I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here. Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. The Nvidia corp still has to answer for that even when Jensen is out.
Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.
This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.
He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.
I remember listening to that and thinking, this sounds like a guy who is primarily focused on selling chips and is brushing away legitimate concerns in a way that, I just did not find very compelling. A little bit too much protest you might say. Not to say there isn't or wasn't validity to his arguments, but in light of the current circumstances it seems to me that those arguments are quite a bit less valid than they were, and I've certainly swung my personal opinion from being on the fence to a hard no to selling these chips to Chinese buyers.
If the Chinese Communist Party are going through such great lengths to obtain these advanced Nvidia chips, it further invalidates a lot of what I've been reading here and elsewhere about China "catching up" or that being the leading models isn't what matters (commoditization). You don't do stuff like this unless you really need something.
I think it's worth remembering that China isn't a monolithic bloc, and CCP doesn't drive everything, that there are tons of private enterprises there that would benefit, even if the Chinese government strategically would prefer to push Huawei to grow the domestic capability. There being a ton of private demand internal to China doesn't invalidate Jensen's view that it's a strategic blunder to let Huawei get a foothold in the market.
That said, I don't have any special insight into the specifics of who was driving the demand backing Megaspeed.
Talking to friends who worked in diplomacy - honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely. It makes sense if you think about it. The failure rate on these is going to be fairly high and even if it’s a small success (ie a one night stand sort of thing) you can get a little compromat. The cost is probably fairly negligible, a lot of this will be fairly low risk as far as spying goes.
I'm a bit out of the loop, what part of what he said is wrong? He said they have more power and the more capability to produce chips, so they can essentially just brute force things vs the US if they wanted to: is that not the case?
China catching up does not mean they are not still behind.
Also, China is a big country with many companies. While some may be trying to catch up via local development, others may still prefer getting western hardware right now e.g. in order to get a competitive advantage over those catching up.
But what’s the point ultimately? Delaying their progress by a couple years?
Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
(and could leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future)
It feels like Space Race thinking, honestly. If the US delays China and ends up with an AGI god a few years in advance, that can still be a significant advantage even if China can catch up. This especially would hold true if a theoretical AGI could maximally leverage RSI so the improvement curve becomes exponential.
If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before there is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has been misaligned to desire.
AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.
AI has been identified as strategic national priority for both the Chinese and United States.
NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.
End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.
No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War, and then managed to subsequently starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then managed to right themselves. They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use.
Who says we won't just progress as well and they stay behind a couple of years?
Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.
If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.
Models aren’t everything. You need physical infrastructure at scale for inference, which is where the economic power comes from. Chinese hardware makes double the heat and needs at least double the energy input.
This is good evidence sanctions don't really work. Critical sectors will find ways around them and it only punishes the rank and file working class. If China or any sanctioned nation wanted those nvidia chips, it has ways to get them. So the military and intelligence get them, but the people don't. Same with sanctions on Russia now, which has not significantly slowed its military machine, but in fact its military machine is coming out with constant innovations (new Gerans, better EW, more spy sats, etc). I remember seeing a post mortem of some Russian drone. It had a Jetson chipset Russia was not supposed to be able to get. I imagine the smuggling market is far bigger than we might think and sanctions far less effective than we think.
Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
Sanctions should be a bigger conversation. They are almost never needed and especially trade tariffs and such are always used for the most corrupt cronyism.
I watched the interview. I think the arguments made sense. People get heated talking about the colour of an object they can both see. I wouldn't want to project reasons for heated behaviour.
For the record I think that less than half of the people who thought the dress was black and gold were being influenced by the Chinese government to take that position.
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china
As a business, why shouldn't they advocate for export to a relatively huge market? It is an expansion for them and from a business perspective completely expected.
They should and there’s nothing wrong with only advocating. The problem is that it wasn’t just advocating but (possibly) knowingly subverting the export controls
Turns out there are laws and regulations that restrict one’s ability to lobby for foreign interests as both a public and private individual. Read about NJ Senator Bob Menendez which is a particularly egregious example.
The image is not a problem. That image has existed for months already. The problem is that Huang lost the tenuous protection that Trump and Lutnick agreed to give him so he could avoid jail. On that basis, investors are now scared the company might suddenly be under investigation for export violations.
And not that Nvidia is absolved of responsibility but it does make it a little easier if it's the new leadership in the hot seat for those things being like "yeah we did some naughty stuff but it was the last guy and we're working on hard on getting it all cleaned up."
There's speculation that Trump knew about the Chinese spy and Nvidia donated $25M to the White House Ballroom in October 2025.
Even if this is just a coincidence, Jensen himself came out and said he donated to the ballroom, but kept the amount hidden. In internal documents, Jensen and Nvidia said to keep the amount hidden and it only came out due to disclosure documents from the government.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think that the risk is not nearly as real as it-- as they talk. And I think the risk can be managed. And it's managed, you know who? By who? The DOJ. We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said, "Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night."
ROSS DOUTHAT: Who was this person?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Or this company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you. But we said-- "Do you like the color orange because get rid --" said, "Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give 'em a kiss good night, and--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"that's the story because--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"because tomorrow morning--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"you're goin' to jail."
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the-- if they--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted to make a deal--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --to put that (UNINTEL)--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person totally changed everything. Totally. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: "Yes, sir"?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Was it a leader of a major AI company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. Yeah.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. And--
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --and-- and I don't think--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --said, "We wanna put th-- we wanna--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --"codify this into law--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't think it was--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --would you work with them--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --done maliciously. But it coulda been malicious, but--
---
This is what losing the Rule of Law looks like by the way. The sitting president is on TV saying that he found out someone rich and powerful is suspected of wrong doing serious enough to get a call from the president threatening him with prison, but that that's the punishment. Once that rich and powerful person bent the knee, said "Yes sir" with the right tone of voice, all was forgiven.
Equal Justice under Law means that we shouldn't punish people we don't like with harsher sentences it also means that wealth and power shouldn't be sufficient to skirt the law.
We often speak of a two-tiered justice system, but I've never seen the president go on TV and tell America in no uncertain terms, it exists, I'm a part of it, and it went very well, he said "Yes sir" just the right way and so you don't need to worry about it.
I’m aware, Apple and other companies donated too. What I found odd was the lengths Jensen and Nvidia went to hide the amount. Other companies came out and said how much they donated.
Oh! That explains why Trump was so sympathetic to Jensen : "He is suffering. Poor man. He is such a nice guy. And his family… but he is suffering greatly."
> Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised
I doubt it has anything to do with it really. China is a huge market and by not exporting to China they were missing out on tens to hundreds of billions in revenue. Any CEO would have advocated the same.
Not the _only_ reason, sure. However, it's quite common when executives have an affair they will get fired. I think that's just the reality. If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
I was on the leadership team of a startup that is now public, during that build something like that happened (almost exactly the same as this NVIDIA situation sans the spy stuff), there were effectively 5 of us involved in what the outcome should be and it basically came down to: me and another guy didn't want to sit on a leadership team with someone who exercised judgement that way, to the point that it was me and the other guy or affair person, so affair person was out, even tho it was very painful for the business. Also, I don't think what I just described is particularly uncommon.
I have worked at a larger company where the CEO did something similar and across the company all anyone could ask was "why would you do something that dumb", which is not a great way for people to feel about the person supposedly leading the company.
At the end of the day, it's also just too simplistic.
Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.
You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.
The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.
The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.
At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.
yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.
This is more than an affair though. This is an affair with someone he has a business relationship with and thus it becomes the interest to the business. There are many many cases where someone give business favors to the person they are having an affair with.
My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.
Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.
Yep that's an even better point. Though I would say there's a distinction between socially-unacceptable and untrustworthy. Being forthcoming both limits surprise (per your point) and mitigates the trust component of deviance.
> Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Why?
I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?
Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.
It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.
Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.
> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?
This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.
Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.
And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.
Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.
Right, and because he was willing to break a commitment that serious it de-values other commitments he's made, including those more directly relevant to the business.
All this coming from a country that elected twice as President a guy that married three times, led a very sexually promiscuous life, including the notorious boasting, and was accused of sexual misbehaviours by almost 30 women. Hilarious.
It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.
But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.
> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.
In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.
If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.
Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.
I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, they were well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, they agreed to them with their words, in fact. With us it was very simple, provided you're not a bigot, what you do on your own time is not our concern. However, what you do within our business is our concern. If you have intimate relations with anyone inside our company, even if consensual, you're no longer on our leadership team. Then, their actions did not match those words, when that is true, trust is gone. In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect their actions and words to match, and there are people who we know that isn't the case, and on some siding scale, we accept it (I didn't say acceptable). For example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). Groups typically have criteria/standards, if they change that, it may change the group to varying degrees, and that may be ok or not ok, depending on the group. I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?
Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.
You cannot tell from the NVDA stock crash if it's because the CEO had an affair, or because NVIDIA illegally sold GPUs to China and is in huge trouble.
One of the reasons this behavior is problematic in general is the potential for blackmail. It's not even really a statement about morality, just an acknowledgement that somebody who wants to keep things hidden is going to be beholden to the people who know the secrets.
Jensen went to many high profile parties with this woman. I don't see where he's trying to even hide it. Even the kiss was made out in public, not like a hotel room.
Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes. I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents, and he pretty much encouraged the agents to publish the photos.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes
No? All it requires is for Jensen to want to remain with his wife and for his wife to be willing to divorce him if she finds out he has an affair.
Or, even if we suppose he doesn’t care about his wife’s feelings at all, he might be very incentivised by losing half of his assets in a divorce. It’s worth many, many millions to him.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes.
You don’t have to be a prude to think cheating on a spouse is condemnable.
In general, it also doesn’t really matter what society thinks. You can just threaten to reveal the affair to the spouse. And even in the case the spouse doesn’t really care it’s fodder they can potentially use in a divorce to get a better deal.
One thing worth pointing out is that in this case in addition to the affair with the Chinese spy he was allegedly having an affair with a subordinate, which is always problematic.
It’s not just about humiliation. If your boss is sleeping with your coworker or someone on your team, how can you trust their decisions are grounded in fairness and logic. Sure, the world doesn’t work this way, and ceos are at a different realm than a mid level manager, but this is usually how HR defines things.
Reminds me of the Coldplay concert couple, which happened to be a CEO and head of HR. Head of HR! And what's more interesting is that they only got removed when the affair became public. At the same time the company was small potatoes so presumably less interesting to state actors.
Several publicly traded companies have (or had) majority-owner CEOs, which makes it more than a little awkward for the board to fire them. I can't really see the board outing Zuckerberg under similar circumstances
> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out
There is no "* only applies to publicly traded companies". Hence, it is incorrect.
The bigger point I am trying to make here being that not everything is investor-driven. People can run businesses without that. It annoys me greatly that HN regularly forgets that.
In publicly-traded companies, the board is not the ultimate boss, though. That would be the shareholders. And, at Meta and many companies copying Meta's playbook who have IPO'd since (notably including Anthropic, though notably not including Nvidia), founder shares have so much voting power that the founders are effectively in complete control.
In theory, Nvidia shareholders, if dissatisfied with today's decision, could vote to oust the current board and replace it with people more sympathetic to Huang, who would, as their first decision, re-hire him as CEO, as would be their prerogative. This is... unlikely to happen.
Public companies in the US are required to have a board of directors. If they’re not a “controlled company” - i.e. no single person controls more than 50% - then a majority of the board are required to be independent, i.e. not employees, executives, or consultants to the company.
I suspect so many of us see examples of corporate crime or even of corporate greed (legally) causing an incredible amount of damage that an affair feels trivial in comparison. That is especially true when the private family life of a CEO is private. The damage of the affair could be anything from devastating to the family to they were all but legally separated.
100%. While I do not condone his actions, publicly we do not know anything about his private life and the dynamics. Until there's a statement from his family, for all we know they may have been separated.
It's clearly the CN link and/or the cosying up with a customer that is the problem; the board would not care about his private life (and neither should the public, tbh).
And the open letter sounds more like it was written the way the public would expect a CEO to write.
> His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?
He has also said so very many times in so very many ways that Nvidia was absolutely not involved in violation of export control laws regarding the export of its products to China. That -in fact- there was absolutely no smuggling going on and claims to the contrary were utterly baseless and without merit.
I agree with ohnnyApplePRNG's assertion that we know literally nothing about the private life and situation of Mr. Huang and his family.
> We know literally nothing about Jensen's private life or if he humiliated his family here.
Uh... but we do!
---
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.
Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
If he is actually a bi-furry with an understanding with his wife on 'affairs', do you think he'd say that? Or would he maintain the straight, family-friendly, investor-friendly front expected of him [by some people] in his position?
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much a promoter of monogamy.
I think it is naive to assume that such public statements are the whole truth of a matter.
People who fuck up a company (or have an affair, or get caught snorting drugs off a sex-worker) aren't really 'stepping back to spend more time with their families'. Historically the classic example of executive public statements.
Which is as it should be. First of all, marriage is a covenant. If someone cannot be trusted to keep his word on that, it's tough to trust him with power over thousands of employees and trillions of dollars. Second, I'm guessing the board asked Huang after the first affair's revelation whether there were more skeletons in his closet, and he said no. Lying to one's board is more than enough reason to be ousted.
That's a very narrow view that's a function of one's religion, culture, and values.
When I was in school, (US) my very Catholic French teacher explained that his uncle, in France, had a mistress. His uncle's wife knew and was okay with it. What my teacher was explaining is that the culture around marriage varies considerably through the world, and you can't take for granted that what we were taught (monogamy) is the standard that others live to, or even expect from you.
First of all, yes, I can. The normalcy of a thing doesn't make it right. But this isn't really about whether absolute cultural relativism is appropriate or not. It's about a man who broke his word. Huang wed an American woman in America, not a French woman in France. Nothing about this situation indicates Huang's wife was remotely aware of nor alright with his philandery.
There's no major American subculture in which stepping out on your wife behind her back is "a good thing" or even "an okay thing". A vast majority of Americans poll consistently against adultery and it's often the most universally condemned action in surveys. Here's one example: https://news.gallup.com/poll/692801/adultery-cloning-seen-im...
My mother had gotten "two wrongs don't make a right" through my head by about age four. It's still true. I don't know nor care what they're doing in San Jose.
From a religious perspective, sure. From an earthly perspective, you don't know what the other side was doing. Have you ever been married to a menopausal or a post menopausal woman? A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
> A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
That’s not quite true. A more accurate statement would be: A marriage may be annulled in some U.S. states if one spouse entered the marriage with a concealed, permanent intention not to consummate it, and that intention constitutes fraud going to the essence of the marriage.
If the couple was having sex after marriage, and then one partner decided to cease having it some time later, that is generally not grounds for annulment.
If it were permitted, this would make many, if not most, late-stage marriages subject to annulment. People get sick and injured or just incapable in old age.
Seems like some weird fundamentalist take. On its own it's purely a private matter between him and his wife (obviously the GPU smuggling stuff is a separate thing). Given that the affair has been semi public for years it's hard to imagine his wife didn't know about it anyway.
If it's fundamentalist to hold a man to his word, then I suppose you can count me a fundamentalist. If he'll shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world, just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
> shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world
Well we don't know that, you are not legally required to love someone you are married to and I have no clue what their relationship is like or whether they have any sort of "arrangements". I could hardly care less really since its their private matter.
> just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
I don't really see a correlation between those things. All sorts of immoral degenerates (e.g. Musk, (potentially) Gates and I assume plenty of other lesser known CEOs) have generated massive amounts of value for their shareholders.
Famously, Mark Hurd made dubious expenses that were perceived negatively by the public (there were sexual harassment allegations) and was ousted as CEO from HP. Then Larry Ellison mocked HP and hired Mark as Oracle's President. So, some companies are worried about that, others aren't
It's entirely possible that the board just wasn't that warm on Jensen in the first place. Not cold, not looking to be the tall poppy that gets cut down... but at least willing to give Jensen the boot if given the right push.
This is how things change. Slowly and then all at once. If the board were more in love with him, they'd probably have been willing to turn a blind eye for just a little while longer. No such luck for Jensen, but we make our own luck in these things.
Tell me you have no clue how corporations are run without telling me. Furthermore Jensen wasn't some random executive otherwise this wouldn't be now top news all over the world.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Let’s be real here. Everyone making money out of NVIDIA was more than happy enough to go around the restrictions and see the prices go up due to Chinese demand.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
In what world is the modern US Congress a good regulator of these kinds of things? Half the people in the Capitol have a literal vested interest in the very companies they claim to be trying to keep on a leash (and I recognize that some of these are inverse instruments, my point still stands).
My money is on the congress members - including the greatest stock trader of all times, Nancy Pelosi - having just sold their NVIDIA shares right before the spying was uncovered.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
Musk's companies have low quality boards, which is by design to make it almost impossible to fire him and the legacy of that should serve as a cautionary tale
Musk controls 19.9% of voting power at Tesla, and more than 80% at SpaceX. Huang has about a 3.5% ownership stake in of Nvidia and that’s jointly controlled with his wife.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
Possibly, I am a bit tired of the national security argument with hand waving vagueness. It’s generally unfalsifiable because details would be a national security risk. Meanwhile we have seen National Security concerns that were pure lies once we get sufficiently far past it.
> There are some things more important than stock valuation.
Given that the economic growth of the USA during the last few years was entirely due to this man and his technologies, I'm going to say nah.
China having access to GPUs is not a national security threat. It's an economic threat. Not sure why people treat China as some enemy nation. It's just a competitor.
Yes you see there are various types of national security. For example, there is the national security when a country that touted capitalism and free trade for years suddenly finds itself beat at capitalism by someone else, that's a big national security issue. Then suddenly free trade is evil and a danger and a national security issue.
Or maybe he just simply wanted to make more money by increasing demand for Nvidia's GPUs by tacitly allowing for them to be exported to China though Singapore.
dark ops may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
I'll plug our Pretrained episode from Monday here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97DW8gfCnI - this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.
Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?
As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?
They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.
