People arguing the technical and business merits of what Jensen brought to the company aren't getting how serious these allegations against him are.
The US Government is using NVIDIA chips for all sort of stuff across all classification levels. Subsequently, Jensen has deep relationships within the government that warrants additional scrutiny.
Him authorizing his company to sell massive amounts of chips to a restricted country is massively illegal, but companies work around that and have since forever. Doesn't make it less illegal, but that's only a small part of the problem.
The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
It's really about fairness. Us technical salespeople take training that tells us all of the ways that deals with restricted countries happen and how we will immediately get fired ten ways to Sunday if we forego that to close quota. Also, normies with clearances tell their partners stuff they shouldn't. Stuff they think isn't really sensitive since it seems so minute. This isn't bad until said partner spills at the wrong place and wrong time. That's how normies get sent to prison for treason. Loose lips sink ships and all that. [^0]
Getting fired -- WHICH HE ABSOLUTELY SHOULD BE -- is the least of his problems.
The claim that he sold massive amounts of chips to a restricted country as being "massively illegal" is absolutely false.
NVIDIA is licensed by the United States government to sell GPUs to China, and they do so at a rate well under their licensed quantity.
Read up on 91 CFR 1684 which directly contradicts your claims.
Your most important argument is categorically false and completely unresearched.
Your subsequent claims also have no basis: you cite a bunch of cases in which people leaked sensitive information as equivalent to the Jensen case, where the affair was with the CEO of a customer they were legally selling product to, and where we have no evidence that any leaks occurred.
This is the biggest problem with HN: people who make big claims without enough research usually get upvoted. But try saying something against, say, Rust, Apple products etc., and you’ll be massively downvoted by fanboys who think they’re superior to everyone else.
That takes the cake, I personally avoid anything Apple posted. There is much cult (and personality cult) involved it doesn't makes for any sensible discussion
> The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
Why? If he's that important then our own intelligence community ought to be doing stuff to fight espionage - doing counterintelligence, generally just making sure he's ok and providing support to him, etc. This is not some random guy. Did we just forget to do that?
If we're not doing that, then are foreign countries just after all of our important people? Forget sexpionage - what about hacking their computers? Do we have zero ability to combat any of this, whereas other countries can do whatever they want?
The relationship has been to a degree known to even the public for years, it's extremely unlikely that intelligence services didn't know about it until now and that they'd permit it if they'd consider it a possibility that Jensen could leak any important IP
Yes. A lot of folks on here were initially thinking the issue with the Chinese spy was a sort of “oh funny how silly” type issue. For someone in his position with Nvidia a strategically important company for the US that’s a grave error of judgment. Add then yesterday revelations of additional indiscretions and this suddenly a growing pattern of incredibly poor judgement.
It appears almost certain now that he’s finished. The lack of any succession planning (which also is too looks like more poor judgment) appears to be the only thing now slowing down his removal by the board.
But this is not the domain of the board, is it? Whether he put the national security at risk is up to US Government to decide. The moral side of the question is for the people involved to decide. For the board to decide is the company will be better off w/o him.
On the contrary, the allegations are tabloid level nonsense. Jensen does not even posses any "sensitive info". He is just a ceo for a company that designs chips, something China has no trouble doings. What China lacks is the manufacturing knowhow of the most advanced lithography machines which will also allow them to manufacture the most advanced chips locally. Huang however does not have a single clue about that chip manufacturing.
He has access to all sensitive info, he's the chief officer! He would not have access to some sensitive unreleased, but the rest he's pretty aware. And he signs every deal.
A single clue really? I reckon he knows a decent amount about chip manufacturing. You know, as part of his role getting microchips designed and manufactured for thirty years. Ok he might not know the minutiae about the techniques used at TSMC but he’ll know a huge amount - he’s not just hand waving at subordinates getting them to deal with it. The fact that he doesn’t yak on about it shouldn’t be confused for ignorance.
The amount of times the word “allegation” and “suspicion” and the way this soap opera is flowing around screams that its all smokescreen. We don’t even know if this women was a spy… even that is an “allegation”.
The facts are very scarce and yet this has been blown out of proportion.
> The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
Non-American here. Isn’t it your goverment’s/CIA’s job to detect Chinese agents and conduct counter-intelligence. Individuals (CEO or not) can’t do that. I heard that they already knew for a long time (as they must have). Then this becomes a hit job with political/business motivations rather than a serious national security issue as promoted to the public. Why don’t you all talk that obvious angle instead? 50s Red Scare rhetorics or a 70s James Bond narrative is politically more appealing I guess.
But we live in 2020s. We live under constant surveillance today. All national secrets are in digital environment (not on a microfilm in a CEOs leather jacket). Also Chinese spies, who require a visa to enter US, can be easily tracked the moment they get in touch with any VIP.
And for the sexual/marriage life of individuals, suddenly everyone goes back to 50s standards. (Note: This is extra interesting because I heard there is a “sex cult” attracting high profile AI engineers in SV. And everyone seems ok with it. But that’s probably another honeypot operation.)
They guy has been running Nvidia for over 30 years and has billions of dollars - what would make him want to sell out to China? What possibly could they offer him? You actually think she was like, "if you tell me secrets then I'll sleep with you"
A lot of people with ulterior motives want to throw him under the bus, don't buy into those narratives so easily. Use some common sense first.
Like most office affairs its rarely if ever about that.
Mostly its about being treated nicely, talked nicely and all by the opposite gender. Even successful people have serious marital strife, where their partner makes them feel really bad, no matter what you do for them. Its just a part of marriage.
People deeply crave for love, affection, being wanted, cared and being talked to nicely.
There you see are deeply sought after needs of the human soul. Im guessing you are willing to trade something for it.
Not sure about how the government or his company perceives it.
But most spouses take deep offence with these 'emotional affairs' reason is simple, the whole reason why anyone even gets into one is because the person with whom they are having the affair is by definition better than their spouse in this regard. Its being given live feed back that you are a bad person. People have trouble sleeping in the night in any story where they aren't the hero.
That hurts, people often fail to see how their own actions would have led to this. And some people even consider their spouse suffering through their abuse itself as a sign of love.
What's so magical about selling to the USG that it should create some sort of obligation on the part of a civilian CEO?
Remember, Huang isn't an army officer, or someone in intelligence working at the Pentagon, or a CIA officer.
Surely he gets to do what he likes. You are not at war with China. Treason is not relevant here, nor are graphics cards some sort of ultra-secret domain. What NVIDIA does is easy, it's just that the package is not so easy to reproduce, what with it having many aspects, from software to chips and fast interconnect.
If you sell national security impactful equipment to the USG, you're in a special category, private industry or not.
Do you think the USG doesn't hold the CEOs of Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, or Northrop Grumman to higher security standards than Delta or Ford?
And I think it's hard to argue that in 2026 Nvidia is not designing and manufacturing national security impactful equipment.
What’s the non-cynical explanation here which doesn’t involve Jensen having ruffled feathers he shouldn’t have?
Elon regularly gets away with way more morally (and perhaps legally) egregious stuff and yet he has increasingly cemented his position. Partly through indirect leverage from his companies and partly from buying access to power directly.
Even Sam managed to stage an employee revolt to stay in control.
For founders of companies perhaps the lesson keeps repeating itself - keep control of your companies no matter what.
I’m not sure this is good for shareholders and the larger AI ecosystem either. Corporate governance is obviously important especially for mature industries.
But Jensen has consistently demonstrated ability to keep Nvidia alive during dire times and eventually delivered the biggest profits in corporate history.
Edit: some cynical explanations:
1. China hawks in tech and admin wanted him out
2. Nvidia competitors found oppo research too juicy to ignore and sequenced a set of destructive reporting
3. People in AI found Jensen’s grip of the supply chain too annoying and wanted to loosen it somehow
You're making the assumption implicitly when comparing to Musk that this should be fair or about morality.
That ship has sailed.
Huang has a problem now because his ability to advocate for NVIDIA in a politically charged environment is damaged.
He can't be an effective CEO for NVIDIA if there's a plausible (even if unproven) suspicion that he's on a geopolitical adversary's side.
He was very strongly advocating for selling to China before this. At that point, it could be understood simply as him looking out for NVIDIA's business interests. Now, there's doubt sowed in everyone's mind about whether it really was just that.
Maybe you don't care, because you think selling to China is the right thing to do - fine, there can be different views on this.
But, a lot of influential people very much do not hold that view, and he needs to be able to effectively communicate to them also.
> He was very strongly advocating for selling to China before this. At that point, it could be understood simply as him looking out for NVIDIA's business interests. Now, there's doubt sowed in everyone's mind about whether it really was just that.
> Maybe you don't care, because you think selling to China is the right thing to do - fine, there can be different views on this.
> But, a lot of influential people very much do not hold that view, and he needs to be able to effectively communicate to them also.
Yeah I think that makes a lot of sense. He could've underestimated how paranoid the admin (and the government) is about China and overestimated how much leverage he had with his board, customers and the admin.
I'm also generally surprised to see few people in tech and admin batting for him, considering he's supposedly a relationship guy.
edit: I realize I'm wrong on the last part after browsing X
Sadly, I hate to make it political.. but I don’t think left wing people can admit they are being mislead. Huge groupthink consensus motivations on both sides but it’s much worse for left wing persons.
They commit the sins of the religious more than they think
I think you should consider the genuine do-gooders inside the federal government who wanted to blow the lid on this for a year but were blocked by the president. Now that he’s weak, they went for it.
There are three forms of accountability here, that Elon and other newer tech founders meticulously calcified themselves away from
First
The board. Elon and his brother are the board, and some sycophants. They are also heavily weighted shareholders.
Jensen doesn’t have that.
Second
The wife, who also is entitled to significant shareholdings. Musk avoided that, and major shareholders are already in trusts, his private foundation, his donor advised fund, and just outside of any future marriage to begin with. The market doesn’t care what a disagreement with his partners mean
Third
The state, and the product. Elon sells cars and it isnt the backbone of economies. The rockets and starlink do pursue waivers or avoid sanctioned countries. Indiscretions were already paid for in the campaign.
So “canceling or not” masquerades as a societal view or tacit consent, when it is solely a matter of who your masters are and if they will stand by you or have any capability of a choice.
> Elon regularly gets away with way more morally (and perhaps legally) egregious stuff and yet he has increasingly cemented his position. Partly through indirect leverage from his companies and partly from buying access to power directly.
I'm not an Elon fan at all, but ... while he sure sleeps around, I have not heard he slept with subordinates, or Chinese spies.
Musk has 4 children with a neurolink exec that reported to him. She was also on OpenAIs board until 2023, where she fed him confidential info about the company
. The relationship has been ongoing since 2016, but was kept secret until 2022.
He kept a lot of his relationships secret, including offering to pay right winger Ashely S. Clair over 10 million/yr to sign an NDA that would prevent her from ever stating she had his child, until he got a position of impunity that thar unlimited wealth and political favors buys you.
Let's not forget that if almost anyone else did what Musk pulled with Starlink in Ukraine he would get a 5 am visit from counterintelligence at his house the next day.
The difference is that Musk is an actual oligarch and Huang is "just" a billionaire.
Nvidia is one of the most critical strategic assets in the USA today, underpinning economic dominance and national defence. Leadership at this level usually operates under an implicit shield. Normal procedure would be to cover-up. A sudden loss of Nvidia's founder and CEO at this juncture is a blow to American strategic posture and a windfall to China.
I think the real story is not the affair, which was already reported in asian media in 2024, but what specific catalyst broke that protective shield and made continued containment untenable.
2 affairs - one with a sub-ordinate and one is a foreign agent who got chip flow through to a sanctioned country.
Do we even know thats the end of this? This is only whats public at this point... It doesn't feel like the end of it but more like beginning to middle.
I'm trying to figure out who pushed this story through or if this is just bubbling up naturally.
I am wondering if his public apology for being unfaithful to his wife (weird for it to be public, to his employees) is actually covering up for some corporate malfeasance.
Perhaps they reached a conclusion that congress would inevitably discover this once real oversight happens, so they decided better to get it out now before Democrats are actually in control? It makes quite a lot of sense to do it now from that perspective. Who knows, maybe a presidential pardon shoe is about to drop as well.
I figured there will be quite a lot of people taking actions like this ... but nVidia was a surprise for sure.
Right exactly. Two months is a long time for this to blow over. It will be far outside the news cycle before anyone is called up to Congress. This is the safest time there will ever be to rip the band-aid off.
I think it’s factions within the GOP. Pro NatSec people wanted to get it out for a long time. Trump blocked. They agreed to keep a lid on it for the midterm to not embarrass Trump and thus hurt their side. Now they’re free to speak.
I mean main media outlets know that the public really has turned on billionaires so this is some meat to feed the readers (great ad rev). Someone from the administration leaking the information to a reporter for sure wouldn't be surprising without knowing how much it would blow up. Also many other viable theories too.
A "windfall to China?" Jensen Huang seems to have been conspiring with Alice Huang to illegally sell high-end NVIDIA chips to China. That's a windfall to China.
Kneecapping Nvidia in this case is absolutely a windfall to China
This, right here. I'm no fan of the "CEO as god" line of thinking but given the past few years there's a strong indication that having him as CEO is going to produce a better outcome than the opposite case.
Sure is convenient for everyone to spend all their time talking about the CEOs personal life than however many billions of prohibited sales have been happening here.
"If the US doesn't allow government intervention into the business dealing of important private entities during times of scandal, to protect lies and initiate cover-ups, then China will win."
I am simply observing that at this level affairs are usually covered-up for the interest of the nation. This affair was covered-up for a bit, seeing as it was broadcast on Taiwan news in 2024, so something else changed for them to end the cover-up and broadcast the affair to America.
probably; reminds me of a quote by Chomsky making fun of postmodernists
> Some of what appears in it sort of actually makes sense, but when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. It’s perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men, it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields, and it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures. All of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.
not 100% the same, but many have made careers out of writing simple ideas that can perfectly well be conveyed with ooga booga language (or alternatively "few word" like that one guy from the Office), using instead flowery impressive-sounding prose
1) The fact that he cheated on his wife isn't particularly relevant, other than the lack of a prenup meaning she owns half his stock (4% of the company).
2) The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal (although improper and opens up potential quid-pro-quo lawsuits)
3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
4) The fact that there are allegations that he was aware that they were selling illegally to China is a huge deal.
5) Even though those export control were arguably bad, the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
6) There is definitely a demonstration of lack of judgment (getting caught selling to china rather than maintaining plausible deniability), (sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort)
7) Despite all of this, in theory he would arguably still be the most profitable CEO (if he doesn't get charged with a crime, AND if there are no other issues to discover) in the medium term, but where there's smoke there may be fire. Does this raise the odds of circular financing and other shenanigans?
> The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal
Most companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it, and for good reason.
It's a big enough deal that former CEOs of Nestle, Norfolk Southern, McDonald's and Intel were either terminated or resigned after similar relationships were uncovered.
Correction: Most US companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it.
In Europe, workplace relationships are considered a private matter as long as workplace peace doesn't suffer, and a ban would be considered legally impermissible. Europeans manage it with disclosure requirements and reassignment, not bans.
> ...and a ban would be considered legally impermissible.
This is factually incorrect. It is entirely legal for companies in Europe to restrict relationships where one party is a direct subordinate to the other. They can also legally require disclosure of such relationships.
This is common because these relationships can create significant conflicts of interest.
As someone else in this thread noted, the former CEO of Nestle (a Swiss company) was fired because he had a relationship with a direct report that he failed to disclose, and the former CEO of BP (a UK company) resigned because of a similar situation.
Isn’t it a conflict of interest to be sleeping with your direct reports? How does that play out in performance reviews? It’s definitely a massive HR problem
That's where the "disclosure and reassignments" come into play - you can date a direct report, as long as you let the company know they should report to someone else from now on.
Mammal world has also worked by killing another mammal with food you want if slightly hungry. Yet, for some reason, people don't question why murder is illegal whenever someone gets convicted of homicide. Selective appeals to evolutionary history are an empty argument.
it's very common actually. One of my former managers was pressing an intern for sex, dangling a job.
Too bad we weren't hiring at that time.
Why are they doing this? Maybe the power is the point?
The US also does not allow banning relationships, but employers are not required to employ both persons in a couple. Europe restricts many aspects of people losing their jobs, is a more salient aspect of the legal comparison.
Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion. The bigger issue is that he has shown multiple poor judgement choices and the board has to weigh if he is a larger liability than he is an asset at this point.
> Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion.
He had an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy, who it appears smuggled potentially billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips into China. And now he is alleged to have slept with an Nvidia executive who reports directly to him.
If he had slept with a waitress or his friend's wife, he would survive this. Instead, he chose to have exactly the type of indiscretions that get you fired.
Carly deserved to be fired, but Hurd was fired ostensibly for an inappropriate expense report (like expensing a date). Larry Ellison immediately hired Hurd, but HP sued.
Page, Brin, and Schmidt all dated Google employees. Gates married a Microsoft employee. I’m not sure if any of those folks dated direct reports, but does it really matter when you’re the CEO? Not condoning this behavior, just saying that there’s precedent for it not significantly impacting careers of execs. The spy thing is a another thing entirely.
Page and Brin have controlling voting shares of Alphabet, so they can't exactly be booted by the Board. Gates met Melinda 40 years ago and many things happened 40 years that would not be acceptable today.
That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.
I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive. People say he got balls of steel, chilled in his data-centers and other funny things. Shareholders are stupid. That guy's been running the firm long enough that being removed would disrupt the business so much, that shareholders piss onto their only firewood in winter. Just to be politically correct, or what's the purpose of removing him, what need does it fill? Just reveals reactive, chaotic and unstable business practices.
3) Most things speak against her being a spy and no spy would be this amateurish either. Most people think she's just enriching herself with a structured deal profiting her a lot and whoever pays most for her deals. If nationalism is involved for China, or just greed, we really don't know, but we can assume that she's surely sympathetic to China.
Jensen is just a like-able person who loves the good things in live "in full", food/sex/woman/drinking/company. I'm sure he didn't care about her business as he's a billionaire and has a lot of things to do, than caring about a crappy broker and her structured and layered shady deals.
I am an open weights model proponent so obviously I am intrigued and glad that Qwen exists (though at the moment I personally use US-trained open weights models — Muse Glimmer, Gemma 4, and I am testing Nvidia’s own Bolt —because they better fit my requirements).
I am aware that there’s a tension there, but the fact that I am glad the Chinese open weights models exist doesn’t change my mind about what Nvidia will almost inevitably have to do about Jensen Huang (or my own view of him in the scenario where he is supposedly naive about espionage!)
I suppose it colours my judgement about his actions re: Megaspeed if they were indeed a deliberate attempt to push availability of GPUs to Chinese customers to the limit; Singapore-washing is not something I am personally that troubled by.
> That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.
> I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive
If you think being a successful CEO should mean that you can do whatever you want, it seems that you look at Trump's America and...like what you see?
The law is one thing, and shouldn't discriminate on CEO status. but the decline of "cancellations" for various infractions of political correctness is definitely a positive in my book
I'd love statistical evidence that "cancellations" have decreased under Trump. As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
And people generally seem to be arguing and trying to destroy the lives of the people they disagree with at a higher rate than ever.
> As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
Has the right cancelled anyone? Like, a single person?
The biggest thing I can think of was a single episode of Jimmy Kimmel, lol. Which came from an incredibly bald-faced lie, on regulated public TV, about a high-sensitivity murder that had just happened.
Yeah I think this is the key thing. Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.
> the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long time ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.
I don't think it will happen for ideological reasons. Despite his lack of respect for the decorum of US democracy, most others have too much respect for it to start putting former leaders in prison.
However, his second term has been a lot different than his first. The first term had mostly just allegations of personal misconduct. The second term has been marked by a much more organized and systematic dismantling of the administrative state in illegal ways, which has been a lot more impactful.
I strongly doubt any American top leader will ever go to prison. That's something that gets decided by American top leaders, who are very aware of what happens when you open that Pandora's box: look at countries like Taiwan or South Korea, where it seems like basically any government position ends in a prison cell.
The US political apparatus has a lot of unwritten standards that are followed out of tradition. While people might vehemently disapprove of how Trump has pushed or blown past those limits, doing the same thing to achieve accountability might set a new lower bar for those traditions, rather than restoring them.
I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.
I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.
A lot of pretty words to give a dressed up version of "yes". That's what you're saying: Yes, it's a good thing if a US president can murder, rape and pillage without going to prison. Where do you sraw the line? Raping 10 children? 100? You're making it sound as if there isn't one.
> I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.
Those presidents going to prison did a coup to stay in power or had their personal shaman run the country behind the scenes. Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.
> I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.
Correct, which is why the law needs to be applied equally. That's the fundamental basis of the rule of law. Otherwise it's worth nothing.
Yeah, in some hypothetical situation where a leader is directly involved in a violent crime, sure, I don't think there would be any issue drawing a line there.
But that isn't what we're talking about here -- we're talking about actions taken related to his official duties. That is an inherently politicized situation where even the textual rule of law does provide for special allowances precisely to discourage political opponents from abusing the rule of law as a political weapon.
> Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.
I think the evidence around the world shows that precisely the opposite is true.
he was not particularly popular at the end of his first term. mainstream right was not pleased with the bad optics of january 6, young right was not pleased that MAGA became MIGA and "build the wall!" became "build what wall?". the early days of COVID fascism happened under him as well. it's fairly obscure lore now, but he'd lost all that deplorable alt right support that supposedly got him nominated and elected in the first place. for example: https://www.newsweek.com/richard-spencer-joe-biden-trump-mag...
he would've never got reelected if the democrats of 2021-2024 resembled democrats of 2008. his reelection was a violently retarded response to the clown world antics of that era.
This is fixed by enforcing the law. Defeatist logic like this serves no purpose. Said country delivered a large electoral defeat to that person a week ago.
The fact that this scandal was leaked is a sign that the rule of law is returning.
They were bypassing natsec based export controls by making donations to the executive branch, and used the influence to bury a commerce investigation into the matter, from the available information.
He can sleep with who or whatever he wants. The Megaspeed story and how investigations into it were mothballed have every appearance of being a big deal even beyond Nvidia.
Just putting it out there, but he might not be the best role model to try and emulate even for a ruthless company. Especially now that the laws might at last be enforced against him.
I'm sure the fact that Trump owns tons of NVDA was of _absolutely_ no consequence when the Department of Commerce granted them the ability to sell their GPUs to certain Chinese companies.
>3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
I'm 50/50 on whether or not Alice Huang is actually a spy for the Chinese government, or rather just a social climber and opportunist. She certainly didn't hide her perceived closeness to Jensen Huang, and in fact actively flaunted it on her social media.
Furthermore, I think it possible if not likely that Jensen has had more than just 2 extramarital liaisons, and if more were to come out, then IMO that would actually shift the likelihood towards Jensen simply being a lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status, rather than being honeypotted by some Chinese intelligence operation.
Sources connected to US intel have gone on the record to say that they believed her to be a spy, going so far as to have the Secretary of State brief the President directly. They don't bother the President with things like this unless they feel the intelligence is strong.[0]
A spy is someone that deals in obtaining and sharing secret information. They would be a spy if they used their information to obtain secrets on NVIDIA hardware and shared these secrets with others. There's no evidence I've seen that this happened. Someone buying NVIDIA hardware is not a spy.
> lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status
I mean, isn't that the easiest guy to honey-pot?
The best HN comment I read on this subject was along the lines of "NVIDIA sure appeared eager to avoid those export restrictions, so does it matter whether she was a spy or not?" Maybe if he was handing over, like, chip designs or something, but there's not (yet?) been any allegation of that.
> The fact that he cheated on his wife isn't particularly relevant
Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail, assuming his wife was not aware of his affairs. Anyone who knew that was happening would have had enormous leverage over him.
Even if no one actually did so it still demonstrates a massive risk.
> Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail.
Do you really want to apply that to congress, the judiciary, the police. Let's face it anyone in any position of trust, which turns out to be everyone in the end because homeless, unemployed I could be a witness to something.
So we just outlawed private consensual behavior of individuals. (Not outlawed, you just lose your right to keep your job or whatever, yeah sure right...)
Doesn't seem like an american Freedom to me but what would I know?
This reminds me of when people complain about a lack “freedom of speech” but what they actually want is freedom from the consequences of their speech.
Plenty of jobs come with personal life restrictions. Work nights. Work on an oil rig. Work on an aircraft carrier in the ocean for months at a time. Everyone is free to not take those jobs. I don’t see why a “no affairs” clause for a CEO should be all that different. If you don’t consent to the rules, take a different job.
Yes I especially want that to apply to congress, judiciary, and police, even more so than corporate CEOs! People in positions of higher responsibility, should, you know... be more responsible. Police and people in power should break laws less often, and be more trustworthy, and less selfish than average. They are in a position that requires a higher standard.
> Do you really want to apply that to congress, the judiciary, the police. Let's face it anyone in any position of trust, which turns out to be everyone in the end because homeless, unemployed I could be a witness to something.
These kinds of paths to blackmail/extortion are literally what government background checks pressure test when hiring employees. So, yes, we do want to apply those to people in positions of trust.
I'm not clear why you claim this extends to everyone including the homeless and unemployed, that seems wrong to me. You can't blackmail a homeless person into violating national security.
Jensen is not as far as any of us are aware, a spy.
Perhaps trying to make sure there aren't morality based repercussions takes the sting out of future blackmail attempts on other successful businessfolk would be a better strategy for national security than, I dunno, briefing the New York Times and trying to make it as miserable as possible?
But sure maybe the CIA is just woefully incompetent, disorganised and accountability free in pursuing this national security goal of blackmail resistance. Or perhaps this is not the best theory as to what is going on.
There's a really, really good reason we keep this kind of moral judgement private, "between you and your rabbi" as Feynmann put it.
> 3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
I'll admit I haven't really been following this story, but I ASSUME he didn't know she was a spy? (Given a good portion of a spy's job is making sure you don't know they are a spy) So why is this an issue either?
That was my understanding too. The spy part makes for a good story, but if she came out and said "Hey, I'm a spy for China. Want to share something of value to the state?" it would make her a terrible spy, so I'd assume it's really about poor judgement.
This is a bit like saying "I didn't know passeordstealer.baddies.com was a phishing site when I typed in the company's password for the bank, so it's not my fault all our money was stolen!"
For sure he is the victim of an adversarial attack against him and Nvidia, but as the leader of one of the most valuable companies in the world in am industry where IP and company secrets hold huge economic value, then you really need to expect and anticipate that spies will be trying to infiltrate your org and steal your secrets. I think you can clearly say he has demonstrated bad judgement here.
Him being removed for sleeping with a spy would not necessarily be intended as a punishment for sleeping with her, it's a self defense mechanism to prevent the spy from continuing to have access to a highly placed, compromised individual
Current evidence suggests he didn’t even do a prelim background check. His mistress worked for Chinese state television prior to the role she assumed through which she was introduced to him.
> That she might be a Chinese agent would have been obvious to Mr Huang had he inquired about her background: before going into business, Ms Huang worked at a Chinese state-run broadcaster known by its unimprovable acronym, “CCTV”.
A piece of speculative but interesting information: the FBI didn't give Jensen Huang a "defense briefing" which would warn him that he was being targeted, despite them knowing Alice Huang was a spy a year prior (memo circulated in May by the state department). Apparently this is very atypical.
The FBI so far has not provided a reason for the lack of a brief, but one reason they might not provide one is they suspect the target is a willing participant.
Isn't the fact that her company is alleged to have smuggled a ton of banned NVIDIA chips into China a lot worse than the fact that he slept with her? Infidelity isn't good but nobody will arrest you for it. Sanctioned goods are a different story
The person you replied to is not making a moral judgement. The reason it is bad for Nvidia that he slept with her is the leverage she had over him. The impropriety is just an issue for his family.
You literally only think shes a spy because the US Propaganda machine says so. There's no evidence of this.
We are so one shot by hollywood movies that if a newspaper points at an attractive middle aged women, whos foriegn, and says shes a spy we'll all believe it.
There's literally nothing to prove this, not even anything suspicious. Its just the Trump admin, whos owned by Silicon Valley oligarchs saying so. Wanting to buy GPUs, even if its for China does not make you a spy. It makes you a business person.
I know Ill get another 5 downvotes for saying this, but its true. Zero evidence. Its the perfect story to kick off the war against Chinese open source models which have really put a damper on Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue.
It's only huge because it has been made public by a large amount of medias.
If you have ever worked in any companies, you'd know the shit going on at any layers.
It's a huge deal regardless. You'll be fired even as a CEO. As the above comment states, CEOs of Nestle, McDonalds, Intel have fallen once these things were uncovered. It's basically an express ticket to getting fired.
> It's a huge deal regardless. You'll be fired even as a CEO
Bill Gates met Melinda Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.
Many such cases. Rupert Murdoch. Larry Ellison.
Maybe I would have worded it differently, but I generally agree with the grandparent poster. It seems rare that a founder would be ousted over this type of thing.
My guess is that the China dealings are the most important part, and that part is being undersold because it's actually illegal and puts both him and anyone with knowledge of it at risk of going to jail.
>Bill Gates met Melinda Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.
Bill Gates met Melinda ~40 years ago. It should be blatantly obvious I'm taking about where things stand today. Lots of things happened 40 years ago that would be generally unacceptable today.
The U.S government have known about this for a year. How serious would it be (i.e in terms of Jail time) for them to just give a warning and sit on it for a year?
For Intel at least, that CEO was fired because the board wanted him gone, because he destroyed the company. The relationship with a subordinate was only a pretext. If he'd been performing well it would never have been made an issue.
You are contradicting yourself. If destroying the company isn't enough pretext to get you fired but an affair with a subordinate is, then it's a big deal that would have been an issue regardless.
They needed a pretext because if the board publically confirmed how much damage he'd done to the company, it would hurt the company even more through investor and employee panic.
When has legal fallout from an affair with a subordinate ever destroyed a Fortune 100 company? That doesn't happen.
You are not making much sense. Was he destroying the company or not? What kind of destruction does not have obviously visible signs (to everyone) that can be acted on? What Kind of board sits down and decides that the destruction of the company is worth investor panic because 'it's worse than it looks'. What, are investors going to be calm as he destroys the company?
Do you think a CEO is a King or what that they are destroying a company and that's not enough to get booted? CEOs get fired all the time. A Board certainly doesn't need an affair pretext to boot one that is actively tanking the company.
Yeah, but does it make sense? The CEO is responsible for company success. Firing them over sexual misconduct is a decision to prioritize non-profit related matters. Companies do this all the time because of political correctness, but it is strictly speaking optimizing for other things than shareholder value.
There is no law or really good principle that suggests that shareholder profits matter above aspects such as ethics; that is just a misrepresentation of something a famous economist said.
It matters for the very obvious reason that a less senior employee may feel pressured or may lose their job when the relationship ends, that usually office affairs result in other employees feeling compelled to keep secrets, that it may result in others losing out on promotions to the employee in the affair, that they often result in abuse of resources, because it opens everyone up to blackmail, that it’s a display of bad judgement and ethics, etc. etc.
It’s nothing at all to do with political correctness.
They were talking about "underlings" who have to "obey their masters" and supposedly don't matter, while those "masters" are not "fully human" if they let anyone impose rules on their "rule making". It is the kind of talk that makes you want to cover your drink.
I read it as sarcastic pointing out the hypocrisy, and that they're fully in support of free will for anyone to pursue relationships they want at all levels. You could disagree with the latter, but the starting point doesn't seem like what you suggest
I am merely saying, if you fire a CEO because of, say, him having a relationship with an underling, you are saying: "there are arbitrary things more important than profitability".
I am not sure it makes sense given why companies exist in the capitalist system. Stockholders, I'd think, on average care more about the returns less whether the CEO is a likable character.
The real problem is potentially illegal behavior, of course.
Even in purest capitalist sense, romantic relationships cloud judgement and point at a possibility (inevitability?) that people in question (CEOs, managers, owners, board members) will do that again thus increasing the risk to the business.
This ignores the direct consequences like "worse" employees getting promoted (affecting business) or put in charge, or like in this case, potential national security issues.
