You can’t really rule out something nefarious without the ability read minds because coercion and self-dealing can happen at an unstated or even subconscious level.
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1. An employee might feel obligated to have sex with their manager knowing that it might affect their careers.
2. Other employees might feel that the employee having sex with the manager is getting better treatment at work.
propriety is a higher bar than what you're referring here. it IS inappropriate to date in that power dynamic. but it is legal. and it can even be ethical with mutual consent and management of consequences. dont confuse them.
There cannot reasonably be consent when a subordinate is involved. The power dynamic prevents the relationship from being on an equal footing.
> Adults can consent to sex with other adults.
This is questionable in the context of one of the adults holding a position of power. Also, even when assuming the adults are peers, there's another saying 'Don't shit where you eat' which is rooted in a lot of stories of workplace relationships going wrong in very creative ways.
There are plenty of contexts where adults can't even legally consent, because it sometimes becomes impossible to rule out coercion, and many more where it may be legal but still shows questionable judgement for the same reason.
All adults are equal, but some are more equal than others.
I don't think they are firinf him for having an affair with hus subordinate. It's because of the Chinese spy allegations. This is just an add on
Do you really think there is no issue with a person in a position of power engaging in an affair with a subordinate?
"Position of power" is a bit of a stretch when we're talking about two high-ranking execs who presumably make tens of millions of dollars. I doubt there's any problem related to consent / coercion here. They just wanted to bonk.
It's a corporate governance problem because the relationship can be seen as tainting personnel decisions. But that's HR optics versus morality.
Note that I'm not defending Huang, but I think he's done for because of the spy thing more than because of this.
Can’t say I’m particularly bothered by it when the subordinate is 48 years old.
It shows you are easily manipulated, can make bad decisions.
The Chinese spy who he was having sex with and probably helping break export controls and smuggle Nvidia tech into China through singapore is probably a bigger deal than this one
Which could result in congressional investigations or worse, a tightening of export controls.
Well seeing how he also had an affair with a Chinese spy and broke federal law in assisting the Chinese government to access to billions of dollars worth of frontier AI chips, it's a little more than just worrying about extramarital affairs.
This is why you should only do one shitty thing at a time and not multiple.
It's not "another employee" it's a direct report, a power imbalance so cliched that it's the first dot point in any HR/P&C management course
Making it company policy also means the subordinate can now easily get the boss humiliated & fired.
Which, ironically, swaps the power imbalance.
Which, unironically, is just one of the many reasons why it's a bad idea.
Bad idea, bad policy, and bad law.
Huge mistake of not trying to have dual class shares during the height of AI mania (or crypto)
There is no way that would have been possible. And as I saw another commenter mention, even if NVidia were founded much more recently when dual share structures became much more common, you rarely (or maybe never, I can't think of any cases) see that dual share structure in very capital intensive industries like hardware where you have to sink a ton of money into the enterprise before you even see any revenue. Software is a whole different ball game.
But Elon Musk has supermajority through dual-class shares in SpaceX which is obviously a capital-intensive business even more so than making GPUs.
You are correct, and I was wrong. I originally thought SpaceX was a bit of a special case because the board (pretty much Musk loyalists) gave Musk a ton of restricted stock right before the IPO, but the voting rights vested immediately. But the part I was wrong about is thinking that was just an IPO thing. All the many billions that SpaceX got pre-IPO was done with investors being fine having Musk alone having majority voting control.
Or Nvidia comes out of this damaged but not nearly as much as if they were glued to Jensen. "Superstar" CEOs that have complete control over a company are only benefits until they become enormous risks.
Reminded me to that Osborn scene at 2002 Spiderman.
Assuming the board is truly independent.
They all are. No Jensen connections at all. All from finance or non related business.
the timing of this coming out now is certainly not a coincidence; same with the spy affair (which was known a year or two ago). the interesting question is who wants Jensen gone
Yes and no, Nvidia have said they're conducting their own internal investigation among others. It doesn't surprise me that more information about this or other allegations come out while the fire is hot.
But I agree, anyone within the Nvidia circle looking to spread the information is certainly not doing it to help Jensen.