I am not sure I can agree. Perhaps this was the underlying reason. Perhaps others wanted to frame him and launched a media campaign. But from what I can see, at the
least on the surface, to me it looks as if he was fired for liking too many women at the same time, at the least one of which might be a possible spy. This may all be fake-reasons on top to cover underlying real causes, but to me right now it looks as if the girls cost him the job here.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
> Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration
I want to add some nuance to this statement. There is a difference between:
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
Being compromised kinda does seem like a reason to be fired. It seemed well known he was doing it since there are plenty of photos over a few years? So it’s more she was a honeypot.
So many HN folks defending Huang's actions as "just an affair" - what an epic reading comprehension fail. Yes there is an affair, and that's what grabbed the initial headlines. But just read a paragraph or two and you'll find the espionage story.
For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.
It may well be that it's his private life and it doesn't have much to do with things, but it is a contributing factor. The skirting of export bans was the reagent, but the infidelity is the catalyst that is making it much bigger.
CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?
I've heard rumours that 20-40% of Nvidia's revenue was coming from sanctioned chips that make their way into Chinese data centres. If true, it's not small potatoes.
Jensen is Taiwanese. Nvidia's chips are made in Taiwan, as are all the most advanced chips in the world -- including the chips in Apple and AMD products -- by TSMC. China wants to re-absorb Taiwan into itself, partially because they cannot match TSMC's geometries and they desperately need those geometries.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
Oh, it's not the repeated violations of sexual conduct with an employee, and a spy, and likely more? A CEO who is that dumb to risk his and the company trust isn't worth it. Look, a trillion already wiped out. When employees say "how dumb could he be", you know the board and major investors are saying that too.
As though the Board had no idea of this, and are suddenly acting oh gosh this is the first we've heard of the phantom SG revenue! Time for Jensen to go. Nah, not buying it. Many of the board have been w JH since the early 1990s. This is because his reckless disregard for the company and his years-long relationship with a Chinese spy.
Well the only thing super weird is the timeline - USA bans exports, China (very soon after) bans IMPORTS! And then there's a company which keeps doing trade under the nose of the potentially two most powerful nation-states and their secret service sources. This is super fishy, really I don't buy nobody knew nothing, only for a "lucky" journalist to figure out the whole thing...
I dont think its more soo about the ban as China itself has 'officially' blocked the chips that were being licensed as exportable. I think its more of the asks that were being made by the NATSec and Amodie aligned actors (see the pod he had with Dwarkesh ), to ho tighter and more aggressive. Basically Jensen was sort of the brake on the impulsive ideas getting thrown around on how to 'win' AI and create a moat against all latecomers.
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
> From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.
I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?
Very much agreed, the second this became clear his position was untenable. He will surely have launched his unicorn by the end of December regardless, I’d be surprised if this had any tangible repercussions outside the divorce court.
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration—with the tacit permission of the current administration.
The problem now is the very public optics of that coming to light in the context of having an affair with a maybe spy.
Biggest valuation ever will turn into biggest investor lawsuit ever. The music on the AI circular deals is about to be broken by a feminine spell. This has Lord of the Rings all over it...
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
Did your TV tell you that? I hope you realize that there is absolutely no proof of the import ban having been skirted. The FBI has been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed since 2024 and all they have is a few GPUs still being unboxed at their Malaysian data center.
Well, you say that, but the perception is he hasn't got sacked for circular financing, nor for the providing of sanctioned components (supposedly they went to third countries, not China, so legal). But he got sacked for two affairs.
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.
We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.
Its a threat to their own companies and whatever amount of democracy is there. Maybe ego is like some cancer that kills/self-ded
structs its host/person if it gets big enough. Which is good. A persons etreme wealth gets them political power and also advantages before the law. We've seen this with big corporations.
TBH, I find the manner in which this was done to be pretty distasteful.
The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
I've seen a theory floated online that somebody inside the government, who was part of the faction advocating for stricter sanctions on China, leaked this in a way to cause maximum damage to the anti-restrictions faction. Whether Huang (female Huang) was actually a Chinese spy in the first place is also up in the air, keep in mind that while the affair has almost certainly occurred, given that Huang (male) has admitted to it himself, the Chinese spy allegations are still unverified. It could possibly have been a "grain of truth in a sea of lies" play.
> A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
That's literally how the world works? And has worked for many centuries or longer. By "value" you mean wealth, and wealthy people can get away with murder. They buy and write the law and have the best lawyers in the world.
We won't have billionaires/trillionaires/kings AND rule of law for /everyone/ equally - the world doesn't work that way.
Our President literally diddled kids on a Carribbean island, cheated on his wives several times, and is probably a closeted homosexual, but richest man on earth having an affair is where we draw the line.
> if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Hmm... I wonder why that is. Could it be because a bunch of CEOs, prominent politicians, and business people were found to have taken multiple trips to an island where the had sex with children and nothing happened to them? No, it couldn't possibly be that. I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age, while we excuse pedophilia.
Are they still in Trump's good graces? Sure, they gave him money before. But can they promise him more money again? He's pretty quick to dispose of people when they're inconvenient too.
There is a wealth of reporting out there, it is harder to ignore this story than to read about it. My statement was couched and is clearly just my opinion, I'll leave the reading to you and let you form your own conclusions
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
Elon Musk has an AI bot generating explicit images without consent, regardless of age, yet nobody's firing him.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
That is simply not true, Grok refuses to make explicit images, and with uploaded media it refuses to do even mildly enticing ones. *
* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.
There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this. NVidia is too big and Huang is too wealthy. This administration in particular would never prosecute that. And, even if they did, a pardon is only $1-3 million anyway.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm 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
The midterms seem like the most obvious timing. Trump has a little less power and everyone is starting to plan for what happens after him - jockeying for being able to say they didn't support this and that. If it was only being ignored because Mr Huang could donate a lot of money to Trump's ballroom that deal probably isn't as important now.
> What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care?
We all now know that Trump knew about it, that's what has changed. It was fine when this was private, but now his administration is starting to get questions around why his Commerce department punted the initial investigation to DOJ where it ultimately died as the opposition party is about to retake Congress with investigations top of mind.
Likely there was at least a feeling of mutual understanding between Jensen and key people in the administration. Now the wind has turned in a big way and none of that is on paper. And in fact what is on paper points in the wrong direction.
Probably the only thing protecting NVDA from prosecution right now is that nobody in the White House wants to pop the AI bubble. That might protect Jensen too because he would entangle the company. There will be an interesting tension with congressional oversight. Buy popcorn and NVDA vol.
Yeah, over a year ago the likes of Gamers Nexus was able to follow the clues to figure out how Nvidia was skirting the export ban.
It's hard to believe the US government was so incompetent that they didn't do the investigation a YouTuber did (But not impossible).
The export ban was always BS. Unless you are going to do a total ban and all parts are manufactured in the US, then it is just 1 additional hop to get stuff into China.
Everybody should be against the export ban. It's laughable to claim that it is for "national security", it's blatant protectionism to cover US AI companies for the fact that they operate at monumental losses. Any country in the world should be allowed to buy the hardware they need to run AI, if they need it, and if the roles were reversed the US should also be allowed to buy tech from other countries. Graphic cards aren't nuclear bombs, and AI is a multi-use core technology every nation on earth should have access to. So far, China has made a far better impression in that respect than the US. At least they have published open weight models.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
Basically every technology is dual use, but still I basically agree, there is an incredible level of anti-China rhetoric in the US right now, not just on the right. The Chip export ban is incredibly tricky reason the outcomes of. For one thing, doesn’t it change the China Taiwan relationship?
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
What's the downside of that for the economy? It seems like it would be the market becoming more efficient, cutting down on margins and so on. Bringing Nvidia back to earth might open up cheaper hardware for other companies to work with and accelerate AI anyway.
Efficiency is a great thing and long term what’s needed so we can buy laptops again at a reasonable price. There will be a pretty large blast radius across ANT/OAI/ORCL/SPCX/TSMC/neoclouds. Prob 15T of market value at risk and the flywheel of investment which is conditioned on investors and the economy believing they have durable appreciation locked up in AI stocks (“if my basket of investments is safe, I’m willing to invest my next dollar in more of it” vs “the sky is falling and I need to tighten the belt / pull money out”). I’m trying not to be a doomer here as I think it’s somewhere in the middle it’s just very frothy and the upside scenarios generally envisioned NVDA to be stable
I will be honest, my personal opinion is keep the blood flowing until RAM prices return to Sept 2025 levels.
This whole saga has been a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. There's no compelling argument that points to these new innovations not otherwise happening if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
It’s not a given that markets are able to navigate the risk between massive capital investment and unknown future revenues. Everyone is trying to figure out the long term value from AI. For a made up numbers example the path might require $1T investment to unlock $10T revenue in 10 years from now. But if no one can put up the $1T it stalls and doesn’t happen next decade
The hardware is expensive because it's supply constrained. Demand far exceeds supply.
Harming Nvidia would only make us more compute constrained, and raise prices further.
It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.
Harming the producers of [thing] or disincentivizing profits will not make [thing] cheaper if demand remains the same (or if it is growing, like in all of the areas I mentioned).
Doesn't this situation demonstrate how bonkers it is to pin the fortunes of the stock market and potentially the entire economy on the behavior of one person?
The company should have plans in place for what to do when something happens to the CEO. Situations like this, death, or just deciding to leave. I've read reports that Nvidia didn't have this, which would be irresponsible if true, but it's not the norm. The founder leaving is likely a bit different than some other CEO coming in later, but any good CEO should be thinking about what happens to the company when they're gone so people know the company is still in good hands.
Huang has served as CEO for a whopping 33 years - hard to argue he wasn't crucial to NVIDIA's success, and how many of the board members are the original from when he was first chosen-selected and continued to be hired as CEO over the crucial early decades?
What nuanced knowledge-understanding does he have that no one else can have?
Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
Respectfully, I don't engage with conspiracy theorists
the stock value just represents what people think the company is (or will be) worth, them selling products at 50% margin is what brings the money, the stock value doesn't give NVIDIA extra cash (unless they're selling or leveraging their own stock reserves to get even more cash?). And definitely shareholder value is not the economy.
and also, how is the efficiency bad now? surely that allows for innovation and other companies and people to get cheaper hardware (assuming they somehow have to lower their margins because Jensen left, still don't get that argument)
What on earth are you talking about. The exponential growth in the 1990s, percentage wise, far outpaced the AI bubble. Go look at Intel, Microsoft, lucid, etc from the dot com boom. This is the problem with 20-somethings’ hot takes on the market: no history.
The '90's bubble is what the AI "bubble" would be if everyone you spoke to was glowing with excitement about AI, and a few niche analysts were raising concerns about capex.
Instead this "bubble" is packed with people who detest AI and have extremely bearish views on it's future. If this "bubble" does pop, I think it will be the first one in history that every single person saw coming.
Almost every bubble ever had its detractors. Yet they still happened because those who actually had decision power and market shaping power didn't care about any downsides from popping a larger bubble so they just wanted to make money.
Nvidia stock price is now lower than it was a year ago. Has been declining for about 6 months, highly volatile, with a step sell off starting a month ago.
Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.
The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.
It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.
A) He never made a single product himself, and B) surely we can see in hindsight that this is a pretty goofy metric for success...? Like, "shareholder value" isn't exactly what we need at this pivotal moment in the terran story.
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company.
...
But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were
Even if we accept capital as the most important thing, this seems pretty openly counterintuitive. You're lamenting the spectre of efficiency.
This is demonstrably untrue. Jensen was an engineer through and through, and contributed significantly to Nvidia's early accelerators from the NV1, at least to the earliest GeForces.
> B) surely we can see in hindsight that this is a pretty goofy metric for success...? Like, "shareholder value" isn't exactly what we need at this pivotal moment in the terran story.
In the slow evolution of the human race into the Ferengi, it is absolutely a milestone!
Long term we want efficiency. The market is SUPER inefficient right now. People are buying GPUs and stacking them up in warehouses so that they get their allocation. Companies are taking retired jet engines, and turning them into very expensive generators. SoftBank just defaulted on a bunch of power generation orders (increased cost for everyone, but didn’t create the value). My point is that it will be a painful road to get to the efficient market which will likely be a recession because of a massive slow down in spending
A is a reddit meme-argument. It assumes that the labor-theory-of-value is a fact and implies that only fungible IC's add value, whereas irreplaceable great men who organize multi-trillion-dollar companies from scratch contribute nothing. It's a way for them to advance for their silly worldview while obscuring its absurd foundational assumptions.
Totally agree. And that's late-stage capitalism for you. For a site named "hacker news" the hacker spirit is noticeably absent here. Instead you have simps for billionaires.
The thing to remember every time you see the orange, so you don't forget, is that you are posting on the promotional website of a multibillion-dollar private equity firm.
I cant help but see a difference in the moral standard to which Jensen is being held compared to the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held. Why can one get away with shocking moral behaviour, but the other has to step down for a mild affair. If Jensen didnt have the affair, or it never came to light, would all of this still have taken place?
When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.
Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.
For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.
Apple used nVidia GPUs in most of its computers. Around 2008-2009, nVidia produced a line of faulty GPUs that were used in the Macbook Pro. This led to widespread hardware failures, and was known as "Bumpgate" because the problem was caused by faulty solder bumps inside the GPU chip. nVidia refused to fully reimburse Apple for repairs because it wasn't contractually obligated to do so. In response, Apple switched away entirely from nVidia GPUs.
I think it was well into 2013 because both the 2011 and 2013 MBPs I had suffered from it. but I thought that was an apple issue (ie not soldering the dicrete gpu well enough to save money on it)
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
Nvidia eventually had a spat with just about any corporation it has ever worked with. Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
> Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
But even then, the original Switch 1 homebrew relied on an oversight in NVIDIA's Tegra chip that blew open the whole platform due to the ability to execute unsigned code. The Switch 1 was actually pretty locked down. Nintendo worked hard on securing it properly, only for it to all be for naught due to their SoC vendor making a massive blunder.
I wish I could have seen what was said in the meetings between the two companies when the first Switch exploit was released, considering it was fully on NVIDIA.
Success in some areas of your life does not insulate you from tragedy. The guy still puts his jeans on one leg at a time. Probably very expensive jeans he throws away after one use...but still. The human condition cannot be escaped.
This includes his family and the family of those involved in the affair. Many lives were turned upside down.
The guy has enough money to buy an island in French Polynesia and never leave it for the rest of his life. You are correct he is still human, but he can do pretty well at making a new life for himself where he doesnt have to ever think the word Nvidia again.
In 10 years he will have a new family and new friends and this will be a distant memory for him.
It isn't the tragic human condition to have affairs. It's a choice he made with his free will. There is no need for apologia; he could simply have not done it.
Jensen has been one of the few outspoken billionaires for promoting higher taxes on himself. In fact, only he and Buffett come to mind as the members of that category.
Then again, below is a 2024 article from the NY Times claiming Jensen was taking advantage of loopholes to save $8 billion on taxes. Actions speak louder than words so perhaps his more recent messaging about being in favor of higher taxes on himself was the result of a PR effort, given his rapidly increasing visibility.
However, I imagine that any good accountant would strongly recommend saving $8 billion on taxes like Jensen did before 2024. The article:
Things Jensen has said are now all suspect. Does he really believe this or is it just his day time positioning, in contrast to his nighttime positioning that cost him his job
This is why socialism/communism won the Cold War. They got rid of entrepreneurship, yet new and innovative companies just spontaneously self-assembled for the greater good!
I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that
It’s not the infidelity part, it’s the undisclosed relationship with a subordinate part. That’s covered in HR training and is a fireable offense in every company I’ve been parr of.
I think the point is that whether he did or didn't, there's so much smoke now, that Nvidia is going to be spending the next few years getting drilled by absolutely every law enforcement agency and government. Even if it genuinely turns out that nothing even slightly bad happened, it's quite damaging the amount of scrutiny Nvidia is going to be under for the foreseeable future.
I didn't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
Just a sad state of affairs. Jensen was by far the biggest voice pushing for open weights and keeping the Anthropic / OpenAI doom narrative from getting out of control.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
Only because it benefits NVIDIA to have more potential customers in the shovel market to mine gold individually versus consolidating within a few providers (where the backend tooling becomes irrelevant to the consumers, and OpenAI & Co could freely change GPU manufacturers on a whim or move things in-house).
I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference for unsigned and registered open-models in the firmware of modern GPUs. Anthropic and others are pushing hard on this. First the hardware export ban, eventually the software one via hardware-enforced execution controls like IETF hinted at
Either through technical means, or simpler: by law for American providers.
It's hard to believe the administration was not aware of Jensen's affiliations all this time. And time is pressing for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Not really tbf, it's an extrapolation. As far as I am concerned, there is growing concern, with Anthropic coordinated lobbying against open weights. The point I am making is we need strong Hardware actors consistently standing for hardware neutrality and integrity. Historically, NVIDIA has been very pro open weights. But at the same time, in-silicon guardrails seem to become the new thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879883
Makes you wonder what would happen if the US ever wanted to enforce "certified US AI" on its chips
I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support. This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
I'm dying to know how other tech CEOs rank on your "historical figures ordered by importance" list. Like, do you think Steve Jobs was more or less important then Harriet Tubman?
What’s the revenue target I need to hit to get a free pass for sanctions avoidance? What other rules, regulations and laws do you think he should be absolved from considering NVIDIAs quarterly profits?
To call it a hit job is absurd. He is smart enough to know his actions could have severe consequences. He took a massive risk on behalf of millions for his own momentary pleasure.
Not a single inch of empathy for his wife and family, nor the misled investors and staff.
I'll tell you what's absurd: Believing the Chinese government sent a spy to honeypot Huang into providing chips to Chinese companies, while everything about their public policy has been designed to prevent exactly that.
The Chinese government wants Chinese companies to buy Chinese chips.
Indeed it seems absurd, but maybe the Chinese government sent a spy to honeypot Huang into destroying (indirectly) its own company instead - knowing how western culture react to such events.
I think you're misunderstanding - I think the suggestion of a hit job is because of the timing of all this coming out.
His affairs have been going on for months or years, so much so that various places knew about it, did nothing to stop it, and didn't leak it.
I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?" Nobody seems to know. In the absence of any other explanation, suggesting "hit job" isn't absurd.
> I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?
1. Got too well known to hide
2. Republicans just badly lost the midterms. There is a lot of info that the President and head of Department of Commerce also knew about all of this the entire time and did nothing. They won't be able to stop investigations, and they don't want to be seen as getting in the way of them.