His dick cost people hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value and this is about the worst case scenario outside of maybe a true sexual misconduct lawsuit coming against him. Like with your thinking taken to an extreme, if he murdered someone he should keep his title and run the company from jail because it doesn’t make him a bad engineer and we don’t want to bow to woke?
How does it NOT make business sense to consider firing bim here (outside of manosphere thinking)?
Having an affair vs. killing someone is materially different - one is legal, the other is not.
I am not debating the spying, smuggling angle here; but it this was just the affair, its a decision by the board, whereas if he run over an elderly lady at a crossing, its no longer a choice - law is law.
Btw, re: ad hominem 'manosphere' or 'woke' whatever. I have nothing to do with either.
I mean—certainly if it turns into the kind of situation where the higher-ups can’t look the other way. It probably becomes a problem as soon as your supervisors have to think about it. It definitely becomes a problem as soon as it becomes their problem, or a distraction from what everybody’s there to do.
By the time it’s public knowledge and reflecting on the company, yes, that’s a failure—and the failure of discretion is probably closer to the board’s clammy little hearts than any particular fluids (or allegations of favoritism) that may have been swapped along the way.
It's difficult (impossible really) to hide such affairs indefintiely when you've reached that kind of status and notoriety. No amount of discretion will keep someone from finding out eventually when so many eyes are on you, so it's really just a matter of time till some sort of public disclosure.
I was going to say that getting your children a job – even a good job – isn't generally a problem. But installing them as senior directors with million dollar salaries does seem like a bit much.
Jensen has successfully grown the company and thus he can be trusted to hire the best talent, even if they come from unusual backgrounds. Perhaps, they were hired because their insights from attending cooking school, etc are valuable.
> the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.
I agree with you on the first and second point. Perhaps you can argue it's in bad taste to have an affair but the private matters of adult lives should be of no interest to outsiders.
You have a due diligence requirement to ensure that whoever you sell to obeys export restrictions. You can't turn a blind eye. This is actually called "self-blinding". It works kinda similarly to KYC/AML (Know Your Customer / Anti-Money Laundering) requirements in financial services.
Yes and no. I think the board knew about the smuggling and now that it's out they need to sacrifice the CEO. Probably, they still trust him but that does not matter here, saving the company's valuation and trying to evade fines is more important.
> other than the lack of a prenup meaning she owns half his stock
They were married years before he founded the company, and lived in California, a community property state. And they got married right out of college. Unless he somehow knew that he would start a company and got a prenup that says "if I start a company it's all mine", a prenup wouldn't matter anyway (and would probably but null and void anyhow).
So this is something I kinda agree with Jensen Huang on. Let me explain. The US export bans to China in this space take two forms:
1. ASML (a Dutch company) is not allowed to sell EUV lithography machines to China; and
2. NVidia is not allowed to sell their best GPUs (made with those machines) to China.
This is all done under the auspices of "national security" and the vague hand-waving notion of "military applications". China is rapidly developing EUV on their own. I kinda expect this to be commercially producing chips by ~2030. Other people believe it will take a little longer.
So what's the problem? By banning the sale of chips to China, the US has inadvertently created captive domestic demand for Chinese made chips because Huawei (etc) cannot buy Western made chips. This is really kickstarting China's lithography efforts because anything they produce has billions of induced demand with no competition from foreign imports.
That is I believe Huang's argument: we should be selling the chips but not the lithography. I agree with that assessment. But Us foreign policy really is just blinded and can be summed up as "China bad".
Frontier labs (and Nvidia) have started using AI in chip development.
AI that requires frontier chips to train (or you steal chain of thought and try to distill…which has mixed results).
That in turn becomes a flywheel for developing domestic supply chains for chips.
See the latest reports for super intelligence takeoff. They (again assuming the timelines are semi correct as it’s all guesswork) show takeoff significantly before 2030.
The worst thing you could do is allow China to accelerate their domestic chip development via giving them access to chips needed to accelerate the AI flywheel.
There are a lot of Game of Thrones type of stuff going on when it comes to chips and AI.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc do not want Nvidia chips to sell to China because it makes the GOU supply constraint even deeper to American companies and it increases model training/inference competition.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of these players worked behind the scenes to try to oust Huang.
The idea behind the export controls is that by 2030 we’ll have some sort of superhuman intelligence and it’ll be impossible to catch up. I spoke to Biden’s ai advisor and that’s what he told me. They know China will catch up but are betting it’ll be too late for them by then.
That's just fan fiction. The only way it's too late is if there are no limits to AI scaling in the universe. Otherwise, China will be able to catch up.
The only other way is that these people want to go war with China as soon as super intelligence is invented.
3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
She's alleged to have been an 'intelligence asset', which is not the same thing as a spy (assets are not agents). Assets are often just good sources of insight and analysis, whereas agents are tasked with active deception and exfiltration of information. Jensen Huang is arguably an intelligence asset; I'm sure he's given informative briefings to spooks on the state of the world, albeit not necessarily knowingly.
A related question to this is whether Jensen Huang even has a US government security clearance.It's not obvious to me that he's privy to any government secrets, even if the US regards Nvidia as a strategic asset. To pick up on your point 4, he might have been knowingly violating the law, a problem for any CEO. But if he's not definitely violating sanctions and is instead just chasing profits, that's considered the norm.
To be frank I think this is a storm in teapot because there have been rumors about his affair floating around since last May, and if the US government has known for at least that long and hasn't intervened or arrested him it's probably not that big of a deal. I can't help wondering if it's a case of the current US administration trying to look tough after the President suffered a humiliating election defeat.
It breaks my heart that so many people will excuse his infidelity as irrelevant. We need better leaders to set examples for the youth. This current crop is so slimy and distasteful.
Other countries and cultures formalize infidelity, Americans just haven't bothered doing so yet.
Even reading the history of European nobility, it is amazing how often you'd come across married nobles who didn't even live in the same city as their partner, and who openly had mistresses or young handsome men hanging around all the time.
I've also talked to Chinese business men who lamented that they are expected to have an overseas girlfriend, almost as a sign of status.
And hell, Saturday Night Live has been joking about rich old ladies and their love of hiring pool boys for literally decades now.
My point is not to normalize cheating, but rather that all sorts of arrangements have existed throughout time and different cultures and instantly saying "he's sleeping with someone who isn't his wife!' doesn't mean that person is devoid of morals.
This kind of morality is between you and your Rabbi. We are allowed to look down on it all we like. It has no relevance to law or keeping your job because if you allow this kind of thing to have relevance it never ends. Rank selfishness comes out in so many ways.
"You got a parking fine, your social conscience is clearly lacking..."
It does end, because people lose their jobs for office affairs all the time and rarely if ever for parking tickets. There’s no moral inconsistency there, not all bad behavior is equivalent.
Not many, because we have principles of that kind of morality not being applicable. Double parking beside fire hydrants isn't universally celebrated though, is it? I look down on that kind of thing, you might be the same yourself.
Your opinions are just that, but not really nuanced.
1) This is a huge matter of character. If you cannot be faithful to your wife, what makes you a faithful leader of a company? There is also the issue of respect: when a leader is morally compromised, the people he is leading lose confidence and respect in him.
2) Isn’t there something of a power dynamic issue here too? He has a greater responsibility to use his authority and power as a superior to not abuse that authority, and committing adultery with an inferior is a huge problem.
3) On what basis is this a huge deal and the previous two are not? Where’s the nuance? It’s just arbitrary.
4) Well yeah, it looks like he was complicit in breaking sanctions. It’s no longer an arms-length deal.
5) Again, why are the first two worth shrugging shoulders and this one is not? It’s no big deal, people cheat and break the law all the time.
6) That sure undersells it. It underlines the stupidity of sin, and the sinfulness of man.
Or is the evidence right over there next to the evidence of WMD?
I know some people believe anonymous govt officials but I kinda don't so if there's actual evidence, let's see it, or note the the doubt legitimately exists.
It seems a very odd thing to be briefing newspapers about rather than the very many other, seemingly more useful ways of using that information if it is true. How does everyone feel about the CIA briefing the New York Times in general to seemingly get a CEO removed? Who takes responsibility for making that decision?
That’s… a take. The fact the only problem you have with him violating export controls is that he got caught isn’t really nuanced. It mostly just points to you not having a moral compass.
Whether he would be the most profitable CEO is absolutely irrelevant. The guy is literally facing prison time if he can be directly tied to the violation of those sanctions. If the board takes more than about 30 seconds to come to a conclusion they should probably all be replaced as well.
> Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.
I don't think you can reasonably argue that their relationship must have had a significant power imbalance or what have you if you can't even decide which direction the power imbalance went in. Why is it impossible that the relationship was, all things considered, on roughly equal terms?
I think you've made the assumption that I'm assuming something.
>>> Or he's a predator.
>> the woman is 42...
> In general, adulthood does not confer an immunity to coercion.
I'm only responding to the idea that one must be young to be victimized by a predator, which is silly and false. I am not, however, supposing anything of the sort is what happened here.
1. Cheating on his wife when that will likely significantly change the ownership of the company is a big deal;
2. Here's where I disagree most. A married billionaire CEO sleeping with an also-married subordinate is a huge deal and that alone warrants an ouster. It creates huge legal exposure for the company;
3. The biggest issue with the Chinese spy is he's wealthy enough that this shouldn't happen. I'm sorry but you can afford corporate security who can vet the people you're involved with and do so discreetly;
Huang hired Heller (a crisis PR firm) a year ago. It seems like he knew something was coming and possibly failed to inform the board. Ok, that's more grounds for termination.
I too am reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
> Even though those export control were arguably bad, the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
On one hand I firmly believe that if a rule is stupid you have no moral obligation to obey it. There might still be consequences though, however unjust.
On the other hand so many rules can be in place for years because people just don't obey them so their stupidity is mitigated to the point of invisibility.
You can argue about what the word "spy" really means, but even the source you quote thinks she's an asset for the Chinese establishment who was working to secure access to Nvidia chips for Chinese users, in contravention of US sanctions. A terrible terrible person for Jensen Huang to (literally) be in bed with.
The details are relevant if you care about the story. If this were flipped, it would make a difference if she was working for the CIA, the state department, or Intel.
> If this were flipped, it would make a difference if she was working for the CIA, the state department, or Intel.
Because those are independent from each other in a way that the corresponding institutions in China are not.
Every large Chinese company is under the direct control of the CCP. Working for a large Chinese company means you are working for the Chinese government in the same way as a state department employee (very differently from someone working for Intel, at least if they haven't individually received a National Security Letter).
> The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal (although improper and opens up potential quid-pro-quo lawsuits)
That is absolutely a huge deal, I have no idea why you don't think it is. That is the kind of behavior which anyone in an American workplace knows is not tolerated in the slightest and would lead to firing. The fact that he did it anyway shows he has shockingly poor judgement.
You've left out the worst parts of the scandal, which involves the US government investigation into the Megaspeed being buried after a large contribution was made to the White House ballroom fund. This website has a pretty good summary https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-nvidia-scandal-no-e...
Such weird takes. Selling shit is bigger deal than destroying your family?! Fuck money, take care of your family, your lives! Family > geopolitics. Everything trickles down from there
> I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.
Huang himself said his infidelity hurt his wife and his kids. The people rushing to normalize this behavior are elevating sexual freedom above family obligations. Those people are wrong.
If this had happened at a more recent founder-led tech company, the board would have far less practical independence
Dual-class share structures have become the defacto standard for founder led companies, giving founders disproportionate (even majority) voting power.
Someone like Zuckerberg effectively controls the board and would be extraordinarily difficult to oust against his wishes (absent some exceptional legal intervention or a decision to step aside)
I think even if NVIDIA were founded recently, it still wouldn't have such a share structure. The companies that do have dual class shares are software companies that can grow significantly without raising a ton of capital. NVIDIA being a hardware company, that is a lot harder to do even today.
The theory is that if an investor is under no compulsion to purchase shares that entitle them to no say in governance, so if they do so, they only have themselves to blame.
Anthropic are planning a bizarre share structure that strips any voting power from shareholders. They will have a single special founders share, held by some new entity owned by the founders, that has 51% voting weight. 1 share to rule them all.
This is kinda huge; my layperson view is that Jensen has been responsible for their long term technology strategy, which requires deep understanding of so much outside of the business domain. I'm not exactly thrilled that they are "eating the world" (hf purchase had me bent out of shape, for example), but they've undeniably executed on some long term complex shit. Who could take his place?
I wonder about Tesla. The Cybertruck was Musk’s baby and I wonder if the company might be better off with someone a bit more balanced at the helm. They might have needed Musk’s outsized personality to warp the perception of electric cars long enough to get the mass production rolling, but now maybe someone more amenable to regular incremental improvements rather than another big bet on AI and Humanoid Robots. Spin that stuff off to another company and focus Tesla more on their core business.
They have (had?) talented engineers, they may have a future as a decent car company if they didn't keep getting pulled into 20 directions by their 5 minute attention span CEO.
The trillion dollar valuation would be gone for sure.
He may not have predicted the specifics, but they didn't just happen to be there. Nvidia started work on CUDA in 2004, and aggressively iterated machine learning hardware and software for twenty years to get into the position they had for the boom.
Large companies always have a backup plan in case the CEO needs to be replaced. What usually happens in these cases is that a new CEO will be named. That new CEO will focus on maximizing the company's earnings while neglecting the tech. And the company will be an earnings winner for the next few years.
He's out as CEO but he'll continue to be a force at Nvidia. If the new CEO is smart, he'll keep him in the company, but it will be hard since Huang will be seen as the company's leader and it will be very hard for Huang to act any other way.
They need to fire him outright. The company needs to set the example that misconduct won’t be tolerated at any level. Keeping him on in anything but a transition capacity would be a mistake.
The no-going-back issue is the corruption. Jensen corruptly quashed an investigation into Megaspeed. He then quite clearly expected Republicans in Congress to back him, which is why he only came clean when forced to.
I agree the corruption and conflict of interest stuff is the real issue here and is serious. I’m just criticising the hand-wringing over him banging some random woman (or women, as it apparently turns out), as if that is some unprecedented or shocking behaviour or worthy of a reprimand on its own. Most of the world left that prudish shit behind in the ‘90s.
I think marital infidelity is shitty behaviour but I also think the main issue here is that this man in this job with this global significance thought this woman was safe to be involved with.
His board must think he's a lunatic. They have every right to know if he's having an affair with anyone (because marital infidelity is a personal corruption issue that is rarely not a problem when it's a CEO, since carrying off an affair usually involves suborning staff in some way). But this? Madness.
> the hand-wringing over him banging some random woman
I don't care about it. But I do understand folks who are dismayed to see someone who many of us–myself included–saw as a bit of a paragon until a few weeks ago turning out to be a total shithead.
Not a paragon but definitely a very capable entrepreneur.
I'm disappointed in him as a business person, not in a some moralistic sense but because he's clearly very smart and capable yet made himself vulnerable with these two dumb mistakes. In his position there are a lot of external interests who want leverage or control over you.
I’ll give you a shortcut for the future, and I will be downvoted for doing so.
Don’t look to billionaires if you’re looking for paragons. They all fail basic ethical checks. It’s very easy and convenient to not look for these failures. But, inevitably, when somebody starts looking hard, they find them.
I don’t think it’s necessarily prudish, but in order to accurately judge it you need to know if someone’s ENM or not, and that’s more than most people make known about their personal lives.
Stepping outside of your marriage behind your spouse’s back is still scummy behavior.
AFAICT, (b.) isn't correct? The alleged spy works for a Singaporean company called "Megaspeed"[1], and while there is a conflict of interest argument, perhaps, "direct report" seems incorrect.
Regardless of that, the comment above still seems correct, and a sibling comment points out that (as a rather new development), that they are separate women.
Considering the current administration and the amount of corruption by trump and co, I feel like not following the rules is too simplistic an explanation for being targeted like this.
Not familiar with the details, I asked the ai overlords to gather up public evidence and give me a summary and... this feels like a very premature accusation. Unless you know something that isn't public, seems like we need to wait and see.
As people said about the Huggingface incident: if you see one ant in your kitchen, the best estimate for the total number of ants actually present is well above one.
One affair was a mistake. Two, with a spy and an employee, are a real failure of responsibility -- and those are just the ones we know about.
I don’t understand you Americans; you live in a disproportionately violent society, tolerate all sort of abuse and manipulation, then will scream hysterically at anyone having an unconventional sex life.
They were shipped to a sketchy Singaporean company that his Chinese spy-mistress worked at, and IIRC he tried to prevent investigations into whether those chips were being redirected to China.
The whole “Chinese operative” reeks of a grossly cobbled together smear campaign, spoken with the voice of a BW cinema newsreel from the McCarthyist era
Engaging in a relationship of any sort with a direct report (the second woman he reportedly had an affair with) is typically prohibited behavior. The imbalance of power between a boss and a subordinate in their report line just screams sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.
It's nothing to do with prudishness about his sex life and everything to do with his actions endangering the company.
Typically prohibited because it comes with the *risk* of sexual harassment accusations.
But so does walking around in public without covering all body head to toe, indeed some countries ban women from doing so, just to avoid having to deal with aroused strangers.
Simple risk aversion or trespassing on personal freedom?
Reducing this to “an unconventional sex life” is a weird and sort of stupid take when matters of global trade and export sanctions policy are concerned, but sure, we’re all a bunch of violent prudes over here.
Well, what makes me little dissapointed is instead of focusing on issues and topics that really matter, we discuss who f*cked whom.
There are gravely important matters to focus on in the current state of affairs that affect us all, our kids and future of human kind, but we got somehow trained to waste our focus and time on mere noise every single day.
I'm talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as published in his landmark paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" that appeared in Psychological Review in 1943.
You would do well to read it, bearing this whole saga in mind.
But if that is too much for you, Wikipedia has a tl;dr:
This doesn’t bode well for Anthropic’s IPO indirectly, due to whole AI industry being propped up largely by Nvidia’s circular investment.
Also there’s likely a big overlap of institutional investors who are both NVDA and ANT investors and will now likely seek to dump ANT at the opening bell.
If anything this should impact the IPO only to the extent it affects the production of new compute capacity, because it is clear that is the #1 thing they need to scale revenues.
Part of me wonders if recent problems with AI (Huang leaks, OpenAI models hacking Huggingface), haven't been arranged by OpenAI in order to poison Anthropic's IPO.
This might rather save the IPO. Banned open source models will allow the closed source players to maintain power and recoup a larger part of their investment by driving up the prices.
Short term, days or weeks, there will be panic. But the impact of the change won't really be felt for years to come. For the next few years, the company will be fine.
The coup of Jensen Huang was precisely organized by the same large institutional investors.
They want NVIDIA to lock-up firmware and prevent any open-weight models from being run. Everyone (at least in US/NATO/US-aligned world) will be forced to use Anthriopic/OpenAI or some other US based closed source model.
Open models will be banned at the GPU level.
This is done to cement the multi-trillion dollar valuation of the AI labs and prevent AI bubble from popping due to customers using free open-weight, instead of pay-per-token closed models
fall of nvidia is acceptable collateral damage, they are just hardware vendor. all their chips are made by TSMC anyways. And they can be replaced by OpenAI's inhouse chips or googles TPUs, made in the same TSMC factories.
no biggie if their valuation will deflate a bit just like Cisco did in 2000.
pure-software business like openai/ant, will be protected and their global market will be protected
If anyone can make chips like Nvidia, why isn't another company doing it already? Anything can sound easy if you reduce it enough, but I really don't see how it is that easy in practice.
Indeed, If the CCP stays stable long enough they'll (as a country) succeed at it.
Not because they care about the rest of the world, they care about their own domestic market/sales though.
They successfully re-invented half of modern consumer tech inside China already, the the US closes a market, it hurts them for a few years then they close that gap.
For decades it's been "Yeah they closed the Gap on X but we have Y" then "Yeah they closed the gap on Y but we have Z" and Z starts to look pretty uncertain.
At a certain point you have to realise that with enough capital and people you can do the things that the other people with enough capital and people are doing, there isn't really any secret special "America has to be the tech leader" sauce, there wasn't when the British where the world leaders or when the Italians where or the Middle East and back through history.
They can't even stop one company from selling physical chips to China, yet somehow they're going to prevent anybody from running open models? I don't know, it doesn't seem likely to me.
there will be divergence: US-aligned world (NATO+Korea+Japan and other vassal states) will bend over and agree to whatever regulation Department of Commerce/State is cooking to ban open weight (Chinese) models.
the rest of the world will be starved of GPUs and chipmaking equipment and chemical supplies for chip making
NATO really barely exists anymore as a consensus mechanism, it doesn't make that kind of policy or have that sort of policy influence, the "US-alignment" of the world has never been weaker, and the genie is really out of the bottle on the technology anyway.
I don't see how this can happen, though. There are a lot of GPUs out there and open models have already been downloaded millions of times. (IIRC Deepseek v4.1 Flash has been downloaded nearly 2M times just on HuggingFace, just over the past month.) The NATO world already relies quite heavily on open models, in many cases served by Mistral and other local providers. China is also developing its own hardware -- Huawei isn't slacking -- and it's not that far behind. And I'd bet there's no such thing as a "GPU Level" block that can't be hacked away.
Such a move would also be transparently dystopian... though, in fairness, I suppose that makes it more plausible than it would otherwise be...
they will use National Security as a pretense to force everyone on "verified-aligned AI".
if Uncle Sam has not approved your model, it will be illegal to run it as a AI risk.
Americans have swallowed even worse limitations on their freedoms, so nobody will even notice that, because all notices will be sent to hyperscalers, neoclouds, and other large operators of GPU farms
The thing I don't understand is what is the real issue? Just the bad PR? I would kind of think affairs are pretty common, it's just this is public? I'm struggling to find anything where he did something bad business wise or compromised national security. Seems like Americans just love the sensationalism of affairs. Makes for good news I guess.
The woman he was having an affair with is suspected of being a Chinese spy, and she may have been using him to circumvent US export controls to move lots of NVidia chips into China.
but we don't have any evidence of that? also, seems the wrong person to target to do that right? He'd leave a long evidence trail trying to get people in the company to do that? I'd think if you wanted to do that you'd target someone further down in the operations side of things. So all we have is he had an affair with a possible "spy"? If he didn't know she was a spy, and didn't take any actions that circumvent anything, basically he just had an affair? Given intelligence agencies knew about this for a long time, and didn't tell him, kind of says they didn't have anything of substance and there was no real risk?
We actually don't, other than the U.S. government claiming she is. The timing of this seems quite odd considering the current government just lost an election, and has a history of blaming things on China.
Only accusations and suspicions at present, possible evidence in the future.
I don't have a deep understanding of the events, but my superficial impression is that China set up a shell company (Megaspeed) in Singapore, and put this woman in charge of it. She then persuaded Huang to engage in intercourse of the physical and commercial varieties. I get the impression he may have convinced some US officials to look the other way, to not dig into the affairs of the "Singaporean" company. That's where he may have strayed from "sucker" into "co-conspirator."
That would be problematic irrespective of him having an affair with her though. The real story then should be the circumvention of the export ban and the coercion of US officials, not the affair itself.
A CEO cheating on his wife doesn't exactly paint them as a trustworthy leader to partners, suppliers and customers. Even less so when he does it twice, with a foreign intelligence operative.
I kind of just assume this (affairs) is likely the case with a reasonable percentage of CEOs, and if he didn't know she was a spy, he was just having an affair. Also given all the photos, it wasn't even that much of a secret. I'm just struggling to see what he did wrong other than the affair. Given approx 15-20% in US have affairs not really out of the ordinary.
Can someone make the strong case for why he should be ousted?
I’m not deep into this story, but my initial reaction is that marital infidelity doesn’t seem like a strong reason to oust him, aside from him possibly being compromised by an international spy. Haven’t other successful leaders continued to lead after having their affairs exposed?
(And no, I don’t believe what he did is morally excusable for the record.)
So let me get this straight, there is now a grand conspiracy within nvidia and its supply chain network to avoid export controls? How exactly would that work? "Hey its Jensen, can you call John in shipping and send 16 containers of H200s through Myanamar to China?"
According to the NYT[1], Megaspeed (originally Chinese owned) was registered in Singapore in 2023, allowing it to bypass US export bans. FOUR days after the re-registration, Nvidia designated Megaspeed a preferred partner, giving it priority access to advanced chips (H200). Seems a bit odd.
Then Nvidia's general counsel contacted the commerce dept in 2025 to ask about a smuggling investigation into Megaspeed and whether the U.S. was involved in Singapore's detention of Alice Huang. Direction for this likely coming from Jensen.
Align that with his active lobbying of Washington officials to loosen export restrictions to China specifically
So because you, in your infinite knowledge of international smuggling, can't envision any method for evading export control, it must not be possible. Is that what you're saying?
Not really that complicated of a scheme! The main thing is that the sales people... they "know" this is likely export control circumvention but choose to not make a stink about it. Willful ignorance.
Often times these export control issues play out like:
- big deals made with shell companies
- most people involved are incentivised to play along and pretend to not notice the shell-ness of the company
- one person doesn't get the memo and is like "uhh... wait isn't this bad?"
- now that the phrase has been uttered, either cover ups happen or a bunch of other nasty shit happens
Reality, I suppose that most procuments is played along the line : this Singapore company claimed it was for their local legal entity, and here the certificate/contract they signed.
At this stage, there is no reason to not sign the contract to provide whatever they ask.
DD done, risk management done, risk but acceptable etc.
Maybe more "Hey, sell to this new Neocloud I met with in Singapore. Sure, it's ran by Chinese nationals, no, I don't know who's workloads they're running, don't worry about it."
...which may or may not be a violation of the export controls but it violates the intent.
It's come out that he was having another affair with a Nvidia employee as well, their vice president of healthcare. Having an affair with a client is one thing but having one with a client and a subordinate is maybe enough for the board to remove him.
There isn't enough discussion of how many controls needed to fail for Nvidia to smuggle billions of dollars of GPUs to Chinese firms in violation of export controls. The affairs with alleged spies is not even the most egregious failure of corporate governance.
Controlling such high-volume products has never really worked, especially if you sell to other third countries. Plenty of western electronic parts show up in Russian weapons, despite export restrictions.
These are matters of degree, and I challenge you to find a comparable example of arms vendors having 20% of their revenues from vassal states of geopolitical enemies while also having their leadership be personally compromised. Makes sense why Jensen boasts about not having written contracts documenting his crimes when, e.g., he was going around Singaporean family offices raising money for Malaysian shell companies to place orders on behalf of China.
Better hope AMD ascendant limits the main (only?) downside of alienating allies (once again, but from "our" side this time) for no upside whatsoever, not even rule of law
(Taiwan. You guys have no idea how this is/will be regarded in Taiwan. and Japan. Where infidelity is baked into the culture already.)
Dems and their sympathizers are taking the rapidly descending Republic and pointing it nose down.
But a separate foiler is that Jensen and family have been preparing for a year for this exact scenario and succession is already planned five years out
Is there any reason why this will actually change the fundamentals of Nvidia's business so long as 5080s go for as much as a used car and the entire world wants H200s? Even if they lose an extremely hands-on CEO, they're selling a very expensive product with extremely high global demand.
Yeah I genuinely don't know either! I'm just very curious about the effect an ouster will have not on the stock price, but the business of designing and selling chips.
I'm concerned about how this further could impact consumer access to GPUs and RAM, if he's replaced with someone who will prioritize these markets even less than they already are.
I wonder what happens to NVDA afterwards. People say Jensen is NVDA or at least he has a lot of controls over the company. I guess they finally found the right time (very bad midterm) and the right opportunity (mistress as Chinese spy).
I even wonder whether some elements within the Chinese government has a hand in it -- not (only) the mistress part but the ousting part.
I think it's worth even considering that if the allegations are true that the objective was to get Huang fired. Sure, he sold China chips, but they have their own homegrown chips now and the Chinese government have played a direct part in that.
I'm thinking the people behind trying to oust him are people who don't appreciate him likely knowingly violating export sanctions and putting the rest of the company and himself at risk of massive fines and criminal prosecution
There is no “they” in this. My read is the timing of all of this entirely down to the results of the midterm elections.
Over the next two years, Congress is going to haul in every tech CEO who licked Trump’s boots. I think Jensen tried to get in front of it and now journalists and institutional short sellers are digging up the dirt.
Interesting to see what happens to the consumer, gaming GPU market.
Financially it almost certainly makes sense to sell to AI hyperscalers alone; without Jensen, perhaps Nvidia shifts like Micron before them, leaving the lower margin consumer market to others.
I would figure Jensen for the type to "dance with the girl who you bought to the dance" type. A new CEO may lack that sort of sentimentality for the gamers/prosumers that made Nvidia.
It's not immediately clear that Jensen is as visionary and indispensable as some people claim. True, under his watch, Nvidia rose from a relatively obscure company to one of the largest companies in the world, and even a national asset. But it's really hard to believe that these achievements are due to Jensen's brilliance. Jensen didn't create the crypto mania that propelled Nvidia in the 2010s, nor did he create the current AI revolution.
To me, he had the good fortune of standing in the right place at the right time. He is no Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly started the PC revolution and the iPhone revolution. This is not to deny his brilliance and business acumen, but I think too many people overstate his contribution to both the company and the United States. Of course I could be wrong so I welcome correction or alternative viewpoints.
Speaking of the US, Jensen has indeed become a liability. A compromised CEO is, of course, a liability to a national asset, and a politically toxic one at that. Nvidia is a business with sensitive political ties now. It can't afford to appear compromised in the eyes of Washington. Therefore, Nvidia's stakeholders must let Jensen go; otherwise, it will affect the company as a whole.
Jensen made basically two visionary decisions. The first was to promote GPGPU with CUDA across their entire lineup including consumer hardware. The second was to specifically invest heavily in supporting machine learning way before anyone else in chips cared. CuDNN came out in 2014, just two years after AlexNet. Three years before the transformer. Eight years before ChatGPT. Before PyTorch. Before TensorFlow. Other chip CEOs probably hadn't even heard of AlexNet in 2014. Even at the time I thought[1] AMD and Intel were crazy to completely ignore a market opportunity like this. They still haven't caught up.
Assuming these decisions are attributable to him personally, then he absolutely deserves the description "visionary". That said, he's made plenty of other choices I don't like, and also invested in plenty of silly stuff that isn't panning out for them. I don't really think Nvidia needs a visionary right now. They have the best business in the world and they just need to execute. Regardless of whether he deserves to be ousted, the company will be fine without him for the next decade at least. So a stock selloff is silly.
Plenty. But also I'm sure there were a lot of decisions he made earlier in the company's history that led to them being in the position to start the CUDA project. I'm less familiar with those. They were consequential at the time but now they only matter inasmuch as they allowed the company to survive until AI took off.
It still baffles me that most people don't realize how success in 'business'/'leadership' positions has almost nothing to do with an individuals skill/intelligence in leading/decisions but simply mere luck and timing. You could argue that to attain a high position in a company requires some level of shrewdness and intelligence though, but that is another game.
The common argument is, well 'x' leader has had success in 5+ companies! Surely they must be excellent visionaries. Firstly, no single person in their lifetime can possibly launch/aid enough companies to success to have a large enough sample size to prove they are a factor for success. Launching 'x' amount of companies is great but its still such a small amount that it cannot really demonstrate anything. Secondly, once you have had success once, you gain connections, wealth, e.t.c. that only bolster further endeavors that you do even if they are pretty bad ones.
Ofc, there are things an individual at the top of a company can do to make 'good decisions', but this is mostly just selecting the right people below you to delegate to (thus reading/spotting talent well) and listening to your data and people to get as much information as possible before making overarching decisions based on that. This is what I consider common-sense and what most people do in their day-to-day jobs all the way at the bottom of companies anyways, alongside all their regular hard-work (engineering e.t.c.). Upper management just has the luxury of only have to focus on the common-sense dull part; listen to incoming data, make obvious meta decision.
You are really not giving the man any credit - I suspect you weren't part of the GPU era of video games and don't understand the roots of nvidia. That man hustled that company. You can't say things like "right time and right place" without being a little blase.
I don't know much about Nvidia's history, but isn't Jensen largely responsible for CUDA and the company's monopoly on machine learning hardware? It wasn't an obvious bet at the time that this would pay off, but Nvidia sure poured a lot of money into making their software stack so good that nobody wanted to even consider other options.