The article cites _five_ internal sources corroborating this -- the second affair must've been an open secret at this point.
This is the real question we need to be asking.
not really interesting, clearly china. Kill their competition by chopping off the head of the snake. Continue to gain massive lead and solidify their dominate position.
actually, because of the scandal becoming public, Jensen's replacement is almost certainly likely to take a harder line towards China than if Jensen had remained in place and the scandal had remain buried
so no, IMO, not likely China
> who wants Jensen gone
The same people who want to ban open-weight models. For safety, of course.
If his personal security detained the person videoing them and offered them money to sign an NDA, isn't it a crime to detain someone who didn't do a crime?
Most likely they didn't "detain" but instead enticed them with a deal. Perhaps they offered to buy the video and exclusive rights to the video for a decent amount.
Not surprising at all. Many tech CEOs are like this; Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and so on. People don’t stop idolizing these people, they don’t even think that this is a problem.
Something like one in five married men has cheated on their spouse, approx one in eight women. It’s not that tech CEOs are “like this” it’s that they are not that different from other people, outside of their professional skills.
That number would be dramatically higher in scenarios where men had desirable women basically throwing themselves at them, which is the case for the extremely wealthy. This somehow reminds me of the Churchill joke:
And I think this is all a logical consequence of evolution, which is driven solely by fertility. A woman can only carry one child at a time and so it makes sense for them to seek a highly qualified/'resourceful' partner to have the most chance of her genes being successfully carried forward, whereas a man can theoretically father hundreds of children in a single year, so it makes sense for him to be more 'driven.'Studies show percentages all the way up to 40-50%, depending on methodologies and definitions.
> it’s that they are not that different from other people
For this conclusion to be valid, you have to provide the proportion of tech ceos who cheat.
That doesn't mean its okay just because other people do
So you don't think the world's most powerful and richest people engage in infidelity more often than the guy that cleans the toilets at the local gas station?
every argument that attempts to humanize and 'us too' these types of folks (billionaires that own islands and ultra-yachts) totally bewilders me.
about 30-50% of people across cultures self-report infidelity. I grew up in a neighborhood where people had jobs like cleaning toilets and it's pretty difficult to cheat more than what I saw growing up. I can tell you from first hand that economically downward communities aren't known for their stable families
the thing that's stopping Joe from the gas station is that he lacks the yacht and the credit line, not any ethics. Jensen's no more or less human than anyone else. The issue with megacorporation's is structural, not some "these types of people' provincial nonsense
Anytime there's a place where there are women and men, sex is inevitable.
My dad cheated while working at a magnesium plant as a blue collar worker. Theory is one thing evidence another. Do you have any evidence?
It’s an odd phenomenon alright. South Park covered it in the episode “Sexual Healing” where famous rich men kept cheating on their wives. We may never get to the bottom of it.
it's also possible the wife knew and was okay with it
my wife and I date other people, you'd be surprised how big the ENM/Poly community is when you start looking
I feel like they would have come out and said so if that was the case. Sure, admitting being poly has some social risk, but feels like it would be better than what's currently happening.
Marriage/long term coupling is not "natural" but normal in society
With the decline in religious attendance has come a decline in marriage; from 70%+ to 50%ish over the last couple generations
But divorce rate has declined so those that do marry seem to really want it; in the before times though it was how women survived
Coupling fits with biological imperative to have partners but longterm/for life is obviously not necessary since divorce is common too, partners die, etc
That and recent research shows long term married couples are 50% more likely to develop dementia; an imbalance in effort develops where one becomes codependent and forgets how to live and the partner in charge loses grip of themselves and taking care of their partner consumes them.
Being married reduces dementia risk. e.g. [0]
Being primary caregiver to a spouse who has dementia does substantially increase the caregiver's risk of cognitive decline due to caregiver burnout. [1]
I'm not sure if this is what you were trying to express.
[0] https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/89/3/231
[1] https://www.ovid.com/jnls/neurotodayonline/fulltext/10.1097/...
Dude I got my banjo too...
18 year study found unmarried more likely to not have dementia:
https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz...