If that's true, the bigger story is not just that Jensen did all this, but that the administration likely knew he was guilty of Espionage and actually helped facilitate it by knowing but not acting. That is a real possibility.
I think the "formal apology letter" wouldn't have existed if this was some sort of open-relationship situation. In that case, Huang violated an important agreement, and cannot be trusted to not violate other important agreements.
Ah. So you know their relationship? Whether it's an 'open marriage' or not? Whether the wife cheated first, or not? You're of course, in the know, so you can judge, yes?
He could have done a wrong thing. Or the affair could have been perfectly fine with his wife. Or the marriage could have been on the rocks for years, and they both agreed to not divorce, with all the drama and media attention, and just live their own lives.
I agree with your sentiment in general: we should not make assumptions about the parameters of others' relationships.
But in this case, Huang himself explicitly mentioned the hurt that he caused his family. I don't think it gets much clearer than this.
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and
our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am
deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and
support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead,
I let them down and damaged the life we built together.
I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I
caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology
cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal
and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
He wrote himself a press release saying he was unfaithful and because of his actions he hurt his family... it sounds pretty clear that was not a consensual non-monogamous relationship. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
If it was an open marriage, why would his first statement have been an apology to his wife and family? I don't see any reason to start assuming it was actually fine. In any case the affair becoming public in such a way would still be hurting them - the media attention you're speaking about. Much worse than a divorce, right?
Because the public sentiment towards open marriages is even more negative than towards infidelity? One is seen as a mistake that one can atone for, while the other is seen as a rejection of the institution itself in a country that has strong beliefs in it. Still only 65% of Americans support gay marriage, for example. Marriage following strict rules remains deeply important to a lot of people.
Absolutely it is performative. Writing a public "apology" for spending time with another person in their free time is also performative. Nobody actually cares what you do with your life. They aren't thinking about you at all. But when performing, the performance has rules of engagement.
The public fall may seem quick but from my read of the timelines this has been ongoing for a lot longer.
The idea his fall is related to his affair also seems more like an attempt to minimise the fact that NVIDIA have been covertly selling to China when they were not supposed to.
I think finding humanity in our villains can help us gain perspective so I’d agree on your first point.
However let’s hold both thoughts at once, this was no hit job. Nvidia was forced to act quickly to mitigate business and legal risks. The eventual fallout they’ll face is still not fully known.
There is no support for people like him, CEOs of such big companies, or even any respectful CEO. People would only use him. That's human nature for you.
It is as much of a mistake to anthropomorphize billionaires as it is to anthropomorphize LLMs. People with resources greater than nations are .001% human and the rest is closer to a lovecraftian god. Consider that he can shatter markets or send massive trading companies under simply by having an affair. The empathy is misplaced.
He jumped in front of that bus himself. If the investigation turns out he was definitely orchestrating defying export controls then it's more like he drove one bus into another. He deserves every bit of embarrassment and ridicule no matter how impressive his business accomplishments were up to now.
Such a bizarre take to me. Yes, it's a quick fall.. but can you really trust him after he's been caught having an affair with a supposed Chinese spy, _and_ potentially another one with an employee? There is zero chance any normal business would keep a CEO after this...
Normally this would never come to light, the admin has known about the Chinese agent since 2025, and there is an extremely high probability that they know of any other affair partners as well as what he had for breakfast and how he’s doing with the fiber in his diet.
If you think that billionaire execs of highly strategic companies don’t have the CIA nonconsentually implanted in their colon you are extremely naive. He misstepped politically.
I’ve known a lot of execs, and I can probably count the ones that were highly successful and never cheated on their wives on one hand. The temptation comes with the territory, and the opportunities are endless and disarmingly charming. It takes a man of outstanding moral character to be unfailingly perfect under those circumstances, and unfortunately outstanding moral character is often not what gets you into the c-suite. It’s a lot like rockstars in the 70s, actually, but with more boring clothes.
You can agree or disagree with his position on exporting to China being good/bad for nVidia or the US. But actively working closely with a company (Megaspeed) where, from a thousand miles away, it was clear that their primary goal was to get around and/or bend US export controls... that's a bad idea. Megaspeed was clearly working for the direct benefit of the Chinese government.
Add onto that having an extramarital affair with the representative of that company? Come on, it's extremely likely she's an agent of China, and if not it's a gigantic business risk.
Then, on top of that, you have to remember that he's married. A divorce results in half of his shares going to his wife, who would then have a grudge, probably not in the best interests of the comapny.
I think the external event maybe moved quickly, but I read there was an internal event as well.
I’m sorry but this shows wildly inappropriate decision making. Say what you will about honeypots (I received specialized “warning” early in my career, but I recognize that is abnormal), but we all are forced through training every single year about how relationships at work, especially with imbalanced power dynamics, are inappropriate and should not take place.
I don’t care about the infidelity, but he represents the company at its pinnacle. He had to go.
> I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support.
Jensen, if you are reading this and need support you can try looking into BetterHelp. You can even get 20% off using certain partner links. No one should have to go through the stress of loosing their job from Chineese spies alone and with BetterHelp you're just one click away from your very own personal therapist.
Money is not that helpful when a 40 year old intimate relationship dissolves. Being able to buy things does little for memories that can no longer be shared.
Sympathy for the guy having multiple affairs, including with a direct report, including with a spy and credible allegations of doing an end-run about valid export controls imposed by his country?
I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!
Which country? The country of Taiwan where he’s from and where all his products are made? Or the USA whose diva in chief has had a fit about selling said chips to the country who produces all the USA’s stuff?
Some very harsh words being thrown around for Jensen’s very human failings. Try walking in his shoes, or at least having some degree of understanding and empathy.
Jensen doesn’t give off sociopath vibes. He really doesn’t. There’s a big difference between being sociopathic or psychopathic and having one’s ego inflated by overwhelming success. Try seeing what it is next time you’re gazing in the mirror.
Try walking in his shoes? He has an easier life than 99% of people lol. People always quick to jump in to defend the shittiest behaviour, maybe have some empathy for his wife?
Really shows you how much we need to kneecap these CEOs for societal good. The idea that they are hard workers is laughable. Everyone working in retail or a restaurant or in a call center is a harder worker than any executive on the planet.
Crazy talk. I’m sitting on a beach in Italy right now. My life couldn’t be easier. The stress and pressure of running a company like Nvidia is off the charts.
Pleaze. Even relaxing on the beach one can read the news and gauge sentiment for their investments. And you’re right, maybe I’ll see Jensen hanging out in Taormina next week. Good place to hide actually.
Well conversely you’re labelling and attacking what you consider the shittiest behaviour, when you only have a sliver of detail. Try pondering what it’s like to create a $5trillion company leading the 21st century’s biggest boom, and consider what weird and unthought of and irresistible demands that might come with. The guy started in Denny’s.
> This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!
> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY
The apologists in this thread are absolutely shocking. Jensen is a ruthless CEO who clearly lacks moral fiber. Why do we idolize and "feel" for people like this?
I have NVDA stock, I think this is neutral at worst. Obviously bad short term, but the fundamentals are what they are. They are gonna print money for at least the next 5 years no matter what happens.
I don't think there is a more hallmark visionary CEO than Jobs, and Apple isn't exactly doing poorly today.
Maybe the veneer isn't there, but it's very hard to make the case that Apple has in any way failed following the loss of him. Cook was pretty mediocre, and it shows that when you have a strong ship sailing, you just need a "not total idiot" to keep it going.
The counterpart is the state of Apple after Steve Jobs left in 1985. Apple was in dire straits when Steve Jobs returned in December 1996. Granted, Jobs wasn't CEO in 1985, but as co-founder, he had tremendous influence over Apple, though he didn't have absolute power; he left due to losing a power struggle against John Sculley and Apple's board.
I'm also reminded about the state of HP once the founders retired. My understanding is that John Young and Lewis Platt preserved the HP Way. However, Platt's successor, Carly Fiorina, moved the company far away from the HP Way, and HP hasn't been the same since.
This is a sad time for NVIDIA. I hope NVIDIA is blessed to get a Platt and not a Fiorina.
Hard disagree. Jobs polished things that already existed. They were never on the bleeding edge of hardware design and manufacturing when it comes to actual performance and capability.
Right, and he had the knowledge to know that consumers don't care about that stuff. So we got iPhones with excellent usability instead of windows phones with HD displays.
Obviously, only him could have great visions about NVIDIA. I am expecting a 'we are going to stagnate, at best, without Jensen' worded admittance now from those poor folks remained in the organisation, with all those visionary thoughts taken away from them so abruptly. CEOs are the one taking the companies forward!
He wanted to have the cake and to eat it at the same time. I've seen CEO's who handled this in a much more orderly way, such as: getting a divorce, then announcing internally to the company that he is getting a divorce, then announcing he has found new love with a certain person at the company and in the same sentence announcing that the certain person effectively no longer answers to him, but to the board or something like that.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me. This is a man who could be fired just for OFFERING to have sex with a subordinate. The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind. But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Which most company policies allow in some form. Peer-to-peer is straight forward. Supervisor-subordinate (relevant here) is less tolerated. You just have to disclose it and maybe sign a "love contract."
Parent is oblivious to this and has already made up their mind that these policies don't exist
> The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind.
I'm very aware that these policies exist, and I'm certain the CEO of Nvidia was also aware. That he decided to circumvent them says all you need to know, really. Even if it's consensual, what happens when she decides she wants to move on from the relationship? What about her peers that didn't receive promotions while she did? This is why these laws exist.
To be honest, even with those policies, a supervisor-subordinate relationship can be problematic. There is an undeniable power dynamic at play, so even when it looks consensual it's hard to be sure. I'm not saying it wasn't consensual in this case, but when person A can impact the future of person B, person B might feel coerced to "consent".
Anyway, not sure if that's the case here but it's hard to rule out entirely.
These policies are intentionally narrowed to workplace conflicts of interest. HR doesn't want to manage morality clauses or stuff outside the workplace.
Yes, you can extrapolate, and our society does. This is why ministers aren't supposed to have relationships with their clergy, therapists are not supposed to have relationships with their clients, lawyers, doctors, etc. The list goes on and on.
Can become, yes. Depends a bit on what exactly the nature of the power imbalance is. Which is why there are usually strict rules about relationships with your reports and how to resolve the situation. Like reporting it to HR so the work positions can be shifted in a way to move positions so that there is no longer a reporting relationship between the two.
You mean infantilising adults and denying their agency to feel better about yourself.
Obviously it depends from case to case and there are certain lines that shouldn’t be crossed but otherwise consenting adults should be free to make their own decisions.
I've never worked at any company that used them or heard about them. Instead we take yearly training saying that even flirting with the idea is a cause for immediate termination.
Do you have stats on how common these are? Is it more popular in some non US country maybe?
Do you suppose Jensen had a love contract with his subordinate, when the breaking of the news of their extramarital relationship led to a 20% drop in stock and the removal of Jensen as CEO?
Considering he was fired it's the other way around. This at most only applies to very small companies or to people at the very bottom on the totem pole.
Not sure about the sexual harassment angle you're pushing... it's about trust isn't it? If you have consensual affairs as a CEO, you are still liable to be fired if it becomes public, that's my opinion anyway.
In any scenario it’s not appropriate. Among peers, everyone knows about the “special relationship” and it directly attacks any perception of fairness and enables others to justify similar or worse behavior in the org.
A good point and the line of thinking you're describing implies that power should override anything else. Rather than rules that apply to everyone, what level of power within a company should no longer be subject to firing for engaging in a power-abuse sexual relationship?
Misbehavior without consequences seems to have become more noticeable in politics within the past ten years, with mainstream news outlets reporting on insider trading and potential bribes for favors. This ethos of power over accountability seems to be having a trickle down effect on general sentiment.
I agree there should be equal accountability. The response to that shouldn't be letting everyone do whatever the hell they want, though, in my opinion.
Any company that wants to pass one of the many audits I'm sure Nvidia is subject to has policies around this. They would both know that not only do all employees need to disclose such relationships but that such a relationship is not appropriate if one is above the other on the org chart. Since the CEO is above everyone, that pretty much means if he wanted a relationship with an employee they would need to resign first.
> The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me.
It's mindboggling that you describe an apparently completely consensual affair as "sexual harassment". That's absurd.
I mean I said in 2016 Hillary basically behaved this way with Bill in regards to others (notably monica lewinsky) and against basically anyone else (i.e. say whole democrat party field) except Trump that should have been a disqualifying thing (and worse, if the republicans put up a decent person, I suspect Hillary would have won!)
At the end of the day, I wouldn't bash everyone here too strongly when everyone who lined up early behind Hillary basically acted in the same way. (And yes, even though Bill did the act, Hillary lined up easily to defend him, much like the people you mention here)
Let's dispense with the theatrics. Having a relationship with someone in your chain is not even close to sexual harassment. Yes, it can lead to it but generally it doesn't. It's not at all illegal either.
When I entered the workforce not so long ago most companies didn't even have policies against it. My university didn't make a policy about it until 2012. I know a very happily married couple who got married this way (a little earlier - perhaps around 2006 or 2007). I don't think they'd be happy if I referred to their behavior as "sexual harrasment".
I think it's a good policy and it's fair they enforce it, but equating it to sexual harassment is nonsense.
They may not think about it that way, but if one of that couple got a promotion from the other then every other person on the team pretty much has grounds for a law suit. There are reasons these rules exist, and the CEO of a high profile company has no excuse not to know them all.
You can't prevent people from having relationships. It's not realistic. My company has specific rules about this. Typically, "problematic" relationships need to be disclosed to HR and leadership, but they're not forbidden per se.
Even if it were about consent (and it's not), it's difficult to show that a relationship with such a power imbalance is consensual. If it were consensual it should have been disclosed. And as a CEO he has a greater responsibility to follow these kinds of rules. He knows it, and he did it anyway, and then he got caught doing it. There's really no other action to take besides removing him.
Maybe it's a generational thing? The younger generations seem to have some sort of anxiety with respect to consent and power dynamics, where even something as trivial as a modest age difference is viewed with suspicion. The movie Obsession can be seen as that anxiety translated into the horror genre.
To be fair though, a CEO having an affair with a subordinate should be seen with at least some suspicion...
IDK, if you look at the messaging around Clancy where women are completely subordinate to hormones to the point it excuses chasing down three children and systematically murdering them, or the Cornell 7 case where a woman can willfully engage in sex with multiple men and then only decide it was rape retroactively after explicitly negotiating with the men what was ok during and after with text messages where she defended her own actions but then when rumors started she decided she didn’t actually give consent…
The people saying you can’t trust women… are mostly coming from women.
Wild time if you are dating! Yes could mean No if later she decides she didn’t like something about it.
money before principles. Not to be crass but this is the ycombinator forum, not bluesky. do not expect principles before money, this is the absolute opposite of trying to preach to the choir.
Who do you work for? Curious whether they have annual sexual harassment training or not. I'm not pushing a narrative. Based on the facts that are public alone this is pretty cut and dry sexual harassment. You may not like the connotation of those words, but they contain a pretty broad set of improprieties.
Cornell 7 would like a word. That’s just the latest. The facts of that case so strongly outweigh the narrative that it’s comical that somehow innocent until proven guilty is now “misogynist rape culture” or something.
I'm... not shocked. Politically, HN skews pretty heavily right. Some of them will claim otherwise, putting rainbow flags in bios and such, but here is where the rubber hits the road. I also believe that the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. He can paint himself a victim of a Chinse spy.
Consider the case of Regina Santos-Aviles [1]. She committed suicide by setting herself on fire and had revealed that she'd been having an affair with her boss.
The power dynamics here are insane. Huang was the CEO and a billionaire. The legal liability that NVidia has or could have because of this is huge, particularly if they did nothing. Now there are big questions about who knew what when.
The reporting says somebody say them in a San Jose hotel and was basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment (I'm guessing; I don't know). Was that from NVidia or Huang personally? What NVidia staff, if any, authorized that?
If the board wants to really clean house they should authorize a thorough external investigation of that and any other possible affairs.
DOGE was less popular than most of the admins stuff, and more scandalous at various levels (the stuff they did cut was fairly popular, they didn't manage to cut the stuff people might have really seen as wasteful, they went about accessing data in strange ways, some of the employees were quite young and looked unqualified).
I don't think you can assume much just by knowing somebody disliked them.
That's totally fair, nobody is happy with DOGE at this point and a lot of people were skeptical and nervous as it was happening. I just don't recall anyone popping in to say "damn it, they're doing it wrong!".
The things they got the most attention for like USAID weren't really core dc money. if anything I think they failed to really touch federal programs much in the end, but they did wildly swing at other stuff (like infamously just word searching to cancel research grants etc).
One may interpret this as the Overton window having shifted quite a bit over the last several years. As in "HN skews pretty heavily right" can be correct *and* it can also be true that the wackadoo faction of the right has dominated the discourse for a while.
To spin it another way: if we ignore the rise of the faux-libertarian (you know, the more typical brand now, libertarian but all for a strong military and christian nationalism), I'd argue that the typical HN skews more old school small-l libertarian on the right wing spectrum. That's quite a bit different from the MAGA, christian nationalist, style of right wing politics that has been in vogue lately.
But DOGE (as conceived) is the wet dream of a libertarian from any era. If anything it's a bone that Trump threw to libertarians. It's not especially MAGA imho.
On paper yes, but anyone with half a brain saw that the opposite was true in real life. They went in, made things worse, didn't save any money, and absconded with a lot of private data. My recollection from that time period was the tenor here shifted rapidly from generally positive to generally negative.
If you truly believe this, you're living in a bubble. Economically it might be pro free markets, but socially it's heavily "progressive" -- see any discussions about Omarchy, LGBTQ, Elon, or Trump.
I'm socially progressive but economically conservative. That's why, whenever there's a tough situation where compromise is needed, I always compromise on the side of "let the free market run amok".
I’m entertained by how far left one must be to think HN “leans pretty heavily right”. Even the most die-hard socialist should be aware enough to find that funny.
I think media, social and traditional, has really done a number on people’s perspectives. I’m not sure why ideology replaces self-awareness.
Die-hard socialists often consider "liberals" to be soft-core right wingers. I'm not sure there's an objective center, it's all a matter of perspective.