Yes, you're entirely correct. But you're also underestimating the people's potential to squander great opportunities like these. Look at AMD for example, they had a good head start over nvidia yet they haven't done anything remotely as good.
Under his watch? You mean the entire time from the very beginning. He built the company from nothing and you are not sure he is visionary and indispensable. can't make this shit up :)
You're not really addressing the point made above, that the things that contributed the most to Nvidia's valuation (crypto, AI) are not things that Jensen had much to do with.
Right - unreal to think the founder from the 90s isn't core DNA to nvidia. All the thread here thinking you can parachute in a CEO and nvidia would be fine.
It's #3 and shortsellers. There's no one who can lead Nvidea, like he does with his technical depth, connections and trust within the company. Getting rid of him will be a loss for all investors and board.
If Nvidia is going to fire Jensen Huang, my question is whether Jensen will be allowed to start another "Nvidia".
I hope he's allowed to do so. He now knows how not to get trapped into a tactically targeted honeypot, he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.
This minus all the cruft and legacy overhead of a company as old as Nvidia. I'm now hoping he gets fired.
I don't think Jensen without Nvidia would be better, but he's uniquely suited to fund a company, raise an enormous amount of capital, jumpstart contracts and partnerships, utilize connections at the highest levels of the global economy, and attract talent across all levels of a new company. Very few people, if any, have the foundations to do this.
Because he can start a new company knowing everything that he got wrong the first time around, be able to hire absolute badass engineers who got fired from Nvidia because some Manager or HR thought they smelled wrong and was a hygiene risk, or quit Nvidia because they didn't like the work they were being assigned, be able to raise capital from investors who currently won't invest in Nvidia because of reasons, be able to strike new deals that hasn't happened because someone at Nvidia isn't letting them happen.
Nvidia is a very old company, not as old as Intel but close. Old companies build their own internal overhead you just cannot get rid of that would just kill a new company
That's not how the world works. Most of what NVIDIA does is protected by patents and trade secrets, not to mention CUDA.
And what do you mean by "the things he did wrong the first time"? NVIDIA was the most valuable company in the world at one point either this year or last year, and it's still in the top three. He did everything right from business perspective.
idk reading everything what is coming out it looks like he had much unlimited power to do whatever he wanted. so i dont buy that someone (even legal) was a hurdle for him.
How is that relevant? You could claim he was a victim of a honeypot, but an affair with a report is an abuse of power. Any regular employee would be terminated within a day. A CEO in his position will take a little more than a day.
It's an abuse of power, but it's also an excuse to get him out. Fortune 100 boards don't make decisions of this financial magnitude because of ethical considerations. Some political wind must have shifted against Jensen.
I used to be a frequent visitor to /r/nvidia ~15 years ago until ~5 years ago. Around 2020 it turned increasingly into a sort of stock price cult. The discussions were corrupted with people who felt like they had a duty to try to help increase the stock price. I'm seeing inklings of that in these sorts of threads. How are these people so unaware of standard corporate policy? This is like the stereotypical case that's presented by HR to new hires.
> he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.
Building an Nvidia competitor would be a long, hard slog that almost certainly ends in failure for anyone including Jensen Huang.
They (NVIDIA) have tens of thousands of patents on their technology that would be hard to build around and commitments that lock up 60-70% of TSMC's CoWoS capacity.
> whether Jensen will be allowed to start another Nvidia
Sure. After he's done responding to the Congress and various investigators and his family, something I suspect will occupy a good part of his next decade.
He's still a shareholder. It is considered extremely bad form to start a company that competes with a company that you are still a shareholder of unless you have not been fired with cause. The only other example I can think of is Jobs. So it is possible but I would assume that post Jobs contracts were put together in such a way that it would be very hard to compete with the company you got booted out of and that you are still a shareholder of. I've signed a couple of contracts over the years just as shareholders and those already mentioned that if I had competing interests the deal would be null and void and I'd be liable, and for good reasons too.
He could pretty trivially divest or move his shares into a blind trust or something. This isn't rocket science, and furthermore it's not as bad form as you might think. It happens all the time with little repurcissions.
He would absolutely be fired if he were in any role, but as CEO cofounder, it's hard not to attribute Nvidia's success to his leadership.
The thing is, this is just what's been reported. There's almost certainly more going on if 2 affairs are public disclosure. If there is a sexual harassment angle here as well, he's toast.
Something very fishy is going on here. If NVIDIA suddenly closes down GPU sales to the general public after Jensen is gone then we know what is happening: the Altman/Dario/Musk mafia have gotten what they wanted: no more compute for open weight models for the general public.
It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, and there seems to be quite a bit of evidence of a coverup and deliberate deception. It’s a liability problem; shareholders will sue. Heads will roll.
Isn't this just not only about the severity of crimes but the potential to withstand the legacy of whatever crimes that were committed that seems untenable to digest.
Won't the CEO be fighting 2 big fights - One on the corporate front burning through the AI races and second the impending doom of lawsuits and the sheer number of avenues this opens up, frivolous or serios, for any Tom, Dick and Harry working with Nvidia as an employee, vendor, partner or anything just wanting an extra piece of the Trillion dollar pie?
Without knowing more this seems like the wrong move... The U.S. has the AI supply chain visualized incorrectly. The necessary manufacturing, raw materials and components all come from outside of the U.S. For nVidia to have decades of supplier relationships and manufacturing understanding, much of this was in the hands of the CEO more than other companies. Jensen has a lot of direct reports which is odd given the corporate structure.
I do wonder if Megaspeed and other shell companies have been monitored for over a year by the Feds where they broke export rules, failed to report to the Govt with the knowledge of several in the Administration... Everyone was making money on the side by allowing Jensen, Megaspeed and others profit off of bypassing export controls. Just recently a shipment of GPUs randomly disappeared as well.
If this all turns out to be true then removing him is a lot stronger than it seems and maybe in the long run fixing the bus factor problem will have been a good change.
Or, since nVidia is the central bank of the AI bubble, forcing him out kicks off a chain reaction that pops the bubble.
This all looks like an excuse to force him to bend the knee. He is the only western tech ceo who is 1) a strong proponent of open weight models and 2) is highly critical of the chip sanctions on China because they’ve done the opposite of what they were meant to do.
If the allegations of selling “trade secrets” are false. He should remain CEO. I am unsure that there is ITAR or real regulations here, is it really an AI war. If it was it would be best if they trained on American chips for America.
I would not be surprised if the woman is actually a CIA agent.
Since the government bought a stake in Intel, and 15% of Nvidia exports revenue, it has been clear that it want direct control of the industry.
My cynical view is that a lot of US IP has already gone to China through Nvidia. The US should probably now monitor AMD, its executives and its relationship with China (via Taiwan or direct), if any, just as closely.
Fired with cause or stepping down (most likely stepping down)>Interim CEO named> Jensen flew too close to sun and got burned. Board investigations will put everything on Jensen and they will turn that chapter over. Much more information will come out. His wife I will divorce him as well. This whole thing is more political than anything else. Who leaked all of this is my biggest question. Nvidia should be fine in the mid term, but unstable in the short term.
I still recall, as a young engineer (1999) working in a high-flying startup outside of Boston -- bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of naive optimism -- I flew to Houston in late '99 to demo a fabulous optical networking switch to ENRON, all the while thinking why in the world would ENRON want to be in the business of networking. Ended up selling them a TON of very expensive equipment.
It all unwound a few months later, much to my chagrin (and my lost stock options, obviously).
Recall that most bubbles do not pop due to one, key material cause. Instead, they pop due to adjacent troubles that, in turn, lead to cascading effects.
That was true of:
- LTCM failure (1998; Thailand and other SE Asian countries defaulted);
- 2000 market crash (dot-coms crash, then telecom crash of 2001);
- 2008-2010 financial crisis (mortgage backed securities);
... and so many others before these.
It's entirely possible that NVDA, despite earning $$$$, could unwind the circular funding within the ecosystem (the very crux of telecom market crash of 2001)
That would be the first affair we learned about... there's another and that may change the calculus. Regardless, the proverbial tragedy, IMO, would be depending on the judgement or heartbeat of one guy (CEO or not) at such a scale.
he'll move to Taiwan, Taiwan will become part of China, China will move talent, Jensen will become the CEO of a new asian company and they will become a powerhouse in chip production in ~5 years
You are wondering if the guy who co-founded Nvidia and was its CEO since its founding (over 33 years of leadership) and saw its market cap top over $4 trillion dollars “had a positive effect”?
This is overblown; nvda is a mature company jensen has set the right bets forward so it's just a matter in who the successor is. In terms of revenue impact, assuming megaspeed accounted for ~20% of sales (rumored estimate) then game optimal move is to have OAI/ANT pick those sales up. We will hear about a transition plan probably around earnings.
yea that can be argued^ if there is proof that Jensen knew and acknowledged that these are shell companies that will funnel the chips to china then yea that's defrauding investors.
You can also argue that he wasn't aware n as far as he knew this was just a company in Singapore. It will be interesting how it plays out based on the facts.
Jensen has always wanted Nvidia to have a footing in China. Without that, the Chinese innovate faster and commoditize Nvidia’s business sooner. I’m willing to bet he already knew about Alice Huang selling to China. Trump probably knew for some time too. The board also knew about his second affair with his subordinate for a while.
Jensen is getting thrown under the bus by the board because it both likely reduces legal consequences (especially now that democrats are a lot more powerful), and as an opportunity to gain power and place someone in the CEO position that is more controllable.
Did he break up with her after finding out she's a spy?
Was she trained as a spy and sent to entrap him specifically? Or did she form a relationship with him, then get told by the Chinese Communist Party "Xi wants you to steal him some secrets from your boyfriend. This is an offer you can't refuse; spy for us or your family in China will be beaten, jailed or worse"?
Is he a victim or an asset? Is she a willing patriotic spy for China, or a victim of blackmail from the Chinese Communist Party? Has she been arrested as a spy, or did she make it to the Chinese embassy before the story broke?
My feeling is he shouldn't be ousted if he took the honey but didn't fall for the trap. OTOH if he passed her company secrets, that's presumably a fireable offense for anyone lower on the totem pole; it's only fair for a CEO to get fired for the same.
given that jensen has handshake deals with many of his critical (supply constrained) suppliers he may have more leverage than founder shares could ever provide.
If you are getting paid millions, you should not make these intentional mistakes, he would have known she was a spy and just didn't care. There are better options for CEO.
The possible security implications of this entire affair (affairs now) can't be overstated. That hardware's in the most secret of facilities, computing very classified workloads for very very serious customers. Not the goofy AI heads, I'm talking about the military and intelligence communities in many nations.
Hopefully this teaches the market to migrate away from proprietary CUDA and NVIDIA and their proprietary drivers.
Can someone explain to me why everyone on this website, and everyone in English-language media, takes for granted that “stopping China on AI” is a worthwhile or important goal?
From where I’m standing, China is the only world power ensuring that the entire world actually benefits from AI, by giving it away. They’re also underwriting and enabling the global transition away from fossil fuels while my country is doing its best to stall or reverse that progress. They are also not a belligerent in any current war of aggression, and to the extent that they are suppliers of weapons, appear to be providing them to countries acting entirely within their legitimate sovereign right to defend themselves.
Someone’s going to come along and call me ignorant or naive for saying “China are the good guys,” but let’s get real here. What are we talking about.
China is terrible to people who speak out against the government and the government censors models. Open weight is nice, but not good if it’s silently been lobotomized on topics.
Separate dimension, these models seem to be distillations of the flagship models. That isn’t healthy for AI because it’s not forward progress. If they suck away revenue that would fund training the next model, then we’re cooked.
That’s crazy. How many American political prisoners have you met or worked with personally? I’ve worked directly on campaigns to free 2 of them. There are many. You almost never hear about that. Along with a lot of other things that, while statutorily legal to talk about publicly, never seem to get a hearing in the mass media. It’s almost as if one of these countries found a way to enact defacto censorship without admitting to it, and the other country is just honest
NVidia doesn't need Jensen in the short / medium term - they are printing money. Unless we discover that all this circular financing was some kind of scheme.
We have 2 other companies though, Tesla and SpaceX, which CEO represents 90% of the valuation. That will be the real one.
Good tech CEOs are rare. Intel will break the bank to bring Jensen on. Even if he’s a Chinese spy, it’s worth more to shore up US fab capacity than it is to lose Intel’s tech secrets.
I am just curious. Not in relation to this story: Have other people here had a change in their perspective in the last two years?
For me I feel like: There are wealthy people doing what Jeffrey Epstein was doing. And so by comparison, it makes other bad behaviors look relatively less important.
I'm just curious if other people have had that thought as well, and/or what else you think or have learned.
Honestly kind of sounds like its a great time to start a DCA buy of NVIDIA.
It is hard for me to see how the company that is currently turning silicon into gold with established production and software, more like a blue chip stock than a tech company, is going to be worth 20%-25% less just because the Ceo cheated on his wife.
The company is a money printer, and they really don't have to do much to keep it that way.
i dont get why everyone just eats up the propaganda that if she's a spy she automatically works for the chinese government. we are talking about 100s of billions of dollars here, this could easily just be a corporate spy or a honeypot. these mega corps are so rich and massive they have their own spy and enforcement teams, same as big oil and gas always had and still do. back in the day when oil and resources were in poorer countries they used the exact same tactics to control and take them over. its the same playbook, just now the target is a big us corporation.
They cannot unseat him now. The work is too important, nations are competing hard against us. He has to just get away with it and everyone needs to move on, same as Oppenheimer.
This does look like a hit job. The spy stuff is ultimately meaningless and a smoke screen and may even be offered up to create plausible deniability. My take is that Dems/Biden + China Hawk Rs + decel crowd/Dario wanted export control and closed models. Jensen and Trump took a different view. Now that Dems have the Congress again, it's going to be non-stop hearings and investigations in the same spirit as the TikTok CEO with all the "Are you a commie?" questions. So the spy is offered as an explanation; nobody evaded export controls and nobody is a commie. The 2nd unrelated affair just points to an op to oust him.
Honestly, I hope this doesn’t play out in a rushed way. Evaluating this is the board’s top duty. It’s critical, and healthy, for them to weigh what’s best for all NVDA stakeholders.
Obviously, the affairs are a very serious issue, but the investigation needs to determine whether there were any security conflict of interest breaches
Let’s be clear: any abuse of power involving related-party relationships is wrong. Jensen should not get a “free pass” just because he’s Jensen. This is very serious.
Jensen’s leadership of the broader company is unparalleled, and replacing him would be nearly impossible. That step should only be taken when it’s extremely clear there is no other option. Even if the board does replace him, that brings significant risk, not just to NVIDIA but to all the other businesses connected to it. I hope a warning shot across the bow is enough for him to clean things up so everyone can get back to focusing on the work.
As for which way the board rules, the details are all that matter. When boards react emotionally, before a thorough investigation and before they have the full picture, they make bad decisions. They shouldn’t rush. They should investigate and dig into every detail.
Then make a decision. These decisions will carry enormous weight.
None of us really know the details. NVIDIA board: do your job and take it very seriously. Deliberately measure three times, cut once. Don’t spectate. The public likes/wants Hollywood drama, but what we really need is good corporate governance.
They had dirt on him for many years. Someone wants him ousted. That’s what’s happening behind the scene. Jensen probably pissed off someone very well-connected.
This is what I'm feeling as well. Similar to the "intervention" that put Altman back as CEO as well as a brand new board which included an ex-CIA director.
Add in that the democratic party wants to look tough on tech and here you have a clear case of the CEO selling known banned exports to a Chinese spy while personally fueling the data center hysteria.
This is going to be easy political win. Jensen's only saving grace is that he is in bed with Trump so he won't be sitting behind in prison cell.
"Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year.
The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.
But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed" [1].
Affairs could be a whole lot more than that. For example, assuming he didn’t want his wife finding out he’s an ideal blackmail target for anyone that does know.
people bemoaning the foreign interference angle seem to forget all the mountains of middle-east money thrown in the AI bubble, and where this money originates from.
Why are all the tech overlords scum people? Do they become that way with power, money and fame, or is it a certain kind of person from the start that achieves these things?
like sleeping Jensen Huang with an incredibly attractive Chinese agent that specifically showed traits he found desirable and exploit what ever weaknesses the Chinese spy agency could find about him to get him involved with her and divulge secrets in a SEXINT operation. Therefore Jensen is one of the worst people who are public figures.
I don't like CEO worship or tech culture (I know I am on hackernews but I am a developer and did like software development and related topics), but this take is crazy most people you know would probably take the bait on an operation like this even 'good' people.
And just take a look at the scum running things outside of Tech a lot worse then a moment of infedality, look at all western leaders you will probably find few better (or even equal) to Jensen. Jensen did not shape the shitshow you are seeing now (not saying he is not part of it), it was corrupt from the start, Just a worthless veneer of morality.
Don't morn your societies decay it was a cadaver from the beginning only by putrefaction will it become the soil to plant strong trees on.
Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point? That's a huge tell you're arguing against a straw man. This post was after a second affair, to me that's a moral flaw, not just someone exploiting him.
And that "scum also exist outside tech" is just a whataboutism. It'd be a better discussion if you actually interacted with my arguments.
> Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point?
> Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point?
Was not trying to be dishonest but was meant to be what I felt you comment boiled down to, I will revise my comment to change the '>'.
> And that "scum also exist outside tech" is just a whataboutism.
What I was saying is not just that scum exists outside tech but that the society that created this tech culture and space is the curruption it's self and it's not worth thinking about as something to save but to replace entirely.
> This post was after a second affair, to me that's a moral flaw, not just someone exploiting him.
I am not saying it's not a moral flaw but compared what Trump has done Epstein, wars, etc. He looks like a Saint. It's pointless even talking about morality in the way you do when Trump and his weak cronies are in power. (and yes I know Nvidia under Jesen no doubt has benefit from this corruption). Infidelity is so common in are time but if only that was the worst of it.
What I was saying is not just that scum exists outside tech
That's an excellent question and I've been wondering about this a lot. I've known a few billionaires, exactly one was an amazing person, the rest were absolutely terrible people in every sense of the word. The whole word is full of NPCs to them. But your question goes to the heart of it: were they terrible people because that's a requirement for becoming a billionaire or did becoming a billionaire somewhere along the line turn them into terrible people?
I haven't found the answer. But I do know one thing from my (smallish) sample: the nice guy never let the money get to his head. He drove his own car (a VW Rabbit, ok, a nice one) and lived in the same house that he lived in when he started his company. And until the day he died he just kept doing what he loved without ever feeling the need to lord it over others. More like a Wozniak (who is the other 'nice billionaire' that I'm aware of but I've never met him).
The question is are the 'good' people you know actually good.
A human being is so unlikely to be good on their own, pretty much all cultures practiced infanticide and child sacrifice and pederasty and only changed because a few hated these practices and forced them to stop.
You're mixing individuals and groups in a way that I can't really say much about it. I was talking exclusively about individuals that I've known personally beyond sitting at the same table or working for them with three layers of indirection.
Fair enough, for me I suppose for me the vast majority of people are
deep down terrible and only made good because they have been made to
be. I can imagine what you say is very true and no doubt the vast
majority of billionaires are horrible and their untouchableness no
doubt makes that so.
But a lot of people the only moment they get to act in an
unaccountable manor will act very badly. This is not all people but
probably above 90%.
I think there is a level where you are no longer accountable in the way that ordinary people are accountable and I suspect that this is the reason why it happens, but my suspicions are worth absolutely nothing and given that these people are - in spite of the vast amount of information we seem to have about them - so in control of the narratives of their lives that it is impossible to make a diagnosis that will stick. So I will revert to the default: I don't know, but the sample I've seen makes me suspect that there is more to this than just coincidence.
> During the conference, Nvidia executives were at a nearby hotel for meetings. Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell were seen being affectionate at the hotel. One bystander captured the interaction on their phone, three people briefed on the incident said.
> 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.
Well, at least there will be one way to make money after AI takes my job...
Jokes aside, I would expect we will soon learn there is more. Given that Nvidia was vouching for Megaspeed while exporting those chips, I still think there's a reasonable chance Jensen ends up in jail over this. Not large, but possible.
Ok but if you are having an affair with your direct report why would you "be affectionate" in public ?
When I encountered this ( in much smaller, non strategic companies!) both parties took great care to hide their affair and appear completely professional in public. The fun and games were kept behind closed bedroom doors. I don't get it.
I'm wondering how people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc. just continually get away with it. Are they just more sociopathic and cover their tracks better?
I'm not really making a judgement on Huang, but it seems others have done worse. It's making me wonder if there's something larger at play where people (i.e., other billionaires and CEOs and perhaps politicians) are unhappy with Huang.
I suppose that's one reason. But Musk has formed basically pyramid schemes to keep his debtors from calling and to move his debt out from under him. Without that, he likely would have to sell shares to cover the debt of his Twitter purchase.
Musk has a history of having his companies buy his other companies, and his most recent example of this is obviously xAI buying X and then SpaceX buying xAI. For example, the purchase of X by xAI valued X at a ridiculous ~$40 billion. And then he took SpaceX public after all of this. And SpaceX is built upon $38 billion worth of taxpayer money, grants, tax credits, etc. Must be nice to have a bunch of loser companies all buy each other and then use a government funded hype stock to make it all back.
It is absolutely impossible to know the exact details, but Musk has a history of shady deals (even having his companies bill each other for expenses), and so it's not much of a leap of faith that these moves are to absolve himself from lenders and investors by shifting debt around and moving losers into winners.
I bet that SpaceX will buy Tesla any day now.
Musk somehow weasles his way through lawsuits and gray areas and corruption and legal loop holes to just have his companies buy each other out when they start sucking, all on the teat of others and the government.
They could lose control through a substantial shareholder lawsuit. A minority shareholder suit against Musk could prove tremendous damages repaid in stock and the judge might not let the special classes of shares with extra voting power protect his control.
It would have to be a very good cause though, disliking him or ordinary bad business decisions won't cut it.
Musk, Zuckerberg, and Altman and their companies have zero history of sketchy stuff that would, in a normal world, lead to CEOs being ousted? Affairs are enough to do it to Huang? The whole Chinese spy thing is not confirmed is it? And the three people I've listed have had documented cases of endangering national security through either their actions or their company's actions.
"Okay, when I introduce you, I'm gonna say, 'This is a friend of mine.' That means you're a connected guy. Now if I were to say, this is a friend of ours—that would mean you're a made guy. Capiche?"
Here is a thought experiment: Put animals from different races into a singe cage and make them have same life-style. All of them are attached with an identifier tag that looks same, they all get same food, go on same rides, watch same TV shows. Then do the animals have same thoughts, beliefs, morals, norms and values? Most western governments thinks they would. Not sure when did the humanity got this dumber and forgot the saying "birds of a feather ...". Politicians decided that minds of people is separate from biology. Race, religion, culture, gender, background, age, geo-location - you were forced to ignore all of this. Just attach a American passport, give an american car, american food, american home; boom - everything is erased and all people are same.
I’ve read through a lot of this thread and one thing that’s interesting to me is the relatively little weight that’s been given to the HR violation aspect of Huang’s behavior with a subordinate; specifically the power dynamic aspect.
I’m guessing most HN folks are in the camp that believes modern, powerful HR orgs serve a crucial function in protecting and advocating for employees in boss-underling relationships like this, where the power dynamic of these situations demands that they not be tolerated.
So which is it? Do you make allowances and exceptions and become a vocal (or tacit) apologist for this dynamic in some cases, or hold to what seems like a reasonable principle? (Not just in Jensen’s case but across the board?).
If the consensus here slides to the apologist side that’s fine, but in that case can we all agree to defund “Big HR”? If they can’t establish and enforce a consistent rule of no sleeping with your reports, especially at the highest echelons, then what good are they?
I think (and I hope for the USA’s sake) Jensen was actually a CIA asset and they knew Alice from day 1 and let him play with his ding dong but also importantly covert reverse spy on China.
And they probably asked him to do other things and he probably was either too naive or didn’t understand the magnitude or just didn’t play ball. So they threw him under the bus.
They waited till after the election to release this carefully.
As it would tank the economy before the election (like that would have had any more effect).
Hopefully this is how I hope would be written in some future Netflix docshow.
And the fact that he went on some long winded media tour portraying himself as some sort of hippie savior (“oh I don’t know where I live” “i love my wife dearly”) seems like a well setup “white washing” to try and cap this follow on news.
Otherwise the news as it reads sounds too stupid to be true Occam’s razor and all that.
Goodbye, money! Who is seriously considering sabotaging their portfolio and precipitating a huge SP500 drop for months to come? Who, remembering the board of directors is making this decision, would want that?
Is this how the whole castle crumbles? some tabloid sex scandal on one side like it's 2017, anthropic vibecoding a CUDA replacement for AMD on the other?
I’m buying the affair and that it facilitated smuggling, but all could be explained by financial interest so far. Was she a spy or made a spy by circumstances on the smuggling itself?
If, as alleged, Alice Huang is an agent of the Chinese government, and if her activities result in Jensen Huang getting ditched by Nvidia, that is certainly going to win her Employee of the Year at the MSS (国家安全部) Christmas Party.
I like the guy, he's funny. I would say to keep him (on a leash), but if I could get endless 10/10 Chinese spy pussy I too would betray the AI race. I wouldn't cheat on my wife though, that's pretty low.
It’s not like he assaulted women, which is apparently par for the course at other big tech companies.
The guy had some consensual sex - so what? “Oh it shows poor judgement” Literally shut the f*k up… his judgement made NVIDIA the behemoth it is. Glad you get to backseat his personal life because judgement as it pertains to relationships is something you can actually relate to.
Removing him as CEO at this point in history is as the kids would say dumb af. Absolute garbage decision.
Most of these things probably have been known for ages. And yes, in comparison to the actually bad billionaires he didn't protect himself left and right. Why is this getting surfaced now?
Some group is trying to make a big deal out of this. I mean which spy posts so publicly their itineraries/photos/business meetings, on wechat? Come on!
I've been writing about history for over 20 years, and this feels like an inflection point. Some day a long-form essay will describe Huang's prescient foray into machine learning, the rise of AI, the resulting bubble, Ed Zitron's prolonged diatribes, Huang's infidelity that leads to the downfall of his company, Anthropic's disappointing IPO, OpenAI's subsequent disastrous IPO, a reckoning for AI's plagiarism, and then there are bubble bits all over everybody.
My armchair analysis is that going forward with this will most likely make the AI bubble pop.
Depending on how Jensen takes it, this could be the catalyst to steer AI in a new direction. Companies will line up to scoop him up, if not fight each other to get him. He is the head of the most valuable company, he has the tightest connection to the US government, it won't take a minute before Mudita* becomes a new company being fast-tracked to the top.
It won’t be the sex it will be the illicit sales of GPUs to China. That domino topples the next and all of the “sales” of goods to AI companies financed by the sellers. There’s a whole lot of paper sales boosting revenues while losing money with each sale going on.
My tinfoil hat theory is that this is all orchestrated. They knew about the affair for months, but withheld it. My theory is that with the midterms results, rather than risk facing accountability as things unravel "naturally", they have this big bombshell as a "get out of blame free" card. That way everyone can collectively say "It wasn't _my_ fault things fell apart. I was doing my best, honest!"
Well, Mr. Huang sure seems to have turned his life upside down.
The extramarital affairs, while salacious, are largely immaterial.
The key issue seems to be not merely was he sleeping with someone who was not his wife, but rather, that he was sleeping with a Chinese spy who was rather essentially running a export smuggling operation to China in violation of United States law specifically crafted to recognize these Nvidia chips as sufficiently high-end to merit a national security concern.
And apparently, the United States government knew about it. But never told him they knew. What Huang personally knew is not clear, and is likely now to be subject to inquiry from a Congress that has also been turned upside down, ushering in a wave of AI skeptics while Huang was notable at the White House's "AI summit" for his almost singular bullishness. Howard Lutnick personally shut down an investigation, concerns from the CIA were not acted upon.
Donald Trump has seen people try to turn his life upside down given salacious scandals. Perhaps the President of the United States and Lutnick (among the well-heeled class known to have lied about their Epstein island connections) simply do not care, given both openly embrace Huang as a source of profit. It's also not clear the President shares the United States natsec consensus (what some of his followers term "the swamp") that actually sees Xi or China as a threat. After all, he plans to have what is likely to be another highly docile visit to the Chinese leader next week.
Put another way, it seems the federal government did not act as turning Mr. Huang's life upside down may have been calculated to turn the entire economy and their fortunes (both personal and political) upside down. Perhaps there is a backroom deal with China the President, Lutnick and Huang are secretly accommodating? I mean why would they not at least warn him?
The present irony is of course, for whatever aligned reasons that led to this hush-hush arrangement, the cat is out of the bag now. One wonders if the consequences this threatens to unleash in the present moment would have been mitigated if instead of trying to pretend it wasn't happening, the powers that be had acted with greater preemption. Perhaps so it goes. The best laid plans of this sort are often turned upside down.
It's easy to blame a person like dumb Jensen who slept with the Chinese spy.
I don't see anyone accusing China of setting up such a trap. China always denies ofc, though all these scummy things eventaully comes out to be true, and by then everyone forgets.
Maybe now Apple and nvidia can rekindle their relationship after the bubble pops. Apple could come to the rescue, secure a heavy investment and enter into the cloud computing business.
I feel this is way over amplified to further restrict chinese models/open weights development by further controlling the company with a new CEO.. seriously, who cares what he’s doing in his personal life, I am not a big fan of him much as he should have made GPUs further more accessible to consumers, but he’s definitely not an evil AI lunatic like some AI ceo bros we see now.
Any ousting will probably be for having an affair with a direct report. At many companies, having an 'inappropriate relationship with a customer' isn't a policy violation unless there's also evidence of undue influence, so it's more conditional and complicated. Whereas just the existence of an inappropriate relationship with a direct report is a serious violation.
From an HR and legal perspective, if Alice was a spy, Jensen was arguably the targeted 'victim' of a foreign intelligence operation. While it was certainly very dumb and negligent, it may not have been a policy violation or may only have been a violation of company policies like mishandling confidential information or not following IT security policies. Those aren't usually "Fire the CEO Now" things, while slamming the sheets with a direct report absolutely requires some kind of immediate action.
The real question is who wants Jensen gone? Because the first leak was clearly intentional and reportedly placed by 'senior White House sources', citing a confidential NSC report. Now the second leak of the inappropriate affair happens immediately after. This was a designed sequence. Both of the underlying events are several months old. Given the facts, I think the most likely source is 'China Trade/AI Hawks' in the White House (possibly the NSC). The reasoning being that Jensen has generally been trying to minimize restrictions on selling AI to China (which is, arguably, part of his job).
He has to go because he opposes restrictions to run Chinese open weight models on NVIDIAs GPUs. He said so in an Axios interview in July - "The industry needs open models, science needs open models, cybersecurity needs open models". [1]
Good riddance. All these csuite people think they are so uniquely capable but if he gets kicked out nothing will change except we'll, hopefully, hear less about jackets at tech presentations.
Also to all the people saying how terrible this will be, would you really want someone running your company who can't keep his word to his wife? Maybe it is a quaint idea in 2026 but I think people who break their word shouldn't be trusted, particularly to be in positions of power.
The reports that he had a second affair with a subordinate, if true, are disgusting and would lead to termination at any other company. He should not get a pass. How someone who has had so much success could have such poor judgement is a mystery to me. It’s sad, he accomplished so much.
What is the endgame of this completely cumbersome and obvious CIA journalist and intelligence community rollout of this narrative surrounding Jensen and Nvidia? Why would they nuke the credibility of America's only AI chip company and hand the future of AI to China? Do they actually think this will gain them control over AI?
I think their concern is that NVidia is acquiescent and in support of policies which give China better AI chips, which is the core of the matter regarding the honeypot scandal. The goal, if it is an op, is to get a CEO who will comply more readily with export controls.
Let’s steelman instead of strawman. The CIA likely cares little about Ant and OpenAI.
What they care about is the US leading China on every militarily and economically relevant technology.
The hawks have long chafed at Huang’s position that we need to sell our best chips to China to keep them on the US tech stack. It’s very obviously giving them the ability to catch up.
And it’s also very obvious that restricting exports will only help in the short term, and in the long term, gives China reason to develop their own tech.