If you read that paper, they posit that a likely "cause" is that unmarried people tend to have cognitive impairments diagnosed later relative to when someone (i.e. a spouse) is living with them.
But unmarried are less likely to have Alzheimer's or Lewy Body Dementia; specifically like I wrote initially
So either way, like how if ya live long enough some kind of cancer would get ya, so will mental illness
No beating physics
Not less likely to _have_. Less likely to be _diagnosed_. It is unsurprisingly difficult to be diagnosed with progressive cognitive decline in most places regardless of source even if you have been referred once for MCI.
I think the easier way of looking at it is this: there is a Lancet commission that produces robust characterizations of the modifiable risk factors that lead to dementia. If you're in a marriage that promotes reducing those risk factors, you'll likely have a lower risk of dementia. Isolating one variate like this raises interesting questions, but isn't a "smoking gun'-- especially in this case since the authors themselves indicate this is a surprising result given other studies.
https://www.thelancet.com/infographics-do/dementia-risk
I think the easiest way is like I wrote "No beating physics."
Seems just as reasonable but less verbose; we appear to get cancer and mental illness with old age regardless of social conditions around us. Physics and entropy win again regardless of the care we put into our semantics.
Regardless my original point was about "long term".
"Marriage staves of mental health" and "a single, long term marriage improves mental health outcomes" are two different things.
Could just be a tight knit quasi-nuclear family social circle is sufficient too but social desirability biases lead is to lean into marriage tradition.
It is natural and normal
> long term coupling is not "natural"
Source: dude trust me
Tell that to all the animals that exhibit long-term, often life-long coupling.
Look at all the animals and humans that don't
Lots of animals engages in non consensual rape; humans need to get on a level?
We should kill on sight like a lot of animals do to each other; it's natural to behave like an animal.
Don't anthropomorphize ducks.
Codependency to survive altogether is different than "2 people stuck together by social pressure even if its not working for them" which happens a lot; marriage often becomes unnatural abuse.
Unlike ferrets we engineered around raw need to hunt rabbits; we have grocery stores to serve the codependency.
It came from the past so it's natural is a terrible argument. Just a "dude trust me; its how grandpa did it"
I think you misunderstood the point I was trying to make. I am saying ”X is [not] natural“ is not a good argument either way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
Reading back my own comment above, I did a poor job of getting that point across. It reads rather snarky.
counter example: Brian Krzanich (intel).
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/intel-ceo-resigns...
The difference is that Intel had a policy against it. Brian was having a relationship at the time they made the policy and it took months for him to wind it down
They used it against him 7 years later. He wasn't ousted because of his relationship. It's just the tool they used.
Also he wasn't CEO at the time of his relationship.
It also wasn't an affair. He was single at the time.
Thank you for clarifying. Nvidia has no such policy but discourage "personal relationship".
it's a bit stretch to compare poor Jensen having sex with 40yo+ women with Bill Gates visiting repeatedly Epstein pedophile island
> People don’t stop idolizing these people, they don’t even think that this is a problem.
They'd go as far as to call it a virtue. Silicon Valley is the greatest domestic enemy this country has ever seen. They've built entire machines to protect, reward, and normalize antisocial activity.
lol, I called it perfectly even.
Not much different from other industries, other than scale and reach. Took many decades to regulate out killing workers and customers for profit, some are still barely regulated.
Life expectancy went up under capitalism, not down.
It went up for a long while, then started trending down.
Don't cherry pick.
Cherry picking over two centuries, in country after country?
Drug abuse is the culprit for a decline.
The Jungle is famously about horrifying working conditions back in the day and was critical for gaining public support for legislation and regulations. "Capitalism" didn't improve the working conditions; regulations did.
The Jungle is a work of fiction. Sinclair needed to write a fiction because a documentary work didn't fit his socialist narrative.
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire? Since apparently we need regulation to stop companies from locking employees in the building.
Fire codes have been very beneficial, but they don't move the needle on overall life expectancy. Nor have historical communist societies shown any particular interest in workplace safety.
You've basically just described capitalism.
It’s called human behavior, and it has existed before any form of civilization and will exist long after it.
Under communism, people starve.