That means he can’t have any affairs with anyone who isn’t a billionaire without it turning into sexual harassment due to the imbalance in power?
> basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment
So depending on how big the payment the alleged victim might be pretty happy with the outcome?
I mean if the board believes that the actions of the CEO resulted in financial damage to the company it’s up to them to investigate and deal with it. I just don’t get the whole morality police angle as long as the affair was between consenting rational adults.
Jensen's the most pro-open weight guy and calmest on China public figure at that level.
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
The difference between Musk and Huang is that Musk has engineered such control of his companies through dual class listings that there really is no one who can fire him. Having said that, people are very openly talking about the fact that Musk is going to spend the next couple of years spending quality time with the US congress explaining in minute detail why he's not a traitor.
From Game of Thrones:
- Men without cocks. You wouldn't find me fighting in an army if I had no cock. What's left to fight for?
- Gold?
- I spent my life around soldiers. What do you think they spend that gold on?
- Family.
- Not without a cock, you don't.
- Maybe it really is all cocks in the end.
More likely the hardliners/security establishment. Rubio reportedly let Trump know of the affair/spy suspicion earlier this year (April? I don't recall), and he clearly ignored it because he likes Jensen and/or he wanted to get in on the action as Nvidia was making bank selling GPUs to China.
This breaking just before a meeting with Trump/Xi and just after the midterms show a changing wind in Washington is a hell of a coincidence—or not.
Securities lawyers, among others. All this scandal is going to lead to shareholder suits, which puts a LOT of pressure on the board to act. They have fiduciary duties!
I don't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
My understanding is that NVidia's organisation is very flat and Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type. Moreover there was no succession plan. I get that having an affair with a spy is not great but isn't it risky to replace him now?
I'm going to guess the 2nd affair with a direct report who rose quickly through the ranks is from the board's perspective the more egregious of the two failings.
And: the public only knows what's made it out. Who knows what else has come out in private.
Oh come on, having sex with a coworker is rape now? This is getting ridiculous. Why not just go the whole way and require all sexual activity to come with with a signed and notarized consent form?
You don't think the board of a listed company care about the CEOs bit on the side is being promoted? That's really not a good look for a company to admit that.
It's one thing to happen and another to put that out in the open.
Officials are corrupted? CEOs sleeping with other women including his subordinates? Snow is white? What's the deal? People at that level are basically playing politics, not laws.
However, the fact that someone decided to release all those information as PUBLIC, and followed that up with ANOTHER scandal, means that they are determined to get rid of them. As you said, it is indeed serious matter.
As the Chineses say: "Something weights as light as a quarter of pound if it's left alone, but can weight a thousand tons if put on the scale".
Because reality deems that this is not really the problem, I was about to mention the Epstein thing -- everything in that file is 100x worse than what Jensen did.
If we (the common people) really want consequences, we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
> we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
I'm with you on the first half, and see the second half changing. The fever may have broken in the US electorate.
I feel like "not having a succession plan" should be a fireable offence on its own.
Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".
Imagine having to explain that line of reasoning to Congress in four months. "Yes, Senator, we know our CEO was facilitating chip smuggling to China while in a relationship with a Chinese spy, but we figured that it would just be too risky to replace him at this time."
Lot of comments here stating with absolute certainty that China wanted Nvidia chips (they've previously ordered Chinese companies to not buy Nvidia chips https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...) and that Alice Huang is a CCP spy (zero public evidence of this).
People who have worked in the national security sector in the US know how China operates. Any Chinese tech personage who is not a CCP spy but who somehow rises to a position of international influence will be recruited to work for the CCP by being made an offer they cannot refuse. In a typical case, there is plenty of evidence but most of it will never be made public for security reasons.
Of course China always denies this, but the evidence for this behavior over thousands of cases is such that the burden of proof is on those who claim such a person was not a spy.
This does not imply that the Chinese people or even its government are "evil" or that we shouldn't do business with them. It's just something that everybody who deals with China needs to be aware of.
Can't help that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the China hawk fraction of the US government and associated entities (i.e. Anthropic) obviously brought the hammer down on Jensen here, even if he arguably brought about his own downfall with the affair.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
Frankly, you're being naive. When it comes to a massive $4 trillion market-cap US corporation and one of the most important companies on planet Earth, money is everything.
If the company struggles without him and it's obvious they need his leadership, he'll be back. Morals be damned.
He's the hero we needed but didn't deserve. If this thing didn't happen my guess is open models wouldn't exist and we would be deeper and darker into the whole AI boom
The big question for NVIDIA investors is how much of their sales came from skirting export sanctions because you can bet there is an investigation coming.
The board is considering both internal and external candidates. Who has experience in hardware, has led a trillion-dollar company, has deep connections in Asia, and might be available?
It's possible Tim Cook's phone is ringing right now.
It would be interesting if the story unfolded with Jensen going to TSMC [1] and Tim Cook taking over NVIDIA.
It's hard for me to imagine Cook taking over Nvidia unless it was strictly temporary. I get the impression Cook retired because he wanted to relax and enjoy his golden years. But I agree he'd be a good choice to manage the chaos at Nvidia.
For intents and purposes, consider NVIDIA compromised for some foreseeable future. For operations and future purchases/CAPEX, more than a passing due dilligence is warranted if considering NVIDIA.
eh, there is a rumour that it was one of those 'open' marriages, given that his daughter was seen with him and Alice Huang in a video, implying they were ok with it. (dunno about the second one though, but given the first, the second seems excused as well)
Nah, this is about the indirect Chinese access to chips, and this whole cheating thing is a cover. He's confessing to a 'lesser' crime to save himself for the real threat of jail.
I only wish he got ousted for being a liar about where the money was coming from during the crypto boom, or the super anti consumer policies like prohibiting OEMs from having a top of the line series with anything other than nvidia, refusing for years to support standard vrr and pushing for g-sync, artificially nerfing silicon capabilities in consumer grade dies and helping this bubble get bigger and bigger with bad accounting practices.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
Despite his personal affairs, he brought significant growth and stability to NVIDIA thanks to which we all have access to excellent products so his dismissal does not seem like a wise decision. I wonder if his successor will be able to measure up to him. And what would be the cost for nvidia?
It all seems political and every politician has an affair to hide...
This might be due to violations or breach of his duties as the CEO, especially given the nature of who the other party has loyalties too, but nonetheless, its a lesson for us all. Because even if he didn't directly provide any IP, would that party have reasonable access to any IP during the events. Guess only time will tell
“Hey Lisa! How’s it going? So ya we just fired your cousin who created our company. We were wondering if we could get on a call with you about replacing him and leaving your rival company? If you could call us back on 1-800-NVDA that would be great.”
There is a lot of discussions on Export Ban. Does selling to a Singapore Company with Chinese Stakeholders considered illegal under those ban? Does Nvidia have to track every single GPU sold or even resold?
I was under the impression he sold it to a Singapore company, or even any other companies. What those companies do with those GPU is not his fault.
'Singaporean' company whose former managing director (Chinese national Alice Huang / Huang Le) and owner (through a self-titled company) is the same person he's had an extramarital affair with.
The same company they've audited the datacentres of, and saw dummy non-running servers within which had been stripped of their GPUs, and were 'fooled' that they were simply yet to be commissioned.
i hate this moral outrage. what's wrong if he was sleeping around? let him just print gpu. his ability to print gpus has nothing to do what he does in his bedroom. i can sympathaize with the wife and infidelity is a sin. but he was supplying everybody with gpu. so that makes him a great guy too.
The specific truths about anything hardly matter when a story becomes this big. The hubbub is too much of a distraction and Jensen was going to get hauled in front of Congress by reps trying to score points with anti-AI constituents.
Regardless of the implications, even just as a change for NVIDIA this will be one of the moments we look back on. Keep hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times!
I've seen some people speculate whether or not he'll be a prosecuted/arrested. It's difficult to believe, but surely would be the biggest imprisonment that I can remember from recent memory.
I can think of one company that rose from $347 billion to $4.6 trillion market cap after their finance person successfully filled the shoes of an innovator
Now I'm in danger of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I think there are several layers to this current drama. Most of the reporting is very "surface level". I also don't pretend to have the full picture myself, but there are many players and many agendas at play, and those can agendas change over time.
The board, made of 10 members, only has 3.94% of Nvidia share in total, out of which 3.58% is owned by Huang.
Meaning that the 9 people pushing him out add up to own 0.36% of Nvidia share, only 0.36%
This is betray of shareholder interest. The board doesn't own Nvidia, this is not their business, yet only they can vote. they just want to finish as soon as possible, and you get a mad result.
Huang has shown catastrophically bad judgement and lied publicly [0]. Many commenters here harbor lots of sympathy for him, I assume out of respect for the technology and company he's built, but that doesn't exonerate him.
He was sleeping with one of his customers—a huge conflict of interest. That alone is good grounds to get a CEO fired, but it only gets worse! Alice Huang, a Chinese national, was previously working for a CCP propaganda channel network with an impeccable acronym: CCTV. Her company was accused publicly and investigated by the government for suspected smuggling of sanctioned NVIDIA hardware into China. Now we learned he also had an affair with one of his direct reports — another diabolical conflict of interest, which alone could be good reason to oust the CEO and possibly the VP as well.
It's yet to be determined whether he disclosed secrets to the Chinese spy, or whether he at least privately admitted to the second affair (if not, that's even worse!)
It's not a single, horrendous mistake anymore but a pattern of disastrously poor judgement. Building an extraordinary company and technology shouldn't mean lack of accountability, and thankfully we found out today that even at the highest level it doesn't.
Huh, between the Anthropic IPO, the big shift in political environment, and the change in outlook for tech stocks, this comes at a pretty pivotal moment to see if AI train keeps accelerating at the same pace or if we start to see the end of the bubble.
I don't want to sound like a Jensen apologist, obviously huge missteps on his part, but he was quite a figure in shaping the last few years broad economic narrative. Good or bad, he was a force in shaping one of the largest investments ever. Does that shift without him? Does it shift really quick?
I would have preferred a slow fade into the sunset as a opposed to a dramatic exit. Yes, there would have always been a correction, but the bubble bursting explosively vs a more measured, slower correction will have different broader impacts and I just hope this doesn't push more towards the outcome that hurts a lot more.
My conspiracy theory is that its American spies who let this go public to pressure him out because Jensen was fighting their agenda of stopping China getting advanced chips. The flow will probably slow for a while, domestic Chinese companies will be forced to adapt, and as a bonus the USA wont even be competitive because they took their best horse out behind the woodshed and shot it to stop someone else from getting a ride. 12 months from now Jensen is gonna be VP of AI hardware at Huaweii or similar, calling it now. Another A+ geopolitical move from an administration that has been in a class of its own right from the beginning. Im a nobody who knows nothing but if I had to bet it would be on this.
This is insane. This is the best case scenario for China, much better than just getting the chips. They just crippled their biggest competitor. The stock might not crater immediately because of ongoing AI demand, but it will at some point.
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA.
Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
Jack Clark Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic / head of the Anthropic Institute is the nyt and @AnaSwanson "source" he is the one coordinating a coup against Jensen.
interesting. the timing would favor their IPO in terms of flexing their ability to move policy through extra-judicial means. but it would also benefit them to coattail the narrative even if they weren't players so I wouldn't assume it without evidence.
But they are going to be hit by this as well - this is a strike against the whole AI ecosystem and honestly, the US economy as a whole considering how propped up it is by the hype.
is today the best day in over a year to buy NVDA? From a long-term perspective, how much was he the one driving innovation, and can they be something like an Apple who overcame founder's reliance?
What I think is hard to argue: Jensen did a remarkable job leading his company, especially during the development of CUDA, which required an enormous investment in the 2000s but eventually created an ecosystem that outside developers and companies now help sustain and expand. CUDA is a major reason Nvidia has such a dominant market position and should continue to achieve far into the future, regardless of who is CEO. Nvidia's massive risk and its extraordinary payoff will likely be studied for a long time.
AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.
He resigns so he would forfeit much of contractual severance in most cases. A negotiated settlement is likely as part of the resignation and if he’s rehired elsewhere (eg at terafab or tsmc) it will generally terminate ongoing payments, healthcare, access to private aircraft and security.
> NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
The irony isn't lost on me that Jensen Huang suffered consequences for his involvement with mature, consenting adults and a whole bunch of other tech billionaires didn't for their island antics.
I think the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. That opens up NVidia to a lot of legal exposure.
The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Skirting export bans is an unknown. I honestly don't believe this administration would let anything bad happen there. Jensen Huang is simply too rich and NVidia too big.
> The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Yeah, this is the most interesting part to me.
It points to the US government knowing about this, and holding onto it as compromat until the time was right to kick him out. But I don't even have a guess as to why this was viewed as the right time...
> Jensen Huang was fighting hard to hang onto his role with the company he founded, according to several people briefed on the discussions. But an interim plan for the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, to take over Nvidia was well underway yesterday.
From the NYT live updates.
Ah well, I'm somewhat seeing parallels to the 2023 OpenAI drama, not sure if this is gonna be how things end quite yet.
The "state of the world economy and the future of open models would be in turmoil due to affairs of a single person who's not even a politician" situation was not on my 2026 bingo card.
we'll see whether it was about the affairs if Nvidia keeps promoting open weight models or just becomes a supplier for openai and anthropic's closed ecosystems for 'national security' reasons.
Would anyone bat an eye for “one admitted affair”? It is the “spy, Chinese, export ban, a blonde” caught on. No evidence whatsoever on these. It is the imagination of if you have “two ANT in the kitchen…”
It’s crazy how many powerful people are brought down by a seemingly super easy thing: using your conscious mind to decide who to have sex with.
Through abstinence-only sex ed programs, we ask millions of teenagers in the throes of puberty to do this. But somehow fully adult leaders with everything to lose, can’t.
The affairs are horrible behavior. Going around export restrictions.
But talk about ruining a legacy before it really took off. I don't really have sympathy. But this guy should have carried around a piece of paper with some short aphorisms to look at everyday to anchor him back to reality.
I remember Jensen saying he doesn’t have a contract with TSMC. The whole supply is based on a trusted relationship and handshake deals between the two CEOs. I wonder if that relationship is transferable to his successor.
I guess everyone looks at infidelity and goes oh the horror. Thing is these are puritanical views and has no bearing on the companys wider performance. Not to mention the fact we dont really know what was going on with these people's personal lives. Now going around sanctions otoh is a whole different problem. Although tbf, given the clown that is the US president right now, I am not sure the US has the moral high ground to suggest selling to China is a problem or anything. I dont see the point of these sanctions, so I understand if Nvidia found a way of going around the sanctioned pathways.
Eh, i think he's acting as a heatshield for Nvidia, his affairs are irrelevant, but the Chinese sales could put both Nvidia as a company and him as CEO in jail... this allows them both to pretends it's a 'personal issue' and get away with it.
That bit with Dwarkesh was very prophetic in hindsight.
Let this be a learning experience for everyone here: if you ever get the CEO if a US tech giant, then never f** a Chinese spy! (and never circumvent export bans while you are at it)
Someone of incredible wealth and influence suffering negative outcomes for something wrong that they did?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
The real question we must ask is if a current $30k consumer GPU that initially sold for $2.7k is just as inflated as the 'AI' holdings revenue predictions.
The smart money will wait till the legal mess starts, as the dead cat bounce in the panic sell off is probable as people try to buy the dip. ymmv =3
He was at the top of the world just last week and now his career is over.
Slept with a direct subordinate - who btw rose quickly through the ranks - also slept with a Chinese spy and allegedly sold one of the most precious commodities in modern times illegally to an economic adversary. Hit job or not, he really fucked up.
So when Musk sleeps with anything with 3 adjacent holes it's fine, the one asian nerd screws two women and is ousted imnmediately. Yet people think there's nothing behind this?
Mind you, when these affairs happened is also literally when he took the company to 5T market cap
Musk has total control of his boards and still gets sued by shareholders on occasion for stuff. Just because he's impossible to fire doesn't mean it's fine when he does it to anyone though.
Not sure about the people thinking he didn't do much wrong.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
I think he clearly did something wrong. It just doesn't seem that bad in comparison to the current shit our leaders do weekly. We're in an age of morally corrupt leadership across the board in the United States.
I never mentioned cheating? Not sure why are you bringing it up.
I said that the missteps was having sex with subordinates and chinese spies.
Now start connecting the dots with Nvidia being one of the major advocates for relaxing exports to China and selling billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies that the chinese spy represented and you understand why the board finds him a liability.
Even the "chinese spies" is just unsubstantiated 'she's chinese so she should be a spy". She's not even chinese iirc, isn't she singaporean? so it's like suspect by ethnicity.
Suspect by payment from ... TenCent? AFAIK. Her company got money from Tencent and after every longer meeting with Jensen, someone from Tencent flew in and had a meeting with her. At least that is what I remember hearing.
In Wikipedia no mention of TenCent at all. In another writeup it's mentioned, but nothing clear.
Was Alice's company supposed to be the only company getting Nvidia chips (which they deny doing anyway). Or one of many and Chinese companies did it with many different others?
If many, why is her relationship specifically important or special from that aspect?
Again, I can understand snooping for confidential early information from him. But "she got with him so that this single company gets chips"?
But yes, the fact that Nvidia advocated for relaxing exports to China and that he sold billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies is now obviously under major scrutiny.
If it was some middle manager who got fired for screwing a subordinate you'd see the typical "don't shit where you eat" comments.
My guess is people are upset because their stock is down 20% over the last month because of this drama.
I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.
I agree. And to the conspiracy theorists: what is more likely? That an impossibly rich guy who thinks he is the center of the universe does something as entitled as this? Or that there is some shadowy coup going on that just checkmated him? Human nature doesn’t need that much encouragement.
I really hope the NVIDIA GeForce Now service sticks around and doesn't get enshittified.
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
What is, however had, more interesting is that many of
his statements did not age well. Now, mind you - I still
think it is his private life at the end of the day; one
can reason about foreign spies, but then the same question
can be asked about Trump and his strange addiction to
Putin. As well as how Jen-Hsun was so obedient to a
mainland-China female, when the other Taiwanese are
scared of being possibly invaded and subsequently killed
by dictator Xi, just as dictator Putin commits to his
own personal genocide against Ukrainians right now.