I thought I was supposed to believe that OpenAI & Anthropic's methods are so much more advanced than any potential capabilities of Chinese competitors that OpenAI & Anthropic must each be trillion dollar companies.
If I ignore the words, and instead observe behaviour, all of the actions I observe indicate the opposite;potential competitors are treated as very credible threats, even existential ones; and actions indicate that 'maintaining special access to hardware' and 'vying for regulatory capture to shut out competition' are major strategic goals.
Americans voted for rooting out corruption. The Congressional committees that review stuff like corruptly quashing an investigation into your lover company [1] are changing hands. Jensen coming clean right after the election was, within the range of options he had, smart.
(Folks run to blow whistles when they realize they're involved in something they may pay the price for isn't new.
Also, have you seen our IC? The days of the CIA running a competent conspiracy, if they ever existed, are behind us.)
If the anti-corruption revolution is going to focus on some dude's sex life rather than the extensive and obvious whoring of political office, I want none of it.
She could have been his chess partner, and if he'd acted the same way on her behalf it would have been fireable. The sex is immaterial and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't read up on this or is selling something.
The sex is just the icing on top of the poor judgement.
When some dude's sex life quashes an investigation into Megaspeed, yeah, it becomes germane. (There are serious questions around Lutnick, for example [1].)
This looks like a major indictment of Lutnick, not Huang.
I don't get it. Huang doesn't get to decide who chips can't be sold to. Presumably Huang wants to sell chips to everyone whether or not he's fucking them. Nvidia will always say yes to another billion dollars. It's up to the state department to say no.
If Lutnick was sleeping with a Chinese spy and approved the sale, sure throw him in jail. If Huang secretly bribed Lutnick to approve the sale, sure throw them both in jail. But that's not what we're seeing?
You’re absolutely correct that we have no smoking gun in the public record. What we have, instead, is smoke. Lots of it.
> What am I missing?
"Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year.
The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.
But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.
It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company’s representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.
The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler’s interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident” [1].
> so far it looks mostly terrible for the commerce department. Huang? I don't know
He caused Nvidia to violate export-control law. To help a Chinese intelligence asset’s company. He then corruptly quashed the investigation using Nvidia’s resources. Those are crimes.
> I don't have money in NVDA but if I did I would certainly want him to stay at his desk
I do have money in Nvidia. I want Huang gone. If he stays, there is a real chance the hammer about to fall on him destroys Nvidia as well.
That’s before the shareholder and supplier lawsuits extract billions from the company. Before states’ AGs extract more. Before the Congress lobs a grenade at a Silicon Valley that honestly doesn’t seem to get why this behaviour is contemptible.
> I doubt very much we will find personal checks written to Lutnik
You don't need this to trigger undue influence issues.
> If he hadn't slept with the woman, would you feel the same way about the whole affair?
Yes. That seems to have blown open the scheme Jensen was running [1], possibly with the knowledge of the White House.
I'm flying from Silicon Valley to New York today. The bubble that has people publicly calling this a nothing burger is the exact reason Americans are furious and fed up with our tech sector's leaders.
When the "some dude" is Jensen Huang and involves sleeping with Chinese spies while advocating for relaxed export controls, then obviously it's gonna pay him some attention.
Those of us foolish enough to vote Trump in 2016 weren't convinced he was going to leave the swamp drained, rather that it was so bad he couldn't do worse. A lesser of two evils kind of choice.
Within weeks I saw the naked racism and left the whole party behind. Having learned more about Trump and Republicans since has been ... humiliating after decades of voting 'R'.
Trying to engage in good faith here. What did you see in the first few weeks after your 2016 vote that were materially different from how he ran his 2016 campaign (and I mean the hits - "they're sending rapists, ...", "grab her by the pussy", ...)?
I can imagine people souring over lack of follow through on economic promises, or the naked corruption with your $coins, but from a racism/xenophobia/morals perspective, I'd feel like most of the signal was there in the 2016 campaign was it not?
For me personally it was trying to ban travel from whole countries based on race. Morally I didn't expect him to personally be a paragon of virtue. My hope was that the vile parts of his retoric were mostly campaign bluster and "locker room talk", and that he'd defer to experts once in office.
The mask-off racism was just beyond the pale, and lead me to look deeper into his past and how he was starting to govern. It became obvious that he'd mostly cheated or lucked his way into fortune and fame.
> Morally I didn't expect him to personally be a paragon of virtue.
Lot of people respond with this, but honestly, that is setting up a straw man to knock down isn't it? No one claims that we should expect any politician to be a paragon of virtue but in terms of how they conduct themselves and the language they choose, there is still a reasonable bar that Trump blew past and set an awful precedent.
What is up with people who seem to love corruption?
Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy, as well as an affair with someone he manages. Either one of these would be grounds for dismissal at any company I've worked at. Committing both of these offenses shows appalling judgment by Huang.
Firing him seems like a very logical conclusion, not some CIA Illuminati bullshit conspiracy theory.
More like: whats up with people being utterly fucking stupid and devoid of even the bare minimum of critical thinking skills. Being pro (or at least unbothered by) corruption is just one of the ways that manifests.
Money talks. Shareholders didn't seem to mind when Tim Cook gave Trump a golden trophy. They certainly didn't mind Jensen Huang's dialog with Trump when sanctions were ill-defined. It seems like cronyism is in, and all the cool kids are doing it.
This scandal has felt like a litmus test for free market idealists vs realpolitik thinkers. Nvidia's board and Trump both knew about the spying allegations for over a year, allegedly. This is not a situation you can navigate with strong principles or a moral compass, you just have to follow the money.
Reminds me of the meme that WorldCom went down because their CEO bravely stood up to NSA pressure. Instead of, you know, running an elaborate shell game of financial fraud to enrich executives and dupe shareholders after the Dot Com bubble burst.
> What is up with people who seem to love corruption?
Paraphrasing the apocryphal quote:
Anti-corruption never took root in America because the commoners see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed future CEOs.
And worse yet, he seemed to be influence by her to violate export restrictions and was probably responsible to a substantial "donation" to the presidential "ballroom fund" to change squash an investigation into the matter.
This is up there with the most fireable things that have ever happened.
They’re just reporting on things that are true and have been kept secret inappropriately. That’s not a “narrative”.
You’re looking for a conspiracy when this is a pretty straightforward story. Jensen’s credibility is shot. Of course they’re preparing contingency plans.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theory to realized someone leaked these stories in fairly rapid succession and it’s not a leap to suggest that person has an agenda. Not everything is a conspiracy but when it only has to involve a few people the odds go up.
When one story comes out, other related stories that have been around are a lot easier to get limelight. And it's much easier to surface new dirt in those situations too. So I wouldn't use rapid succession of multiple stories as indicative of anything.
> When one story comes out, other related stories that have been around are a lot easier to get limelight
I've already heard stories in social circles in Silicon Valley from senior folks in the industry that they didn't share before. Not because they were hiding anything. But because it wasn't topical. There are a lot of scumbags, and there is a lot of corruption to go around right now.
You’ve already made an assumption there that both stories were leaked by the same person. What’s the evidence to back that up?
The first story came from sources close to the White House, or something along those lines. Makes sense since it was a national security issue. The second story is internal to the company.
Very plausible non conspiracy explanation: after the first story came out the exec he was having an affair with was pissed to discover she was in fact the other other woman and went to a reporter.
I am pretty sure under normal circumstances, a person with 160 billion dollars that leads a 4 trillion dollar company is able to cause these stories to never materialize.
If someone thinks there is not a lot of sex going on in the c-suite maybe you need to get out more.
perhaps they acquired or feign having acquired fundamental cryptographic breakthroughs, hoping the "bubble" spreads to China / India / ... to convert a few moths of cryptographic lead into perhaps a few years....
Unless there’s an evidence of him being compromised, this is crazy. I’m total outsider and don’t know Nvidia copropare rule machinery, but from perceived perspective that feels like significant blow to the company.
I expect shit show funnier than when OpenAI tried to put Altman with same result.
Even shift leaders at McDonalds need to sign various workplace policies, including policies about relations with their direct reports. So yeah, this is not exactly a surprise or something unheard of.
If you can be fired for any reason, then that's it and they can put in the contract that you aren't allowed to drink a glass of water if so be.
But does that make it reasonable for hackers to think that drinking a glass of water is some kind of horrible offence, like some lunatics seem to think about workplace relationships? Which are one of the most common way that people meet and get married.
Having a relationship with someone you have authority over is considered very problematic just about everywhere, in part because the existence of that authority creates problems for consent (among other reasons).
> Even shift leaders at McDonalds need to sign various workplace policies, including policies about relations with their direct reports.
Does Nvidia have such a policy? Unless laws have changed, this isn't an issue as far as the law is concerned.
(Googling - seems they may actually have this policy...)
From what I've heard: Nvidia's operations is heavily reliant on Jensen. He's embedded in everything. Early in the pandemic, I interviewed with them. The recruiter said that pretty much every engineer at the company will, at some point, be in a meeting that includes Jensen. I spoke to a friend who worked there and he confirmed it.
(Probably no longer true as they've grown a lot since then).
The NYT reports that Huang was caught on video with this second affair when they were together in San Jose.
Seems like this video and the first affair with the spy was a classic blackmail operation used against him as I said before [0] and Huang likely said no to the wrong person.
https://archive.is/ZmOEH
People arguing the technical and business merits of what Jensen brought to the company aren't getting how serious these allegations against him are.
The US Government is using NVIDIA chips for all sort of stuff across all classification levels. Subsequently, Jensen has deep relationships within the government that warrants additional scrutiny.
Him authorizing his company to sell massive amounts of chips to a restricted country is massively illegal, but companies work around that and have since forever. Doesn't make it less illegal, but that's only a small part of the problem.
The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
It's really about fairness. Us technical salespeople take training that tells us all of the ways that deals with restricted countries happen and how we will immediately get fired ten ways to Sunday if we forego that to close quota. Also, normies with clearances tell their partners stuff they shouldn't. Stuff they think isn't really sensitive since it seems so minute. This isn't bad until said partner spills at the wrong place and wrong time. That's how normies get sent to prison for treason. Loose lips sink ships and all that. [^0]
Getting fired -- WHICH HE ABSOLUTELY SHOULD BE -- is the least of his problems.
[^0] Examples:
- https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/retired-us-army-officer.... Army officer leaks secrets through dating website to sound cool; gets six years
- https://www.foxnews.com/us/pentagon-leaker-jack-teixeira-rec.... Leaked secrets about Ukraine war through Discord to sound cool; gets 15 years
- https://www.westernjournal.com/ex-cia-officer-accused-leakin.... CIA officer leaks stuff to journalist girlfriend; gets 10 years
The claim that he sold massive amounts of chips to a restricted country as being "massively illegal" is absolutely false.
NVIDIA is licensed by the United States government to sell GPUs to China, and they do so at a rate well under their licensed quantity.
Read up on 91 CFR 1684 which directly contradicts your claims.
Your most important argument is categorically false and completely unresearched.
Your subsequent claims also have no basis: you cite a bunch of cases in which people leaked sensitive information as equivalent to the Jensen case, where the affair was with the CEO of a customer they were legally selling product to, and where we have no evidence that any leaks occurred.
> NVIDIA is licensed by the United States government to sell GPUs to China, and they do so at a rate well under their licensed quantity
My understanding was the Megaspeed sales weren’t classified as sales to China. Nvidia circumvented those requirements.
Based on what? I thought Megaspeed circumvented those requirements?
Did they? Singapore and Malaysia are not China, FYI, and there is no prohibition on Chinese entities using GPU capacity overseas.
This is the biggest problem with HN: people who make big claims without enough research usually get upvoted. But try saying something against, say, Rust, Apple products etc., and you’ll be massively downvoted by fanboys who think they’re superior to everyone else.
Hn is just a rumor mill these days. All people do is gossip
That has always been the case as far as I can tell. The idea that forums were less about rumors and gossip in the past is nonsense
>Apple products
That takes the cake, I personally avoid anything Apple posted. There is much cult (and personality cult) involved it doesn't makes for any sensible discussion
> The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
Why? If he's that important then our own intelligence community ought to be doing stuff to fight espionage - doing counterintelligence, generally just making sure he's ok and providing support to him, etc. This is not some random guy. Did we just forget to do that?
If we're not doing that, then are foreign countries just after all of our important people? Forget sexpionage - what about hacking their computers? Do we have zero ability to combat any of this, whereas other countries can do whatever they want?
The relationship has been to a degree known to even the public for years, it's extremely unlikely that intelligence services didn't know about it until now and that they'd permit it if they'd consider it a possibility that Jensen could leak any important IP
Yes. A lot of folks on here were initially thinking the issue with the Chinese spy was a sort of “oh funny how silly” type issue. For someone in his position with Nvidia a strategically important company for the US that’s a grave error of judgment. Add then yesterday revelations of additional indiscretions and this suddenly a growing pattern of incredibly poor judgement.
It appears almost certain now that he’s finished. The lack of any succession planning (which also is too looks like more poor judgment) appears to be the only thing now slowing down his removal by the board.
But this is not the domain of the board, is it? Whether he put the national security at risk is up to US Government to decide. The moral side of the question is for the people involved to decide. For the board to decide is the company will be better off w/o him.
On the contrary, the allegations are tabloid level nonsense. Jensen does not even posses any "sensitive info". He is just a ceo for a company that designs chips, something China has no trouble doings. What China lacks is the manufacturing knowhow of the most advanced lithography machines which will also allow them to manufacture the most advanced chips locally. Huang however does not have a single clue about that chip manufacturing.
He has access to all sensitive info, he's the chief officer! He would not have access to some sensitive unreleased, but the rest he's pretty aware. And he signs every deal.
Yeah, he has die layouts tattooed on his penis.
A single clue really? I reckon he knows a decent amount about chip manufacturing. You know, as part of his role getting microchips designed and manufactured for thirty years. Ok he might not know the minutiae about the techniques used at TSMC but he’ll know a huge amount - he’s not just hand waving at subordinates getting them to deal with it. The fact that he doesn’t yak on about it shouldn’t be confused for ignorance.
He started as an engineer and easily could have all kinds of shit on a laptop that could have been accessed physically
On the plus side we might start seeing a lot more modded 5090 with 96GB of ram
The amount of times the word “allegation” and “suspicion” and the way this soap opera is flowing around screams that its all smokescreen. We don’t even know if this women was a spy… even that is an “allegation”.
The facts are very scarce and yet this has been blown out of proportion.
Maybe I am wrong :-) time will tell.
Nah.
if you fire him, he can go work for China. Or he’ll go work for Elon. I just have this feeling you aren’t explicit with your implicit motive.
> The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
Non-American here. Isn’t it your goverment’s/CIA’s job to detect Chinese agents and conduct counter-intelligence. Individuals (CEO or not) can’t do that. I heard that they already knew for a long time (as they must have). Then this becomes a hit job with political/business motivations rather than a serious national security issue as promoted to the public. Why don’t you all talk that obvious angle instead? 50s Red Scare rhetorics or a 70s James Bond narrative is politically more appealing I guess.
But we live in 2020s. We live under constant surveillance today. All national secrets are in digital environment (not on a microfilm in a CEOs leather jacket). Also Chinese spies, who require a visa to enter US, can be easily tracked the moment they get in touch with any VIP.
And for the sexual/marriage life of individuals, suddenly everyone goes back to 50s standards. (Note: This is extra interesting because I heard there is a “sex cult” attracting high profile AI engineers in SV. And everyone seems ok with it. But that’s probably another honeypot operation.)
They guy has been running Nvidia for over 30 years and has billions of dollars - what would make him want to sell out to China? What possibly could they offer him? You actually think she was like, "if you tell me secrets then I'll sleep with you"
A lot of people with ulterior motives want to throw him under the bus, don't buy into those narratives so easily. Use some common sense first.
Like most office affairs its rarely if ever about that.
Mostly its about being treated nicely, talked nicely and all by the opposite gender. Even successful people have serious marital strife, where their partner makes them feel really bad, no matter what you do for them. Its just a part of marriage.
People deeply crave for love, affection, being wanted, cared and being talked to nicely.
There you see are deeply sought after needs of the human soul. Im guessing you are willing to trade something for it.
No harm no foul then. Let adults be adults.
Not sure about how the government or his company perceives it.
But most spouses take deep offence with these 'emotional affairs' reason is simple, the whole reason why anyone even gets into one is because the person with whom they are having the affair is by definition better than their spouse in this regard. Its being given live feed back that you are a bad person. People have trouble sleeping in the night in any story where they aren't the hero.
That hurts, people often fail to see how their own actions would have led to this. And some people even consider their spouse suffering through their abuse itself as a sign of love.
People are irrational, and marriages are hard.
she was like, "if you give me allocation of gpus for delivery now rather than in 5 years then I'll sleep with you"
pretty much how it went down
i’d sleep with him too if he sold me a billion dollars worth of gpus I could sell on tomorrow for 2 billion in the US or 4 billion in China
I don't think he'd sell out to China. But I can believe he'd be sharing high valuable information during some pillow talk sessions.
If you have a CEO doing that, you need to fire them.
What's so magical about selling to the USG that it should create some sort of obligation on the part of a civilian CEO?
Remember, Huang isn't an army officer, or someone in intelligence working at the Pentagon, or a CIA officer.
Surely he gets to do what he likes. You are not at war with China. Treason is not relevant here, nor are graphics cards some sort of ultra-secret domain. What NVIDIA does is easy, it's just that the package is not so easy to reproduce, what with it having many aspects, from software to chips and fast interconnect.
If you sell national security impactful equipment to the USG, you're in a special category, private industry or not.
Do you think the USG doesn't hold the CEOs of Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, or Northrop Grumman to higher security standards than Delta or Ford?
And I think it's hard to argue that in 2026 Nvidia is not designing and manufacturing national security impactful equipment.
One thing is the China question. Another thing is the question of open source AI.
The latter is a question of how centralized modern AI-based computing is. And to me that is almost a fight between good and evil.
A marriage between an Anthropic/OpenAI duopoly and the national security establishment is a marriage made in hell.
What’s the non-cynical explanation here which doesn’t involve Jensen having ruffled feathers he shouldn’t have?
Elon regularly gets away with way more morally (and perhaps legally) egregious stuff and yet he has increasingly cemented his position. Partly through indirect leverage from his companies and partly from buying access to power directly.
Even Sam managed to stage an employee revolt to stay in control.
For founders of companies perhaps the lesson keeps repeating itself - keep control of your companies no matter what.
I’m not sure this is good for shareholders and the larger AI ecosystem either. Corporate governance is obviously important especially for mature industries.
But Jensen has consistently demonstrated ability to keep Nvidia alive during dire times and eventually delivered the biggest profits in corporate history.
Edit: some cynical explanations:
1. China hawks in tech and admin wanted him out
2. Nvidia competitors found oppo research too juicy to ignore and sequenced a set of destructive reporting
3. People in AI found Jensen’s grip of the supply chain too annoying and wanted to loosen it somehow
4. Internal politics / someone wanting Jensen’s job
5. Some combination of the above
You're making the assumption implicitly when comparing to Musk that this should be fair or about morality.
That ship has sailed.
Huang has a problem now because his ability to advocate for NVIDIA in a politically charged environment is damaged.
He can't be an effective CEO for NVIDIA if there's a plausible (even if unproven) suspicion that he's on a geopolitical adversary's side.
He was very strongly advocating for selling to China before this. At that point, it could be understood simply as him looking out for NVIDIA's business interests. Now, there's doubt sowed in everyone's mind about whether it really was just that.
Maybe you don't care, because you think selling to China is the right thing to do - fine, there can be different views on this.
But, a lot of influential people very much do not hold that view, and he needs to be able to effectively communicate to them also.
> He was very strongly advocating for selling to China before this. At that point, it could be understood simply as him looking out for NVIDIA's business interests. Now, there's doubt sowed in everyone's mind about whether it really was just that.
> Maybe you don't care, because you think selling to China is the right thing to do - fine, there can be different views on this.
> But, a lot of influential people very much do not hold that view, and he needs to be able to effectively communicate to them also.
Yeah I think that makes a lot of sense. He could've underestimated how paranoid the admin (and the government) is about China and overestimated how much leverage he had with his board, customers and the admin.
I'm also generally surprised to see few people in tech and admin batting for him, considering he's supposedly a relationship guy.
edit: I realize I'm wrong on the last part after browsing X
Is that true? The orange man has been openly accused of being a Russian asset for quite a while.
Sadly, I hate to make it political.. but I don’t think left wing people can admit they are being mislead. Huge groupthink consensus motivations on both sides but it’s much worse for left wing persons.
They commit the sins of the religious more than they think
I think you should consider the genuine do-gooders inside the federal government who wanted to blow the lid on this for a year but were blocked by the president. Now that he’s weak, they went for it.
You’re deducing too much from two lines of reporting
does the timing seem random to you?
There are three forms of accountability here, that Elon and other newer tech founders meticulously calcified themselves away from
First
The board. Elon and his brother are the board, and some sycophants. They are also heavily weighted shareholders.
Jensen doesn’t have that.
Second
The wife, who also is entitled to significant shareholdings. Musk avoided that, and major shareholders are already in trusts, his private foundation, his donor advised fund, and just outside of any future marriage to begin with. The market doesn’t care what a disagreement with his partners mean
Third
The state, and the product. Elon sells cars and it isnt the backbone of economies. The rockets and starlink do pursue waivers or avoid sanctioned countries. Indiscretions were already paid for in the campaign.
So “canceling or not” masquerades as a societal view or tacit consent, when it is solely a matter of who your masters are and if they will stand by you or have any capability of a choice.
6. Huang's public persona wasn't unhinged enough, and too Asian, to withstand such a scandal.
> 1. China hawks in tech and admin wanted him out
kinda weird China would want him out, considering he's been begging to sell chips to them
Eh, the hammer will down on Musk for his Ukraine betrayal.
> Elon regularly gets away with way more morally (and perhaps legally) egregious stuff and yet he has increasingly cemented his position. Partly through indirect leverage from his companies and partly from buying access to power directly.
I'm not an Elon fan at all, but ... while he sure sleeps around, I have not heard he slept with subordinates, or Chinese spies.
He literally has children with Shivon, who is an employee / direct reportee informally in at least some of his companies.
That's a fair point. I wasn't aware that she had a reporting chain to Musk, but it seems that she did when she worked at Tesla and Neuralink.
Has Shivon been implicated in billions of dollars' worth of export control violations?
(Also not batting for Elon, but you asked for reasons why people would care about this scandal more.)
Musk has 4 children with a neurolink exec that reported to him. She was also on OpenAIs board until 2023, where she fed him confidential info about the company . The relationship has been ongoing since 2016, but was kept secret until 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivon_Zilis
He kept a lot of his relationships secret, including offering to pay right winger Ashely S. Clair over 10 million/yr to sign an NDA that would prevent her from ever stating she had his child, until he got a position of impunity that thar unlimited wealth and political favors buys you.
Let's not forget that if almost anyone else did what Musk pulled with Starlink in Ukraine he would get a 5 am visit from counterintelligence at his house the next day.
The difference is that Musk is an actual oligarch and Huang is "just" a billionaire.
Nvidia is one of the most critical strategic assets in the USA today, underpinning economic dominance and national defence. Leadership at this level usually operates under an implicit shield. Normal procedure would be to cover-up. A sudden loss of Nvidia's founder and CEO at this juncture is a blow to American strategic posture and a windfall to China.
I think the real story is not the affair, which was already reported in asian media in 2024, but what specific catalyst broke that protective shield and made continued containment untenable.
2 affairs - one with a sub-ordinate and one is a foreign agent who got chip flow through to a sanctioned country.
Do we even know thats the end of this? This is only whats public at this point... It doesn't feel like the end of it but more like beginning to middle.
I'm trying to figure out who pushed this story through or if this is just bubbling up naturally.
I am wondering if his public apology for being unfaithful to his wife (weird for it to be public, to his employees) is actually covering up for some corporate malfeasance.
You mean alleged chipflow to China?
Seems like this happened just after the US midterm elections, maybe there's something there?
Perhaps they reached a conclusion that congress would inevitably discover this once real oversight happens, so they decided better to get it out now before Democrats are actually in control? It makes quite a lot of sense to do it now from that perspective. Who knows, maybe a presidential pardon shoe is about to drop as well.
I figured there will be quite a lot of people taking actions like this ... but nVidia was a surprise for sure.
Right exactly. Two months is a long time for this to blow over. It will be far outside the news cycle before anyone is called up to Congress. This is the safest time there will ever be to rip the band-aid off.
I think it’s factions within the GOP. Pro NatSec people wanted to get it out for a long time. Trump blocked. They agreed to keep a lid on it for the midterm to not embarrass Trump and thus hurt their side. Now they’re free to speak.
Three things are happening that seem relevant for timing.
Midterms over, major loss of power for faction Huang seems linked to
Distillation getting harder
Anthropic IPO
Not to mention the recent government rebranding to Superintelligence.
I think a new regulatory regime is coming.
Your last sentence lacks clarity for me
Commenter is saying the real news isn't the affairs. (Trump was told about the spy late 2025.)
But "whatever" happened to make them count.
E.g. Jensen angers some important people. Or someone decides NVIDIA has too much market control. Etc.
I mean main media outlets know that the public really has turned on billionaires so this is some meat to feed the readers (great ad rev). Someone from the administration leaking the information to a reporter for sure wouldn't be surprising without knowing how much it would blow up. Also many other viable theories too.
Which affair?
It turns out he was banging an employee from his company, too. Dude is a sex addict.
If Apple can survive losing Jobs, Nvidia can definitely survive losing Huang.
Apple survived when Jobs returned.
Been doing just fine without him since.
I hope “fine” isn’t an illusion.
Compared to what?
A "windfall to China?" Jensen Huang seems to have been conspiring with Alice Huang to illegally sell high-end NVIDIA chips to China. That's a windfall to China.
There is not going to be a stop of chips going into China.
If not exporting to Singapore, it will be exported to more countries that have more opaque business practices.
Kneecapping Nvidia in this case is absolutely a windfall to China, by allowing them time to catch up in semiconductor technologies
Kneecapping Nvidia in this case is absolutely a windfall to China
This, right here. I'm no fan of the "CEO as god" line of thinking but given the past few years there's a strong indication that having him as CEO is going to produce a better outcome than the opposite case.
China has a stated government policy they don't want Nvidia chips and you aren't allowed to import them.
China have billions of $ of GPUs sitting on the dock because their government capped imports of nvidia.
Pedantically: it's not a windfall if they specifically brought it about.
Sure is convenient for everyone to spend all their time talking about the CEOs personal life than however many billions of prohibited sales have been happening here.
let me get this straight :
standing on its' head your statement reads as :
"If the US doesn't allow government intervention into the business dealing of important private entities during times of scandal, to protect lies and initiate cover-ups, then China will win."
do I interpret that correctly?
I am simply observing that at this level affairs are usually covered-up for the interest of the nation. This affair was covered-up for a bit, seeing as it was broadcast on Taiwan news in 2024, so something else changed for them to end the cover-up and broadcast the affair to America.
Gates, Bezos, and now Huang ? Let's see, whose left ? Zuck ? I'm sure there are plenty of skeleton's hiding in his closet ...
CIA hawks. Self-inflicted wounds again.
llm slop
One would hope.
probably; reminds me of a quote by Chomsky making fun of postmodernists
> Some of what appears in it sort of actually makes sense, but when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. It’s perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men, it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields, and it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures. All of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.
not 100% the same, but many have made careers out of writing simple ideas that can perfectly well be conveyed with ooga booga language (or alternatively "few word" like that one guy from the Office), using instead flowery impressive-sounding prose
More like brAIn rot tbh
Nuanced opinions
1) The fact that he cheated on his wife isn't particularly relevant, other than the lack of a prenup meaning she owns half his stock (4% of the company).
2) The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal (although improper and opens up potential quid-pro-quo lawsuits)
3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
4) The fact that there are allegations that he was aware that they were selling illegally to China is a huge deal.
5) Even though those export control were arguably bad, the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
6) There is definitely a demonstration of lack of judgment (getting caught selling to china rather than maintaining plausible deniability), (sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort)
7) Despite all of this, in theory he would arguably still be the most profitable CEO (if he doesn't get charged with a crime, AND if there are no other issues to discover) in the medium term, but where there's smoke there may be fire. Does this raise the odds of circular financing and other shenanigans?
> The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal
Most companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it, and for good reason.
It's a big enough deal that former CEOs of Nestle, Norfolk Southern, McDonald's and Intel were either terminated or resigned after similar relationships were uncovered.
Correction: Most US companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it.
In Europe, workplace relationships are considered a private matter as long as workplace peace doesn't suffer, and a ban would be considered legally impermissible. Europeans manage it with disclosure requirements and reassignment, not bans.
> ...and a ban would be considered legally impermissible.
This is factually incorrect. It is entirely legal for companies in Europe to restrict relationships where one party is a direct subordinate to the other. They can also legally require disclosure of such relationships.
This is common because these relationships can create significant conflicts of interest.
As someone else in this thread noted, the former CEO of Nestle (a Swiss company) was fired because he had a relationship with a direct report that he failed to disclose, and the former CEO of BP (a UK company) resigned because of a similar situation.
the person you're replying to wrote you have to disclose.
But as far as I know, it's not illegal, as this person implied, for a European company to forbid relationships between direct reports.
Disclosure allows for people to be reassigned so that they're no longer in a subordinate position.
But they didn't say you could be fired in the EU, which the comment you replied to pointed out has actually happened.
Are you guys thinking that Europe is a country and have the same labor law everywhere?
Isn’t it a conflict of interest to be sleeping with your direct reports? How does that play out in performance reviews? It’s definitely a massive HR problem
That's where the "disclosure and reassignments" come into play - you can date a direct report, as long as you let the company know they should report to someone else from now on.
It's also really ethically dubious to sleep with someone you have that kind of authority over
It's certainly an abuse of power and a lot of companies in the US forbid this explicitly, often in employee guidebook
Why? It’s how the mammal world works since the beginning of time. Females seek out the alpha male.
"Is-Ought Fallacy" is the right search term.
The "alpha male" is not even how wolf packs work in the wild: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-alpha-wolf...
The researchers who coined the phrase eventually realized it only applied to artificial packs in captivity, not the wild.
Mammal world has also worked by killing another mammal with food you want if slightly hungry. Yet, for some reason, people don't question why murder is illegal whenever someone gets convicted of homicide. Selective appeals to evolutionary history are an empty argument.
How would they reassign someone from the reporting chain of the company's CEO?
Asserting that they can’t be a direct subordinate should suffice in practice in most cases.
The CEOs of both BP and Nestle lost their jobs for having relationships with employees.
it's very common actually. One of my former managers was pressing an intern for sex, dangling a job. Too bad we weren't hiring at that time. Why are they doing this? Maybe the power is the point?
The US also does not allow banning relationships, but employers are not required to employ both persons in a couple. Europe restricts many aspects of people losing their jobs, is a more salient aspect of the legal comparison.
What US state law prevents this?
Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion. The bigger issue is that he has shown multiple poor judgement choices and the board has to weigh if he is a larger liability than he is an asset at this point.
> Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion.
He had an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy, who it appears smuggled potentially billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips into China. And now he is alleged to have slept with an Nvidia executive who reports directly to him.
If he had slept with a waitress or his friend's wife, he would survive this. Instead, he chose to have exactly the type of indiscretions that get you fired.
At Japanese companies this happens monthly or weekly. Although J companies are more like a clan than a western corp.
At US companies or even at Nestlé (as it was quoted) or other, it continues to be the case.
The United States is not required to emulate every single cultural value of former Axis powers, I think.
That we know of
He sure did.
At the time Mark Hurd was shown the door I think HP had 320,000 employees. Still got the boot.
Many thought that was a mistake at the time.
Carly deserved to be fired, but Hurd was fired ostensibly for an inappropriate expense report (like expensing a date). Larry Ellison immediately hired Hurd, but HP sued.
Law For Thee, But Not For Me
It demonstrates poor judgement, which should be a sackable offense for a CE.
The problem is every other CEO and potential CEO has demonstrated the poor judgment of not building Nvidia.
