Were Jensen simply a caretaker CEO, a vanilla Board appointment, I would say he should resign.
But that is not the case. He is the founder. A founder has a very different relationship to a company. He is its father and mother, and severing that relationship and transitioning to a CEO that does not have the same relationship is fraught with danger.
As a shareholder, for purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal.
I don't live living in this no forgiveness court of public opinion society. Everyone makes mistakes CEOs are people too. Do you fire the intern to takes down prod? Only if he does it twice.
Anyone have a good model of how much more GPU prices would go up (or down) in the world where he resigns vs not. My guess is they would go up even more with some much more ruthless CEO who'd wanna prove himself able to push up the stock price but I guess a counter argument is that there's only so much higher the prices can go so maybe it wouldn't be much different.
White tech founder cheats on his wife? He's just the butt of late-night TV jokes for a few weeks. (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs... the list goes on)
Non-white tech founder does the same? Fire him, NOW!
Meanwhile Zuck is the only founder that's still a respectable family man, and yet he's pilloried left and right.
What an interesting Chinese operation. Undermine Nvidia, possibly force the CEO to resign, and lose half the company in a divorce. I'd say as far as China is concerned this was a successful intelligence operation.
and all they actually cared about is getting some good GPUs to bootstrap their already functional industrial technology sector.
Like, being paranoid about this is kinda dumb. This is pretty much just a sweet industrial play to bootstrap their technoogy sector. Something US corporations do in many different ways.
He should probably go to jail (after a fair trial, of course).
Even with the few public facts we have now, I don't know how a reasonable person could conclude that it isn't extremely likely that he knew all about the export control diversions that were going on. He would have to be an idiot not to, and he clearly isn't an idiot.
Of course there's no way a centibillionaire is going to do 20 days in jail, let alone 20 years (because we don't live in a society with an actually functioning rule of law), but resigning and disappearing from public life is getting off easy here.
Jensen beat the reform academy conditions as a boy.
Jensen beat the odds as a founder and CEO.
The chinese sent a female spy to make him look like a fool. Thats why all major governments use this tactic. It works on everyone, for some period of time, to some degree. Almost as if the public thinks "Why didn't he know ? Didn't she have a 'Hello I'm a Spy' sticker on at the meetup ?"
Now, The Economist aka 'the Rothchilds' aka 'the british billionaires' magazine is throwing him under the double decker for clicks.
The man has a track record of winning.
This is a speed bump, not a brick wall.
We're all apes, and he's the big monkey the little monkeys are attacking today.
He can do something great again with his life. Just not while he’s spending the next year being investigated in multiple countries and going through family issues.
> It works on everyone, for some period of time, to some degree.
No, it doesn't. It works on the unethical. Cheaters would like you to believe that everyone is cheater, but they're not.
There's a type of person who find a wallet on the ground and attempts to find the owner of the wallet. There's another type of person who just quietly pockets the money. I suspect Huang is the latter. Most billionaires are. Normal people don't even aspire to that obscene level of wealth and power, would consider it gluttony.
Huang, "The Fonz", was captured on video cheerfully signing his autograph on a woman's chest while jokingly posing the rhetorical question, is that a good idea? Of course it was not a good idea, and a normal, non-cheating person would politely offer to sign something more appropriate.
Same phenomenon with dictator worship, and authoritarianism in general. Organizations that structure all their operations around a single power figure seem to be the most effective, but we're ignoring all the downsides: single point of failure, lack of checks against poor (or illegal) decisions, and of course we're ignoring the countless failed organizations with the exact same structure.
The thing is pessimists make money, optimists make money, stupid idealists get slaughtered...
As a CEO, he kicks ass...
As a husband, public humiliation by memes and private humiliation by his family are in order...
How is a model minority infidelity with a woman who probably wasn't a spy, but was absolutely out to oust Lori Huang like Lauren Sanchez ousted Mackenzie Bezos worse than a felon convicted of accounting fraud put in charge of Cerebras? And don't even start on they should all be thrown out. We didn't throw out creepy, stalking, semi-assaulty womanizing Eric (piece of) Schmidt. Why don't we all just take a step back and acknowledge the model minority racism inherent in the outrage here.
Downvotes I'm sure, but I doubt anyone is going to spell out a case where JHH needs to go, but all systems normal with Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and everyone else on that page, some of whom are likely in the Epstein files which JHH isn't.
Ok, you get that the issue isn't that he "looks like a fool" for having an affair, right? If that's the worst thing he's done as a billionaire, he's relatively a saint.
The issue is that he may have just been caught effectively subverting US national security. Like, even in just the teaser paragraph, they spell that out:
>American officials think she is a Chinese spy, and that her Singaporean company is a front for smuggling the politically sensitive chips into China.