But, with regards to statements, I distinctly remember
Jen-Hsun berating the british as incompetent economists.
I watched that on a shorts on youtube; can not find it
right now (google search AND youtube search sucks to
no ends now). Well - he may be right that the UK suffers
huge economic problems, but boy, this has not aged well.
People will poke fun at his love of women potentially
being spies while berating the british as being too
incompetent in economics. Perhaps he was too incompetent
in his own love life?
One Blue Tsunami, and now all the oligarchs are suddenly turning progressive and transitioning! Trump was right all along. This is exactly what he was trying to warn us about.
Think of all the mistresses who will now have to accept and adapt to their oligarch lover's new gender -- Jensen has at least two that we know of, but when you see two ants in the kitchen, you know there are a lot more. I can't wait to see the wig Bezos picks out.
The reason this is all going so quickly now is because they realised how deep the shit is Jensen put the company in.
There will be an endless walk of shame for Jensen that would constantly drag the price of the company down, because this is the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to fly out of the gate in January and put the fear of god into the other billionaire oligarchs again. Punish one with extreme measures the others will fall in line, because at the end of the day they are all pussys.
Remember Elon wanted to do cagefighting with Zuckerberg. Those two losers had every excuse ready not to fight in the end. They didn’t even touch gloves for a single sparring. Manly men. All they can do is tough talk.
Plus the voters will see at least one party is doing something against blatant billionaire corruption, with corruption being the third most important topic in the elections.
There needs to be made an example of what happens to you if you start selling weapons-grade technology to the enemies of the United States for personal profit, and then think you are above the law.
This is not over for Jensen. And also not over for Nvidia, so the only sane thing to do is get as much distance between the "rogue" CEO and the company. Same for the White House, let’s see how often we see Jensen and Trump still together.
They are going to throw him under the bus and say he had the opportunity and the access and the power to do this without anyone else noticing, especially as he was sexually manipulating managers that directly report to him on important corporate issues.
They will make it look as though it’s all Jensen’s fault because otherwise they stop being a trillion-dollar company.
It’s a fitting end for Jensen Huang.
He gets taken down by the holy trifecta of power, money and politics he valued above his own marriage or what this whole mess would do to his kids.
He even lied in his public apology because he still was confident the other affair with his married manager would never surface because he truly believes he is smarter than anyone else.
What a loser. 140B deep pockets and still a loser.
Money is only paper. All that counts is family.
Threw away his life’s work, his marriage and every last drop of respect for him as a man, father and husband his kids could ever have for pocket change and some ass.
If shareholders want to save the company fu-g board of directors should be replaced completely and Jensen back.
Colette Kress has brain of Marisa Mayer who destroyed Yahoo. A woke clown to lead technology company? No vision, no skills, no understanding of technology.
Because he cheated on his wife?? Or what am I missing? If that's the official reason, I don't buy it. I don't think those who can influence this decision give two shits about this type of morality. It's silly on its face. Obviously it's cover for some other agenda. I'm just surprised people buy this silly excuse instead of getting to the bottom of what is really happening.
That he conspired to smuggle NVIDIA GPUs into China to bypass a US embargo working with the Chinese government via a spy (either willingly or via blackmail). Impropriety adds insult to injury - the board have rightly seen that the market will view it more negatively if he stays than if he leaves.
It's only been like a year since the last CEO resigned for viral infidelity.
And that was only with a subordinate, not a subordinate AND with a foreign spy (alleged). Reports say China got billions in chips imported thanks to this operation.
Politicians also drop like flies. The only person impervious to consequences has been Trump. None of his supporters care that he's the devil.
No, it's because he repeatedly lied. 20% of the company's profits were/are coming from selling sanctioned chips to China and he said 0% 0% 0% (in official filings)
The news made it sound like she was a sophisticated person using him as a simpleton, but if anything he was using her to move his products against sanctions.
I have to say, this seems like a ridiculous over-reaction on the part of the board.
I think if you could know the truth, 75% of CEOs in the US probably cheat on their wives. They are not hired to be faithful to their wives, they are hired to increase the stock prices of their companies.
Like sure, if you're a good Christian, it's not good behavior, but ultimately, it's just having sex with someone. I want the guy to make me money and build a great company, I don't care who he has sex with.
It's not about the sex. It's about the judgement shown in cheating with a Chinese spy and a direct report, specifically. It's the lack of trustworthiness shown by someone who is willing to cheat in their marriage (presumably they are then fine lying to their company). And finally it's about exporting gpus to China illegally.
I'd like to give some insight into this process. A few days ago, we learned that market disrupters were planning negative news to artificially collapse the AI economy, we investigated it at the time and considered completely outlawing short selling. Here is our investigation: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_e05fb23d-aa67-43e4-a7c1-df...
As you can see, it was not clear that we should completely eliminate short selling.
When the character assassination process began against Jensen (who is the Founder of NVidia; he currently owns around 3% of the stock; his stake is worth around $100 billion) we gave our feedback that this is not newsworthy.
Yesterday, we learned of plans to remove him from his position and passed the law linked above, making this illegal.
We will now begin the process of liquidating and delisting the short seller companies involved. These are some investment banks.
We do not consider any of the recent reporting to be newsworthy or material.
Did you read what Grok told you? You asked whether restricting short selling would help, and it said "No" and explained why. Somehow that became "we uncovered a conspiracy and will liquidate the investment banks."
And who's "we"? You and Grok? Because Grok said no. You've lost half your government before issuing your first decree.
You've managed to make MechaHitler the voice of reason in this conversation.
The only reason Jensen is out is because he doesn't pretend AI is an existential threat like Anthropic and OpenAI do to boost their own valuation/moats and to boost the anti-China sentiment for the administration.
Jensen Huang called Israel a "second home" while it was committing genocide against Palestinians. This is just a continuation of a pattern of corruption. I think he resented his own success because these are not honest mistakes. Jensen Huang is the AI Great Gatsby.
fwiw, this was seen at the time as a gesture to the large number of NVIDIA (Mellanox) employees in Israel. Both due to it being a major center for the company and because he had personally been spending a lot of time there meeting with the networking org.
I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here. Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. The Nvidia corp still has to answer for that even when Jensen is out.
+1. Jensen getting really heated when pressed by Dwarkesh over China during his interview can be seen in new light now.
Link to the interview https://youtu.be/Hrbq66XqtCo?t=3457
Thanks for the link.
Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.
This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.
He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.
https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U?t=1058
Wrong interview
I remember listening to that and thinking, this sounds like a guy who is primarily focused on selling chips and is brushing away legitimate concerns in a way that, I just did not find very compelling. A little bit too much protest you might say. Not to say there isn't or wasn't validity to his arguments, but in light of the current circumstances it seems to me that those arguments are quite a bit less valid than they were, and I've certainly swung my personal opinion from being on the fence to a hard no to selling these chips to Chinese buyers.
If the Chinese Communist Party are going through such great lengths to obtain these advanced Nvidia chips, it further invalidates a lot of what I've been reading here and elsewhere about China "catching up" or that being the leading models isn't what matters (commoditization). You don't do stuff like this unless you really need something.
I think it's worth remembering that China isn't a monolithic bloc, and CCP doesn't drive everything, that there are tons of private enterprises there that would benefit, even if the Chinese government strategically would prefer to push Huawei to grow the domestic capability. There being a ton of private demand internal to China doesn't invalidate Jensen's view that it's a strategic blunder to let Huawei get a foothold in the market.
That said, I don't have any special insight into the specifics of who was driving the demand backing Megaspeed.
Talking to friends who worked in diplomacy - honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely. It makes sense if you think about it. The failure rate on these is going to be fairly high and even if it’s a small success (ie a one night stand sort of thing) you can get a little compromat. The cost is probably fairly negligible, a lot of this will be fairly low risk as far as spying goes.
I'm a bit out of the loop, what part of what he said is wrong? He said they have more power and the more capability to produce chips, so they can essentially just brute force things vs the US if they wanted to: is that not the case?
> invalidates . . . . China "catching up"
China catching up does not mean they are not still behind.
Also, China is a big country with many companies. While some may be trying to catch up via local development, others may still prefer getting western hardware right now e.g. in order to get a competitive advantage over those catching up.
I am trying to separate the current situation from his comments. Perhaps that is a mistake. He's trying to sell chips but that doesn't make him wrong.
Going to "such great lengths"? Buying a few wh0res for Western leaders isn't exactly complicated.
But what’s the point ultimately? Delaying their progress by a couple years?
Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
(and could leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future)
It feels like Space Race thinking, honestly. If the US delays China and ends up with an AGI god a few years in advance, that can still be a significant advantage even if China can catch up. This especially would hold true if a theoretical AGI could maximally leverage RSI so the improvement curve becomes exponential.
It's much closer to nuclear arms-race thinking.
If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before there is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has been misaligned to desire.
AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.
This. And this happened before, see the China Sovjet split
AI has been identified as strategic national priority for both the Chinese and United States.
NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.
End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.
Why wouldn’t they have done that by now then? Where is their ASML or TSMC? They’ve had decades to catch up already.
> They’ve had decades to catch up already
No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War, and then managed to subsequently starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then managed to right themselves. They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use.
Their ASML and TSMC are...ASML and TSMC.
Who says we won't just progress as well and they stay behind a couple of years?
Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.
If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.
> Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
The ever closing gap between the capabilities of frontier models vs chinese open weight models.
Models aren’t everything. You need physical infrastructure at scale for inference, which is where the economic power comes from. Chinese hardware makes double the heat and needs at least double the energy input.
This is good evidence sanctions don't really work. Critical sectors will find ways around them and it only punishes the rank and file working class. If China or any sanctioned nation wanted those nvidia chips, it has ways to get them. So the military and intelligence get them, but the people don't. Same with sanctions on Russia now, which has not significantly slowed its military machine, but in fact its military machine is coming out with constant innovations (new Gerans, better EW, more spy sats, etc). I remember seeing a post mortem of some Russian drone. It had a Jetson chipset Russia was not supposed to be able to get. I imagine the smuggling market is far bigger than we might think and sanctions far less effective than we think.
Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
Sanctions should be a bigger conversation. They are almost never needed and especially trade tariffs and such are always used for the most corrupt cronyism.
I watched the interview. I think the arguments made sense. People get heated talking about the colour of an object they can both see. I wouldn't want to project reasons for heated behaviour.
For the record I think that less than half of the people who thought the dress was black and gold were being influenced by the Chinese government to take that position.
He was so unhinged and angry. Ppl just ignored it at the leather jacket glazing time s
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china
As a business, why shouldn't they advocate for export to a relatively huge market? It is an expansion for them and from a business perspective completely expected.
The advocacy is not the problem. The problem is that, once the ban was in place, they skirted the ban.
Which is not what the comment being replied to said at all.
They should and there’s nothing wrong with only advocating. The problem is that it wasn’t just advocating but (possibly) knowingly subverting the export controls
Turns out there are laws and regulations that restrict one’s ability to lobby for foreign interests as both a public and private individual. Read about NJ Senator Bob Menendez which is a particularly egregious example.
Also that its intertwined with asking the corrupt administration to relax export regulations
The image is not a problem. That image has existed for months already. The problem is that Huang lost the tenuous protection that Trump and Lutnick agreed to give him so he could avoid jail. On that basis, investors are now scared the company might suddenly be under investigation for export violations.
https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/trump-lutnick-nvidia-china-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...
And not that Nvidia is absolved of responsibility but it does make it a little easier if it's the new leadership in the hot seat for those things being like "yeah we did some naughty stuff but it was the last guy and we're working on hard on getting it all cleaned up."
There's speculation that Trump knew about the Chinese spy and Nvidia donated $25M to the White House Ballroom in October 2025.
Even if this is just a coincidence, Jensen himself came out and said he donated to the ballroom, but kept the amount hidden. In internal documents, Jensen and Nvidia said to keep the amount hidden and it only came out due to disclosure documents from the government.
Trump went on 60 Minutes and said as much
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think that the risk is not nearly as real as it-- as they talk. And I think the risk can be managed. And it's managed, you know who? By who? The DOJ. We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said, "Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night."
ROSS DOUTHAT: Who was this person?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Or this company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you. But we said-- "Do you like the color orange because get rid --" said, "Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give 'em a kiss good night, and--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"that's the story because--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"because tomorrow morning--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"you're goin' to jail."
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the-- if they--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted to make a deal--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --to put that (UNINTEL)--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person totally changed everything. Totally. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: "Yes, sir"?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Was it a leader of a major AI company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. Yeah.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. And--
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --and-- and I don't think--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --said, "We wanna put th-- we wanna--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --"codify this into law--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't think it was--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --would you work with them--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --done maliciously. But it coulda been malicious, but--
---
This is what losing the Rule of Law looks like by the way. The sitting president is on TV saying that he found out someone rich and powerful is suspected of wrong doing serious enough to get a call from the president threatening him with prison, but that that's the punishment. Once that rich and powerful person bent the knee, said "Yes sir" with the right tone of voice, all was forgiven.
Equal Justice under Law means that we shouldn't punish people we don't like with harsher sentences it also means that wealth and power shouldn't be sufficient to skirt the law.
We often speak of a two-tiered justice system, but I've never seen the president go on TV and tell America in no uncertain terms, it exists, I'm a part of it, and it went very well, he said "Yes sir" just the right way and so you don't need to worry about it.
These "donations" are just par for the course (to use an expression from the current president's favorite sport)...
I’m aware, Apple and other companies donated too. What I found odd was the lengths Jensen and Nvidia went to hide the amount. Other companies came out and said how much they donated.
Ok Mr. Both Sides, show me the donations to Biden's gilded ballroom.
I should have made it clearer that I was only both-sidesing it when it comes to the donors, not to the recipient...
$25M to sell billions of GPUs to China
cost of doing business. kiss the ring, get the blessing, make fat stacks -- illegally.
Oh! That explains why Trump was so sympathetic to Jensen : "He is suffering. Poor man. He is such a nice guy. And his family… but he is suffering greatly."
Corrupt from top to bottom.
So directly colluding with Russia hasn't taken Trump down, but maybe allowing prohibited exports to China in exchange for money will?
The audit on the main contractor for that "ballroom" must be wild. I guess that auditor is going to make a pretty penny.
Trump has several protections- #1 is that as chief executive he gets to decide who our friends and enemies are to begin with…
Where did I say this will bring Trump down? Maybe Trump gave the go ahead as long as he gets his cut?
You didn't say that, I was speculating in response to your comment.
I can think of several more urgent topics for congressional hearings than that honestly...
> Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised
I doubt it has anything to do with it really. China is a huge market and by not exporting to China they were missing out on tens to hundreds of billions in revenue. Any CEO would have advocated the same.
Not the _only_ reason, sure. However, it's quite common when executives have an affair they will get fired. I think that's just the reality. If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
I was on the leadership team of a startup that is now public, during that build something like that happened (almost exactly the same as this NVIDIA situation sans the spy stuff), there were effectively 5 of us involved in what the outcome should be and it basically came down to: me and another guy didn't want to sit on a leadership team with someone who exercised judgement that way, to the point that it was me and the other guy or affair person, so affair person was out, even tho it was very painful for the business. Also, I don't think what I just described is particularly uncommon.
I have worked at a larger company where the CEO did something similar and across the company all anyone could ask was "why would you do something that dumb", which is not a great way for people to feel about the person supposedly leading the company.
this is something i am probably too european to understand...
At the end of the day, it's also just too simplistic.
Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.
You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.
The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.
The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.
At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.
That is the unforgivable lapse in judgement.
yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.
This is more than an affair though. This is an affair with someone he has a business relationship with and thus it becomes the interest to the business. There are many many cases where someone give business favors to the person they are having an affair with.
My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.
You should be fired if you're having an affair with a spy, or with someone who reports to you.
Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
(Agreeing, with an asterisk.)
Markets care about predictability.
To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.
Yep that's an even better point. Though I would say there's a distinction between socially-unacceptable and untrustworthy. Being forthcoming both limits surprise (per your point) and mitigates the trust component of deviance.
> Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Why? I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?
Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.
Maybe I don't understand enough the US culture.
> Why?
It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.
Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.
> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?
This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.
Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.
And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.
Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.
Right, and because he was willing to break a commitment that serious it de-values other commitments he's made, including those more directly relevant to the business.
gosh we need another 68
What does that mean?
All this coming from a country that elected twice as President a guy that married three times, led a very sexually promiscuous life, including the notorious boasting, and was accused of sexual misbehaviours by almost 30 women. Hilarious.
Trump's key innovation was shamelessness. It's good that Jensen feels shame here.
It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.
But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.
> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.
In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.
If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.
Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.
I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, they were well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, they agreed to them with their words, in fact. With us it was very simple, provided you're not a bigot, what you do on your own time is not our concern. However, what you do within our business is our concern. If you have intimate relations with anyone inside our company, even if consensual, you're no longer on our leadership team. Then, their actions did not match those words, when that is true, trust is gone. In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect their actions and words to match, and there are people who we know that isn't the case, and on some siding scale, we accept it (I didn't say acceptable). For example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). Groups typically have criteria/standards, if they change that, it may change the group to varying degrees, and that may be ok or not ok, depending on the group. I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?
*Everything on a spectrum.
Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.
You cannot tell from the NVDA stock crash if it's because the CEO had an affair, or because NVIDIA illegally sold GPUs to China and is in huge trouble.
Somehow, that wasn't an issue for Eric Schmidt, who was shagging some publicist while he was Google's CEO (and while happily married). Wonder why.
Was she working at Google at that time and reporting directly to Eric Schmidt?
That’s how it was for Sergei brin.
For one, Schmidt left Google in 2011. Cultural acceptance of fucking subordinates has changed a lot since then.
One of the reasons this behavior is problematic in general is the potential for blackmail. It's not even really a statement about morality, just an acknowledgement that somebody who wants to keep things hidden is going to be beholden to the people who know the secrets.
"It's not the crime, it's the coverup."
Jensen went to many high profile parties with this woman. I don't see where he's trying to even hide it. Even the kiss was made out in public, not like a hotel room.
Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes. I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents, and he pretty much encouraged the agents to publish the photos.
> affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes
For better or worse, this is the world we live in.