Page, Brin, and Schmidt all dated Google employees. Gates married a Microsoft employee. I’m not sure if any of those folks dated direct reports, but does it really matter when you’re the CEO? Not condoning this behavior, just saying that there’s precedent for it not significantly impacting careers of execs. The spy thing is a another thing entirely.
Page and Brin have controlling voting shares of Alphabet, so they can't exactly be booted by the Board. Gates met Melinda 40 years ago and many things happened 40 years that would not be acceptable today.
Gates also had the most expensive divorce, paying Melinda 70B or something. We’ll see what Jensen has to pay the ex wife.
But ok at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, …
Elon hiring Jensen to run Terafab would actually be hilarious.
It's ok a lot of places. Consenting adults gonna consent.
At an America Monopoly Telecom you know, it is acceptable so long as you wait 365+1 days to marry your affair partner.
CEO of a public company answers to the Board. CEO of a private business do anything they want until caught.
That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.
I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive. People say he got balls of steel, chilled in his data-centers and other funny things. Shareholders are stupid. That guy's been running the firm long enough that being removed would disrupt the business so much, that shareholders piss onto their only firewood in winter. Just to be politically correct, or what's the purpose of removing him, what need does it fill? Just reveals reactive, chaotic and unstable business practices.
3) Most things speak against her being a spy and no spy would be this amateurish either. Most people think she's just enriching herself with a structured deal profiting her a lot and whoever pays most for her deals. If nationalism is involved for China, or just greed, we really don't know, but we can assume that she's surely sympathetic to China.
Jensen is just a like-able person who loves the good things in live "in full", food/sex/woman/drinking/company. I'm sure he didn't care about her business as he's a billionaire and has a lot of things to do, than caring about a crappy broker and her structured and layered shady deals.
He and Nvidia intervened to stop an investigation into Megaspeed.
Imagine not having Kimi, Qwen & co.
I am an open weights model proponent so obviously I am intrigued and glad that Qwen exists (though at the moment I personally use US-trained open weights models — Muse Glimmer, Gemma 4, and I am testing Nvidia’s own Bolt —because they better fit my requirements).
I am aware that there’s a tension there, but the fact that I am glad the Chinese open weights models exist doesn’t change my mind about what Nvidia will almost inevitably have to do about Jensen Huang (or my own view of him in the scenario where he is supposedly naive about espionage!)
I suppose it colours my judgement about his actions re: Megaspeed if they were indeed a deliberate attempt to push availability of GPUs to Chinese customers to the limit; Singapore-washing is not something I am personally that troubled by.
> That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.
> I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive
If you think being a successful CEO should mean that you can do whatever you want, it seems that you look at Trump's America and...like what you see?
The law is one thing, and shouldn't discriminate on CEO status. but the decline of "cancellations" for various infractions of political correctness is definitely a positive in my book
I'd love statistical evidence that "cancellations" have decreased under Trump. As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
And people generally seem to be arguing and trying to destroy the lives of the people they disagree with at a higher rate than ever.
> As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
Has the right cancelled anyone? Like, a single person?
The biggest thing I can think of was a single episode of Jimmy Kimmel, lol. Which came from an incredibly bald-faced lie, on regulated public TV, about a high-sensitivity murder that had just happened.
Trump literally tried to cancel the White House press corps but putting that aside:
https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=List_of...
I mean, how could you forget a washed-up rockstar shooting cans of beer because the beer company inked a sponsorship deal with a trans person?
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/kid-rock-shoots-bud-light-...
I'm sorry but that list HAS to be satire, right?
Amazon and Apple were cancelled?
> tried to
Yeah I think this is the key thing. Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.
> Amazon and Apple were cancelled?
You can read, right? The list has sources:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/donald-trump...
https://www.inquisitr.com/candace-owens-apple-boycott/
> Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.
Yeah, they've been too busy grifting, running crypto scams, selling pardons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_allegations_during_...
https://americanoversight.org/investigation/corruption-in-th...
"Cancellation" is just how the rich spell "the consequences of my actions".
Being burned by a mob is technically a consequence of the action of appearing like a witch.
That doesn't imply that's a good and healthy way to run a society.
Yes, the consequence-free current administration has been soooo much better for the US.
The balls of steel is what got him in trouble in the first place.
> the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long time ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.
Unfortunate but true. The current admin is lawless which makes everything think that they are stupid if they follow the law.
Not to mention another friend of the admin whose crimes in DOGE might need investigation.
Hopefully that guy will also be in prison in three years.
Why would that happen if it didn’t happen when they had 4 years to do it the first time? Seems unlikely.
I don't think it will happen for ideological reasons. Despite his lack of respect for the decorum of US democracy, most others have too much respect for it to start putting former leaders in prison.
However, his second term has been a lot different than his first. The first term had mostly just allegations of personal misconduct. The second term has been marked by a much more organized and systematic dismantling of the administrative state in illegal ways, which has been a lot more impactful.
I strongly doubt any American top leader will ever go to prison. That's something that gets decided by American top leaders, who are very aware of what happens when you open that Pandora's box: look at countries like Taiwan or South Korea, where it seems like basically any government position ends in a prison cell.
So the "decorum of US democracy" means that a president can murder, rape, pillage and raid, yet should not be put into prison?
The US political apparatus has a lot of unwritten standards that are followed out of tradition. While people might vehemently disapprove of how Trump has pushed or blown past those limits, doing the same thing to achieve accountability might set a new lower bar for those traditions, rather than restoring them.
I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.
I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.
A lot of pretty words to give a dressed up version of "yes". That's what you're saying: Yes, it's a good thing if a US president can murder, rape and pillage without going to prison. Where do you sraw the line? Raping 10 children? 100? You're making it sound as if there isn't one.
> I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.
Those presidents going to prison did a coup to stay in power or had their personal shaman run the country behind the scenes. Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.
> I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.
Correct, which is why the law needs to be applied equally. That's the fundamental basis of the rule of law. Otherwise it's worth nothing.
Yeah, in some hypothetical situation where a leader is directly involved in a violent crime, sure, I don't think there would be any issue drawing a line there.
But that isn't what we're talking about here -- we're talking about actions taken related to his official duties. That is an inherently politicized situation where even the textual rule of law does provide for special allowances precisely to discourage political opponents from abusing the rule of law as a political weapon.
> Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.
I think the evidence around the world shows that precisely the opposite is true.
It's much better than the South American alternative of throwing the former president in prison every single time the party switches.
Leaders do a lot of things and laws are complicated, lawfare is stupidly easy.
The Republicans that shielded him will be out of office and also he is a lot less popular now.
he was not particularly popular at the end of his first term. mainstream right was not pleased with the bad optics of january 6, young right was not pleased that MAGA became MIGA and "build the wall!" became "build what wall?". the early days of COVID fascism happened under him as well. it's fairly obscure lore now, but he'd lost all that deplorable alt right support that supposedly got him nominated and elected in the first place. for example: https://www.newsweek.com/richard-spencer-joe-biden-trump-mag...
he would've never got reelected if the democrats of 2021-2024 resembled democrats of 2008. his reelection was a violently retarded response to the clown world antics of that era.
> Why would that happen if it didn’t happen when they had 4 years to do it the first time?
Not saying it will certainly happen, but there will be different people at helm this time, and his more crimes are out now.
He blanket pardons Vance and everyone around him. He resigns in the last month and Vance blanket pardons him.
The guy who now has complete and total immunity thanks to the Supreme Court?
It's not complete and total immunity. It's presumptive immunity for official presidential acts.
Prosecutors "just" have to establish that the criminal behavior is not an official act, of which there are plenty such examples.
Yeah fair. But not everyone is POTUS. And maybe we can hold CEOs to a higher standard, idk.
This is fixed by enforcing the law. Defeatist logic like this serves no purpose. Said country delivered a large electoral defeat to that person a week ago.
The fact that this scandal was leaked is a sign that the rule of law is returning.
„this scandal was leaked“ is for sure not a sign of „the rule of law is returning“.
Go on.
It sure is.
They were bypassing natsec based export controls by making donations to the executive branch, and used the influence to bury a commerce investigation into the matter, from the available information.
He can sleep with who or whatever he wants. The Megaspeed story and how investigations into it were mothballed have every appearance of being a big deal even beyond Nvidia.
Just putting it out there, but he might not be the best role model to try and emulate even for a ruthless company. Especially now that the laws might at last be enforced against him.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
- William Penn & MLK Jr
I'm sure the fact that Trump owns tons of NVDA was of _absolutely_ no consequence when the Department of Commerce granted them the ability to sell their GPUs to certain Chinese companies.
>3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
I'm 50/50 on whether or not Alice Huang is actually a spy for the Chinese government, or rather just a social climber and opportunist. She certainly didn't hide her perceived closeness to Jensen Huang, and in fact actively flaunted it on her social media.
Furthermore, I think it possible if not likely that Jensen has had more than just 2 extramarital liaisons, and if more were to come out, then IMO that would actually shift the likelihood towards Jensen simply being a lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status, rather than being honeypotted by some Chinese intelligence operation.
Sources connected to US intel have gone on the record to say that they believed her to be a spy, going so far as to have the Secretary of State brief the President directly. They don't bother the President with things like this unless they feel the intelligence is strong.[0]
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/trump-china-t...
there are some doubts there https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/jim-himes-alice-hua...
I'll bet 100 dollar this is just about money.
maybe she didn't even know she's being used as a spy.
this is hard to prove or dispute. smuggler is benefit china 100%.
Spies don't tend to advertise their activities on social media, so "unwitting spy" might be the real explanation.
> "unwitting spy" might be the real explanation
A spy is someone that deals in obtaining and sharing secret information. They would be a spy if they used their information to obtain secrets on NVIDIA hardware and shared these secrets with others. There's no evidence I've seen that this happened. Someone buying NVIDIA hardware is not a spy.
Unfortunately Senior US leadership said it doesn’t count for much anymore
Why not both?
> lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status
I mean, isn't that the easiest guy to honey-pot?
The best HN comment I read on this subject was along the lines of "NVIDIA sure appeared eager to avoid those export restrictions, so does it matter whether she was a spy or not?" Maybe if he was handing over, like, chip designs or something, but there's not (yet?) been any allegation of that.
> The fact that he cheated on his wife isn't particularly relevant
Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail, assuming his wife was not aware of his affairs. Anyone who knew that was happening would have had enormous leverage over him.
Even if no one actually did so it still demonstrates a massive risk.
> Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail.
Do you really want to apply that to congress, the judiciary, the police. Let's face it anyone in any position of trust, which turns out to be everyone in the end because homeless, unemployed I could be a witness to something.
So we just outlawed private consensual behavior of individuals. (Not outlawed, you just lose your right to keep your job or whatever, yeah sure right...)
Doesn't seem like an american Freedom to me but what would I know?
This reminds me of when people complain about a lack “freedom of speech” but what they actually want is freedom from the consequences of their speech.
Plenty of jobs come with personal life restrictions. Work nights. Work on an oil rig. Work on an aircraft carrier in the ocean for months at a time. Everyone is free to not take those jobs. I don’t see why a “no affairs” clause for a CEO should be all that different. If you don’t consent to the rules, take a different job.
Yes I especially want that to apply to congress, judiciary, and police, even more so than corporate CEOs! People in positions of higher responsibility, should, you know... be more responsible. Police and people in power should break laws less often, and be more trustworthy, and less selfish than average. They are in a position that requires a higher standard.
Handmaiden's tale.
> Do you really want to apply that to congress, the judiciary, the police. Let's face it anyone in any position of trust, which turns out to be everyone in the end because homeless, unemployed I could be a witness to something.
These kinds of paths to blackmail/extortion are literally what government background checks pressure test when hiring employees. So, yes, we do want to apply those to people in positions of trust.
I'm not clear why you claim this extends to everyone including the homeless and unemployed, that seems wrong to me. You can't blackmail a homeless person into violating national security.
But if you allow them privilege denied the great and the good what message does that send "to the children" ?
Are you really claiming the homeless don't matter?
Even if you can do all these things then you must deny them the ability to testify in court because they could be blackmailed.
If you don't see how this goes I probably can't help you. Read a diversity of sci-fi? Read what life was like in the soviet union?
Not the person you replied to, but
> Are you really claiming the homeless don't matter?
Towards being blackmailed against national security interests? Yeah I’d say the risk of that is low. The GP didn’t claim anything else
Jensen is not as far as any of us are aware, a spy.
Perhaps trying to make sure there aren't morality based repercussions takes the sting out of future blackmail attempts on other successful businessfolk would be a better strategy for national security than, I dunno, briefing the New York Times and trying to make it as miserable as possible?
But sure maybe the CIA is just woefully incompetent, disorganised and accountability free in pursuing this national security goal of blackmail resistance. Or perhaps this is not the best theory as to what is going on.
There's a really, really good reason we keep this kind of moral judgement private, "between you and your rabbi" as Feynmann put it.
dude you better believe if you have a clearance and they find out you have an affair you're losing your clearance
exceptions of course for the commander in chief
Yeah, right, the /only/ exception.
Jensen's job does not rely on having security clearance. There's no evidence he has security clearance is there?
> 3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
I'll admit I haven't really been following this story, but I ASSUME he didn't know she was a spy? (Given a good portion of a spy's job is making sure you don't know they are a spy) So why is this an issue either?
That was my understanding too. The spy part makes for a good story, but if she came out and said "Hey, I'm a spy for China. Want to share something of value to the state?" it would make her a terrible spy, so I'd assume it's really about poor judgement.
How'd they figure out she was a spy anyway?
This is a bit like saying "I didn't know passeordstealer.baddies.com was a phishing site when I typed in the company's password for the bank, so it's not my fault all our money was stolen!"
For sure he is the victim of an adversarial attack against him and Nvidia, but as the leader of one of the most valuable companies in the world in am industry where IP and company secrets hold huge economic value, then you really need to expect and anticipate that spies will be trying to infiltrate your org and steal your secrets. I think you can clearly say he has demonstrated bad judgement here.
Him being removed for sleeping with a spy would not necessarily be intended as a punishment for sleeping with her, it's a self defense mechanism to prevent the spy from continuing to have access to a highly placed, compromised individual
Current evidence suggests he didn’t even do a prelim background check. His mistress worked for Chinese state television prior to the role she assumed through which she was introduced to him.
Source: The Economist. (Paywalled) https://economist.com/business/2026/11/11/there-has-never-be...
> That she might be a Chinese agent would have been obvious to Mr Huang had he inquired about her background: before going into business, Ms Huang worked at a Chinese state-run broadcaster known by its unimprovable acronym, “CCTV”.
A piece of speculative but interesting information: the FBI didn't give Jensen Huang a "defense briefing" which would warn him that he was being targeted, despite them knowing Alice Huang was a spy a year prior (memo circulated in May by the state department). Apparently this is very atypical.
The FBI so far has not provided a reason for the lack of a brief, but one reason they might not provide one is they suspect the target is a willing participant.
Large numbers of chips sold at high prices skirting export laws would possibly make him a willing participant...
Isn't the fact that her company is alleged to have smuggled a ton of banned NVIDIA chips into China a lot worse than the fact that he slept with her? Infidelity isn't good but nobody will arrest you for it. Sanctioned goods are a different story
The person you replied to is not making a moral judgement. The reason it is bad for Nvidia that he slept with her is the leverage she had over him. The impropriety is just an issue for his family.
Spy is just an allegation
> I'll admit I haven't really been following this story, but I ASSUME he didn't know she was a spy?
As best I've heard, nobody knows that now. We have some rumors with absolutely nothing behind them.
I'm sorry, is your assertion that he didn't know somehow makes this better?
That assertion makes no sense, yet tits the best interpretation I can gather from your odd comment!
Surely you mean something else?!
Incompetence is a great reason to fire someone, it turns out.
The co-founder of NVIDIA, when it is basically at its peak stock value, is incompetent at running NVIDIA? Sure.
Jesus, it's like nobody has ever watched a James Bond movie.
It changes things from "he was the victim of a spy" to "sanctions evading conspirator that aided an enemy".
Even more interesting given his Taiwanese citizenship.
You literally only think shes a spy because the US Propaganda machine says so. There's no evidence of this.
We are so one shot by hollywood movies that if a newspaper points at an attractive middle aged women, whos foriegn, and says shes a spy we'll all believe it.
There's literally nothing to prove this, not even anything suspicious. Its just the Trump admin, whos owned by Silicon Valley oligarchs saying so. Wanting to buy GPUs, even if its for China does not make you a spy. It makes you a business person.
I know Ill get another 5 downvotes for saying this, but its true. Zero evidence. Its the perfect story to kick off the war against Chinese open source models which have really put a damper on Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue.
Her whole work history is very suspicious. The company she worked for is extremely suspicious.
2 is a huge deal, enough to get you fired in almost all instances in Corporate America for that alone.
It's only huge because it has been made public by a large amount of medias. If you have ever worked in any companies, you'd know the shit going on at any layers.
It doesn't have to be 'made public by a large amount of medias', just made public. Regular ole avergae nobodies get fired for the same.
It's a huge deal for underlings who have to obey their masters. It's not a huge deal for masters who make the rules.
If you allow your employer to control your sexuality you are not fully human.
It's a huge deal regardless. You'll be fired even as a CEO. As the above comment states, CEOs of Nestle, McDonalds, Intel have fallen once these things were uncovered. It's basically an express ticket to getting fired.
> It's a huge deal regardless. You'll be fired even as a CEO
Bill Gates met Melinda Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.
Many such cases. Rupert Murdoch. Larry Ellison.
Maybe I would have worded it differently, but I generally agree with the grandparent poster. It seems rare that a founder would be ousted over this type of thing.
My guess is that the China dealings are the most important part, and that part is being undersold because it's actually illegal and puts both him and anyone with knowledge of it at risk of going to jail.
>Bill Gates met Melinda Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.
Bill Gates met Melinda ~40 years ago. It should be blatantly obvious I'm taking about where things stand today. Lots of things happened 40 years ago that would be generally unacceptable today.
The U.S government have known about this for a year. How serious would it be (i.e in terms of Jail time) for them to just give a warning and sit on it for a year?
For Intel at least, that CEO was fired because the board wanted him gone, because he destroyed the company. The relationship with a subordinate was only a pretext. If he'd been performing well it would never have been made an issue.
You are contradicting yourself. If destroying the company isn't enough pretext to get you fired but an affair with a subordinate is, then it's a big deal that would have been an issue regardless.
They needed a pretext because if the board publically confirmed how much damage he'd done to the company, it would hurt the company even more through investor and employee panic.
When has legal fallout from an affair with a subordinate ever destroyed a Fortune 100 company? That doesn't happen.
You are not making much sense. Was he destroying the company or not? What kind of destruction does not have obviously visible signs (to everyone) that can be acted on? What Kind of board sits down and decides that the destruction of the company is worth investor panic because 'it's worse than it looks'. What, are investors going to be calm as he destroys the company?
Do you think a CEO is a King or what that they are destroying a company and that's not enough to get booted? CEOs get fired all the time. A Board certainly doesn't need an affair pretext to boot one that is actively tanking the company.
It’s a big difference if it’s a mercenary CEO hired by the board versus a founder CEO that likely controls much of the board.
Yeah, but does it make sense? The CEO is responsible for company success. Firing them over sexual misconduct is a decision to prioritize non-profit related matters. Companies do this all the time because of political correctness, but it is strictly speaking optimizing for other things than shareholder value.
There is no law or really good principle that suggests that shareholder profits matter above aspects such as ethics; that is just a misrepresentation of something a famous economist said.
It matters for the very obvious reason that a less senior employee may feel pressured or may lose their job when the relationship ends, that usually office affairs result in other employees feeling compelled to keep secrets, that it may result in others losing out on promotions to the employee in the affair, that they often result in abuse of resources, because it opens everyone up to blackmail, that it’s a display of bad judgement and ethics, etc. etc.
It’s nothing at all to do with political correctness.
They were talking about "underlings" who have to "obey their masters" and supposedly don't matter, while those "masters" are not "fully human" if they let anyone impose rules on their "rule making". It is the kind of talk that makes you want to cover your drink.
I read it as sarcastic pointing out the hypocrisy, and that they're fully in support of free will for anyone to pursue relationships they want at all levels. You could disagree with the latter, but the starting point doesn't seem like what you suggest
I am merely saying, if you fire a CEO because of, say, him having a relationship with an underling, you are saying: "there are arbitrary things more important than profitability".
I am not sure it makes sense given why companies exist in the capitalist system. Stockholders, I'd think, on average care more about the returns less whether the CEO is a likable character.
The real problem is potentially illegal behavior, of course.
Even in purest capitalist sense, romantic relationships cloud judgement and point at a possibility (inevitability?) that people in question (CEOs, managers, owners, board members) will do that again thus increasing the risk to the business.
This ignores the direct consequences like "worse" employees getting promoted (affecting business) or put in charge, or like in this case, potential national security issues.
> arbitrary things
I'm sure Jenson knew sleeping with his direct reports was wrong. And that plenty of CEOs got fired for that. Nothing arbitrary about that.
His dick cost people hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value and this is about the worst case scenario outside of maybe a true sexual misconduct lawsuit coming against him. Like with your thinking taken to an extreme, if he murdered someone he should keep his title and run the company from jail because it doesn’t make him a bad engineer and we don’t want to bow to woke?
How does it NOT make business sense to consider firing bim here (outside of manosphere thinking)?
Having an affair vs. killing someone is materially different - one is legal, the other is not.
I am not debating the spying, smuggling angle here; but it this was just the affair, its a decision by the board, whereas if he run over an elderly lady at a crossing, its no longer a choice - law is law.
Btw, re: ad hominem 'manosphere' or 'woke' whatever. I have nothing to do with either.
Sleeping with your subordinates opens the company to lawsuits. Which is bad for business.
This is just a weird and IMO slightly creepy thing to say. Office affairs are ripe for power abuse and corruption. It’s not about sexuality.
I mean—certainly if it turns into the kind of situation where the higher-ups can’t look the other way. It probably becomes a problem as soon as your supervisors have to think about it. It definitely becomes a problem as soon as it becomes their problem, or a distraction from what everybody’s there to do.
By the time it’s public knowledge and reflecting on the company, yes, that’s a failure—and the failure of discretion is probably closer to the board’s clammy little hearts than any particular fluids (or allegations of favoritism) that may have been swapped along the way.
It's difficult (impossible really) to hide such affairs indefintiely when you've reached that kind of status and notoriety. No amount of discretion will keep someone from finding out eventually when so many eyes are on you, so it's really just a matter of time till some sort of public disclosure.
I think the revelations about his children working for the company as well aren't helping him much as well.
I was going to say that getting your children a job – even a good job – isn't generally a problem. But installing them as senior directors with million dollar salaries does seem like a bit much.
Jensen has successfully grown the company and thus he can be trusted to hire the best talent, even if they come from unusual backgrounds. Perhaps, they were hired because their insights from attending cooking school, etc are valuable.
Founders benefits? Also "family business" loyalty can be a win for the company.
> the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.
I agree with you on the first and second point. Perhaps you can argue it's in bad taste to have an affair but the private matters of adult lives should be of no interest to outsiders.
> the law must be respected
I wouldn’t call this particularly nuanced, certainly if they were sold to intermediaries not subject to the export controls (Singapore)
You have a due diligence requirement to ensure that whoever you sell to obeys export restrictions. You can't turn a blind eye. This is actually called "self-blinding". It works kinda similarly to KYC/AML (Know Your Customer / Anti-Money Laundering) requirements in financial services.
More [1].
[1]: https://www.millercanfield.com/resources-305.html
Yes and no. I think the board knew about the smuggling and now that it's out they need to sacrifice the CEO. Probably, they still trust him but that does not matter here, saving the company's valuation and trying to evade fines is more important.
> other than the lack of a prenup meaning she owns half his stock
They were married years before he founded the company, and lived in California, a community property state. And they got married right out of college. Unless he somehow knew that he would start a company and got a prenup that says "if I start a company it's all mine", a prenup wouldn't matter anyway (and would probably but null and void anyhow).
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/11/10/800126553/whiteh...
> The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
Since US counterintelligence has known about the relationship since late 2024, they would be completely incompetent if they had not:
1) taken measures to ensure that she did not get US secrets,
2) collected information on Chinese priorities and methods for acquiring AI hardware, and/or
3) fed misinformation to the Chinese.
1) They were married years before he founded NVIDIA and she already co-owns the stock.
curious from someone who is ignorant, what makes the export controls bad?
So this is something I kinda agree with Jensen Huang on. Let me explain. The US export bans to China in this space take two forms:
1. ASML (a Dutch company) is not allowed to sell EUV lithography machines to China; and
2. NVidia is not allowed to sell their best GPUs (made with those machines) to China.
This is all done under the auspices of "national security" and the vague hand-waving notion of "military applications". China is rapidly developing EUV on their own. I kinda expect this to be commercially producing chips by ~2030. Other people believe it will take a little longer.
So what's the problem? By banning the sale of chips to China, the US has inadvertently created captive domestic demand for Chinese made chips because Huawei (etc) cannot buy Western made chips. This is really kickstarting China's lithography efforts because anything they produce has billions of induced demand with no competition from foreign imports.
That is I believe Huang's argument: we should be selling the chips but not the lithography. I agree with that assessment. But Us foreign policy really is just blinded and can be summed up as "China bad".
A counterpoint I’d like to suggest.
Frontier labs (and Nvidia) have started using AI in chip development.
AI that requires frontier chips to train (or you steal chain of thought and try to distill…which has mixed results).
That in turn becomes a flywheel for developing domestic supply chains for chips.
See the latest reports for super intelligence takeoff. They (again assuming the timelines are semi correct as it’s all guesswork) show takeoff significantly before 2030.
The worst thing you could do is allow China to accelerate their domestic chip development via giving them access to chips needed to accelerate the AI flywheel.
I don't think your point counters his. I think it supports his point.
There are a lot of Game of Thrones type of stuff going on when it comes to chips and AI.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc do not want Nvidia chips to sell to China because it makes the GOU supply constraint even deeper to American companies and it increases model training/inference competition.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of these players worked behind the scenes to try to oust Huang.
The idea behind the export controls is that by 2030 we’ll have some sort of superhuman intelligence and it’ll be impossible to catch up. I spoke to Biden’s ai advisor and that’s what he told me. They know China will catch up but are betting it’ll be too late for them by then.
That's just fan fiction. The only way it's too late is if there are no limits to AI scaling in the universe. Otherwise, China will be able to catch up.
The only other way is that these people want to go war with China as soon as super intelligence is invented.
Well its certainly not fan fiction because I got it straight from the authors mouth. I believe that would just be called fiction.
Then it's fiction.
I'm as big as an AI bull as anyone here but we still have physical laws. Everything is a sigmoid.
smashing a spy doesnt affect anything, did he leak anything? Did he report to the authorities?
2) Got Brian Krzanich of Intel fired
3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
She's alleged to have been an 'intelligence asset', which is not the same thing as a spy (assets are not agents). Assets are often just good sources of insight and analysis, whereas agents are tasked with active deception and exfiltration of information. Jensen Huang is arguably an intelligence asset; I'm sure he's given informative briefings to spooks on the state of the world, albeit not necessarily knowingly.
A related question to this is whether Jensen Huang even has a US government security clearance.It's not obvious to me that he's privy to any government secrets, even if the US regards Nvidia as a strategic asset. To pick up on your point 4, he might have been knowingly violating the law, a problem for any CEO. But if he's not definitely violating sanctions and is instead just chasing profits, that's considered the norm.
To be frank I think this is a storm in teapot because there have been rumors about his affair floating around since last May, and if the US government has known for at least that long and hasn't intervened or arrested him it's probably not that big of a deal. I can't help wondering if it's a case of the current US administration trying to look tough after the President suffered a humiliating election defeat.
It breaks my heart that so many people will excuse his infidelity as irrelevant. We need better leaders to set examples for the youth. This current crop is so slimy and distasteful.
Other countries and cultures formalize infidelity, Americans just haven't bothered doing so yet.
Even reading the history of European nobility, it is amazing how often you'd come across married nobles who didn't even live in the same city as their partner, and who openly had mistresses or young handsome men hanging around all the time.
I've also talked to Chinese business men who lamented that they are expected to have an overseas girlfriend, almost as a sign of status.
And hell, Saturday Night Live has been joking about rich old ladies and their love of hiring pool boys for literally decades now.
My point is not to normalize cheating, but rather that all sorts of arrangements have existed throughout time and different cultures and instantly saying "he's sleeping with someone who isn't his wife!' doesn't mean that person is devoid of morals.
No you missed the point.
This kind of morality is between you and your Rabbi. We are allowed to look down on it all we like. It has no relevance to law or keeping your job because if you allow this kind of thing to have relevance it never ends. Rank selfishness comes out in so many ways.
"You got a parking fine, your social conscience is clearly lacking..."
It does end, because people lose their jobs for office affairs all the time and rarely if ever for parking tickets. There’s no moral inconsistency there, not all bad behavior is equivalent.
number of people who lose their jobs for infidelity divided by the number of people who do it.
Hard to estimate it precisely but less than 1% is likely to be accurate, no?
What percentage of people who get parking tickets do you think lose their jobs as a result?
Not many, because we have principles of that kind of morality not being applicable. Double parking beside fire hydrants isn't universally celebrated though, is it? I look down on that kind of thing, you might be the same yourself.
If someone is willing to break their most sacred vows to their loved ones, why should I, a relative stranger, think they will keep their word to me?
You are absolutely entitled to that opinion.
You do not have to judge someone for a parking fine just because you judge someone for cheating on their wife.
> The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
Is it true?
Your opinions are just that, but not really nuanced.
1) This is a huge matter of character. If you cannot be faithful to your wife, what makes you a faithful leader of a company? There is also the issue of respect: when a leader is morally compromised, the people he is leading lose confidence and respect in him.
2) Isn’t there something of a power dynamic issue here too? He has a greater responsibility to use his authority and power as a superior to not abuse that authority, and committing adultery with an inferior is a huge problem.
3) On what basis is this a huge deal and the previous two are not? Where’s the nuance? It’s just arbitrary.
4) Well yeah, it looks like he was complicit in breaking sanctions. It’s no longer an arms-length deal.
5) Again, why are the first two worth shrugging shoulders and this one is not? It’s no big deal, people cheat and break the law all the time.
6) That sure undersells it. It underlines the stupidity of sin, and the sinfulness of man.
7) I can’t argue with that.
Has anyone stood up the claim she's a spy yet?
Or is the evidence right over there next to the evidence of WMD?
I know some people believe anonymous govt officials but I kinda don't so if there's actual evidence, let's see it, or note the the doubt legitimately exists.
It seems a very odd thing to be briefing newspapers about rather than the very many other, seemingly more useful ways of using that information if it is true. How does everyone feel about the CIA briefing the New York Times in general to seemingly get a CEO removed? Who takes responsibility for making that decision?
That’s… a take. The fact the only problem you have with him violating export controls is that he got caught isn’t really nuanced. It mostly just points to you not having a moral compass.
Whether he would be the most profitable CEO is absolutely irrelevant. The guy is literally facing prison time if he can be directly tied to the violation of those sanctions. If the board takes more than about 30 seconds to come to a conclusion they should probably all be replaced as well.
https://fortune.com/2026/03/19/supermicro-arrested-founder-s...
Neo-puritanism in 2026. Why?
> sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort
Or just... not cheating on your wife
Fyi just calling something nuanced doesn't mean that it is.
> sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort
I really don't like Jensen but I think this actually shows decent character! Sleeping with a femme fatale is rather romantic.
One man’s infidielities is going to cost every investor in index funds greatly given the outsized weighting of Nvidia in the SPY and QQQ ETFs.
Not to mention that Nvidia has a huge stake in the ai space being a backstop to a bunch of players in all its circular financing deals.
2 is a huge deal.
Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.
There's no scenario in 2026 where sleeping with a boss or subordinate is acceptable behavior for corporate leadership.
And... look, I get it, and maybe you can write it off as just something that happens in the real world.
But the fact that he would do it, also screams, "This is someone who thinks the rules don't apply to him."
Which again puts him squarely in the "not someone you want as a leader" category.
> Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.
I don't think you can reasonably argue that their relationship must have had a significant power imbalance or what have you if you can't even decide which direction the power imbalance went in. Why is it impossible that the relationship was, all things considered, on roughly equal terms?
the woman is 42...