That's a very bad look. Way worse than just "looking like a fool".
Has there any proof of any actual subversion of national security?
I mean, sleeping with a spy is not the same as giving her any secrets or chips.
A third point is that, as an Nvidia investor, I don't really care what the US government considers a "national secret" or if china gets the secret too.
I care if this harm Nvidia's ability to generate revenue.
That's spelt Rothschilds. It's a nice little conspiracy trope you're working there with the quotes around "the British billionaires" but you should probably just say "Jews" or "globalists" so everyone gets your point. Why waste time with euphemisms when you have something this novel to say?
The public is not thinking "how did he not know she was a spy?"
The public is thinking "Why did he have an affair with a business partner? (who also happened to be a spy). That is a massive conflict of interest. Was he putting Nvidia's interests first, or his own?
I am not convinced that he needs to resign, but describing this as a speed bump is utterly delusional.
Many people believe the time for letting the wealthy and elite do what ever they want without consequence should be over. See last week's election results
What we need is an investigation and transparency into the details. Why was Trump able to negotiate a 15% profit sharing deal with Jensen shortly after Trump was informed about this? How much did Jensen know about the export control violations?
A determination for either outcome is unwarranted without more information.
Were Jensen simply a caretaker CEO, a vanilla Board appointment, I would say he should resign.
But that is not the case. He is the founder. A founder has a very different relationship to a company. He is its father and mother, and severing that relationship and transitioning to a CEO that does not have the same relationship is fraught with danger.
As a shareholder, for purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal.
I don't live living in this no forgiveness court of public opinion society. Everyone makes mistakes CEOs are people too. Do you fire the intern to takes down prod? Only if he does it twice.
Anyone have a good model of how much more GPU prices would go up (or down) in the world where he resigns vs not. My guess is they would go up even more with some much more ruthless CEO who'd wanna prove himself able to push up the stock price but I guess a counter argument is that there's only so much higher the prices can go so maybe it wouldn't be much different.
They will plummet if it turns out a large proportion of them have been sold to China and this route is now closed.
Without Jensen, the stock will tank.
For better or worse, Jensen === NVIDIA.
Very well argued piece covering all the angles of pro/against I’ve seen here on HN and elsewhere.
All the roads lead to he must resign or be fired.
any non-paywall copy to share?
Mildly amusingly, an LLM running on Nvidia hardware will gladly help you avoid paying the Economist.
I'm glad my "Summarize HN thread and submit to Economist" prompt is working.
Dam is an Asian merchant not allowed to have a mistress or two..
White tech founder cheats on his wife? He's just the butt of late-night TV jokes for a few weeks. (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs... the list goes on)
Non-white tech founder does the same? Fire him, NOW!
Meanwhile Zuck is the only founder that's still a respectable family man, and yet he's pilloried left and right.
What an interesting Chinese operation. Undermine Nvidia, possibly force the CEO to resign, and lose half the company in a divorce. I'd say as far as China is concerned this was a successful intelligence operation.
and all they actually cared about is getting some good GPUs to bootstrap their already functional industrial technology sector.
Like, being paranoid about this is kinda dumb. This is pretty much just a sweet industrial play to bootstrap their technoogy sector. Something US corporations do in many different ways.
> Jensen Huang Must Resign
He should probably go to jail (after a fair trial, of course).
Even with the few public facts we have now, I don't know how a reasonable person could conclude that it isn't extremely likely that he knew all about the export control diversions that were going on. He would have to be an idiot not to, and he clearly isn't an idiot.
That points to him being complicit in very serious (20 year sentence) crimes. https://www.bis.gov/enforcement/penalties
Of course there's no way a centibillionaire is going to do 20 days in jail, let alone 20 years (because we don't live in a society with an actually functioning rule of law), but resigning and disappearing from public life is getting off easy here.
I agree with you. The reporting around this makes it sound like he got tricked. He’s been against the export controls from day one.
Jensen beat the reform academy conditions as a boy.
Jensen beat the odds as a founder and CEO.
The chinese sent a female spy to make him look like a fool. Thats why all major governments use this tactic. It works on everyone, for some period of time, to some degree. Almost as if the public thinks "Why didn't he know ? Didn't she have a 'Hello I'm a Spy' sticker on at the meetup ?"
Now, The Economist aka 'the Rothchilds' aka 'the british billionaires' magazine is throwing him under the double decker for clicks.
The man has a track record of winning.
This is a speed bump, not a brick wall.
We're all apes, and he's the big monkey the little monkeys are attacking today.
Just shake it, shake it off.
> The man has a track record of winning
The article calls for resignation. Not execution.
He can do something great again with his life. Just not while he’s spending the next year being investigated in multiple countries and going through family issues.