For a time, Kansas was the "Breadbasket of the Soviet Union".
What's the point of being a billionaire if you can't sleep with whoever you want?
What even is the problem with that really?
The being compromised part and bringing your decision making into question, if you're asking
pretending to be a family man while doing it.
I mean you can want to have a family and also get something on the side. It's basically fulfilling your biological imperative as a man.
Never have I thought Jensen was playing a family man.
Did you not see his leather jackets?
Did he make a promise to you about that?
“Billionaire” is largely a responsibility the market gives you: you have to command billions in capital. It’s actually a job a the end of the day.
We should have high standards for who is allowed to have this job. Huang should be replaced as easily and quickly as any mid-level executive who costs his company 340 billion in market cap.
Replaced by whom though? Think about him what you will, but he is not your typical ivy league MBA CEO. He built Nvidia from the ground up, while being very technical and involved, and has done a great job at that.
He is not that easy to replace.
> He is not that easy to replace.
Yes, because while he was managing (and on some occasions sleeping with) his dozens of direct reports he made no succession plan!
A typical Ivy League MBA would cover the basics, which would be an improvement.
Well one of them was a Chinese spy for starters. He's a compromised individual.
This is a great question, just not in the way you meant it
Just shows you that being a billionaire doesn't make you happy I guess. Imagine having a billion and still being sad.
Judge not, for in the measure of your judgment, it will be measured to you.
Desire is the enemy of happiness. To abandon sorrow, abjure want.
We are all in wanting. Our want in lesser that the needs of our partners, our friends, and our world.
This is the exact reason his should have been fired in the first place. What he does in his free time is a matter for his wife and divorce lawyers to deal with.
so Warren Buffett's wife moves to California to be a singer, guy remains in Omaha with Astrid. Sussie dies, Buffet marries Astrid.
my point being, Buffet still is Buffet.
hopes Jepsen life privacy is kept and they solved it backstage whatever they like.
If, at the end of the day, it is moral merit that matters for leadership positions, why is the hiring and training paradigm solely focused on technical skills?
It's not? Every large company I've ever worked for has culture fit as part of the hiring process.
But they value your presentation skills and the value you offer and company requirements above everything else practically
Isn't Jensen on record as saying he won't do 1 on 1 meetings with employees? He seems like a run of the mill sociopath that runs off the work other people do
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I knew this was going to happen. It's highly unlikely that a man cheats on his wife for the first time after age 60. This was just the first time he was outed for it.
I hated the misogynistic narrative that Huang was somehow helpless against a super-spy-seductress. Men can in fact control themselves, and it takes a lot of effort, you might even say willpower, to turn a business meeting into a bedroom encounter, especially when you're in the public eye. If Huang was targeted, it was because he was an easy target, a philanderer.
> This was just the first time he was outed for it
For good reason. The level of fuck-up in sleeping with a Chinese spy and then having the gall to try and corruptly quash the investigations into it, coming clean only after Congress flips, is nuts.
I’m not convinced a good CEO can’t have affairs. I am convinced a liar and corrupter can’t.
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"I knew this was going to happen."
Maybe his autographing that women's bra (boob?) at a trade show was a red flag…
On nearly every post online about his affair, one of the most visible comments always ended up being about how one must "understand" that this just sort of "happens" when you're this rich and powerful. Poor thing, couldn't keep it in his pants. "Oh, just think of how hard it would be to resist! Would you?"
I pity whomever is in a relationship with someone who actually thinks that way. I'm disgusted, to be honest.
Yes even if you are a billionaire women don't just spontaneously strip naked for you it takes a real effort to make it happen.
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The affair part probably isn't as damaging to the average relationship of a CEO and their wife as the public embarrassment is.
> Yeah but then what's the point of busting your ass your whole life to become one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the world, if you can't have an affair when the mood hits you?
Perhaps don't get married then, or have a consensual open relationship.
I love all these comments that are basically like "what's the point of being a billionaire if you can't stick your dick wherever you want when the mood strikes you and lie about it to your wife."