For worse.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes
No? All it requires is for Jensen to want to remain with his wife and for his wife to be willing to divorce him if she finds out he has an affair.
Or, even if we suppose he doesn’t care about his wife’s feelings at all, he might be very incentivised by losing half of his assets in a divorce. It’s worth many, many millions to him.
Very little involvement from society in that one.
186 thousand million.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes.
You don’t have to be a prude to think cheating on a spouse is condemnable.
In general, it also doesn’t really matter what society thinks. You can just threaten to reveal the affair to the spouse. And even in the case the spouse doesn’t really care it’s fodder they can potentially use in a divorce to get a better deal.
One thing worth pointing out is that in this case in addition to the affair with the Chinese spy he was allegedly having an affair with a subordinate, which is always problematic.
> I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents
Sukarno. "Project Happy Days", lol.
He (Sukarno) thought it was hilarious and sent copies to his friends.
CIA was pissed w/ him because he killed a lot of Communists but then started leaning to China and beefing with Malaysia, which irritated the British
It’s not just about humiliation. If your boss is sleeping with your coworker or someone on your team, how can you trust their decisions are grounded in fairness and logic. Sure, the world doesn’t work this way, and ceos are at a different realm than a mid level manager, but this is usually how HR defines things.
It seems more common they get fired for either "with a subordinate" or "a relationship with a conflict of interest for the company".
There are many examples where the outed affair resulted in nothing material when neither of the above was true.
This case, seems to touch both.
Reminds me of the Coldplay concert couple, which happened to be a CEO and head of HR. Head of HR! And what's more interesting is that they only got removed when the affair became public. At the same time the company was small potatoes so presumably less interesting to state actors.
That is assuming there is a layer above the executive, which is not necessarily the case.
It is true for anything with a board, of course. But there is no rule mandating boards.
Pretty sure all publicly traded companies in the US are required to have a board
Several publicly traded companies have (or had) majority-owner CEOs, which makes it more than a little awkward for the board to fire them. I can't really see the board outing Zuckerberg under similar circumstances
Zuckerberg protected himself from this scenario by starting off with an Asian wife.
Most certainly, but the statement was
> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out
There is no "* only applies to publicly traded companies". Hence, it is incorrect.
The bigger point I am trying to make here being that not everything is investor-driven. People can run businesses without that. It annoys me greatly that HN regularly forgets that.
In publicly-traded companies, the board is not the ultimate boss, though. That would be the shareholders. And, at Meta and many companies copying Meta's playbook who have IPO'd since (notably including Anthropic, though notably not including Nvidia), founder shares have so much voting power that the founders are effectively in complete control.
In theory, Nvidia shareholders, if dissatisfied with today's decision, could vote to oust the current board and replace it with people more sympathetic to Huang, who would, as their first decision, re-hire him as CEO, as would be their prerogative. This is... unlikely to happen.
None of the above is investment advice.
It worked for Sam.
Public companies in the US are required to have a board of directors. If they’re not a “controlled company” - i.e. no single person controls more than 50% - then a majority of the board are required to be independent, i.e. not employees, executives, or consultants to the company.
> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business
I can hardly imagine anything more stupid than judging the aptitude of the CEO of a 5T$ business based on his private love life.
I suspect so many of us see examples of corporate crime or even of corporate greed (legally) causing an incredible amount of damage that an affair feels trivial in comparison. That is especially true when the private family life of a CEO is private. The damage of the affair could be anything from devastating to the family to they were all but legally separated.
We know nothing about Jensen's private life or if he humiliated his family here.
Marriages of 41+ years can get into any kind of dynamic.
100%. While I do not condone his actions, publicly we do not know anything about his private life and the dynamics. Until there's a statement from his family, for all we know they may have been separated.
It's clearly the CN link and/or the cosying up with a customer that is the problem; the board would not care about his private life (and neither should the public, tbh).
And the open letter sounds more like it was written the way the public would expect a CEO to write.
Then obviously his letter could've said as much. It didn't, ergo an interpretation of available evidence clearly indicates you are wrong.
> or if he humiliated his family here.
His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?
> His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?
He has also said so very many times in so very many ways that Nvidia was absolutely not involved in violation of export control laws regarding the export of its products to China. That -in fact- there was absolutely no smuggling going on and claims to the contrary were utterly baseless and without merit.
I agree with ohnnyApplePRNG's assertion that we know literally nothing about the private life and situation of Mr. Huang and his family.
So because he lied when he denied certain allegations, you don't believe his admissions of guilt? That seems like an odd logical jump.
> we know literally nothing
He "literally" wrote about how his actions hurt his family, I'm not sure why there's a second account parroting the exact same phrase.
This is incorrect. Even if they had a totally open relationship, it being public news across the world can be humiliating.
We do actually know enough to know that the edge cases do not sufficiently apply here to arrive at the conclusion you're implying.
> We know literally nothing about Jensen's private life or if he humiliated his family here.
Uh... but we do!
---
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.
Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
Jensen
---
Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
If he is actually a bi-furry with an understanding with his wife on 'affairs', do you think he'd say that? Or would he maintain the straight, family-friendly, investor-friendly front expected of him [by some people] in his position?
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much a promoter of monogamy.
I think it is naive to assume that such public statements are the whole truth of a matter.
People who fuck up a company (or have an affair, or get caught snorting drugs off a sex-worker) aren't really 'stepping back to spend more time with their families'. Historically the classic example of executive public statements.
People don’t realise that execs don’t actually write these messages usually.
Which is as it should be. First of all, marriage is a covenant. If someone cannot be trusted to keep his word on that, it's tough to trust him with power over thousands of employees and trillions of dollars. Second, I'm guessing the board asked Huang after the first affair's revelation whether there were more skeletons in his closet, and he said no. Lying to one's board is more than enough reason to be ousted.
> marriage is a covenant
That's a very narrow view that's a function of one's religion, culture, and values.
When I was in school, (US) my very Catholic French teacher explained that his uncle, in France, had a mistress. His uncle's wife knew and was okay with it. What my teacher was explaining is that the culture around marriage varies considerably through the world, and you can't take for granted that what we were taught (monogamy) is the standard that others live to, or even expect from you.
First of all, yes, I can. The normalcy of a thing doesn't make it right. But this isn't really about whether absolute cultural relativism is appropriate or not. It's about a man who broke his word. Huang wed an American woman in America, not a French woman in France. Nothing about this situation indicates Huang's wife was remotely aware of nor alright with his philandery.
> Huang wed an American woman in America
Please don't make the mistake of assuming that American culture is homogeneous: It's not.
There's no major American subculture in which stepping out on your wife behind her back is "a good thing" or even "an okay thing". A vast majority of Americans poll consistently against adultery and it's often the most universally condemned action in surveys. Here's one example: https://news.gallup.com/poll/692801/adultery-cloning-seen-im...
Wait till you hear about what wives get up to at “board game night” in San Jose.
[deleted]
My mother had gotten "two wrongs don't make a right" through my head by about age four. It's still true. I don't know nor care what they're doing in San Jose.
From a religious perspective, sure. From an earthly perspective, you don't know what the other side was doing. Have you ever been married to a menopausal or a post menopausal woman? A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
> A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
That’s not quite true. A more accurate statement would be: A marriage may be annulled in some U.S. states if one spouse entered the marriage with a concealed, permanent intention not to consummate it, and that intention constitutes fraud going to the essence of the marriage.
If the couple was having sex after marriage, and then one partner decided to cease having it some time later, that is generally not grounds for annulment.
If it were permitted, this would make many, if not most, late-stage marriages subject to annulment. People get sick and injured or just incapable in old age.
Seems like some weird fundamentalist take. On its own it's purely a private matter between him and his wife (obviously the GPU smuggling stuff is a separate thing). Given that the affair has been semi public for years it's hard to imagine his wife didn't know about it anyway.
If it's fundamentalist to hold a man to his word, then I suppose you can count me a fundamentalist. If he'll shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world, just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
> shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world
Well we don't know that, you are not legally required to love someone you are married to and I have no clue what their relationship is like or whether they have any sort of "arrangements". I could hardly care less really since its their private matter.
> just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
I don't really see a correlation between those things. All sorts of immoral degenerates (e.g. Musk, (potentially) Gates and I assume plenty of other lesser known CEOs) have generated massive amounts of value for their shareholders.
no one cares who you put your dick into if the returns are good and there are no threats to the business. but he only fucked threats to the business.
he was fucking a spy
he was fucking one of his direct reports
what are two things you shouldn't ever do as a CEO of the biggest company in the world?
this wasn't Cindy the random waitress from the Palo Alto Ruth Chris', these were literally two people he should never be fucking
he put the company at risk of national security issues and HR lawsuits for what is otherwise painfully mid-tier pussy. he's gotta go.
was it confirmed she was a spy? or is that just twitter rumors?
Famously, Mark Hurd made dubious expenses that were perceived negatively by the public (there were sexual harassment allegations) and was ousted as CEO from HP. Then Larry Ellison mocked HP and hired Mark as Oracle's President. So, some companies are worried about that, others aren't
It's entirely possible that the board just wasn't that warm on Jensen in the first place. Not cold, not looking to be the tall poppy that gets cut down... but at least willing to give Jensen the boot if given the right push.
This is how things change. Slowly and then all at once. If the board were more in love with him, they'd probably have been willing to turn a blind eye for just a little while longer. No such luck for Jensen, but we make our own luck in these things.
Hasnt Elon been jizzing around Silicon Valley for like years now ? I guess enforcing these guidelines requires an independent board.
He isn't married?
To be fair his marital status changes frequently so it can be hard knowing what happened when.
Doesn't count if you only rub into a cup and have lawyers exchange the fluid. elon, worlds richest virgo
Not sure how personal affairs humiliate your business
They do when they're with a subordinate or a vendor, both of which he did. Add on "foreign agent" and you're done.
Good executives go to Epstein island and do not get fired.
Tell me you have no clue how corporations are run without telling me. Furthermore Jensen wasn't some random executive otherwise this wouldn't be now top news all over the world.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Let’s be real here. Everyone making money out of NVIDIA was more than happy enough to go around the restrictions and see the prices go up due to Chinese demand.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
Unless you are a competitor.
It's a good thing Congress doesn't just care about their opinions then.
In what world is the modern US Congress a good regulator of these kinds of things? Half the people in the Capitol have a literal vested interest in the very companies they claim to be trying to keep on a leash (and I recognize that some of these are inverse instruments, my point still stands).
My money is on the congress members - including the greatest stock trader of all times, Nancy Pelosi - having just sold their NVIDIA shares right before the spying was uncovered.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
Musk has survived and brushed off much worse.
And Jensen isn't just any CEO, he is the founder and has run the company for thirty years.
He would have survived the affairs if it wasn't for the export control violation aspects.
Musk's companies have low quality boards, which is by design to make it almost impossible to fire him and the legacy of that should serve as a cautionary tale
Musk controls 19.9% of voting power at Tesla, and more than 80% at SpaceX. Huang has about a 3.5% ownership stake in of Nvidia and that’s jointly controlled with his wife.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
> He slept with someone who worked directly under him
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I agree that this is a more likely explanation, given the AI arms race between the US and China.
I think NVIDIA lose more things by firing Jensen.
Screw him.
He put US national security at risk just because between his wife and his other mistress, he couldn't keep it in his pants.
There are some things more important than stock valuation.
Possibly, I am a bit tired of the national security argument with hand waving vagueness. It’s generally unfalsifiable because details would be a national security risk. Meanwhile we have seen National Security concerns that were pure lies once we get sufficiently far past it.
Or, he was right by advocating for letting China buy Nvidia chips to keep China dependent on US.
> There are some things more important than stock valuation.
Given that the economic growth of the USA during the last few years was entirely due to this man and his technologies, I'm going to say nah.
China having access to GPUs is not a national security threat. It's an economic threat. Not sure why people treat China as some enemy nation. It's just a competitor.
Yes you see there are various types of national security. For example, there is the national security when a country that touted capitalism and free trade for years suddenly finds itself beat at capitalism by someone else, that's a big national security issue. Then suddenly free trade is evil and a danger and a national security issue.
This is the funniest thing to see it happen so blatantly. “National security”, what a joke.
> He put US national security at risk
It is far far worse than that - he lied to shareholders.
> he couldn't keep it in his pants.
Or maybe he just simply wanted to make more money by increasing demand for Nvidia's GPUs by tacitly allowing for them to be exported to China though Singapore.
well...and I am not generally a theorist but
dark ops may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
It is currently not possible to commit treason because the United States is not at war.
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
I'll plug our Pretrained episode from Monday here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97DW8gfCnI - this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
Probably A/B testing. People click the salacious stuff, so that's what gets emphasized.
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
We've had insatiable demand for Nvidia excluding China, I doubt they would have run that kind of legal risk.
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc. And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.
Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?
As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?
They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.
What happens if all the money in the system circulating through AI companies turns out to be ill-gotten gains?
I am not sure I can agree. Perhaps this was the underlying reason. Perhaps others wanted to frame him and launched a media campaign. But from what I can see, at the least on the surface, to me it looks as if he was fired for liking too many women at the same time, at the least one of which might be a possible spy. This may all be fake-reasons on top to cover underlying real causes, but to me right now it looks as if the girls cost him the job here.
They were allowed to sell to china, just not their top models. It was widely known that china acquired those indirectly.
What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.
Or the publicity about the affair put a brighter light on the thing that was already "widely known" and increased the need for a response.
It's widely known that luxury cars stolen in the west end up shipped to the UAE, where they're resold, frequently to Russian customers.
So for example, a stolen Porsche could end up being driven by a Russian oligarch.
Porsche is not on the hook for this. The car was stolen by a third party.
If a Porsche exec instead had sex with the thief and tossed them the keys to a brand new 911, then they might be on the hook for violating sanctions.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
> I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.
Do we know yet what the potential consequences may be? Legally or from a market/business standpoint?
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
I think they were selling to Malaysian shell companies to China.
Being compromised kinda does seem like a reason to be fired. It seemed well known he was doing it since there are plenty of photos over a few years? So it’s more she was a honeypot.
So many HN folks defending Huang's actions as "just an affair" - what an epic reading comprehension fail. Yes there is an affair, and that's what grabbed the initial headlines. But just read a paragraph or two and you'll find the espionage story.
For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.
Mostly the apologism is for the affair part, not the espionage part. So it kind of lines up with your points about what the important issue is.
The affairs are absolutely part of it, they show a dishonest pattern of behavior.
Does it mean we will have mass produced cheaper graphics cards? Akin to flagship killer mobile phones and other hardware? Sounds good.
They did not even need to sell them physically to China. Many of them ended up in Malaysian datacenters that rented them to China.
Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
The affair is what led to this, demonstrating why it actually should matter if your CEO is having one. Ethics and trust should matter.
It may well be that it's his private life and it doesn't have much to do with things, but it is a contributing factor. The skirting of export bans was the reagent, but the infidelity is the catalyst that is making it much bigger.
CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?
They didn’t sold the chips directly to China, they sold them to Megaspeed and they sold the compute to China.
It looks like there's quite a bit of them that made their way directly to China, and that they knew that was where they would eventually end up.
I've heard rumours that 20-40% of Nvidia's revenue was coming from sanctioned chips that make their way into Chinese data centres. If true, it's not small potatoes.
Wilful blindness is not a valid defense
I mean having an affair with someone who works below in the company hierachy, is also a huge problem (if the thing about second affair is correct)
The previous and current administration.
This is obviously something that has been postponed for after the midterms.
It will be interesting to see if there are criminal proceedings. If you or I violated ITAR or CMMC/NIST 800 there would be.
Um hard negative to what you are saying. It is absolutely fundamental to the issue -- its compounds the issues around assessing Jensen's judgement.
This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.
Jensen is Taiwanese. Nvidia's chips are made in Taiwan, as are all the most advanced chips in the world -- including the chips in Apple and AMD products -- by TSMC. China wants to re-absorb Taiwan into itself, partially because they cannot match TSMC's geometries and they desperately need those geometries.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
Highly unlikely that China would direct a military threat at a tech CEO.
The more sane explanation is that Jensen Huang just wanted to capture more revenue.
Trump is on record saying Jensen should not be fired.
Oh, it's not the repeated violations of sexual conduct with an employee, and a spy, and likely more? A CEO who is that dumb to risk his and the company trust isn't worth it. Look, a trillion already wiped out. When employees say "how dumb could he be", you know the board and major investors are saying that too.
As though the Board had no idea of this, and are suddenly acting oh gosh this is the first we've heard of the phantom SG revenue! Time for Jensen to go. Nah, not buying it. Many of the board have been w JH since the early 1990s. This is because his reckless disregard for the company and his years-long relationship with a Chinese spy.
Well the only thing super weird is the timeline - USA bans exports, China (very soon after) bans IMPORTS! And then there's a company which keeps doing trade under the nose of the potentially two most powerful nation-states and their secret service sources. This is super fishy, really I don't buy nobody knew nothing, only for a "lucky" journalist to figure out the whole thing...
I dont think its more soo about the ban as China itself has 'officially' blocked the chips that were being licensed as exportable. I think its more of the asks that were being made by the NATSec and Amodie aligned actors (see the pod he had with Dwarkesh ), to ho tighter and more aggressive. Basically Jensen was sort of the brake on the impulsive ideas getting thrown around on how to 'win' AI and create a moat against all latecomers.
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
Why was it bad?
His argument was “we must not make it more convenient to develop a fully domestic stack”
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is a fairly reasonable adage
> From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.
I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?
Very much agreed, the second this became clear his position was untenable. He will surely have launched his unicorn by the end of December regardless, I’d be surprised if this had any tangible repercussions outside the divorce court.
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration—with the tacit permission of the current administration.
The problem now is the very public optics of that coming to light in the context of having an affair with a maybe spy.
I think this episode proves one thing:
It would have been simpler and more profitable to sell China the GPUs.
One woman from the CCP just burned a couple of trillion out of your 401Ks. Have you said thank you even once? Are you sick of winning yet?
I just find it weird that trump loses the midterms and suddenly this happens. Might be a coincident but feels very sus.
Biggest valuation ever will turn into biggest investor lawsuit ever. The music on the AI circular deals is about to be broken by a feminine spell. This has Lord of the Rings all over it...