> It works on everyone, for some period of time, to some degree.
No, it doesn't. It works on the unethical. Cheaters would like you to believe that everyone is cheater, but they're not.
There's a type of person who find a wallet on the ground and attempts to find the owner of the wallet. There's another type of person who just quietly pockets the money. I suspect Huang is the latter. Most billionaires are. Normal people don't even aspire to that obscene level of wealth and power, would consider it gluttony.
Huang, "The Fonz", was captured on video cheerfully signing his autograph on a woman's chest while jokingly posing the rhetorical question, is that a good idea? Of course it was not a good idea, and a normal, non-cheating person would politely offer to sign something more appropriate.
cool it with the antisemitic remarks
The CEO worship on this website is bizarre
Same phenomenon with dictator worship, and authoritarianism in general. Organizations that structure all their operations around a single power figure seem to be the most effective, but we're ignoring all the downsides: single point of failure, lack of checks against poor (or illegal) decisions, and of course we're ignoring the countless failed organizations with the exact same structure.
Tech CEOs are just the modern day cult leaders.
A framing I have recently encountered is "The Tyranny of Merit"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
> A framing I have recently encountered is "The Tyranny of Merit"
I'm sure the CEOs would love for us to believe that they are in their position because of merit.
YC is full of temporarily embarassed tech billionaries by definition.
Im doing the math, not dusting a golden calf.
The public thinks the spy affair is a scandal, but the governments that can really hang the man see it as a round of chess.
Boards of directors and investors, we know where they vote, typically where they are legally obligated to, financial interests of shareholders.
And thats where we are right now, british billionaires magazine wants him fired. That doesn't exactly ruin his life, just being fired.
He'll survive this. Enjoy the show.
The thing is pessimists make money, optimists make money, stupid idealists get slaughtered...
As a CEO, he kicks ass...
As a husband, public humiliation by memes and private humiliation by his family are in order...
How is a model minority infidelity with a woman who probably wasn't a spy, but was absolutely out to oust Lori Huang like Lauren Sanchez ousted Mackenzie Bezos worse than a felon convicted of accounting fraud put in charge of Cerebras? And don't even start on they should all be thrown out. We didn't throw out creepy, stalking, semi-assaulty womanizing Eric (piece of) Schmidt. Why don't we all just take a step back and acknowledge the model minority racism inherent in the outrage here.
Downvotes I'm sure, but I doubt anyone is going to spell out a case where JHH needs to go, but all systems normal with Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and everyone else on that page, some of whom are likely in the Epstein files which JHH isn't.
Harper Valley PTA hypocrisy to the moon here.
he's compromised. who knows what leverage this might lead to. cheerio
Ok, you get that the issue isn't that he "looks like a fool" for having an affair, right? If that's the worst thing he's done as a billionaire, he's relatively a saint.
The issue is that he may have just been caught effectively subverting US national security. Like, even in just the teaser paragraph, they spell that out:
>American officials think she is a Chinese spy, and that her Singaporean company is a front for smuggling the politically sensitive chips into China.
That's a very bad look. Way worse than just "looking like a fool".
Has there any proof of any actual subversion of national security? I mean, sleeping with a spy is not the same as giving her any secrets or chips.
A third point is that, as an Nvidia investor, I don't really care what the US government considers a "national secret" or if china gets the secret too. I care if this harm Nvidia's ability to generate revenue.
The law doesn’t apply to the woman and her company, on account of being limited to the USA.
The law also doesn’t apply to an American billionaire, on account of being a billionaire.
So really, nothing wrong happened here.
That's spelt Rothschilds. It's a nice little conspiracy trope you're working there with the quotes around "the British billionaires" but you should probably just say "Jews" or "globalists" so everyone gets your point. Why waste time with euphemisms when you have something this novel to say?
The public is not thinking "how did he not know she was a spy?"
The public is thinking "Why did he have an affair with a business partner? (who also happened to be a spy). That is a massive conflict of interest. Was he putting Nvidia's interests first, or his own?
I am not convinced that he needs to resign, but describing this as a speed bump is utterly delusional.
20% of men and 13% of women, in marriages, reported having affairs at least once, and thats only the people who told on themselves.
Who hasn't had a momentary lapse of reason, especially when sex is involved ?
The billionaire class who could hang him understand all this.
His status in life is up for a vote. What do you think is happening ?
Many people believe the time for letting the wealthy and elite do what ever they want without consequence should be over. See last week's election results
What we need is an investigation and transparency into the details. Why was Trump able to negotiate a 15% profit sharing deal with Jensen shortly after Trump was informed about this? How much did Jensen know about the export control violations?
A determination for either outcome is unwarranted without more information.