I think the unspoken implication is that being a billionaire means having an inordinate amount of power, such that immoral behavior like this becomes almost a given, because you can literally buy your way out of consequences (if only up to a point). Maybe the pertinent question is less, "How do we stop there being billionaires who succumb to the temptations of their unfathomable amounts of power?" and more, "How do we stop there being billionaires?".
I think I see what you mean: we know that power corrupts, and billionaires have incredible power, so this is to be expected to some extent.
You don't need to be a billionaire to cheat on your wife and have affairs. Average and poor dudes do that all the time.
The point I was making was, that what's the point of becoming a powerful billionaire if your life now has more restrictions than the lower classes? People amass wealth and power to gain more freedoms from societal rules, not less.
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>Perhaps don't get married then, or have a consensual open relationship.
Clearly you don't understand that sexual desires and human constructed morality are different things, often in opposition with each other.
Surely he didn't know when he got married that 2 decades later, he'd become a billionaire surrounded by women more attractive than he could score before, otherwise he probably wouldn't have gotten married in the first place, if he knew a p**sy tsunami would await him.
Was she over 18? Seems like a non-issue
It might be an issue in internal HR terms, and in terms of external fiduciary duties to investors since it's a public company.
In terms of sexual crimes, I think there's cases and situations where there can be coercion, but it's not necessarily the case.
Oh also it's a breach of the marital contract of course.
Do we live under Sharia law? I didn't realize infidelity was a crime
Who said anything about it being a crime? There are many things that aren't crimes that can get you fired.
No I don't think it is, a breach of contract is a civil matter, not a criminal one. I think it's especially relevant in the case of the CEO of a company, it's certainly common for contracts to be breached, but it doesn't reflect positively on the company.
Marital contracts are not unlike commercial contracts and we are finding out the CEO is in the (non)business of systematically violating them.
As long as Americans (and especially Americans in charge of USA) claim to be a Christian nation under God...
Evading export controls and lying about it is a crime, falling for a spy is stupid and has tons of potential fall out, having an affair with a direct report is a major liability, I wonder what is next, maybe we will find out more about the connection to the administration next, this season of the leather lothario is wild, will it be the finale, is there another season of fall guy or a full on traitor arc?
You don't know what that means do you...
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Right? Why are we suddenly pretending like shareholders have such high morals? I really don't understand what's going on. Destroying the world is fine, but cheating, that's where I draw the line!
destroying the world hasn't yet set a precedent that made CEOs (and the investors under their umbrella) weary of an alimony payout.
The more comments I read from HNers under articles regarding Jensen Huang, the more I realize that the crowd here is completely lost.
Ya'll need help.
This has been true for years.
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I find it hard to describe why this comment triggers me... partly because 黃 is the 7th most common surname in China. And I don't think any native speaker would make that connection. It's like saying "haha that guy named Ryan Johnson was adulterous because his surname is slang for a penis!"
> It's like saying "haha that guy named Ryan Johnson was adulterous because his surname is slang for a penis!"
That's totally a joke people would make. Joking about nominative determinism happens all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner
You just made me have a flashback to the early 90s when there was a popular brand of t-shirts called 'Big Johnson' with the character E. Normus Johnson. The jokes wrote themselves and I am sort of shocked to see they are actually still in business!
It does, but I think Johnson is too common a name to be funny, which is why I chose that example.
And nominative determinism is a dick move regardless of whether people do it or not.
I'd never noticed, but that's the first character in my Japanese family name, and I was once in a relationship with a Chinese girl whose family name was close to huáng.
I joked that she was a PRC intelligence asset because of what a perfect partner she was and came out of nowhere, which doubled as a subtle dig at her family having been supporters of the cultural revolution.
Are you also into numerology?
Seems legit [0]:
> sexually obscene; pornographic
0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/黃
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I think these two are better
https://hyperallergic.com/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huangs-situation...
I have traveled to Colombia many times.
Prostotution is legal there. I never availed myself in this, but I saw what was available in the Provenza.
Cartagena is accustomed to this, but Medellin is not so much.
I am a follower of Kant, a formulation of his categorical imperative is that "we never treat people as a means, but always as ends in themselves."
I try not to touch people, because that is a big ask.