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
Did your TV tell you that? I hope you realize that there is absolutely no proof of the import ban having been skirted. The FBI has been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed since 2024 and all they have is a few GPUs still being unboxed at their Malaysian data center.
It’s not the side chicks, it’s the side chips.
yup, my NVDA puts are printing hard rn.
>I'd love to be wrong
wong?
Pretty sure he was fucking a Chinese spy though... so...
Well, you say that, but the perception is he hasn't got sacked for circular financing, nor for the providing of sanctioned components (supposedly they went to third countries, not China, so legal). But he got sacked for two affairs.
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
They could not have done any of the export ban skirting without the complicity or outright cooperation of the administration.
Remind me: when did Huang direct NVDA funds to the Trump ballroom fund?
Trump greenlit H200s for China just this year.
How naive do you have to be to believe that Congress actually cares about that? They don’t care and happily watch their shares rise in price.
If the second affair didn’t come out, this wouldn’t be a discussion.
Do you think he might get the death sentence for treason?
A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.
We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.
Its a threat to their own companies and whatever amount of democracy is there. Maybe ego is like some cancer that kills/self-ded structs its host/person if it gets big enough. Which is good. A persons etreme wealth gets them political power and also advantages before the law. We've seen this with big corporations.
TBH, I find the manner in which this was done to be pretty distasteful.
The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
I've seen a theory floated online that somebody inside the government, who was part of the faction advocating for stricter sanctions on China, leaked this in a way to cause maximum damage to the anti-restrictions faction. Whether Huang (female Huang) was actually a Chinese spy in the first place is also up in the air, keep in mind that while the affair has almost certainly occurred, given that Huang (male) has admitted to it himself, the Chinese spy allegations are still unverified. It could possibly have been a "grain of truth in a sea of lies" play.
> A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
That's literally how the world works? And has worked for many centuries or longer. By "value" you mean wealth, and wealthy people can get away with murder. They buy and write the law and have the best lawyers in the world.
We won't have billionaires/trillionaires/kings AND rule of law for /everyone/ equally - the world doesn't work that way.
Our President literally diddled kids on a Carribbean island, cheated on his wives several times, and is probably a closeted homosexual, but richest man on earth having an affair is where we draw the line.
Affairs are wrong, but they are not illegal.
> if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Hmm... I wonder why that is. Could it be because a bunch of CEOs, prominent politicians, and business people were found to have taken multiple trips to an island where the had sex with children and nothing happened to them? No, it couldn't possibly be that. I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age, while we excuse pedophilia.
> Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light
Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?
Are they still in Trump's good graces? Sure, they gave him money before. But can they promise him more money again? He's pretty quick to dispose of people when they're inconvenient too.
He ALSO slept with a direct report, which would get most of us fired too.
Allegedly. There were no proofs of that, not confessions.
> supposedly
According to who?
There is a wealth of reporting out there, it is harder to ignore this story than to read about it. My statement was couched and is clearly just my opinion, I'll leave the reading to you and let you form your own conclusions
> national security reasons
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
The rumor is
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
I don't think so.
I think it was the affair with the direct report that did him in.
That's a bigger no-no than selling to spies, especially when the administration knew about it and did nothing.
The ban was lifted and fees were applied so there were plenty of legitimate ways to sell. I hate how inaccurate hn has become.
Elon Musk has an AI bot generating explicit images without consent, regardless of age, yet nobody's firing him.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
That is simply not true, Grok refuses to make explicit images, and with uploaded media it refuses to do even mildly enticing ones. *
* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.
Musk has 82% of the voting shares of SpaceX, which owns Twitter. He can't be fired, no matter how much he might deserve it.
There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this. NVidia is too big and Huang is too wealthy. This administration in particular would never prosecute that. And, even if they did, a pardon is only $1-3 million anyway.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm 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
[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
Being fired seems like a serious consequence.
"There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this."
Hah. He doesn't have a prenup. That's going to lead to serious enough consequences for him in divorce court.
Except the administration has known about them skirting it since day 1.
So it’s no longer about national security. What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care? Did Jenson reduce SpaceX’s allocation?
The midterms seem like the most obvious timing. Trump has a little less power and everyone is starting to plan for what happens after him - jockeying for being able to say they didn't support this and that. If it was only being ignored because Mr Huang could donate a lot of money to Trump's ballroom that deal probably isn't as important now.
> What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care?
We all now know that Trump knew about it, that's what has changed. It was fine when this was private, but now his administration is starting to get questions around why his Commerce department punted the initial investigation to DOJ where it ultimately died as the opposition party is about to retake Congress with investigations top of mind.
You have put your finger on it.
Likely there was at least a feeling of mutual understanding between Jensen and key people in the administration. Now the wind has turned in a big way and none of that is on paper. And in fact what is on paper points in the wrong direction.
Probably the only thing protecting NVDA from prosecution right now is that nobody in the White House wants to pop the AI bubble. That might protect Jensen too because he would entangle the company. There will be an interesting tension with congressional oversight. Buy popcorn and NVDA vol.
Yeah, over a year ago the likes of Gamers Nexus was able to follow the clues to figure out how Nvidia was skirting the export ban.
It's hard to believe the US government was so incompetent that they didn't do the investigation a YouTuber did (But not impossible).
The export ban was always BS. Unless you are going to do a total ban and all parts are manufactured in the US, then it is just 1 additional hop to get stuff into China.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
...maybe. Or maybe not. Consistency in application of the law is not exactly at an all-time high right now.
Everybody should be against the export ban. It's laughable to claim that it is for "national security", it's blatant protectionism to cover US AI companies for the fact that they operate at monumental losses. Any country in the world should be allowed to buy the hardware they need to run AI, if they need it, and if the roles were reversed the US should also be allowed to buy tech from other countries. Graphic cards aren't nuclear bombs, and AI is a multi-use core technology every nation on earth should have access to. So far, China has made a far better impression in that respect than the US. At least they have published open weight models.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
If the roles were reversed you’d see American battleships off the country’s Ports
Basically every technology is dual use, but still I basically agree, there is an incredible level of anti-China rhetoric in the US right now, not just on the right. The Chip export ban is incredibly tricky reason the outcomes of. For one thing, doesn’t it change the China Taiwan relationship?
And, there is no spy business. They just want a more compliant CEO. What a *hit show.
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
What's the downside of that for the economy? It seems like it would be the market becoming more efficient, cutting down on margins and so on. Bringing Nvidia back to earth might open up cheaper hardware for other companies to work with and accelerate AI anyway.
Efficiency is a great thing and long term what’s needed so we can buy laptops again at a reasonable price. There will be a pretty large blast radius across ANT/OAI/ORCL/SPCX/TSMC/neoclouds. Prob 15T of market value at risk and the flywheel of investment which is conditioned on investors and the economy believing they have durable appreciation locked up in AI stocks (“if my basket of investments is safe, I’m willing to invest my next dollar in more of it” vs “the sky is falling and I need to tighten the belt / pull money out”). I’m trying not to be a doomer here as I think it’s somewhere in the middle it’s just very frothy and the upside scenarios generally envisioned NVDA to be stable
I will be honest, my personal opinion is keep the blood flowing until RAM prices return to Sept 2025 levels.
This whole saga has been a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. There's no compelling argument that points to these new innovations not otherwise happening if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
It’s not a given that markets are able to navigate the risk between massive capital investment and unknown future revenues. Everyone is trying to figure out the long term value from AI. For a made up numbers example the path might require $1T investment to unlock $10T revenue in 10 years from now. But if no one can put up the $1T it stalls and doesn’t happen next decade
Spot on
The hardware is expensive because it's supply constrained. Demand far exceeds supply.
Harming Nvidia would only make us more compute constrained, and raise prices further.
It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.
Harming the producers of [thing] or disincentivizing profits will not make [thing] cheaper if demand remains the same (or if it is growing, like in all of the areas I mentioned).
> It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.
What type of person are you referring to?
Have you ever considered that an efficient economy is you paying everything you have for food and living in absolute poverty
Doesn't this situation demonstrate how bonkers it is to pin the fortunes of the stock market and potentially the entire economy on the behavior of one person?
The company should have plans in place for what to do when something happens to the CEO. Situations like this, death, or just deciding to leave. I've read reports that Nvidia didn't have this, which would be irresponsible if true, but it's not the norm. The founder leaving is likely a bit different than some other CEO coming in later, but any good CEO should be thinking about what happens to the company when they're gone so people know the company is still in good hands.
But by not having one, the CEO has a lot more leverage over the company.
So what mechanism do you propose?
Huang has served as CEO for a whopping 33 years - hard to argue he wasn't crucial to NVIDIA's success, and how many of the board members are the original from when he was first chosen-selected and continued to be hired as CEO over the crucial early decades?
What nuanced knowledge-understanding does he have that no one else can have?
Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
Huang is known to literally respond to low-level e-mails between ICs. The idea that a CFO can take his place is ridiculous. People need to be real.
> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
This is, frankly, an outlandish statement.
> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
Respectfully, I don't engage with conspiracy theorists
what kind of argument is this?
the stock value just represents what people think the company is (or will be) worth, them selling products at 50% margin is what brings the money, the stock value doesn't give NVIDIA extra cash (unless they're selling or leveraging their own stock reserves to get even more cash?). And definitely shareholder value is not the economy.
and also, how is the efficiency bad now? surely that allows for innovation and other companies and people to get cheaper hardware (assuming they somehow have to lower their margins because Jensen left, still don't get that argument)
surely the telegraph was the biggest value creator ever?
Or the steam engine, or writing, or... Shareholder value is such an obtuse way to look at the world.
What on earth are you talking about. The exponential growth in the 1990s, percentage wise, far outpaced the AI bubble. Go look at Intel, Microsoft, lucid, etc from the dot com boom. This is the problem with 20-somethings’ hot takes on the market: no history.
The '90's bubble is what the AI "bubble" would be if everyone you spoke to was glowing with excitement about AI, and a few niche analysts were raising concerns about capex.
Instead this "bubble" is packed with people who detest AI and have extremely bearish views on it's future. If this "bubble" does pop, I think it will be the first one in history that every single person saw coming.
Almost every bubble ever had its detractors. Yet they still happened because those who actually had decision power and market shaping power didn't care about any downsides from popping a larger bubble so they just wanted to make money.
>Almost every bubble ever had its detractors.
Absolutely correct. That's why I mentioned the niche in my comment.
But no bubble ever has been predominately detractors.
And poof just like that the myth of the founder led company being untouchable has imploded. All other founder led CEOs will be watching this closely.
Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.
And we get to buy GPUs again in normalized prices. How's that bad for the economy exactly?
I’m stoked about my next computer. It does kind of suck to see one’s retirement account get cut by 30% even when in mutual funds…
How is it going to get cut by 30%? NVDA is only 6% of SP500.
Nvidia stock price is now lower than it was a year ago. Has been declining for about 6 months, highly volatile, with a step sell off starting a month ago.
Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.
The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.
It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.
> A) He never made a single product himself
This is demonstrably untrue. Jensen was an engineer through and through, and contributed significantly to Nvidia's early accelerators from the NV1, at least to the earliest GeForces.
Don't even engage with these types of people. They think CEOs provide no value and anyone can do the job
> B) surely we can see in hindsight that this is a pretty goofy metric for success...? Like, "shareholder value" isn't exactly what we need at this pivotal moment in the terran story.
In the slow evolution of the human race into the Ferengi, it is absolutely a milestone!
Neither did Elon. What’s the point of A?
Long term we want efficiency. The market is SUPER inefficient right now. People are buying GPUs and stacking them up in warehouses so that they get their allocation. Companies are taking retired jet engines, and turning them into very expensive generators. SoftBank just defaulted on a bunch of power generation orders (increased cost for everyone, but didn’t create the value). My point is that it will be a painful road to get to the efficient market which will likely be a recession because of a massive slow down in spending
A is a reddit meme-argument. It assumes that the labor-theory-of-value is a fact and implies that only fungible IC's add value, whereas irreplaceable great men who organize multi-trillion-dollar companies from scratch contribute nothing. It's a way for them to advance for their silly worldview while obscuring its absurd foundational assumptions.
This slavish devotion to shareholder value above all else is pretty gross.
He cheated, multiple times, he is scum for that.
He seems to have consorted with a spy and evaded export bans. He is a criminal for that.
Oh, but he made people a lot of money? All good! /s
Throwing all morals and ethics out the window because of the eCoNoMy is insane.
The cult of personality around CEOs is unhealthy.
Both can be true. What if Jensen is a guy who did bad things and Nvidia triggers a recession because it loses its central status on AI?
We need better markets and recessions are the cost of cleaning markets up, unfortunately.
I never said there wouldn't be consequences to the economy. I said it's crazy to put up with such bad behavior to spare the economy.
The economy is everything. Ask Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The comments in these threads are somewhat sickening. That many commenters here see no problem with his behavior is troubling.
Totally agree. And that's late-stage capitalism for you. For a site named "hacker news" the hacker spirit is noticeably absent here. Instead you have simps for billionaires.
The thing to remember every time you see the orange, so you don't forget, is that you are posting on the promotional website of a multibillion-dollar private equity firm.
> This slavish devotion to shareholder value above all else is pretty gross.
Anti-capitalists appealing to bourgeoisie values in their zeal to destroy a capitalist icon is pretty freakin' rich.
I cant help but see a difference in the moral standard to which Jensen is being held compared to the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held. Why can one get away with shocking moral behaviour, but the other has to step down for a mild affair. If Jensen didnt have the affair, or it never came to light, would all of this still have taken place?
When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.
Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.
Elon and Zuck set themselves in a position where they are 51% and cannot be ousted by the board by construction.
Jensen messed up by splitting the power between all board members equally, and not getting a bunch of his family on a board.
The lesson is that if you do the right, non-authoritarian thing, you get punished
A lesson for future entrepreneurs. Follow the rules and lose.
For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.
> "And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago."
Apparently I am able to, what was that?
Apple used nVidia GPUs in most of its computers. Around 2008-2009, nVidia produced a line of faulty GPUs that were used in the Macbook Pro. This led to widespread hardware failures, and was known as "Bumpgate" because the problem was caused by faulty solder bumps inside the GPU chip. nVidia refused to fully reimburse Apple for repairs because it wasn't contractually obligated to do so. In response, Apple switched away entirely from nVidia GPUs.
I think it was well into 2013 because both the 2011 and 2013 MBPs I had suffered from it. but I thought that was an apple issue (ie not soldering the dicrete gpu well enough to save money on it)
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
No, it was Nvidia because of the way the BGA solder was done. The problem was across manufacturers.
I don't remember either, but I do remember Linus Torwalds not being entirely satisfied with NVIDIA. That is actually something very hard to forget.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
Every time I have to reinstall CUDA, I fondly remember this video.
> I do feel for Jensen
Why? He caused this. He chose to have affairs with a spy and a subordinate. Now he has to deal with the consequences.
> Why?
cause this place is full of incels
It will be the end of this species
Nvidia eventually had a spat with just about any corporation it has ever worked with. Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
TSMC?
from what i remember, morris chang is a close friend to hueng.
i wonder what will happen to nvidia's relationship with TMSC now.
> Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
But even then, the original Switch 1 homebrew relied on an oversight in NVIDIA's Tegra chip that blew open the whole platform due to the ability to execute unsigned code. The Switch 1 was actually pretty locked down. Nintendo worked hard on securing it properly, only for it to all be for naught due to their SoC vendor making a massive blunder.
I wish I could have seen what was said in the meetings between the two companies when the first Switch exploit was released, considering it was fully on NVIDIA.
This is undoubtedly the most painful professional moment in his career which has been almost entirely Nvidia.
and entirely preventable. FAFO
7th richest person in the world. Has multiple side pieces. The horror, the horror.
Success in some areas of your life does not insulate you from tragedy. The guy still puts his jeans on one leg at a time. Probably very expensive jeans he throws away after one use...but still. The human condition cannot be escaped.
This includes his family and the family of those involved in the affair. Many lives were turned upside down.
The guy has enough money to buy an island in French Polynesia and never leave it for the rest of his life. You are correct he is still human, but he can do pretty well at making a new life for himself where he doesnt have to ever think the word Nvidia again.
In 10 years he will have a new family and new friends and this will be a distant memory for him.
It isn't the tragic human condition to have affairs. It's a choice he made with his free will. There is no need for apologia; he could simply have not done it.
I feel for his wife, personally
He worked at Dennys in Portland for a while, so... He can always lean on that experience if needed.
I think he will be ok with $50B+
In this economy, that might just cover his rent until next month.
He is hoarding dozens of billions of dollars. He does not need your feelings, he needs a wealth tax.
Wrong tree?
> Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Backs California Billionaire Tax Despite Potential $8B Bill
> "I don't mind paying taxes. The more you make, the more taxes you pay. I'm okay with that," Huang said
Jensen has been one of the few outspoken billionaires for promoting higher taxes on himself. In fact, only he and Buffett come to mind as the members of that category.
Then again, below is a 2024 article from the NY Times claiming Jensen was taking advantage of loopholes to save $8 billion on taxes. Actions speak louder than words so perhaps his more recent messaging about being in favor of higher taxes on himself was the result of a PR effort, given his rapidly increasing visibility.
However, I imagine that any good accountant would strongly recommend saving $8 billion on taxes like Jensen did before 2024. The article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/business/nvidia-jensen-hu...
Things Jensen has said are now all suspect. Does he really believe this or is it just his day time positioning, in contrast to his nighttime positioning that cost him his job
Owning part of the company he built isn't hoarding, kiddo.
Tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people built that company, kiddo.
I, too, feel for the billionaire adulterer.
> He built this thing from an absolute scratch.
Pretty sure all those nVidia employees over the years had a bigger hand in building it.
Right. I'm sure if you got all of those employees in a room together with no vision and no Jensen, Nvidia as we know it today just pops out, right?
“The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.” -Elbert Hubbard
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/
Aha. So now we know why the world is in such a sorry state.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of AI chip startups right now. So yes is a very reasonable stance to your question
It's CUDA, indeed, only Jensen can do it
Allegedly Ai does it better now, and there is more than CUDA these days
The idea that only one person matters is a plague on society
This is why socialism/communism won the Cold War. They got rid of entrepreneurship, yet new and innovative companies just spontaneously self-assembled for the greater good!