In general, adulthood does not confer an immunity to coercion.
But is assuming that all actions of extremely successful mature women are due to coercion as progressive as you hopped?
I think you've made the assumption that I'm assuming something.
>>> Or he's a predator.
>> the woman is 42...
> In general, adulthood does not confer an immunity to coercion.
I'm only responding to the idea that one must be young to be victimized by a predator, which is silly and false. I am not, however, supposing anything of the sort is what happened here.
I somewhat disagree.
1. Cheating on his wife when that will likely significantly change the ownership of the company is a big deal;
2. Here's where I disagree most. A married billionaire CEO sleeping with an also-married subordinate is a huge deal and that alone warrants an ouster. It creates huge legal exposure for the company;
3. The biggest issue with the Chinese spy is he's wealthy enough that this shouldn't happen. I'm sorry but you can afford corporate security who can vet the people you're involved with and do so discreetly;
Huang hired Heller (a crisis PR firm) a year ago. It seems like he knew something was coming and possibly failed to inform the board. Ok, that's more grounds for termination.
I too am reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
I very much doubt it stops here.
[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
> Even though those export control were arguably bad, the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
On one hand I firmly believe that if a rule is stupid you have no moral obligation to obey it. There might still be consequences though, however unjust.
On the other hand so many rules can be in place for years because people just don't obey them so their stupidity is mitigated to the point of invisibility.
Odds are she wasn't a spy see this write up - https://desmondshum.substack.com/p/alice-huang-the-spy-narra...
The tl;dr is she slept with Jensen in return for large benefits for her Husband's company.
Her actual role in this doesn't have a real good direct translation to English.
Great substack, can I ask how you discovered?
That post hit the front page here recently a couple days ago but had 0 engagement and fell off after less than an hour.
You can argue about what the word "spy" really means, but even the source you quote thinks she's an asset for the Chinese establishment who was working to secure access to Nvidia chips for Chinese users, in contravention of US sanctions. A terrible terrible person for Jensen Huang to (literally) be in bed with.
The details are relevant if you care about the story. If this were flipped, it would make a difference if she was working for the CIA, the state department, or Intel.
> If this were flipped, it would make a difference if she was working for the CIA, the state department, or Intel.
Because those are independent from each other in a way that the corresponding institutions in China are not.
Every large Chinese company is under the direct control of the CCP. Working for a large Chinese company means you are working for the Chinese government in the same way as a state department employee (very differently from someone working for Intel, at least if they haven't individually received a National Security Letter).
> The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal (although improper and opens up potential quid-pro-quo lawsuits)
That is absolutely a huge deal, I have no idea why you don't think it is. That is the kind of behavior which anyone in an American workplace knows is not tolerated in the slightest and would lead to firing. The fact that he did it anyway shows he has shockingly poor judgement.
You've left out the worst parts of the scandal, which involves the US government investigation into the Megaspeed being buried after a large contribution was made to the White House ballroom fund. This website has a pretty good summary https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-nvidia-scandal-no-e...
Agree with everything, except a sub point of #6: Jensen was presumably unaware she was a spy.
Sleeping with somebody that turns out to be a spy is insanely poor judgement.
Not knowing doesn't make it any better!
Not knowing doesn't make it worse.
Where does "bribed the President of the United States to ignore 3 & 4" fit in? Or is that one more of a problem for said President?
Who are we to judge beyond legal controls?
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 is lesser than the needs of our partners, our friends, and our world.
Your judgment of me is a reflection of how you judge yourselves.
I pity you.
Such weird takes. Selling shit is bigger deal than destroying your family?! Fuck money, take care of your family, your lives! Family > geopolitics. Everything trickles down from there
Excellently put.
I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.
The Chinese spy thing and illegal dealing with China are far worse but they should be investigated properly.
He shouldn't be ousted from the company he built to be the biggest company in the world because he cheated on his wife.
> I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.
Huang himself said his infidelity hurt his wife and his kids. The people rushing to normalize this behavior are elevating sexual freedom above family obligations. Those people are wrong.
> Huang himself said his infidelity hurt his wife and his kids.
Well...
to what extent do you believe his public and almost entirely content-free apology letter ( https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company ) reflects his personal thoughts?
If this had happened at a more recent founder-led tech company, the board would have far less practical independence
Dual-class share structures have become the defacto standard for founder led companies, giving founders disproportionate (even majority) voting power.
Someone like Zuckerberg effectively controls the board and would be extraordinarily difficult to oust against his wishes (absent some exceptional legal intervention or a decision to step aside)
I think even if NVIDIA were founded recently, it still wouldn't have such a share structure. The companies that do have dual class shares are software companies that can grow significantly without raising a ton of capital. NVIDIA being a hardware company, that is a lot harder to do even today.
Anthropic is the most capitalist intensive company of all time and has a similar structure.
Per their S-1, Anthropic has on net spent almost none of the cash they raised.
are they just funding it via revenue?
Yes. Turns out all the people claiming Anthropic was a terrible business have some extremely heavy goalposts to move.
They may be.. Rest in piece.
Anthropic structure is way, way more complicated. Though it does indeed give full control to the founders, forever
Based on the publicly-available org chart [1], I gotta say that OpenAI's legal structure [2] is way more complicated than either.
1 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthropic%27s_corpor...
2 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OpenAI_corporate_str...
Oh wow, that’s a whole other level of over engineered hierarchy
Crazy we even allow non-voting shares and multiple tiers of shares.
It has worked out very well for my portfolio for 20 years now.
If you cherry pick the winners, doesn't matter what the corporate structure is.
Not really. We allow for a lot of ownership conditions.
i'm actually pretty okay with non-voting shares, it's super voting that are the issue
Those are the same thing.
you sure about that?
How and why would you?
The theory is that if an investor is under no compulsion to purchase shares that entitle them to no say in governance, so if they do so, they only have themselves to blame.
So much for theory!
America has always been a land of inequality..
Remember all men are created equal.. except in reality they werent, just ask the Blacks, natives, Chinese and all the others.
Even today how many average Americans can call the President and have a chat even once ?
And that’s precisely the sort of arrangement we should ban.
Humans need someone to be accountable to, even if it’s just some guy walking behind you saying “memento mori” twice a day.
Even among dual-class IPOs (which are the minority), only 18% of them have CEO control. [1]
That figure raises to about half if you include all officers/directors.
[1] https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Lowry%20-%20Buck...
Anthropic are planning a bizarre share structure that strips any voting power from shareholders. They will have a single special founders share, held by some new entity owned by the founders, that has 51% voting weight. 1 share to rule them all.
This is kinda huge; my layperson view is that Jensen has been responsible for their long term technology strategy, which requires deep understanding of so much outside of the business domain. I'm not exactly thrilled that they are "eating the world" (hf purchase had me bent out of shape, for example), but they've undeniably executed on some long term complex shit. Who could take his place?
> Who could take his place?
One of the greatest failures of Nvidia's Board was in failing to push for a successor. (Musks' companies face a similar risk.)
Nvidia had 3 cofounders. Jensen was one. The second cofounder still works there.
What kind of coat do they wear
I’m personally hoping for a red trench coat like Carmen Sandiego.
Hopefully a tasteful and highly monogamous tweed
Is that founder a Jobs or a Woz? It matters.
Jensen is a Jobs.
I have a lot of respect for the man, but he is no Steve Jobs.
I served with Steve Jobs. I knew Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a friend of mine. He is no Steve Jobs.
It's been so long since he passed that I think most people commenting have forgotten Steve's singular contribution to the industry.
Steve Jobs never had a black leather jacket
He's not that bad
not really; all three founders were engineers with deep technical expertise
With Nvidia, Do we know this or is there just not a public face?
SpaceX has Shotwell to cushion the blow. Tesla will obviously crash into the cellar the moment he OD's or gets thrown in jail for pedo shit.
I wonder about Tesla. The Cybertruck was Musk’s baby and I wonder if the company might be better off with someone a bit more balanced at the helm. They might have needed Musk’s outsized personality to warp the perception of electric cars long enough to get the mass production rolling, but now maybe someone more amenable to regular incremental improvements rather than another big bet on AI and Humanoid Robots. Spin that stuff off to another company and focus Tesla more on their core business.
Tesla's stock is not based in reality. It's based on a cult of personality. Once that person is gone, so too is the stock price.
They have (had?) talented engineers, they may have a future as a decent car company if they didn't keep getting pulled into 20 directions by their 5 minute attention span CEO.
The trillion dollar valuation would be gone for sure.
What about his cousin? I think she would be a perfect fit
you implying acquisition?
Yeah but how much is just nvidia happened to be in the right business for the AI boom
It’s not like Jensen predicted it
He may not have predicted the specifics, but they didn't just happen to be there. Nvidia started work on CUDA in 2004, and aggressively iterated machine learning hardware and software for twenty years to get into the position they had for the boom.
Well AMD and Intel were too, and they've not delivered remotely close to the same performance as NVIDIA.
Ok AMD had some financial woes, but it also has made a lot of less optimal technical and business decisions that were entirely unforced errors.
China will pay him more.
That would be fascinating if China offered to double Jensen's salary and give him command of all AI hardware production ...
Why though.. He's a CEO.
Large companies always have a backup plan in case the CEO needs to be replaced. What usually happens in these cases is that a new CEO will be named. That new CEO will focus on maximizing the company's earnings while neglecting the tech. And the company will be an earnings winner for the next few years.
He's out as CEO but he'll continue to be a force at Nvidia. If the new CEO is smart, he'll keep him in the company, but it will be hard since Huang will be seen as the company's leader and it will be very hard for Huang to act any other way.
Large traditional companies.
Recent trend is quite the opposite. What's Tesla without Musk selling pipe dreams ? Pretty sure there is 0 plan for replacement.
Are you suggesting that one cherry picked example proves a new trend?
Nvidia, SpaceX, Tesla - that's 3 out of 3 new companies in top 10 US.
two people
And 3 out of top 10 US companies by valuation. Sample size is obviously small. But if you look at larger picture, there is lots of them.
It doesn't seem Nvidia had a backup plan: https://x.com/business/status/2119633671300730893
Huang expected to run the company well into his 80s, with no clear successor.
would you want that CEO job?... founder behind the scenes driving the show.
I'd be crying into my $10,000 dollar bills that I'm also lighting on fire...
They need to fire him outright. The company needs to set the example that misconduct won’t be tolerated at any level. Keeping him on in anything but a transition capacity would be a mistake.
Most people couldn’t care less about him having affairs. Sex is part of life, and affairs are pretty common.
The bigger issue is the conflict of interest stuff, but until that’s proven this is a horrible look for NVIDIA if they actually go through with it.
> bigger issue is the conflict of interest stuff
The no-going-back issue is the corruption. Jensen corruptly quashed an investigation into Megaspeed. He then quite clearly expected Republicans in Congress to back him, which is why he only came clean when forced to.
I agree the corruption and conflict of interest stuff is the real issue here and is serious. I’m just criticising the hand-wringing over him banging some random woman (or women, as it apparently turns out), as if that is some unprecedented or shocking behaviour or worthy of a reprimand on its own. Most of the world left that prudish shit behind in the ‘90s.
I think marital infidelity is shitty behaviour but I also think the main issue here is that this man in this job with this global significance thought this woman was safe to be involved with.
His board must think he's a lunatic. They have every right to know if he's having an affair with anyone (because marital infidelity is a personal corruption issue that is rarely not a problem when it's a CEO, since carrying off an affair usually involves suborning staff in some way). But this? Madness.
> the hand-wringing over him banging some random woman
I don't care about it. But I do understand folks who are dismayed to see someone who many of us–myself included–saw as a bit of a paragon until a few weeks ago turning out to be a total shithead.
> saw as a bit of a paragon
He was never a paragon.
https://mustsharenews.com/jensen-huang-signs-woman-chest/
Consensual and very tame. That's nothing.
Ok, I see your definition of paragon differs from mine, possibly depending on how much money the paragon has.
Apparently. I don't think that anything vaguely sexual is inherently immoral.
Not a paragon but definitely a very capable entrepreneur.
I'm disappointed in him as a business person, not in a some moralistic sense but because he's clearly very smart and capable yet made himself vulnerable with these two dumb mistakes. In his position there are a lot of external interests who want leverage or control over you.
I’ll give you a shortcut for the future, and I will be downvoted for doing so.
Don’t look to billionaires if you’re looking for paragons. They all fail basic ethical checks. It’s very easy and convenient to not look for these failures. But, inevitably, when somebody starts looking hard, they find them.
I don’t think it’s necessarily prudish, but in order to accurately judge it you need to know if someone’s ENM or not, and that’s more than most people make known about their personal lives.
Stepping outside of your marriage behind your spouse’s back is still scummy behavior.
"some random woman" who happen to be a) a foreign spy and b) a direct report. You absolute moron.
AFAICT, (b.) isn't correct? The alleged spy works for a Singaporean company called "Megaspeed"[1], and while there is a conflict of interest argument, perhaps, "direct report" seems incorrect.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang_spying_scandal
There are reportedly two women. One is Alice Huang, who you mention, the other is Nvidia's VP of health care: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/technology/jensen-huang-n...
you didn't even bother trying to read the article...
The article is paywalled for me.
Regardless of that, the comment above still seems correct, and a sibling comment points out that (as a rather new development), that they are separate women.
"random women"
one was a direct report, one was a spy
can't get more random than that, i agree
This sounds too reasonable.
Considering the current administration and the amount of corruption by trump and co, I feel like not following the rules is too simplistic an explanation for being targeted like this.
Not familiar with the details, I asked the ai overlords to gather up public evidence and give me a summary and... this feels like a very premature accusation. Unless you know something that isn't public, seems like we need to wait and see.
There are now two allegations: that he had sex with a Chinese spy and that he had sex with a direct report.
The second one will get you fired just about anywhere.
Man what are you on about? Most CEOs are gone the moment affairs (especially those within the company) come to light.
Your common or garden affair? Not a big deal.
Affair of a CEO with a direct report and member of senior leadership? Kind of a big deal
Affair with a Chinese intelligence agent? Quite a big deal
As people said about the Huggingface incident: if you see one ant in your kitchen, the best estimate for the total number of ants actually present is well above one.
One affair was a mistake. Two, with a spy and an employee, are a real failure of responsibility -- and those are just the ones we know about.
Frankly, has he broken any law?
I don’t understand you Americans; you live in a disproportionately violent society, tolerate all sort of abuse and manipulation, then will scream hysterically at anyone having an unconventional sex life.
Enabling billions of dollars of export-restricted chips to be shipped to China is probably more of an issue than the affairs, legally speaking.
Huang doesn't decide national policy. Were the chips shipped legally?
They were shipped to a sketchy Singaporean company that his Chinese spy-mistress worked at, and IIRC he tried to prevent investigations into whether those chips were being redirected to China.
The whole “Chinese operative” reeks of a grossly cobbled together smear campaign, spoken with the voice of a BW cinema newsreel from the McCarthyist era
And someone using their influence to have the DOJ squash the investigation into the matter that Commerce was running? Not a good look.
Engaging in a relationship of any sort with a direct report (the second woman he reportedly had an affair with) is typically prohibited behavior. The imbalance of power between a boss and a subordinate in their report line just screams sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.
It's nothing to do with prudishness about his sex life and everything to do with his actions endangering the company.
Typically prohibited because it comes with the *risk* of sexual harassment accusations.
But so does walking around in public without covering all body head to toe, indeed some countries ban women from doing so, just to avoid having to deal with aroused strangers.
Simple risk aversion or trespassing on personal freedom?
The accusal is that he has broken US federal securities and export control laws. There also may be some light treason.
Reducing this to “an unconventional sex life” is a weird and sort of stupid take when matters of global trade and export sanctions policy are concerned, but sure, we’re all a bunch of violent prudes over here.
Give me a fucking break.
Would be pretty difficult for him to have any influence if he ends up in a cell
Well, what makes me little dissapointed is instead of focusing on issues and topics that really matter, we discuss who f*cked whom.
There are gravely important matters to focus on in the current state of affairs that affect us all, our kids and future of human kind, but we got somehow trained to waste our focus and time on mere noise every single day.
I agree, but the risk of company secret leakage is high in this story. And for a such pivotal and big company I understand the board decision.
It is unethical to fuck your subordinates.
ETA: It's nice to see all the incels downvoting this lol.
>we got somehow trained
Not that long ago, it was accepted that sex - f*cking - was at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - basic physiological needs.
This is, of course, true for men.
But it is incredibly inconvenient for feminists.
So what did we do? Well, we just got rid of it of course.
And now here we are.
What on earth are you talking about?
The bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are things you need to stay alive. Without these things you die:
- Food
- Water
- Shelter
- Sleep and rest
- Air and comfortable temperature
As much as men (and not exclusively men) like sex, they don't literally die without it.
I'm talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as published in his landmark paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" that appeared in Psychological Review in 1943.
You would do well to read it, bearing this whole saga in mind.
But if that is too much for you, Wikipedia has a tl;dr:
"Maslow's hierarchy places sex in the physiological needs category, alongside food and breathing." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#...)
"Not that long ago"
"appeared in Psychological Review in 1943."
I consider 1943 a long time ago.
The acceptance did not end (or begin) with the first publication?
But nothing turns on this. Feel free to replace "Not that long ago" with "Previously".
I guess the point is there's no value in repeating some long-refuted idea, especially when it's kind of sexist and outdated now.
There are a whole host of ideas we thought "previously". And then we learnt more and improved as a society, and now we don't think them anymore.
The fact we thought it previously and don't now is kind of evidence that we've moved on from that idea.
Related: Jensen Huang Said to Have Had Relationship with Nvidia Executive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459321
This doesn’t bode well for Anthropic’s IPO indirectly, due to whole AI industry being propped up largely by Nvidia’s circular investment. Also there’s likely a big overlap of institutional investors who are both NVDA and ANT investors and will now likely seek to dump ANT at the opening bell.
> due to whole AI industry being propped up largely by Nvidia’s circular investment.
This premise is most likely incorrect: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-state-of-the-ai-economy
If anything this should impact the IPO only to the extent it affects the production of new compute capacity, because it is clear that is the #1 thing they need to scale revenues.
Part of me wonders if recent problems with AI (Huang leaks, OpenAI models hacking Huggingface), haven't been arranged by OpenAI in order to poison Anthropic's IPO.
This might rather save the IPO. Banned open source models will allow the closed source players to maintain power and recoup a larger part of their investment by driving up the prices.
Maybe Jensen used Claude and asked a bit wrong things about Chinese ladies. And here we go.
Short term, days or weeks, there will be panic. But the impact of the change won't really be felt for years to come. For the next few years, the company will be fine.
Is that why tech bros are circling the wagons? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/technology/jensen-huang-a...
FALSE.
The coup of Jensen Huang was precisely organized by the same large institutional investors.
They want NVIDIA to lock-up firmware and prevent any open-weight models from being run. Everyone (at least in US/NATO/US-aligned world) will be forced to use Anthriopic/OpenAI or some other US based closed source model.
Open models will be banned at the GPU level.
This is done to cement the multi-trillion dollar valuation of the AI labs and prevent AI bubble from popping due to customers using free open-weight, instead of pay-per-token closed models
These days US has nowhere near enough soft power to do something like that.
Agreed. And it would damage Nvidia if they went along with this.
fall of nvidia is acceptable collateral damage, they are just hardware vendor. all their chips are made by TSMC anyways. And they can be replaced by OpenAI's inhouse chips or googles TPUs, made in the same TSMC factories.
no biggie if their valuation will deflate a bit just like Cisco did in 2000.
pure-software business like openai/ant, will be protected and their global market will be protected
If anyone can make chips like Nvidia, why isn't another company doing it already? Anything can sound easy if you reduce it enough, but I really don't see how it is that easy in practice.
its not easy, but google and amazon are doing that, openai is working on that, others will follow
Indeed, If the CCP stays stable long enough they'll (as a country) succeed at it.
Not because they care about the rest of the world, they care about their own domestic market/sales though.
They successfully re-invented half of modern consumer tech inside China already, the the US closes a market, it hurts them for a few years then they close that gap.
For decades it's been "Yeah they closed the Gap on X but we have Y" then "Yeah they closed the gap on Y but we have Z" and Z starts to look pretty uncertain.
At a certain point you have to realise that with enough capital and people you can do the things that the other people with enough capital and people are doing, there isn't really any secret special "America has to be the tech leader" sauce, there wasn't when the British where the world leaders or when the Italians where or the Middle East and back through history.
Exceptionalism eventually kills your lead.
They can't even stop one company from selling physical chips to China, yet somehow they're going to prevent anybody from running open models? I don't know, it doesn't seem likely to me.
there will be divergence: US-aligned world (NATO+Korea+Japan and other vassal states) will bend over and agree to whatever regulation Department of Commerce/State is cooking to ban open weight (Chinese) models.
the rest of the world will be starved of GPUs and chipmaking equipment and chemical supplies for chip making
I… don't think that will work now…
> US/NATO/US-aligned world
NATO really barely exists anymore as a consensus mechanism, it doesn't make that kind of policy or have that sort of policy influence, the "US-alignment" of the world has never been weaker, and the genie is really out of the bottle on the technology anyway.
false, US is able to dictate its will to its vassals, because US controls the supply us chips for inference and software for LLM
> (at least in US/NATO/US-aligned world)
Might have worked if they did it suddenly and all at once a decade ago.
I don't think anyone thinking that is possible has thoroughly understood how much soft power the US has lost in the last decade.
US still has hard power, what do you think Canada or Denmark can do against US's will ?
invoke Nato article 5? or loudly complain to see a manager?
>Open models will be banned at the GPU level.
Is this actually technically possible?
maybe, unless you have a torrent client
I don't see how this can happen, though. There are a lot of GPUs out there and open models have already been downloaded millions of times. (IIRC Deepseek v4.1 Flash has been downloaded nearly 2M times just on HuggingFace, just over the past month.) The NATO world already relies quite heavily on open models, in many cases served by Mistral and other local providers. China is also developing its own hardware -- Huawei isn't slacking -- and it's not that far behind. And I'd bet there's no such thing as a "GPU Level" block that can't be hacked away.
Such a move would also be transparently dystopian... though, in fairness, I suppose that makes it more plausible than it would otherwise be...
they will use National Security as a pretense to force everyone on "verified-aligned AI".
if Uncle Sam has not approved your model, it will be illegal to run it as a AI risk.
Americans have swallowed even worse limitations on their freedoms, so nobody will even notice that, because all notices will be sent to hyperscalers, neoclouds, and other large operators of GPU farms
... NATO? The EU's biggest AI provider sells DeepSeek and GLM.
lol
The thing I don't understand is what is the real issue? Just the bad PR? I would kind of think affairs are pretty common, it's just this is public? I'm struggling to find anything where he did something bad business wise or compromised national security. Seems like Americans just love the sensationalism of affairs. Makes for good news I guess.
The woman he was having an affair with is suspected of being a Chinese spy, and she may have been using him to circumvent US export controls to move lots of NVidia chips into China.
but we don't have any evidence of that? also, seems the wrong person to target to do that right? He'd leave a long evidence trail trying to get people in the company to do that? I'd think if you wanted to do that you'd target someone further down in the operations side of things. So all we have is he had an affair with a possible "spy"? If he didn't know she was a spy, and didn't take any actions that circumvent anything, basically he just had an affair? Given intelligence agencies knew about this for a long time, and didn't tell him, kind of says they didn't have anything of substance and there was no real risk?
We actually don't, other than the U.S. government claiming she is. The timing of this seems quite odd considering the current government just lost an election, and has a history of blaming things on China.
> but we don't have any evidence of that?
Only accusations and suspicions at present, possible evidence in the future.
I don't have a deep understanding of the events, but my superficial impression is that China set up a shell company (Megaspeed) in Singapore, and put this woman in charge of it. She then persuaded Huang to engage in intercourse of the physical and commercial varieties. I get the impression he may have convinced some US officials to look the other way, to not dig into the affairs of the "Singaporean" company. That's where he may have strayed from "sucker" into "co-conspirator."
That would be problematic irrespective of him having an affair with her though. The real story then should be the circumvention of the export ban and the coercion of US officials, not the affair itself.
A CEO cheating on his wife doesn't exactly paint them as a trustworthy leader to partners, suppliers and customers. Even less so when he does it twice, with a foreign intelligence operative.
I kind of just assume this (affairs) is likely the case with a reasonable percentage of CEOs, and if he didn't know she was a spy, he was just having an affair. Also given all the photos, it wasn't even that much of a secret. I'm just struggling to see what he did wrong other than the affair. Given approx 15-20% in US have affairs not really out of the ordinary.
Remember Jensen Huang's first post on twitter: "For my first post, I’m sharing a letter NVIDIA signed on why open models matter." https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2080643682408321103
Open Weights and American AI Leadership https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-L...
That has nothing to do with the topic at hand
Can someone make the strong case for why he should be ousted?
I’m not deep into this story, but my initial reaction is that marital infidelity doesn’t seem like a strong reason to oust him, aside from him possibly being compromised by an international spy. Haven’t other successful leaders continued to lead after having their affairs exposed?
(And no, I don’t believe what he did is morally excusable for the record.)
Your aside is the primary issue and he may have worked with a CCP agent to bypass federal export controls.
So let me get this straight, there is now a grand conspiracy within nvidia and its supply chain network to avoid export controls? How exactly would that work? "Hey its Jensen, can you call John in shipping and send 16 containers of H200s through Myanamar to China?"
According to the NYT[1], Megaspeed (originally Chinese owned) was registered in Singapore in 2023, allowing it to bypass US export bans. FOUR days after the re-registration, Nvidia designated Megaspeed a preferred partner, giving it priority access to advanced chips (H200). Seems a bit odd.
Then Nvidia's general counsel contacted the commerce dept in 2025 to ask about a smuggling investigation into Megaspeed and whether the U.S. was involved in Singapore's detention of Alice Huang. Direction for this likely coming from Jensen.
Align that with his active lobbying of Washington officials to loosen export restrictions to China specifically
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000011275138/nvidia-j...
So because you, in your infinite knowledge of international smuggling, can't envision any method for evading export control, it must not be possible. Is that what you're saying?
"This Singapore client wants a bazillion H200s".
Not really that complicated of a scheme! The main thing is that the sales people... they "know" this is likely export control circumvention but choose to not make a stink about it. Willful ignorance.
Often times these export control issues play out like:
- big deals made with shell companies
- most people involved are incentivised to play along and pretend to not notice the shell-ness of the company
- one person doesn't get the memo and is like "uhh... wait isn't this bad?"
- now that the phrase has been uttered, either cover ups happen or a bunch of other nasty shit happens
Reality, I suppose that most procuments is played along the line : this Singapore company claimed it was for their local legal entity, and here the certificate/contract they signed.
At this stage, there is no reason to not sign the contract to provide whatever they ask. DD done, risk management done, risk but acceptable etc.
So yes everyone is playing the game.
Maybe more "Hey, sell to this new Neocloud I met with in Singapore. Sure, it's ran by Chinese nationals, no, I don't know who's workloads they're running, don't worry about it."
...which may or may not be a violation of the export controls but it violates the intent.
These are some good points! Thanks for the replies.
He revealed himself to be obviously stupid and while CEOs don't do much, they can't seem to be obviously stupid.
Evading export controls and lying about it is a pretty bad look
> aside from him possibly being compromised by an international spy
That's a pretty big "aside" for a very big company like NVIDIA.
> Haven’t other successful leaders continued to lead after having their affairs exposed?
https://andybyron.wiki/ is one half of the erstwhile internet-meme "Coldplay Cam Couple".
The part where the mistress is a corporate cutout for Alibaba and head of a company making multi billion dollar deals with Nvidia, I imagine.
> him possibly being compromised by an international spy
you answered your own question.
It's come out that he was having another affair with a Nvidia employee as well, their vice president of healthcare. Having an affair with a client is one thing but having one with a client and a subordinate is maybe enough for the board to remove him.
he was sleeping with a chinese spy
There isn't enough discussion of how many controls needed to fail for Nvidia to smuggle billions of dollars of GPUs to Chinese firms in violation of export controls. The affairs with alleged spies is not even the most egregious failure of corporate governance.
Controlling such high-volume products has never really worked, especially if you sell to other third countries. Plenty of western electronic parts show up in Russian weapons, despite export restrictions.
These are matters of degree, and I challenge you to find a comparable example of arms vendors having 20% of their revenues from vassal states of geopolitical enemies while also having their leadership be personally compromised. Makes sense why Jensen boasts about not having written contracts documenting his crimes when, e.g., he was going around Singaporean family offices raising money for Malaysian shell companies to place orders on behalf of China.
When I read that Jensen was exploring Chinese Models, I thought it meant something different.
NVDA down almost 8% in after-hours trading.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/
AMD way up
Better hope AMD ascendant limits the main (only?) downside of alienating allies (once again, but from "our" side this time) for no upside whatsoever, not even rule of law
(Taiwan. You guys have no idea how this is/will be regarded in Taiwan. and Japan. Where infidelity is baked into the culture already.)
Dems and their sympathizers are taking the rapidly descending Republic and pointing it nose down.
But a separate foiler is that Jensen and family have been preparing for a year for this exact scenario and succession is already planned five years out
Is there any reason why this will actually change the fundamentals of Nvidia's business so long as 5080s go for as much as a used car and the entire world wants H200s? Even if they lose an extremely hands-on CEO, they're selling a very expensive product with extremely high global demand.
Uh huh.. that is today. what about the day after tomorrow?
I think demand for Nvidia products will remain strong by Friday.
I don't know, there sure are a whole lot of H200s sitting in warehouses for companies forced to take delivery or be cut out of future lots.
Yeah I genuinely don't know either! I'm just very curious about the effect an ouster will have not on the stock price, but the business of designing and selling chips.
Why aren’t they putting them on for resale ?
I'm concerned about how this further could impact consumer access to GPUs and RAM, if he's replaced with someone who will prioritize these markets even less than they already are.
I wonder what happens to NVDA afterwards. People say Jensen is NVDA or at least he has a lot of controls over the company. I guess they finally found the right time (very bad midterm) and the right opportunity (mistress as Chinese spy).
I even wonder whether some elements within the Chinese government has a hand in it -- not (only) the mistress part but the ousting part.
There's probably a lot more to this than we'll ever know.
I think it's worth even considering that if the allegations are true that the objective was to get Huang fired. Sure, he sold China chips, but they have their own homegrown chips now and the Chinese government have played a direct part in that.
I'm thinking the people behind trying to oust him are people who don't appreciate him likely knowingly violating export sanctions and putting the rest of the company and himself at risk of massive fines and criminal prosecution
Given that
1/ China is still interested in chips
2/ Chip exports to China will now (presumably) be under even more scrutiny
What would their motivation be to leak this info?
Show of power Got caught Kill stock
Maybe?
Offer Jensen asylum to run a chip company in China
There is no “they” in this. My read is the timing of all of this entirely down to the results of the midterm elections.
Over the next two years, Congress is going to haul in every tech CEO who licked Trump’s boots. I think Jensen tried to get in front of it and now journalists and institutional short sellers are digging up the dirt.
Interesting to see what happens to the consumer, gaming GPU market.
Financially it almost certainly makes sense to sell to AI hyperscalers alone; without Jensen, perhaps Nvidia shifts like Micron before them, leaving the lower margin consumer market to others.
I would figure Jensen for the type to "dance with the girl who you bought to the dance" type. A new CEO may lack that sort of sentimentality for the gamers/prosumers that made Nvidia.
Yeah, I'm really worried about this
It's not immediately clear that Jensen is as visionary and indispensable as some people claim. True, under his watch, Nvidia rose from a relatively obscure company to one of the largest companies in the world, and even a national asset. But it's really hard to believe that these achievements are due to Jensen's brilliance. Jensen didn't create the crypto mania that propelled Nvidia in the 2010s, nor did he create the current AI revolution.
To me, he had the good fortune of standing in the right place at the right time. He is no Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly started the PC revolution and the iPhone revolution. This is not to deny his brilliance and business acumen, but I think too many people overstate his contribution to both the company and the United States. Of course I could be wrong so I welcome correction or alternative viewpoints.