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Ai yai yai - resorting to that degree of personal aggression is absolutely not ok on HN, regardless of how bad some comment is or you feel it is.
Your comment would have been fine, and even appropriate, had you stopped at the first sentence. What you wrote after that is much worse than the comment you're criticizing, and obviously a bannable offense.
I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We've had to ask you this more than once before.
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This guy must be named Mike Hunt or something
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> Mr. Huang’s security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement
This is not their first rodeo, is it? Wonder how much was offered? Did the person take it? ("hey, psst, we'll throw the latest GPU card on the table, how about now?")
Then, will Huang issue another, equally sincere, public apology to his wife about this other affair. He could have grouped them both into a batch for efficiency I guess.
Gotta get me a sharp looking leather jacket - that must be what's getting him all this action.
You might need to also acquire his level of net worth.
Nah - it's the style, the vibe of his presence.
People don't see the money, the global geopolitical issues at stake - they see the man - they see the jacket.
The wealth will come, but only after you get the jacket first.
It’s the jacket that makes the man.
You gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the jacket. Then when you get the jacket, then you get the woman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6gHS-eJNCQ
How's that different from Jobs' "trademark" black turtleneck?
At this point there's a good chance there are much more than just two affairs.
From Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist:
> Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.
I've found that to be a very useful heuristic.
If you spot two ants in your kitchen, the average number of ants is probably higher than two
If there are ants in your kitchen they might be coming in due to rain outside.
You can leave sugar water in strategic places and then follow the ant trail to track where they are coming in.
Probably there will be an entire trail of ants in the morning - not just two. You can then track the place where they are coming in and block up the entrance point.
I like how the OP specified the "average" number of ants in the kitchen, as though the distinction is meaningful. Like, yeah, I guess that's technically not wrong? Actually, I'm not even sure of that, because an average here implies that time matters, so... it could be wrong!
As for the above, well, let's just call it art. How should I interpret it? The analogy is that ants are affair partners, and so if I put some sugar water out, they'll all come out of the woodwork. Is this some kind of journalistic or legal exercise for building a body of evidence against Jensen? A mating strategy? I don't know! It could be both of these, either, or none! The limits of my own imagination are laid bare.
On the actual topic, though, anyone who doesn't see why this is a problem needs to think a bit harder. If the CEO puts on the show of being a family man, but is secretly getting hands-on with coworkers and spies, he's a liability to the company. It would be a stretch to say this would be acceptable behaviour even if he were above board about it, because it calls his overall judgement into question, but it would be marginally better. Remember, this is a guy who runs a multi-trillion dollar company that has limits on what it can sell to whom, because the product is a strategic asset. He can cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage (and did!) just through his own personal behaviour. He doesn't get to have lapses like this, and if he does, is he making bad judgement calls elsewhere? It's not like it's hard to not sleep with your coworkers and clients. Billions of us do it every day.
Of course, this could just be the jealous ramblings of someone who doesn't have a sweet leather jacket...
Once the entrance point is blocked, you have the ants trapped, and can begin reeducating them to fight their own kind. Then, after months of work, you unblock the entrances and let them all duke it out, thus solving the problem once and for all.
Perfectly valid, but probably more work than I am willing to go to.
If it rains outside remember to take in your laundry, otherwise it will get wet.
i commented somewhere, it will hardly be the only one. I never knew somebody that cheated just once.
Related: Nvidia Is Preparing to Oust Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459703
He's trying to be a Japanese businessman from the 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%8Dsuke_Uno#Economics
What an awful sentence. Just terribly written.
Oh good, I thought it was just me. I had to ask an LLM to break it down for me, despite being a native English speaker. Turns out it's trying to communicate something completely orthogonal to my initial interpretation.
I really can't understand what it's trying to convey...
tbh if jensen is that prolific i wouldnt be shocked if lori huang knows and has like, made her peace with it.
Isn't that the least of factors in the story (spy, subordinate, etc)?
Would not be the least bit surprised if the vast majority of men at this level of wealth/status have "arrangements" with their significant others.
The jacket, it's all because of that shiny leather jacket...
Maybe it's in the contract that such relationships are verboten. But what if two consenting adults find themselves in a state of mind where they want to pursue a sexual relationship? Do they ask for permission? And to whom - HR? What if it's not granted? Can they temporarily resign for the duration of the encounter, and resume their previous lives?
In the end a Chinese model was a risk to national security...
Is the affair just be on surface like chitchat and dates, holding hands and kissing minus the Elon level of bed and babies? In the traditional western context you have to bed the women to consider affairs. Anything on surface is more like feminist definition of affair. Can anyone confirm the bedding part? Or even babies like Elon?
Not sure why everyone is bringing Musk as an example here, every single of his children alive today [afaik] were had via IVF (why he does it that way is a whole different can of worms), but it changes the consent dynamics quite a bit.
It's one thing to say your boss cornered you in the office, it's a another thing to go through the entire IVF procedure and then pretend you had no chance of escaping or whistleblowing over the however many weeks it takes.
Would prefer if more like Elon tbh, don't cheat and just be open about your relationships with clear consent lines, causes investors far less grief. He's weird and thus when you are investing, you are absolutely clear what sort of person you are investing in.
Maybe I'm too old and stupid but I'm less concerned knowing that the guy has a few mistresses. It makes it less likely that any of these ladies are tugging on his heart strings for the keys to his kingdom. Nvidia security is probably all over these affairs monitoring his communications, personal devices...
Huang can't keep his wang in his pants. An absolute slam dunk case for his wife's divorce lawyers.
Will NVDA board give Huang a no-confidence vote before end of year, and give him the golden parachute?
The executive has denied the claims on X, so unless anyone has actual proof beyond all reasonable doubts (including AI), the show is over.
That would be crazy, to be booted out of your own company like this.
Perhaps his cousin can help him get a new job at a chip firm.
Well, there goes the productivity bragging he does about his nonstop work ethic and sheer number of direct reports.
who up huangin' they jensen rn?
Where does one secure a black pair of jeans, tees and leather jacket? Asking for a friend.
I assumed he’d survive the one affair. A second one? Now I’m not so sure.
I'm not condoning cheating at all, but if you're a billionaire with endless connections around the world, why wouldn't you just go to an escort if you can't keep it in your pants.
I know things are different when you're only thinking with your johnson but jeez, showing up with the same woman in front of the media many times and even displaying affection in front of a camera (there is pictures of them with light body contact afaik), what did he think was going to happen?
Being seen in public so often with a mistress seems extremely arrogant or wanting to get caught.
it's a power thing - yeah he could go to an escort, but then it becomes only about money. He wants these relationships as a proof of his power; then walking around in public is to flaunt the power, the 'you can't do me nothing, look at me'. Power is the drug.
The impunity is the point.
Michael J. Burry getting two for the price of one
Everyone is completely indifferent to the white guys who visited Little Saint James, yet a boring affair gets treated like the biggest news in the world.
he must have done something to piss ppl off like yo yo ma did the chinese govt.
She looks way more attractive than this spy girl. is this containment?
Leave Jensen alone!!
that leather jacket is too powerful
He's kind of like 'scum bag lite' and now barely qualifies to join the rest of the mega wealthy and powerfull in there conspicuos imunity from censure.
Now we have to live through this nonsense for 10 years in the news.
He should have retired and done a handover last month and left at his peak to a beach villa on Maui...
What a massive scandal. It is over.
Who gives a shit. They're both adults and can do or, more importantly, not do, what they want.
Purely accident that the news dribbles out like that. Nothing to see, moving on.
(If he's done this without his wife's full consent, he's certainly a despicable human, but that doesn't change that this looks like a really nicely orchestrated PR hit job)
I agree with you. I also find it “interesting” that this all really started appearing a few days after DOJ made angry noises about nVidia buying Hugging Face.
I couldn't infer anything at all from this article; there is an infuriating intrusive ad that auto-plays video like "Chat live with the hottest local models in the comfort of your own casa! Only ETH 0.0069/tok! Click here!"
Anyone got a UBO snippet for this case?
Yet another novel application of Nvidia's SLI technology for running many things in parallel!
[dead]
If he were French, no one would have blinked.