Speaking of the US, Jensen has indeed become a liability. A compromised CEO is, of course, a liability to a national asset, and a politically toxic one at that. Nvidia is a business with sensitive political ties now. It can't afford to appear compromised in the eyes of Washington. Therefore, Nvidia's stakeholders must let Jensen go; otherwise, it will affect the company as a whole.
Jensen made basically two visionary decisions. The first was to promote GPGPU with CUDA across their entire lineup including consumer hardware. The second was to specifically invest heavily in supporting machine learning way before anyone else in chips cared. CuDNN came out in 2014, just two years after AlexNet. Three years before the transformer. Eight years before ChatGPT. Before PyTorch. Before TensorFlow. Other chip CEOs probably hadn't even heard of AlexNet in 2014. Even at the time I thought[1] AMD and Intel were crazy to completely ignore a market opportunity like this. They still haven't caught up.
Assuming these decisions are attributable to him personally, then he absolutely deserves the description "visionary". That said, he's made plenty of other choices I don't like, and also invested in plenty of silly stuff that isn't panning out for them. I don't really think Nvidia needs a visionary right now. They have the best business in the world and they just need to execute. Regardless of whether he deserves to be ousted, the company will be fine without him for the next decade at least. So a stock selloff is silly.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10030957
That's two things over a long history. I wonder how many other initiatives he spear headed that never went anywhere.
Plenty. But also I'm sure there were a lot of decisions he made earlier in the company's history that led to them being in the position to start the CUDA project. I'm less familiar with those. They were consequential at the time but now they only matter inasmuch as they allowed the company to survive until AI took off.
It still baffles me that most people don't realize how success in 'business'/'leadership' positions has almost nothing to do with an individuals skill/intelligence in leading/decisions but simply mere luck and timing. You could argue that to attain a high position in a company requires some level of shrewdness and intelligence though, but that is another game.
The common argument is, well 'x' leader has had success in 5+ companies! Surely they must be excellent visionaries. Firstly, no single person in their lifetime can possibly launch/aid enough companies to success to have a large enough sample size to prove they are a factor for success. Launching 'x' amount of companies is great but its still such a small amount that it cannot really demonstrate anything. Secondly, once you have had success once, you gain connections, wealth, e.t.c. that only bolster further endeavors that you do even if they are pretty bad ones.
Ofc, there are things an individual at the top of a company can do to make 'good decisions', but this is mostly just selecting the right people below you to delegate to (thus reading/spotting talent well) and listening to your data and people to get as much information as possible before making overarching decisions based on that. This is what I consider common-sense and what most people do in their day-to-day jobs all the way at the bottom of companies anyways, alongside all their regular hard-work (engineering e.t.c.). Upper management just has the luxury of only have to focus on the common-sense dull part; listen to incoming data, make obvious meta decision.
You are really not giving the man any credit - I suspect you weren't part of the GPU era of video games and don't understand the roots of nvidia. That man hustled that company. You can't say things like "right time and right place" without being a little blase.
I don't know much about Nvidia's history, but isn't Jensen largely responsible for CUDA and the company's monopoly on machine learning hardware? It wasn't an obvious bet at the time that this would pay off, but Nvidia sure poured a lot of money into making their software stack so good that nobody wanted to even consider other options.
Yes, at least according to the reporting on the company. It was an all-in bet on something very niche at the time.
Yes, you're entirely correct. But you're also underestimating the people's potential to squander great opportunities like these. Look at AMD for example, they had a good head start over nvidia yet they haven't done anything remotely as good.
> He is no Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly started the PC revolution and the iPhone revolution
by being ousted from his own company and using his golden parachute while * being bought back*?
Under his watch? You mean the entire time from the very beginning. He built the company from nothing and you are not sure he is visionary and indispensable. can't make this shit up :)
You're not really addressing the point made above, that the things that contributed the most to Nvidia's valuation (crypto, AI) are not things that Jensen had much to do with.
Right - unreal to think the founder from the 90s isn't core DNA to nvidia. All the thread here thinking you can parachute in a CEO and nvidia would be fine.
Did he break any law?
Did he circumvent export restrictions?
If not, replacing him would be a mistake for Nvidia. I also fear that it would endanger open weight models in America.
I think this is for the FBI to determine.
I think there are multiple factors working here:
1. Hardliners angry about NVDA selling GPUs to China;
2. Board/Big investors want to get rid of him. They may think he is less important now that NVDA is clearly the top dog.
3. Political power trying to build up a case starting with him;
Anything else?
It's #3 and shortsellers. There's no one who can lead Nvidea, like he does with his technical depth, connections and trust within the company. Getting rid of him will be a loss for all investors and board.
Looks like the board is not really with him though. Maybe there are too many scandals if he refuses to step down?
If Nvidia is going to fire Jensen Huang, my question is whether Jensen will be allowed to start another "Nvidia".
I hope he's allowed to do so. He now knows how not to get trapped into a tactically targeted honeypot, he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.
This minus all the cruft and legacy overhead of a company as old as Nvidia. I'm now hoping he gets fired.
Why would Jensen without Nvidia be a better bet than Nvidia without Jensen?
I don't think Jensen without Nvidia would be better, but he's uniquely suited to fund a company, raise an enormous amount of capital, jumpstart contracts and partnerships, utilize connections at the highest levels of the global economy, and attract talent across all levels of a new company. Very few people, if any, have the foundations to do this.
Why does it need to be? Why not both? What if both produces a net positive, as competition is usually a good thing?
> Why would Jensen without Nvidia be a better bet
Because he can start a new company knowing everything that he got wrong the first time around, be able to hire absolute badass engineers who got fired from Nvidia because some Manager or HR thought they smelled wrong and was a hygiene risk, or quit Nvidia because they didn't like the work they were being assigned, be able to raise capital from investors who currently won't invest in Nvidia because of reasons, be able to strike new deals that hasn't happened because someone at Nvidia isn't letting them happen.
Nvidia is a very old company, not as old as Intel but close. Old companies build their own internal overhead you just cannot get rid of that would just kill a new company
Thought they smelled wrong? Am I missing a reference to something?
It's just a shower. It won't harm you.
That's not how the world works. Most of what NVIDIA does is protected by patents and trade secrets, not to mention CUDA.
And what do you mean by "the things he did wrong the first time"? NVIDIA was the most valuable company in the world at one point either this year or last year, and it's still in the top three. He did everything right from business perspective.
idk reading everything what is coming out it looks like he had much unlimited power to do whatever he wanted. so i dont buy that someone (even legal) was a hurdle for him.
> be able to hire absolute badass engineers who got fired from Nvidia because some Manager or HR thought they smelled wrong and was a hygiene risk
This is … oddly specific
What are you talking about? Do you understand how companies work?
> Jensen will be allowed to start another "Nvidia".l
Jensen has a very good relationship with Musk. I think he would hire him and put him CEO of Terrafab, of course only if Jensen is down for it as well.
This is a fascinating theory.
Almost worth the time I wasted reading through the steaming pile of trash that all the other comments on this story are...
It's not just the Chinese spy. NYT:
> Jensen Huang... also had an extramarital relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company.
In what way did this affect nvidia's products?
How is that relevant? You could claim he was a victim of a honeypot, but an affair with a report is an abuse of power. Any regular employee would be terminated within a day. A CEO in his position will take a little more than a day.
It's an abuse of power, but it's also an excuse to get him out. Fortune 100 boards don't make decisions of this financial magnitude because of ethical considerations. Some political wind must have shifted against Jensen.
I used to be a frequent visitor to /r/nvidia ~15 years ago until ~5 years ago. Around 2020 it turned increasingly into a sort of stock price cult. The discussions were corrupted with people who felt like they had a duty to try to help increase the stock price. I'm seeing inklings of that in these sorts of threads. How are these people so unaware of standard corporate policy? This is like the stereotypical case that's presented by HR to new hires.
You mean like Sergey Brin was over Amanda Rosenberg? Oh wait, he wasn't.
1. That was 2014, prior to #MeToo, etc. This is less tolerated now (which is good, in my opinion).
2. Huang does not have the same control over the board that Brin and Page had. That doesn't make it "better", but it does affect the outcome.
To be clear, I am not defending Brin.
Even putting that aside, it affected the stock price, so I don’t see why the board wouldn’t care.
So what ? Does it make him a bad boss ?
Yes.
...yes... maybe effective at business, but definitely a bad boss to have relationships with your directs
I can overlook a lot for a bad boss that makes me a multi-millionaire possibly ten times over.
... yes? Obviously?
He will have a non compete agreement for a while. May be 1 year or more.
In California?
California allows paid noncompetes but it's not clear what they could offer him since he already has ~$150B.
> he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.
Building an Nvidia competitor would be a long, hard slog that almost certainly ends in failure for anyone including Jensen Huang.
They (NVIDIA) have tens of thousands of patents on their technology that would be hard to build around and commitments that lock up 60-70% of TSMC's CoWoS capacity.
What do you mean "allowed"?
I assume golden parachute + noncompete contract.
Ah, the golden handcuffs.
> whether Jensen will be allowed to start another Nvidia
Sure. After he's done responding to the Congress and various investigators and his family, something I suspect will occupy a good part of his next decade.
> He now knows how not to get trapped into a tactically targeted honeypot…
Does he? Plenty of serial cheaters out there getting caught repeatedly.
If I am Lip-bu at Intel, I’d wire Huang after news cycle cools.
He's still a shareholder. It is considered extremely bad form to start a company that competes with a company that you are still a shareholder of unless you have not been fired with cause. The only other example I can think of is Jobs. So it is possible but I would assume that post Jobs contracts were put together in such a way that it would be very hard to compete with the company you got booted out of and that you are still a shareholder of. I've signed a couple of contracts over the years just as shareholders and those already mentioned that if I had competing interests the deal would be null and void and I'd be liable, and for good reasons too.
He could pretty trivially divest or move his shares into a blind trust or something. This isn't rocket science, and furthermore it's not as bad form as you might think. It happens all the time with little repurcissions.
You think the kind of lawyers that power the documents behind these endeavours (a couple of trillion dollars) have not thought about this?
> the kind of lawyers that power the documents behind these endeavours
Those lawyers were hired by Jensen.
And paid by NV.
Why couldn't he just sell his shares then buy unencumbered fresh shares straight on the stock market? Lose <1% of spread...
Jensen made Nvidia. He named it, he built it from nothing with 2 other founders.
Ousting him is pretty much the worst case scenario for the company.
He would absolutely be fired if he were in any role, but as CEO cofounder, it's hard not to attribute Nvidia's success to his leadership.
The thing is, this is just what's been reported. There's almost certainly more going on if 2 affairs are public disclosure. If there is a sexual harassment angle here as well, he's toast.
Something very fishy is going on here. If NVIDIA suddenly closes down GPU sales to the general public after Jensen is gone then we know what is happening: the Altman/Dario/Musk mafia have gotten what they wanted: no more compute for open weight models for the general public.
That is exceptionally unlikely.
It's been true for the last 2 years. If they hadn't slowed down the historical progress, we would've had 512 GB VRAM graphics cards today.
China wins again The Guoanbu ( Guojia Anquan Bu (国家安全部) China's spy agency ) is subtle.
Honeytrap.
Reveal the information to a trusted journalist.
Destroy Huang's credibility.
Force his resignation.
Damage Nvidia.
China moves further in the AI game.
Game set and match. Sounds like this might have been China's real goal.
Jensen Huang is genuinely a classy guy, all possibilities accounted for, I like him.
The breed of CEO's coming up in tech are monstrous in comparison.
It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, and there seems to be quite a bit of evidence of a coverup and deliberate deception. It’s a liability problem; shareholders will sue. Heads will roll.
It will be a huge mistake for Nvidia
Is everyone here subscribed to wsj?
No. They read the headline, hit the paywall, and decide that’s enough to give their well-informed opinion.
This is like Apple board firing Jobs and Woz at the same time.
I fear this is all political. Jensen was becoming too powerful.
This is basically the civilised US version of what China did to Jack Ma.
Isn't this just not only about the severity of crimes but the potential to withstand the legacy of whatever crimes that were committed that seems untenable to digest.
Won't the CEO be fighting 2 big fights - One on the corporate front burning through the AI races and second the impending doom of lawsuits and the sheer number of avenues this opens up, frivolous or serios, for any Tom, Dick and Harry working with Nvidia as an employee, vendor, partner or anything just wanting an extra piece of the Trillion dollar pie?
That YTD chart, woooow. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/
Without knowing more this seems like the wrong move... The U.S. has the AI supply chain visualized incorrectly. The necessary manufacturing, raw materials and components all come from outside of the U.S. For nVidia to have decades of supplier relationships and manufacturing understanding, much of this was in the hands of the CEO more than other companies. Jensen has a lot of direct reports which is odd given the corporate structure.
I do wonder if Megaspeed and other shell companies have been monitored for over a year by the Feds where they broke export rules, failed to report to the Govt with the knowledge of several in the Administration... Everyone was making money on the side by allowing Jensen, Megaspeed and others profit off of bypassing export controls. Just recently a shipment of GPUs randomly disappeared as well.
If this all turns out to be true then removing him is a lot stronger than it seems and maybe in the long run fixing the bus factor problem will have been a good change.
Or, since nVidia is the central bank of the AI bubble, forcing him out kicks off a chain reaction that pops the bubble.
This all looks like an excuse to force him to bend the knee. He is the only western tech ceo who is 1) a strong proponent of open weight models and 2) is highly critical of the chip sanctions on China because they’ve done the opposite of what they were meant to do.
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
— Honoré de Balzac
If the allegations of selling “trade secrets” are false. He should remain CEO. I am unsure that there is ITAR or real regulations here, is it really an AI war. If it was it would be best if they trained on American chips for America.
I want a straw poll from people that actually own NVDA. Or at least can honestly adjust to a mental frame of "I am an NVDA shareholder".
Should the board replace him or not?
It's easy to judge when you have no skin in the game. What would you think if you did?
Any Nvidia employees out there?
Own some stock, don’t want him to be fired but he should be. Sucks all around
I would not be surprised if the woman is actually a CIA agent. Since the government bought a stake in Intel, and 15% of Nvidia exports revenue, it has been clear that it want direct control of the industry.
What bothers me is all these might be the plan afterall, the primary goal is not just to buy billion dollars of GPU.
Iamgine you're a spy or a mistresss, would you appear in public with the high profile target?
My cynical view is that a lot of US IP has already gone to China through Nvidia. The US should probably now monitor AMD, its executives and its relationship with China (via Taiwan or direct), if any, just as closely.
Fired with cause or stepping down (most likely stepping down)>Interim CEO named> Jensen flew too close to sun and got burned. Board investigations will put everything on Jensen and they will turn that chapter over. Much more information will come out. His wife I will divorce him as well. This whole thing is more political than anything else. Who leaked all of this is my biggest question. Nvidia should be fine in the mid term, but unstable in the short term.
I still recall, as a young engineer (1999) working in a high-flying startup outside of Boston -- bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of naive optimism -- I flew to Houston in late '99 to demo a fabulous optical networking switch to ENRON, all the while thinking why in the world would ENRON want to be in the business of networking. Ended up selling them a TON of very expensive equipment.
It all unwound a few months later, much to my chagrin (and my lost stock options, obviously).
Recall that most bubbles do not pop due to one, key material cause. Instead, they pop due to adjacent troubles that, in turn, lead to cascading effects.
That was true of:
- LTCM failure (1998; Thailand and other SE Asian countries defaulted);
- 2000 market crash (dot-coms crash, then telecom crash of 2001);
- 2008-2010 financial crisis (mortgage backed securities); ... and so many others before these.
It's entirely possible that NVDA, despite earning $$$$, could unwind the circular funding within the ecosystem (the very crux of telecom market crash of 2001)
Affair or not, this is a tragedy for American technology.
If the affair were not with someone who was a CCP spy then Jensen Huang would still have his job.
That would be the first affair we learned about... there's another and that may change the calculus. Regardless, the proverbial tragedy, IMO, would be depending on the judgement or heartbeat of one guy (CEO or not) at such a scale.
"Our kingdom for a shadow", or something. https://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardiii/richardiii.5.4.html
Nope, sleeping with your subordinates will also get you fired
he'll move to Taiwan, Taiwan will become part of China, China will move talent, Jensen will become the CEO of a new asian company and they will become a powerhouse in chip production in ~5 years
And getting the big boss all the bitches he wants is actually part of Chinese corporate culture.
Do we actually know how much positive effect he has on running the company or are we just making assumptions?
You are wondering if the guy who co-founded Nvidia and was its CEO since its founding (over 33 years of leadership) and saw its market cap top over $4 trillion dollars “had a positive effect”?
This is overblown; nvda is a mature company jensen has set the right bets forward so it's just a matter in who the successor is. In terms of revenue impact, assuming megaspeed accounted for ~20% of sales (rumored estimate) then game optimal move is to have OAI/ANT pick those sales up. We will hear about a transition plan probably around earnings.
If those sales were illicit, and listed under earnings reports as legitimate, is that defrauding investors?
yea that can be argued^ if there is proof that Jensen knew and acknowledged that these are shell companies that will funnel the chips to china then yea that's defrauding investors.
You can also argue that he wasn't aware n as far as he knew this was just a company in Singapore. It will be interesting how it plays out based on the facts.
I take no joy in noting that personality-driven companies are notably at the mercy of the vagaries of the key-man in the key-man risk clause... :-/
That's a tautology, of course. And the board should have been doing its job handling the key man in question
It's most obvious in hindsight, obviously. Across the history of such governance debacles.
Jensen has always wanted Nvidia to have a footing in China. Without that, the Chinese innovate faster and commoditize Nvidia’s business sooner. I’m willing to bet he already knew about Alice Huang selling to China. Trump probably knew for some time too. The board also knew about his second affair with his subordinate for a while.
Jensen is getting thrown under the bus by the board because it both likely reduces legal consequences (especially now that democrats are a lot more powerful), and as an opportunity to gain power and place someone in the CEO position that is more controllable.
Trump knew about the Chinese Spy for a YEAR.
So was Huang playing along as part of some other US-Chinese plot? He was a pawn, or go-between.
So what happens if this actually goes through? Everyone switches their hardware spend to which other providers?
TPUs and AWS's Trainium seem to be at least in the ballpark of being competitive but does that matter at all?
Nvidia will still be around?
So his girlfriend's a spy.
Did he know she was a spy?
Did he give her any secrets?
Did he break up with her after finding out she's a spy?
Was she trained as a spy and sent to entrap him specifically? Or did she form a relationship with him, then get told by the Chinese Communist Party "Xi wants you to steal him some secrets from your boyfriend. This is an offer you can't refuse; spy for us or your family in China will be beaten, jailed or worse"?
Is he a victim or an asset? Is she a willing patriotic spy for China, or a victim of blackmail from the Chinese Communist Party? Has she been arrested as a spy, or did she make it to the Chinese embassy before the story broke?
My feeling is he shouldn't be ousted if he took the honey but didn't fall for the trap. OTOH if he passed her company secrets, that's presumably a fireable offense for anyone lower on the totem pole; it's only fair for a CEO to get fired for the same.
Jensen Huang is a traitor without a doubt
Someone really wanted him out that bad. Wow!
given that jensen has handshake deals with many of his critical (supply constrained) suppliers he may have more leverage than founder shares could ever provide.
If you are getting paid millions, you should not make these intentional mistakes, he would have known she was a spy and just didn't care. There are better options for CEO.
The possible security implications of this entire affair (affairs now) can't be overstated. That hardware's in the most secret of facilities, computing very classified workloads for very very serious customers. Not the goofy AI heads, I'm talking about the military and intelligence communities in many nations.
Hopefully this teaches the market to migrate away from proprietary CUDA and NVIDIA and their proprietary drivers.
Why would this do anything to make people move on from the best performing devices in widespread production that money can buy?
There is a second affair...
Not so surprised
They are going to put in Eric Schmidt.
Can someone explain to me why everyone on this website, and everyone in English-language media, takes for granted that “stopping China on AI” is a worthwhile or important goal?
From where I’m standing, China is the only world power ensuring that the entire world actually benefits from AI, by giving it away. They’re also underwriting and enabling the global transition away from fossil fuels while my country is doing its best to stall or reverse that progress. They are also not a belligerent in any current war of aggression, and to the extent that they are suppliers of weapons, appear to be providing them to countries acting entirely within their legitimate sovereign right to defend themselves.
Someone’s going to come along and call me ignorant or naive for saying “China are the good guys,” but let’s get real here. What are we talking about.
China is terrible to people who speak out against the government and the government censors models. Open weight is nice, but not good if it’s silently been lobotomized on topics.
Separate dimension, these models seem to be distillations of the flagship models. That isn’t healthy for AI because it’s not forward progress. If they suck away revenue that would fund training the next model, then we’re cooked.
That’s crazy. How many American political prisoners have you met or worked with personally? I’ve worked directly on campaigns to free 2 of them. There are many. You almost never hear about that. Along with a lot of other things that, while statutorily legal to talk about publicly, never seem to get a hearing in the mass media. It’s almost as if one of these countries found a way to enact defacto censorship without admitting to it, and the other country is just honest
Some of these main narratives just don't add up. If the end goal was to get chips, why is China blocking those H200s and it's stuck on port.
There's a different angle here worth listening to: https://youtu.be/IC3Kh40dEQY
Earnings call next week is going to be very interesting. Wow.
Nvidia is Jensen. If he's out, NVidia crashes and takes the AI bubble with it
I have no qualms with this outcome.
EDIT: I assume the bubble will collapse into correction eventually, sooner is better than later.
Nah, just get rid of him now. It's a GPU not a rock band.
It would be quite funny.
NVidia doesn't need Jensen in the short / medium term - they are printing money. Unless we discover that all this circular financing was some kind of scheme.
We have 2 other companies though, Tesla and SpaceX, which CEO represents 90% of the valuation. That will be the real one.
>Unless we discover that all this circular financing was some kind of scheme.
I think this is one of those " the question is the answer" moments.
Good tech CEOs are rare. Intel will break the bank to bring Jensen on. Even if he’s a Chinese spy, it’s worth more to shore up US fab capacity than it is to lose Intel’s tech secrets.
The only issue is finding replacement, Only 5 days to earnings.
What about Chris Malachowsky? He also would be a co-founder CEO
For the time being the CFO or COO would do. But stock will take a hit.
I was at Intel when they made Bob Swan (COO) the CEO.
Going only on the one day point, I wouldn't recommend it for Nvidia.
s/day/data
Is there one? Obviously lots of MBAs out there but anyone who can really fill his shoes?
1. Replace Jensen as the President in the board with Tim Cook.
2. Ian Buck as CEO (Inventor of CUDA, PhD, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing).
Right replacement could jump the stock 20%, mediocre replacement can drop it 20% from the current lows.
Buck is a great person, really nice. Hiring Tim Cook as CEO probably not a great idea though IMO
Isn’t Jensen super vocal about having dozens of direct reports? Because that would prevent any of them from appearing as a natural successor.
Obviously his actions were wrong and showed poor judgement but it would be a massive mistake for them to can Huang.
Idiots
Huh I wonder if the true goal of the spy was to disrupt Nvidia by getting him fired, slowing them down, not stealing secrets.
I am just curious. Not in relation to this story: Have other people here had a change in their perspective in the last two years?
For me I feel like: There are wealthy people doing what Jeffrey Epstein was doing. And so by comparison, it makes other bad behaviors look relatively less important.
I'm just curious if other people have had that thought as well, and/or what else you think or have learned.
Honestly kind of sounds like its a great time to start a DCA buy of NVIDIA.
It is hard for me to see how the company that is currently turning silicon into gold with established production and software, more like a blue chip stock than a tech company, is going to be worth 20%-25% less just because the Ceo cheated on his wife.
The company is a money printer, and they really don't have to do much to keep it that way.
He’s not gonna end up leaving. This is rubbish.
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.
If your getting paid millions, you should not be able to get away with these kinds of mistakes. There are better options for CEO
Karma for fucking over the gaming community that propped up his company for so long.
i dont get why everyone just eats up the propaganda that if she's a spy she automatically works for the chinese government. we are talking about 100s of billions of dollars here, this could easily just be a corporate spy or a honeypot. these mega corps are so rich and massive they have their own spy and enforcement teams, same as big oil and gas always had and still do. back in the day when oil and resources were in poorer countries they used the exact same tactics to control and take them over. its the same playbook, just now the target is a big us corporation.
They cannot unseat him now. The work is too important, nations are competing hard against us. He has to just get away with it and everyone needs to move on, same as Oppenheimer.
LOL this is so funny!
This does look like a hit job. The spy stuff is ultimately meaningless and a smoke screen and may even be offered up to create plausible deniability. My take is that Dems/Biden + China Hawk Rs + decel crowd/Dario wanted export control and closed models. Jensen and Trump took a different view. Now that Dems have the Congress again, it's going to be non-stop hearings and investigations in the same spirit as the TikTok CEO with all the "Are you a commie?" questions. So the spy is offered as an explanation; nobody evaded export controls and nobody is a commie. The 2nd unrelated affair just points to an op to oust him.
Honestly, I hope this doesn’t play out in a rushed way. Evaluating this is the board’s top duty. It’s critical, and healthy, for them to weigh what’s best for all NVDA stakeholders.
Obviously, the affairs are a very serious issue, but the investigation needs to determine whether there were any security conflict of interest breaches
Let’s be clear: any abuse of power involving related-party relationships is wrong. Jensen should not get a “free pass” just because he’s Jensen. This is very serious.
Jensen’s leadership of the broader company is unparalleled, and replacing him would be nearly impossible. That step should only be taken when it’s extremely clear there is no other option. Even if the board does replace him, that brings significant risk, not just to NVIDIA but to all the other businesses connected to it. I hope a warning shot across the bow is enough for him to clean things up so everyone can get back to focusing on the work.
As for which way the board rules, the details are all that matter. When boards react emotionally, before a thorough investigation and before they have the full picture, they make bad decisions. They shouldn’t rush. They should investigate and dig into every detail.
Then make a decision. These decisions will carry enormous weight.
None of us really know the details. NVIDIA board: do your job and take it very seriously. Deliberately measure three times, cut once. Don’t spectate. The public likes/wants Hollywood drama, but what we really need is good corporate governance.
They had dirt on him for many years. Someone wants him ousted. That’s what’s happening behind the scene. Jensen probably pissed off someone very well-connected.
This is what I'm feeling as well. Similar to the "intervention" that put Altman back as CEO as well as a brand new board which included an ex-CIA director.
> the investigation needs to determine whether there were any security conflict of interest breaches
The Board–correctly–fears for themselves personally in a case involving Jensen's public and multinational corruption scheme.
hopefully the "fear" whats the best long interest of stockholders.
Add in that the democratic party wants to look tough on tech and here you have a clear case of the CEO selling known banned exports to a Chinese spy while personally fueling the data center hysteria.
This is going to be easy political win. Jensen's only saving grace is that he is in bed with Trump so he won't be sitting behind in prison cell.
> democratic party wants to look tough on tech
There is a real corruption angle here that a lot of folks out west are missing [1].
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/answer-in-front-of-...
> Obviously, the affairs are a very serious issue,
It’s just sex mate, it’s really not a big deal unless he giving favourable deals to his mistress’s company.
"Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year.
The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.
But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed" [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
Affairs could be a whole lot more than that. For example, assuming he didn’t want his wife finding out he’s an ideal blackmail target for anyone that does know.
it could be just a hookup. But its his life. His family. Its trust. And like others said, it can get way deeper and more complex. We just don't know.
Who do you think Alice Huang is, mate? People had questions about NVidia's deal with Megaspeed since day 1.
people bemoaning the foreign interference angle seem to forget all the mountains of middle-east money thrown in the AI bubble, and where this money originates from.
Why are all the tech overlords scum people? Do they become that way with power, money and fame, or is it a certain kind of person from the start that achieves these things?
I'm scared about how this in turn shapes society.
Kings were also famously out of touch with reality. Hierarchies, if left alone to grow this tall, do this to people.
Only the bad kings and they soon found out about it.
You would do well to look at the history beyond the modern era.
It's so common, the French have a word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roi_fain%C3%A9ant
More than a century of "do-nothing kings" who did not "soon find out about it".
Inertia and corruption are the default state. If we want nice things we have to be vigilant about letting power concentrate.
"Nearly any man can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power" - Honest Abe
I hope you can see the conceit in this answer as well. Being powerless is perhaps a great test of character.
> Why are all the tech overlords scum people?
like sleeping Jensen Huang with an incredibly attractive Chinese agent that specifically showed traits he found desirable and exploit what ever weaknesses the Chinese spy agency could find about him to get him involved with her and divulge secrets in a SEXINT operation. Therefore Jensen is one of the worst people who are public figures.
I don't like CEO worship or tech culture (I know I am on hackernews but I am a developer and did like software development and related topics), but this take is crazy most people you know would probably take the bait on an operation like this even 'good' people.
And just take a look at the scum running things outside of Tech a lot worse then a moment of infedality, look at all western leaders you will probably find few better (or even equal) to Jensen. Jensen did not shape the shitshow you are seeing now (not saying he is not part of it), it was corrupt from the start, Just a worthless veneer of morality.
Don't morn your societies decay it was a cadaver from the beginning only by putrefaction will it become the soil to plant strong trees on.
Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point? That's a huge tell you're arguing against a straw man. This post was after a second affair, to me that's a moral flaw, not just someone exploiting him.
And that "scum also exist outside tech" is just a whataboutism. It'd be a better discussion if you actually interacted with my arguments.
> Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point?
> Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point?
Was not trying to be dishonest but was meant to be what I felt you comment boiled down to, I will revise my comment to change the '>'.
> And that "scum also exist outside tech" is just a whataboutism.
What I was saying is not just that scum exists outside tech but that the society that created this tech culture and space is the curruption it's self and it's not worth thinking about as something to save but to replace entirely.
> This post was after a second affair, to me that's a moral flaw, not just someone exploiting him.
I am not saying it's not a moral flaw but compared what Trump has done Epstein, wars, etc. He looks like a Saint. It's pointless even talking about morality in the way you do when Trump and his weak cronies are in power. (and yes I know Nvidia under Jesen no doubt has benefit from this corruption). Infidelity is so common in are time but if only that was the worst of it.
What I was saying is not just that scum exists outside tech
That's an excellent question and I've been wondering about this a lot. I've known a few billionaires, exactly one was an amazing person, the rest were absolutely terrible people in every sense of the word. The whole word is full of NPCs to them. But your question goes to the heart of it: were they terrible people because that's a requirement for becoming a billionaire or did becoming a billionaire somewhere along the line turn them into terrible people?
I haven't found the answer. But I do know one thing from my (smallish) sample: the nice guy never let the money get to his head. He drove his own car (a VW Rabbit, ok, a nice one) and lived in the same house that he lived in when he started his company. And until the day he died he just kept doing what he loved without ever feeling the need to lord it over others. More like a Wozniak (who is the other 'nice billionaire' that I'm aware of but I've never met him).
Edit: I wrote about him:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/in-memoriam-rene-sommer/
The question is are the 'good' people you know actually good.
A human being is so unlikely to be good on their own, pretty much all cultures practiced infanticide and child sacrifice and pederasty and only changed because a few hated these practices and forced them to stop.
You're mixing individuals and groups in a way that I can't really say much about it. I was talking exclusively about individuals that I've known personally beyond sitting at the same table or working for them with three layers of indirection.
Fair enough, for me I suppose for me the vast majority of people are deep down terrible and only made good because they have been made to be. I can imagine what you say is very true and no doubt the vast majority of billionaires are horrible and their untouchableness no doubt makes that so.
But a lot of people the only moment they get to act in an unaccountable manor will act very badly. This is not all people but probably above 90%.
I think there is a level where you are no longer accountable in the way that ordinary people are accountable and I suspect that this is the reason why it happens, but my suspicions are worth absolutely nothing and given that these people are - in spite of the vast amount of information we seem to have about them - so in control of the narratives of their lives that it is impossible to make a diagnosis that will stick. So I will revert to the default: I don't know, but the sample I've seen makes me suspect that there is more to this than just coincidence.
Edison v. Tesla is probably informative here, the system rewards scummy behavior.
"a certain kind of person from the start"
From the NYT Story:
> During the conference, Nvidia executives were at a nearby hotel for meetings. Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell were seen being affectionate at the hotel. One bystander captured the interaction on their phone, three people briefed on the incident said.
> 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.
Well, at least there will be one way to make money after AI takes my job...
Jokes aside, I would expect we will soon learn there is more. Given that Nvidia was vouching for Megaspeed while exporting those chips, I still think there's a reasonable chance Jensen ends up in jail over this. Not large, but possible.
Ok but if you are having an affair with your direct report why would you "be affectionate" in public ?
When I encountered this ( in much smaller, non strategic companies!) both parties took great care to hide their affair and appear completely professional in public. The fun and games were kept behind closed bedroom doors. I don't get it.
The longer you get away with it, the safer it starts to feel, so they take more risks.
Some folks get a thrill from getting caught, too.
I’m very curious what the going rate for such an offer is.
An RTX 5090?
I mean, the guy's worth $150B or so.
Do they offer $20k? $200k? $2M? He stands to potentially lose tens of billions over this.
The fact that they had a process for this is telling.
See Succession, after a certain net worth this is common practice, family bodyguards and lawyers train for such cases, however absurd.
So, is "the AI-trade" now gone?
(Whatever the wallstreet guys understand by this term)
This is certainly fast after the NYT article on his second affair. I suspect this was in the works after the original affair + export scandal.
Board is likely looking ahead to Democrats taking office and investigating the spy relationship and lack of action taken by the government.
Sen. Chris Coons says investigating Nvidia's CEO is top priority for Democratic Congress
https://www.npr.org/2026/11/09/nx-s1-6032682/senator-chris-c...
I'm wondering how people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc. just continually get away with it. Are they just more sociopathic and cover their tracks better?
I'm not really making a judgement on Huang, but it seems others have done worse. It's making me wonder if there's something larger at play where people (i.e., other billionaires and CEOs and perhaps politicians) are unhappy with Huang.
Zuckerberg and Musk can't be fired. They own controlling share.
I suppose that's one reason. But Musk has formed basically pyramid schemes to keep his debtors from calling and to move his debt out from under him. Without that, he likely would have to sell shares to cover the debt of his Twitter purchase.
He paid for that with: 1) shares of TSLA that he sold, 2) company debt (not personal debt)
He had billions of dollars in a margin loan tied to Tesla stock.
Care to explain which "basically pyramid schemes" you are alluding to? A link to a reputable source would suffice.
Musk has a history of having his companies buy his other companies, and his most recent example of this is obviously xAI buying X and then SpaceX buying xAI. For example, the purchase of X by xAI valued X at a ridiculous ~$40 billion. And then he took SpaceX public after all of this. And SpaceX is built upon $38 billion worth of taxpayer money, grants, tax credits, etc. Must be nice to have a bunch of loser companies all buy each other and then use a government funded hype stock to make it all back.
It is absolutely impossible to know the exact details, but Musk has a history of shady deals (even having his companies bill each other for expenses), and so it's not much of a leap of faith that these moves are to absolve himself from lenders and investors by shifting debt around and moving losers into winners.
I bet that SpaceX will buy Tesla any day now.
Musk somehow weasles his way through lawsuits and gray areas and corruption and legal loop holes to just have his companies buy each other out when they start sucking, all on the teat of others and the government.
They could lose control through a substantial shareholder lawsuit. A minority shareholder suit against Musk could prove tremendous damages repaid in stock and the judge might not let the special classes of shares with extra voting power protect his control.
It would have to be a very good cause though, disliking him or ordinary bad business decisions won't cut it.
Get away with what exactly?
Musk, Zuckerberg, and Altman and their companies have zero history of sketchy stuff that would, in a normal world, lead to CEOs being ousted? Affairs are enough to do it to Huang? The whole Chinese spy thing is not confirmed is it? And the three people I've listed have had documented cases of endangering national security through either their actions or their company's actions.
Zuckerberg controls 61% of voting shares for Meta, and implicitly, the Meta board of directors.
The board decides who is CEO. Zuck controls the board. Zuck cannot be fired unless he wants to be.
"Okay, when I introduce you, I'm gonna say, 'This is a friend of mine.' That means you're a connected guy. Now if I were to say, this is a friend of ours—that would mean you're a made guy. Capiche?"
Get away with what? I haven’t heard anything about Musk, Zuck or Altman falling straight into a honeypot from an unallied nation
Musk and Russia?
Why does he support Putin?
Here is a thought experiment: Put animals from different races into a singe cage and make them have same life-style. All of them are attached with an identifier tag that looks same, they all get same food, go on same rides, watch same TV shows. Then do the animals have same thoughts, beliefs, morals, norms and values? Most western governments thinks they would. Not sure when did the humanity got this dumber and forgot the saying "birds of a feather ...". Politicians decided that minds of people is separate from biology. Race, religion, culture, gender, background, age, geo-location - you were forced to ignore all of this. Just attach a American passport, give an american car, american food, american home; boom - everything is erased and all people are same.
I’ve read through a lot of this thread and one thing that’s interesting to me is the relatively little weight that’s been given to the HR violation aspect of Huang’s behavior with a subordinate; specifically the power dynamic aspect.
I’m guessing most HN folks are in the camp that believes modern, powerful HR orgs serve a crucial function in protecting and advocating for employees in boss-underling relationships like this, where the power dynamic of these situations demands that they not be tolerated.
So which is it? Do you make allowances and exceptions and become a vocal (or tacit) apologist for this dynamic in some cases, or hold to what seems like a reasonable principle? (Not just in Jensen’s case but across the board?).
If the consensus here slides to the apologist side that’s fine, but in that case can we all agree to defund “Big HR”? If they can’t establish and enforce a consistent rule of no sleeping with your reports, especially at the highest echelons, then what good are they?
I think (and I hope for the USA’s sake) Jensen was actually a CIA asset and they knew Alice from day 1 and let him play with his ding dong but also importantly covert reverse spy on China.
And they probably asked him to do other things and he probably was either too naive or didn’t understand the magnitude or just didn’t play ball. So they threw him under the bus.
They waited till after the election to release this carefully.
As it would tank the economy before the election (like that would have had any more effect).
Hopefully this is how I hope would be written in some future Netflix docshow.
And the fact that he went on some long winded media tour portraying himself as some sort of hippie savior (“oh I don’t know where I live” “i love my wife dearly”) seems like a well setup “white washing” to try and cap this follow on news.
Otherwise the news as it reads sounds too stupid to be true Occam’s razor and all that.
what a weird coincidence that:
1. Anthropic is IPOing at exactly the same time
2. Anthropic announced that they could destroy "CUDA moat"
3. The cheating was an open secret for years and it burst just now
4. The biggest loser in Chinese chip flow is Anthropic, and they are hostile to idea of OSS AI
weird coincidences all around :-)
He came upon a wife changing amount of money and couldn't resist
He should run Intel then.
Goodbye, money! Who is seriously considering sabotaging their portfolio and precipitating a huge SP500 drop for months to come? Who, remembering the board of directors is making this decision, would want that?
People owning no stock, with grudges against the C suite class. A lot of people, I'd assume.
Mr. President a second Jensen affair has hit the tower
AI is under attack.
Is this how the whole castle crumbles? some tabloid sex scandal on one side like it's 2017, anthropic vibecoding a CUDA replacement for AMD on the other?
Any proof his mistress is a Chinese spy or is she just Chinese (and young and hot)?
It's kinda cool this guy is a computer nerd who is living like a rock star.
I’m buying the affair and that it facilitated smuggling, but all could be explained by financial interest so far. Was she a spy or made a spy by circumstances on the smuggling itself?
No, just a smuggler in contact with the biggest chinese companies, and the department of commerce being utterly corrupt, normal rock star stuff.
If, as alleged, Alice Huang is an agent of the Chinese government, and if her activities result in Jensen Huang getting ditched by Nvidia, that is certainly going to win her Employee of the Year at the MSS (国家安全部) Christmas Party.
ITT: underclass gossips about their masters' sex lives and wifey feelings
I like the guy, he's funny. I would say to keep him (on a leash), but if I could get endless 10/10 Chinese spy pussy I too would betray the AI race. I wouldn't cheat on my wife though, that's pretty low.
It’s not like he assaulted women, which is apparently par for the course at other big tech companies.
The guy had some consensual sex - so what? “Oh it shows poor judgement” Literally shut the f*k up… his judgement made NVIDIA the behemoth it is. Glad you get to backseat his personal life because judgement as it pertains to relationships is something you can actually relate to.
Removing him as CEO at this point in history is as the kids would say dumb af. Absolute garbage decision.
So Jensen also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who is also married.
Looks like both Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia CEO have Single Instruction Multiple Threads (SIMT) architecture.
China would love nothing more... Perhaps they orchestrated it... Illogical...
The media attention here was weirdly intense when it broke out.
With his connections , he can start another one.
100% dumping my Nvidia stocks if this happens. Maybe triggering this en-masse was the goal all along?
What you mean "goal"? It takes a lot of active effort to shoot yourself in the foot like that.
Most of these things probably have been known for ages. And yes, in comparison to the actually bad billionaires he didn't protect himself left and right. Why is this getting surfaced now?
Macro: Is this political subterfuge to distract us from other things like criminal government officials? Spiteful payback for losing the mid-terms?
I don't think it's any of these things.
It's NVIDIA being sued because they defrauded investors by including illicit chip sales in their Q3 figures
He literally FAFOed
well deserved. Should join Bill Gates in the same Unfavored Not-Gentleman-Anymore Club and be forgotten.
Note to self: if a hot chick ever shows interest in me and I'm not that attractive then be on my guard.
What did board of tesla said when Elon asked some random girl on Internet to have a baby for him?
Turns out he's just Jensen Hung
Sadly, Jensen never got invited to Epstein Island and is therefore a persona non grata in the highest circles of business and government.
Some group is trying to make a big deal out of this. I mean which spy posts so publicly their itineraries/photos/business meetings, on wechat? Come on!
I hope it was worth it.
What do you think he’ll be thinking of on his death bed. Nvidia’s shareholders or the human connection.
Correct. It's been reported that his blood is now over 80% Cialis, so yeah, he'll be thinking of human connections for sure.
Everyone knows what the GeForceExperience meant.
huang himself be open sourced prior to nvidia graphics driver.
I've been writing about history for over 20 years, and this feels like an inflection point. Some day a long-form essay will describe Huang's prescient foray into machine learning, the rise of AI, the resulting bubble, Ed Zitron's prolonged diatribes, Huang's infidelity that leads to the downfall of his company, Anthropic's disappointing IPO, OpenAI's subsequent disastrous IPO, a reckoning for AI's plagiarism, and then there are bubble bits all over everybody.
We'll call it Billy and the Bubbleosaurus.
It's Joever
Jensen really needs some time off.
My armchair analysis is that going forward with this will most likely make the AI bubble pop.
Depending on how Jensen takes it, this could be the catalyst to steer AI in a new direction. Companies will line up to scoop him up, if not fight each other to get him. He is the head of the most valuable company, he has the tightest connection to the US government, it won't take a minute before Mudita* becomes a new company being fast-tracked to the top.
* Opposite of Envy (nvidia)
Interesting that the thing that might pop the AI stock bubble isn’t anything to do with the technology at all but a good old-fashioned sex scandal.
It won’t be the sex it will be the illicit sales of GPUs to China. That domino topples the next and all of the “sales” of goods to AI companies financed by the sellers. There’s a whole lot of paper sales boosting revenues while losing money with each sale going on.
It’s the Dot Bomb days all over again.
Hard to imagine this happening. Curious if he will pull off a coup like Sam Altman.
Why does it feel like half these comments are NVDA holders?
These things would be clear causes for resignation at any big corp
Good luck with their stock. He's on par with Steve Jobs level of marketing.
it's because the gamers haven't been able to buy a gpu since 2024
That was probably the Chinese intelligence intent, to destroy Nvidia this way. The tools are going for it.
My tinfoil hat theory is that this is all orchestrated. They knew about the affair for months, but withheld it. My theory is that with the midterms results, rather than risk facing accountability as things unravel "naturally", they have this big bombshell as a "get out of blame free" card. That way everyone can collectively say "It wasn't _my_ fault things fell apart. I was doing my best, honest!"
So they risked an actual transfer of intel to entrap him?
silicon valley - paedophilia is fine, but sleeping with a Chinese AI executive is where I draw the line
Well, Mr. Huang sure seems to have turned his life upside down.
The extramarital affairs, while salacious, are largely immaterial.
The key issue seems to be not merely was he sleeping with someone who was not his wife, but rather, that he was sleeping with a Chinese spy who was rather essentially running a export smuggling operation to China in violation of United States law specifically crafted to recognize these Nvidia chips as sufficiently high-end to merit a national security concern.
And apparently, the United States government knew about it. But never told him they knew. What Huang personally knew is not clear, and is likely now to be subject to inquiry from a Congress that has also been turned upside down, ushering in a wave of AI skeptics while Huang was notable at the White House's "AI summit" for his almost singular bullishness. Howard Lutnick personally shut down an investigation, concerns from the CIA were not acted upon.
Donald Trump has seen people try to turn his life upside down given salacious scandals. Perhaps the President of the United States and Lutnick (among the well-heeled class known to have lied about their Epstein island connections) simply do not care, given both openly embrace Huang as a source of profit. It's also not clear the President shares the United States natsec consensus (what some of his followers term "the swamp") that actually sees Xi or China as a threat. After all, he plans to have what is likely to be another highly docile visit to the Chinese leader next week.
Put another way, it seems the federal government did not act as turning Mr. Huang's life upside down may have been calculated to turn the entire economy and their fortunes (both personal and political) upside down. Perhaps there is a backroom deal with China the President, Lutnick and Huang are secretly accommodating? I mean why would they not at least warn him?
The present irony is of course, for whatever aligned reasons that led to this hush-hush arrangement, the cat is out of the bag now. One wonders if the consequences this threatens to unleash in the present moment would have been mitigated if instead of trying to pretend it wasn't happening, the powers that be had acted with greater preemption. Perhaps so it goes. The best laid plans of this sort are often turned upside down.
"Nvidia" was named for envy, one of the 7 deadly sins. Maybe his next company will be "Luxuria"?
It's easy to blame a person like dumb Jensen who slept with the Chinese spy.
I don't see anyone accusing China of setting up such a trap. China always denies ofc, though all these scummy things eventaully comes out to be true, and by then everyone forgets.
Finally some sanity. He should have resigned.
Should have sold at 220 ugh
But there's no real competitors still? Even for the medium term?
I had 10 shares at 30 I sold at 40. Now I'm all bogleheads though.
> But there's no real competitors still? Even for the medium term?
So AMD, Google are not "real" competitors?
AMD does not have any hardware in direct competition with Nvidia's high end products. No company does.
They do. Anthropic just moved off of Nvidia and straight onto AMD hardware as if it was nothing.
Interesting that seems to have just happened. Surprised it wasn't bigger news
Conspiracy theory, the affair news came out to bury this story lol
This is how the market tanks...
SMH
Does every man, woman, other and pet in silicon valley still inform for Stratfor?
His crime is he put his junk in the wrong kind of spy?
Maybe now Apple and nvidia can rekindle their relationship after the bubble pops. Apple could come to the rescue, secure a heavy investment and enter into the cloud computing business.
Steve Bannon ( et al., himself already having done the job now serving by rolling release AI proxy ) Trump move. Dunno who invented it but it works
.
You posted this verbatim in the other thread, Dario.
it would be ironic if this is how the AI 'bubble' pops.
Irattional things continue to be irrational i guess
I feel this is way over amplified to further restrict chinese models/open weights development by further controlling the company with a new CEO.. seriously, who cares what he’s doing in his personal life, I am not a big fan of him much as he should have made GPUs further more accessible to consumers, but he’s definitely not an evil AI lunatic like some AI ceo bros we see now.
Seems the sort of rumor anyone could produce.
I still don't understand why Jensen didn't just offer the lady involved a horse.
I mean, that's acceptable these days isn't it?
Is there a archive.ph link? This article is paywalled.
Any ousting will probably be for having an affair with a direct report. At many companies, having an 'inappropriate relationship with a customer' isn't a policy violation unless there's also evidence of undue influence, so it's more conditional and complicated. Whereas just the existence of an inappropriate relationship with a direct report is a serious violation.
From an HR and legal perspective, if Alice was a spy, Jensen was arguably the targeted 'victim' of a foreign intelligence operation. While it was certainly very dumb and negligent, it may not have been a policy violation or may only have been a violation of company policies like mishandling confidential information or not following IT security policies. Those aren't usually "Fire the CEO Now" things, while slamming the sheets with a direct report absolutely requires some kind of immediate action.
The real question is who wants Jensen gone? Because the first leak was clearly intentional and reportedly placed by 'senior White House sources', citing a confidential NSC report. Now the second leak of the inappropriate affair happens immediately after. This was a designed sequence. Both of the underlying events are several months old. Given the facts, I think the most likely source is 'China Trade/AI Hawks' in the White House (possibly the NSC). The reasoning being that Jensen has generally been trying to minimize restrictions on selling AI to China (which is, arguably, part of his job).
He has to go because he opposes restrictions to run Chinese open weight models on NVIDIAs GPUs. He said so in an Axios interview in July - "The industry needs open models, science needs open models, cybersecurity needs open models". [1]
[1] https://www.facebook.com/ChinainAus/videos/nvidia-ceo-jensen...
Good riddance. All these csuite people think they are so uniquely capable but if he gets kicked out nothing will change except we'll, hopefully, hear less about jackets at tech presentations.
Also to all the people saying how terrible this will be, would you really want someone running your company who can't keep his word to his wife? Maybe it is a quaint idea in 2026 but I think people who break their word shouldn't be trusted, particularly to be in positions of power.
CEO sleeps with customer. CEO sleeps with someone who reports to him. Time to go.
The reports that he had a second affair with a subordinate, if true, are disgusting and would lead to termination at any other company. He should not get a pass. How someone who has had so much success could have such poor judgement is a mystery to me. It’s sad, he accomplished so much.
What is the endgame of this completely cumbersome and obvious CIA journalist and intelligence community rollout of this narrative surrounding Jensen and Nvidia? Why would they nuke the credibility of America's only AI chip company and hand the future of AI to China? Do they actually think this will gain them control over AI?
https://x.com/ChinaSelect/status/2120253050845593723
I think their concern is that NVidia is acquiescent and in support of policies which give China better AI chips, which is the core of the matter regarding the honeypot scandal. The goal, if it is an op, is to get a CEO who will comply more readily with export controls.
They are finding ways to tighten chip export to China, which is the biggest threat to OpenAI/Anthropic atm.
Let’s steelman instead of strawman. The CIA likely cares little about Ant and OpenAI.
What they care about is the US leading China on every militarily and economically relevant technology.
The hawks have long chafed at Huang’s position that we need to sell our best chips to China to keep them on the US tech stack. It’s very obviously giving them the ability to catch up.
And it’s also very obvious that restricting exports will only help in the short term, and in the long term, gives China reason to develop their own tech.
China already has reason to develop their own tech, and is actively trying to do so. Availability of US chips will not change that.
The biggest constraint in AI is energy, not hardware. You can always throw slower hardware at the problem, just have more of it.
Energy is the hard part, and US is deeply behind on that.
I’d say EUV lithography is the hard part; China doesn’t have DUV in production yet from what I can tell, so their FLOPs / MW is going to be terrible.
I thought I was supposed to believe that OpenAI & Anthropic's methods are so much more advanced than any potential capabilities of Chinese competitors that OpenAI & Anthropic must each be trillion dollar companies.
If I ignore the words, and instead observe behaviour, all of the actions I observe indicate the opposite;potential competitors are treated as very credible threats, even existential ones; and actions indicate that 'maintaining special access to hardware' and 'vying for regulatory capture to shut out competition' are major strategic goals.
Americans voted for rooting out corruption. The Congressional committees that review stuff like corruptly quashing an investigation into your lover company [1] are changing hands. Jensen coming clean right after the election was, within the range of options he had, smart.
(Folks run to blow whistles when they realize they're involved in something they may pay the price for isn't new.
Also, have you seen our IC? The days of the CIA running a competent conspiracy, if they ever existed, are behind us.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
If the anti-corruption revolution is going to focus on some dude's sex life rather than the extensive and obvious whoring of political office, I want none of it.
"some dude's sex life"
She could have been his chess partner, and if he'd acted the same way on her behalf it would have been fireable. The sex is immaterial and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't read up on this or is selling something.
The sex is just the icing on top of the poor judgement.
> some dude's sex life
When some dude's sex life quashes an investigation into Megaspeed, yeah, it becomes germane. (There are serious questions around Lutnick, for example [1].)
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/answer-in-front-of-...
This looks like a major indictment of Lutnick, not Huang.
I don't get it. Huang doesn't get to decide who chips can't be sold to. Presumably Huang wants to sell chips to everyone whether or not he's fucking them. Nvidia will always say yes to another billion dollars. It's up to the state department to say no.
If Lutnick was sleeping with a Chinese spy and approved the sale, sure throw him in jail. If Huang secretly bribed Lutnick to approve the sale, sure throw them both in jail. But that's not what we're seeing?
What am I missing? Seriously, ELI5.
> that's not what we're seeing?
You’re absolutely correct that we have no smoking gun in the public record. What we have, instead, is smoke. Lots of it.
> What am I missing?
"Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year.
The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.
But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.
It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company’s representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.
The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler’s interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident” [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
Thanks. I have my popcorn in hand but... so far it looks mostly terrible for the commerce department. Huang? I don't know.
Maybe the board knows more, and that's why they are "preparing to oust" him. Or maybe it's about the sex scandal.
I don't have money in NVDA but if I did I would certainly want him to stay at his desk until we have the actual gun.
> so far it looks mostly terrible for the commerce department. Huang? I don't know
He caused Nvidia to violate export-control law. To help a Chinese intelligence asset’s company. He then corruptly quashed the investigation using Nvidia’s resources. Those are crimes.
> I don't have money in NVDA but if I did I would certainly want him to stay at his desk
I do have money in Nvidia. I want Huang gone. If he stays, there is a real chance the hammer about to fall on him destroys Nvidia as well.
That’s before the shareholder and supplier lawsuits extract billions from the company. Before states’ AGs extract more. Before the Congress lobs a grenade at a Silicon Valley that honestly doesn’t seem to get why this behaviour is contemptible.
> He then corruptly quashed the investigation using Nvidia’s resources.
This seems awfully handwavy. Civilians don't get to quash investigations.
The legality will depend on what we find under that handwaving, but I doubt very much we will find personal checks written to Lutnik.
I have to ask: If he hadn't slept with the woman, would you feel the same way about the whole affair? If not, why does the sex matter?
> Civilians don't get to quash investigations
Correct. It's called corruption.
> I doubt very much we will find personal checks written to Lutnik
You don't need this to trigger undue influence issues.
> If he hadn't slept with the woman, would you feel the same way about the whole affair?
Yes. That seems to have blown open the scheme Jensen was running [1], possibly with the knowledge of the White House.
I'm flying from Silicon Valley to New York today. The bubble that has people publicly calling this a nothing burger is the exact reason Americans are furious and fed up with our tech sector's leaders.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/nvidias-disappearing-s...
When the "some dude" is Jensen Huang and involves sleeping with Chinese spies while advocating for relaxed export controls, then obviously it's gonna pay him some attention.
The guy advocates for relaxed export controls because it makes him stupid amounts of money, at the cost of our national security.
That's why Huang doesn't get to decide whether chips should be sold to China. He can advocate all he wants, speech is cheap.
> Americans voted for rooting out corruption.
Wasn’t the swap drained in 2016 too?
Those of us foolish enough to vote Trump in 2016 weren't convinced he was going to leave the swamp drained, rather that it was so bad he couldn't do worse. A lesser of two evils kind of choice.
Within weeks I saw the naked racism and left the whole party behind. Having learned more about Trump and Republicans since has been ... humiliating after decades of voting 'R'.
Thanks for the honesty and humility. These types of perspectives are wonderful to read.
Wherever you land on your views in the future, being willing to question everything is a superpower.
Onward!
Trying to engage in good faith here. What did you see in the first few weeks after your 2016 vote that were materially different from how he ran his 2016 campaign (and I mean the hits - "they're sending rapists, ...", "grab her by the pussy", ...)?
I can imagine people souring over lack of follow through on economic promises, or the naked corruption with your $coins, but from a racism/xenophobia/morals perspective, I'd feel like most of the signal was there in the 2016 campaign was it not?
For me personally it was trying to ban travel from whole countries based on race. Morally I didn't expect him to personally be a paragon of virtue. My hope was that the vile parts of his retoric were mostly campaign bluster and "locker room talk", and that he'd defer to experts once in office.
The mask-off racism was just beyond the pale, and lead me to look deeper into his past and how he was starting to govern. It became obvious that he'd mostly cheated or lucked his way into fortune and fame.
Gotcha.
> Morally I didn't expect him to personally be a paragon of virtue.
Lot of people respond with this, but honestly, that is setting up a straw man to knock down isn't it? No one claims that we should expect any politician to be a paragon of virtue but in terms of how they conduct themselves and the language they choose, there is still a reasonable bar that Trump blew past and set an awful precedent.
> The days of the CIA running a competent conspiracy, if they ever existed, are long behind us.
Now that's something I'd like everyone to believe, if I was the CIA.
The US intelligence community is pretty shot, but we too quickly forget how much of the internet is influenced by them.
Reputedly it’s Marco Rubio who has been the main leaker. Think about what his motivations may be and the timing and you’ll have an answer.
What is up with people who seem to love corruption?
Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy, as well as an affair with someone he manages. Either one of these would be grounds for dismissal at any company I've worked at. Committing both of these offenses shows appalling judgment by Huang.
Firing him seems like a very logical conclusion, not some CIA Illuminati bullshit conspiracy theory.
More like: whats up with people being utterly fucking stupid and devoid of even the bare minimum of critical thinking skills. Being pro (or at least unbothered by) corruption is just one of the ways that manifests.
Money talks. Shareholders didn't seem to mind when Tim Cook gave Trump a golden trophy. They certainly didn't mind Jensen Huang's dialog with Trump when sanctions were ill-defined. It seems like cronyism is in, and all the cool kids are doing it.
This scandal has felt like a litmus test for free market idealists vs realpolitik thinkers. Nvidia's board and Trump both knew about the spying allegations for over a year, allegedly. This is not a situation you can navigate with strong principles or a moral compass, you just have to follow the money.
Its also utterly myopic and partially the reason we are at the precipice of a massive bubble burst.
Reminds me of the meme that WorldCom went down because their CEO bravely stood up to NSA pressure. Instead of, you know, running an elaborate shell game of financial fraud to enrich executives and dupe shareholders after the Dot Com bubble burst.
> What is up with people who seem to love corruption?
Paraphrasing the apocryphal quote:
Anti-corruption never took root in America because the commoners see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed future CEOs.
And worse yet, he seemed to be influence by her to violate export restrictions and was probably responsible to a substantial "donation" to the presidential "ballroom fund" to change squash an investigation into the matter.
This is up there with the most fireable things that have ever happened.
They’re just reporting on things that are true and have been kept secret inappropriately. That’s not a “narrative”.
You’re looking for a conspiracy when this is a pretty straightforward story. Jensen’s credibility is shot. Of course they’re preparing contingency plans.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theory to realized someone leaked these stories in fairly rapid succession and it’s not a leap to suggest that person has an agenda. Not everything is a conspiracy but when it only has to involve a few people the odds go up.
When one story comes out, other related stories that have been around are a lot easier to get limelight. And it's much easier to surface new dirt in those situations too. So I wouldn't use rapid succession of multiple stories as indicative of anything.
> When one story comes out, other related stories that have been around are a lot easier to get limelight
I've already heard stories in social circles in Silicon Valley from senior folks in the industry that they didn't share before. Not because they were hiding anything. But because it wasn't topical. There are a lot of scumbags, and there is a lot of corruption to go around right now.
You’ve already made an assumption there that both stories were leaked by the same person. What’s the evidence to back that up?
The first story came from sources close to the White House, or something along those lines. Makes sense since it was a national security issue. The second story is internal to the company.
Very plausible non conspiracy explanation: after the first story came out the exec he was having an affair with was pissed to discover she was in fact the other other woman and went to a reporter.
“sources close to the White House”
I am pretty sure under normal circumstances, a person with 160 billion dollars that leads a 4 trillion dollar company is able to cause these stories to never materialize.
If someone thinks there is not a lot of sex going on in the c-suite maybe you need to get out more.
"America's only AI chip company"
Nvidia has a large market share, but AMD, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Qualcomm all produce AI chips... these are all American companies.
And let’s not forget Apple, which makes Apple Silicon chips and makes the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio, which are very popular devices for local LLMs.
They're a non-factor. The largest coherent Mac cluster you can wire together is >100x smaller than a single DGX SuperPOD.
Apple has no product like the SuperPOD, or AMD's CDNA, or Google's TPU, or Amazon's Trainium, or OpenAI's Jalapeño, so on and so forth.
+Broadcom (as much as it pains me to say)
Given the massive amount of chips funneled through to CN, I guess it leaves regular ol' corporate governance no other option.
If they didn't want to hand the future of AI to China, maybe Nvidia shouldn't have had a Chinese CEO? (By which I mean this wasn’t their objective)
perhaps they acquired or feign having acquired fundamental cryptographic breakthroughs, hoping the "bubble" spreads to China / India / ... to convert a few moths of cryptographic lead into perhaps a few years....
NYT and WSJ doing the bidding. Unleash the Oppenheimer protocol. It’s an epic footgun. History repeats itself.
Unless there’s an evidence of him being compromised, this is crazy. I’m total outsider and don’t know Nvidia copropare rule machinery, but from perceived perspective that feels like significant blow to the company.
I expect shit show funnier than when OpenAI tried to put Altman with same result.
Even shift leaders at McDonalds need to sign various workplace policies, including policies about relations with their direct reports. So yeah, this is not exactly a surprise or something unheard of.
Any such policy is illegal and wouldn't last in court. You can't contract away human rights.
You can't ban someone from having a relationship. But you certainly can require them to disclose such a conflict of interest to the board.
As a manager of McDonald's?
It is not a human right to have sex with whomever you wish free of restrictions.
It absolutely is for two consenting adults who aren't blood related.
It certainly isn't something for Ronald fucking McDonald to have an opinion about.
No, it isn't.
In the US, most employment is at-will, which means they can fire you for any reason they want except for a list of prohibited reasons.
"Having sex with a direct report" is not on that list of prohibited reasons.
If you can be fired for any reason, then that's it and they can put in the contract that you aren't allowed to drink a glass of water if so be.
But does that make it reasonable for hackers to think that drinking a glass of water is some kind of horrible offence, like some lunatics seem to think about workplace relationships? Which are one of the most common way that people meet and get married.
Having a relationship with someone you have authority over is considered very problematic just about everywhere, in part because the existence of that authority creates problems for consent (among other reasons).
> Even shift leaders at McDonalds need to sign various workplace policies, including policies about relations with their direct reports.
Does Nvidia have such a policy? Unless laws have changed, this isn't an issue as far as the law is concerned.
(Googling - seems they may actually have this policy...)
From what I've heard: Nvidia's operations is heavily reliant on Jensen. He's embedded in everything. Early in the pandemic, I interviewed with them. The recruiter said that pretty much every engineer at the company will, at some point, be in a meeting that includes Jensen. I spoke to a friend who worked there and he confirmed it.
(Probably no longer true as they've grown a lot since then).
Even if he’s not compromised it shows a pretty serious lapse in judgment. Remember that CEO and HR exec who got caught at a Coldplay concert?
I'm not sure what the big deal is. Eric Swalwell slept with a Chinese spy and he was part of the government at the time.
He wasn't punished nor fired over it. It seems when a Democrat does something like this, everyone looks the other way.
There are many such cases, which makes the pearl clutching much less convincing.
I wonder if Trump will retaliate against Nvidia. Neither (firing, retaliating) would be good for the world economy.
The NYT reports that Huang was caught on video with this second affair when they were together in San Jose.
Seems like this video and the first affair with the spy was a classic blackmail operation used against him as I said before [0] and Huang likely said no to the wrong person.
It is over.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50417105
Makes you wonder who the person(s) is?
It:s because he's close to Trump.