I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that
It’s not the infidelity part, it’s the undisclosed relationship with a subordinate part. That’s covered in HR training and is a fireable offense in every company I’ve been parr of.
I think the point is that whether he did or didn't, there's so much smoke now, that Nvidia is going to be spending the next few years getting drilled by absolutely every law enforcement agency and government. Even if it genuinely turns out that nothing even slightly bad happened, it's quite damaging the amount of scrutiny Nvidia is going to be under for the foreseeable future.
Everyone on that board will have had knowledge of GPUs going to China. Everyone on on THIS board has knowledge about GPUs going to China. Jeez.
I'm going to suggest that everyone or a lot of people on the board likely knew about the affairs as well. Jensen wasn't exactly hiding it.
This is a CYA move by the board as all this is becoming public.
They had some amount of plausible deniability until the "spy" story made the news then they didn't.
So, you think that crime is good? What's your point here?
Yeah it’s great.
I didn't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
Just a sad state of affairs. Jensen was by far the biggest voice pushing for open weights and keeping the Anthropic / OpenAI doom narrative from getting out of control.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
Only because it benefits NVIDIA to have more potential customers in the shovel market to mine gold individually versus consolidating within a few providers (where the backend tooling becomes irrelevant to the consumers, and OpenAI & Co could freely change GPU manufacturers on a whim or move things in-house).
Which is why he got railroaded.
[delayed]
I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference for unsigned and registered open-models in the firmware of modern GPUs. Anthropic and others are pushing hard on this. First the hardware export ban, eventually the software one via hardware-enforced execution controls like IETF hinted at
It's obviously the biggest concern.
Either through technical means, or simpler: by law for American providers. It's hard to believe the administration was not aware of Jensen's affiliations all this time. And time is pressing for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Only conjectures for now, time will tell
Yeah, this is the biggest concern that I have regarding this whole story.
Is there a source for this? I googled it and this was claimed to be satire
Not really tbf, it's an extrapolation. As far as I am concerned, there is growing concern, with Anthropic coordinated lobbying against open weights. The point I am making is we need strong Hardware actors consistently standing for hardware neutrality and integrity. Historically, NVIDIA has been very pro open weights. But at the same time, in-silicon guardrails seem to become the new thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879883
Makes you wonder what would happen if the US ever wanted to enforce "certified US AI" on its chips
Definitely, expect future GPUs to run only signed LLM models with mandatory online attestation and reporting.
I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support. This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
He's the chief architect of this. I hope the ones he's hurt along the way have support.
He’s also the chief architect of one of the most influential companies in the world. How many people has he positively affected?
He makes overpriced computer chips... he isn't gandhi.
He is changing the course of history, maybe even more impactful on a global scale than colonial conflict
I'm dying to know how other tech CEOs rank on your "historical figures ordered by importance" list. Like, do you think Steve Jobs was more or less important then Harriet Tubman?
You don't seem to understand how the economy and competitive forces work, nor how hierarchies of competency function and work.
I suspect you hypocritically have and will continue to benefit from his work that he started as their CEO 33 years ago.
I just shed a tear thinking of how much shareholder value he created over the course of his career.
I'll be sure to tell that to my kids while I put them to bed today.
Or maybe they understand better than you.
I hope this kicks the legs out from under the "circular financing"[0] that has enabled slop to permeate seemingly everything good about computing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting
Really shows you how out of touch the tech world is with humanity and what average people care about.
And how many has his influential company affected negatively?
That isn't the way the world - or most morality systems - work.
A surgeon who saves a thousand lives doesn't get a pass for the one murder they commit.
If the person who eventually cures cancer also happens to be a rapist, do you remember their name with awe or pity?
The sort of Felicific Calculus practiced by the "Effective" Altruists is a tawdry trick designed to excuse despicable behaviour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect
And yet you've a convicted felon who vacationed on Epstein island sitting at the highest office in the land, or even in the world.
> How many people has he positively affected?
I honestly don't care. It's not a balance sheet to me.
> How many people has he positively affected?
What's your definition? People he sold a GPU to at extortionate markups?
What’s the revenue target I need to hit to get a free pass for sanctions avoidance? What other rules, regulations and laws do you think he should be absolved from considering NVIDIAs quarterly profits?
To call it a hit job is absurd. He is smart enough to know his actions could have severe consequences. He took a massive risk on behalf of millions for his own momentary pleasure.
Not a single inch of empathy for his wife and family, nor the misled investors and staff.
I'll tell you what's absurd: Believing the Chinese government sent a spy to honeypot Huang into providing chips to Chinese companies, while everything about their public policy has been designed to prevent exactly that.
The Chinese government wants Chinese companies to buy Chinese chips.
Do you find it implausible that there is any reason the Chinese government would want to spy on NVidia?
Indeed it seems absurd, but maybe the Chinese government sent a spy to honeypot Huang into destroying (indirectly) its own company instead - knowing how western culture react to such events.
I think you're misunderstanding - I think the suggestion of a hit job is because of the timing of all this coming out.
His affairs have been going on for months or years, so much so that various places knew about it, did nothing to stop it, and didn't leak it.
I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?" Nobody seems to know. In the absence of any other explanation, suggesting "hit job" isn't absurd.
> I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?
1. Got too well known to hide 2. Republicans just badly lost the midterms. There is a lot of info that the President and head of Department of Commerce also knew about all of this the entire time and did nothing. They won't be able to stop investigations, and they don't want to be seen as getting in the way of them.
If that's true, the bigger story is not just that Jensen did all this, but that the administration likely knew he was guilty of Espionage and actually helped facilitate it by knowing but not acting. That is a real possibility.
My guess would be it having to do with Jensen's friend in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue recently losing a ton of power.
He cheated on his wife. More than once. Fuck him, let him be stressed.
Who says she's didn't know or even if she cares?
> I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
I don't understand what compels people to make up scenarios to defend people who have come out and said the opposite.
Not defending, but it's also clear that the statement is meaningless.
I think the "formal apology letter" wouldn't have existed if this was some sort of open-relationship situation. In that case, Huang violated an important agreement, and cannot be trusted to not violate other important agreements.
Well you could read the letter he wrote but why when you can just ask empty edgy questions to farm karma.
Framing a pretty basic question as "edgy" is pretty silly.
The world as a whole is pretty conservative, people like to project the happily married couple image regardless of reality of the relationship.
it's the empty part that makes it edgy.
Ah. So you know their relationship? Whether it's an 'open marriage' or not? Whether the wife cheated first, or not? You're of course, in the know, so you can judge, yes?
He could have done a wrong thing. Or the affair could have been perfectly fine with his wife. Or the marriage could have been on the rocks for years, and they both agreed to not divorce, with all the drama and media attention, and just live their own lives.
But you know all this is true, or not true.
Yes?
I agree with your sentiment in general: we should not make assumptions about the parameters of others' relationships.
But in this case, Huang himself explicitly mentioned the hurt that he caused his family. I don't think it gets much clearer than this.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/08/nvidia-jensen-huang-email-bo...We don't know how much of that is "what public expects" in such situation vs what is actually true.
Even if his wife doesn't care it would be wise to keep this apology style, rather than try to go with cliche "its not as bad as it looks".
This is just some basic PR letter, no one from his family actually cares about corporate theatrics
He wrote himself a press release saying he was unfaithful and because of his actions he hurt his family... it sounds pretty clear that was not a consensual non-monogamous relationship. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
If it was an open marriage, why would his first statement have been an apology to his wife and family? I don't see any reason to start assuming it was actually fine. In any case the affair becoming public in such a way would still be hurting them - the media attention you're speaking about. Much worse than a divorce, right?
Because the public sentiment towards open marriages is even more negative than towards infidelity? One is seen as a mistake that one can atone for, while the other is seen as a rejection of the institution itself in a country that has strong beliefs in it. Still only 65% of Americans support gay marriage, for example. Marriage following strict rules remains deeply important to a lot of people.
> the institution itself in a country that has strong beliefs in it.
It could be argued much of that is performative. The most vocal group for this in America voted for someone who is well known to break oaths.
Absolutely it is performative. Writing a public "apology" for spending time with another person in their free time is also performative. Nobody actually cares what you do with your life. They aren't thinking about you at all. But when performing, the performance has rules of engagement.
he wouldn't have publicly apologized if all of that was "perfectly fine" with his wife
Might wanna google the term “affair”
He publicly stated he broke his wife’s trust, buddy.
People don't need facts when they just want an excuse to attack someone from the outgroup.
Yes, I'm completely sure his wife never ever cheated on him, lol
LMAO this guy feeling bad about a billionaire who cheated on his wife. Is he projecting muc
Actions do have consequences and unlike his family, he made those decisions. They also are affect by them despite never having a choice.
The public fall may seem quick but from my read of the timelines this has been ongoing for a lot longer.
The idea his fall is related to his affair also seems more like an attempt to minimise the fact that NVIDIA have been covertly selling to China when they were not supposed to.
I think finding humanity in our villains can help us gain perspective so I’d agree on your first point.
However let’s hold both thoughts at once, this was no hit job. Nvidia was forced to act quickly to mitigate business and legal risks. The eventual fallout they’ll face is still not fully known.
There is no support for people like him, CEOs of such big companies, or even any respectful CEO. People would only use him. That's human nature for you.
It's only the beginning of his problems. Congress hearings and an investor class action lawsuit are being prepared.
It is as much of a mistake to anthropomorphize billionaires as it is to anthropomorphize LLMs. People with resources greater than nations are .001% human and the rest is closer to a lovecraftian god. Consider that he can shatter markets or send massive trading companies under simply by having an affair. The empathy is misplaced.
The mistake is to direct your empathy only one way
He actually built something amazing. That is why he should be thanked and left alone, not thrown under the bus.
So much hate for him, it is sad.
He jumped in front of that bus himself. If the investigation turns out he was definitely orchestrating defying export controls then it's more like he drove one bus into another. He deserves every bit of embarrassment and ridicule no matter how impressive his business accomplishments were up to now.
He quickly threw a small but original market under the bus without hesitation. I'm sure every man, woman, and child without a 5090 is chuckling
Are you saying Jensen had godlike sex with that Chinese spy?
Such a bizarre take to me. Yes, it's a quick fall.. but can you really trust him after he's been caught having an affair with a supposed Chinese spy, _and_ potentially another one with an employee? There is zero chance any normal business would keep a CEO after this...
If there were a dozen more affairs I would not be surprised.
Normally this would never come to light, the admin has known about the Chinese agent since 2025, and there is an extremely high probability that they know of any other affair partners as well as what he had for breakfast and how he’s doing with the fiber in his diet.
If you think that billionaire execs of highly strategic companies don’t have the CIA nonconsentually implanted in their colon you are extremely naive. He misstepped politically.
I’ve known a lot of execs, and I can probably count the ones that were highly successful and never cheated on their wives on one hand. The temptation comes with the territory, and the opportunities are endless and disarmingly charming. It takes a man of outstanding moral character to be unfailingly perfect under those circumstances, and unfortunately outstanding moral character is often not what gets you into the c-suite. It’s a lot like rockstars in the 70s, actually, but with more boring clothes.
I'm sorry, but a hit job he conducted on himself?
You can agree or disagree with his position on exporting to China being good/bad for nVidia or the US. But actively working closely with a company (Megaspeed) where, from a thousand miles away, it was clear that their primary goal was to get around and/or bend US export controls... that's a bad idea. Megaspeed was clearly working for the direct benefit of the Chinese government.
Add onto that having an extramarital affair with the representative of that company? Come on, it's extremely likely she's an agent of China, and if not it's a gigantic business risk.
Then, on top of that, you have to remember that he's married. A divorce results in half of his shares going to his wife, who would then have a grudge, probably not in the best interests of the comapny.
I think the external event maybe moved quickly, but I read there was an internal event as well.
I’m sorry but this shows wildly inappropriate decision making. Say what you will about honeypots (I received specialized “warning” early in my career, but I recognize that is abnormal), but we all are forced through training every single year about how relationships at work, especially with imbalanced power dynamics, are inappropriate and should not take place.
I don’t care about the infidelity, but he represents the company at its pinnacle. He had to go.
You’re that sympathetic for a billionare having multiple affairs?
Are you serious?
Hopefully his wife has support. Jensen gets to reap what he sowed.
> I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support.
Jensen, if you are reading this and need support you can try looking into BetterHelp. You can even get 20% off using certain partner links. No one should have to go through the stress of loosing their job from Chineese spies alone and with BetterHelp you're just one click away from your very own personal therapist.
I think with personal wealth in the billions he'll be just fine.
Money is not that helpful when a 40 year old intimate relationship dissolves. Being able to buy things does little for memories that can no longer be shared.
womp womp. Shoulda thought of that before he went and got himself some strange
Sympathy for the guy having multiple affairs, including with a direct report, including with a spy and credible allegations of doing an end-run about valid export controls imposed by his country?
I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!
Just like Jensen built nvidia from scratch, he did build this situation from scratch too.
Imagine not having a full picture and defending someone going around sanctions for profit. Wild stuff.
> I hope whatever he's going through he's got support.
You don't get to cheat on your wife, company and country and get support lmao, what a strange things to say.
Which country? The country of Taiwan where he’s from and where all his products are made? Or the USA whose diva in chief has had a fit about selling said chips to the country who produces all the USA’s stuff?
Some very harsh words being thrown around for Jensen’s very human failings. Try walking in his shoes, or at least having some degree of understanding and empathy.
He's a US citizen living in the west coast and the CEO of a company's who's headquarter is also there.
> Some very harsh words
Who gives a fuck, every executive is a sociopath, no feelings for parasites
Jensen doesn’t give off sociopath vibes. He really doesn’t. There’s a big difference between being sociopathic or psychopathic and having one’s ego inflated by overwhelming success. Try seeing what it is next time you’re gazing in the mirror.
> Try walking in his shoes…
Chances are I could just sell them and live for a year or ten off it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/17/leather-jacket-worn-by-nvidi...
Which illustrates the gap between his life's challenges and everyone else's nicely, IMO.
Try walking in his shoes? He has an easier life than 99% of people lol. People always quick to jump in to defend the shittiest behaviour, maybe have some empathy for his wife?
Really shows you how much we need to kneecap these CEOs for societal good. The idea that they are hard workers is laughable. Everyone working in retail or a restaurant or in a call center is a harder worker than any executive on the planet.
99% is too low. He has an easier life than anyone. There's maybe tens of people who have an even easier life.
Crazy talk. I’m sitting on a beach in Italy right now. My life couldn’t be easier. The stress and pressure of running a company like Nvidia is off the charts.
And you’re a bot so as if you’d know.
> I’m sitting on a beach in Italy right now. My life couldn’t be easier.
You're choosing to argue with strangers on the Internet while on said beach. Your life could be easier.
Huang is choosing to make his life easier by resigning, and has the resources to do the beach thing - at essentially infinite luxury - indefinitely.
Pleaze. Even relaxing on the beach one can read the news and gauge sentiment for their investments. And you’re right, maybe I’ll see Jensen hanging out in Taormina next week. Good place to hide actually.
Well conversely you’re labelling and attacking what you consider the shittiest behaviour, when you only have a sliver of detail. Try pondering what it’s like to create a $5trillion company leading the 21st century’s biggest boom, and consider what weird and unthought of and irresistible demands that might come with. The guy started in Denny’s.
He put out the hit on himself when he stepped out.
If only there was something he could have done to not do it
maybe he shouldn't have been putting his dick in people other than where it was supposed to be?
I mean yes, he shouldn't be hounded, but if he'd kept it in his pants, he could have avoided all this nastiness.
> This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!
> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY
Won’t someone please think of the poor tech CEO
The apologists in this thread are absolutely shocking. Jensen is a ruthless CEO who clearly lacks moral fiber. Why do we idolize and "feel" for people like this?
To quote a fictional president: "That's the problem with the american dream, it makes everyone concerned for the day they're going to be rich..."
The apologists probably hold NVDA stock. Same thing happens with other popular companies and their voices are very loud online.
I have NVDA stock, I think this is neutral at worst. Obviously bad short term, but the fundamentals are what they are. They are gonna print money for at least the next 5 years no matter what happens.
I would invest but my concern is nvidia getting dragged through investigations, who knows how deep this goes.
To which kind of morality are you referring to? The extramarital affair, the puritan angle, or something else?
The sleeping with a spy and selling chips to china part.
NVIDIA without Jensen? That’s a huge risk. The company may be bigger than ever but replacing its visionary won't be easy.
I don't think there is a more hallmark visionary CEO than Jobs, and Apple isn't exactly doing poorly today.
Maybe the veneer isn't there, but it's very hard to make the case that Apple has in any way failed following the loss of him. Cook was pretty mediocre, and it shows that when you have a strong ship sailing, you just need a "not total idiot" to keep it going.
The counterpart is the state of Apple after Steve Jobs left in 1985. Apple was in dire straits when Steve Jobs returned in December 1996. Granted, Jobs wasn't CEO in 1985, but as co-founder, he had tremendous influence over Apple, though he didn't have absolute power; he left due to losing a power struggle against John Sculley and Apple's board.
I'm also reminded about the state of HP once the founders retired. My understanding is that John Young and Lewis Platt preserved the HP Way. However, Platt's successor, Carly Fiorina, moved the company far away from the HP Way, and HP hasn't been the same since.
This is a sad time for NVIDIA. I hope NVIDIA is blessed to get a Platt and not a Fiorina.
Hard disagree. Jobs polished things that already existed. They were never on the bleeding edge of hardware design and manufacturing when it comes to actual performance and capability.
Right, and he had the knowledge to know that consumers don't care about that stuff. So we got iPhones with excellent usability instead of windows phones with HD displays.
Tim Cook was a lot more than just “not a total idiot”
Temporary setback maybe, but I guess I don't see how an organization this large can depend so much on 1 person
NVIDIA would be without Jensen some day anyway, and he still owns a lot of stock.
Obviously, only him could have great visions about NVIDIA. I am expecting a 'we are going to stagnate, at best, without Jensen' worded admittance now from those poor folks remained in the organisation, with all those visionary thoughts taken away from them so abruptly. CEOs are the one taking the companies forward!
He wanted to have the cake and to eat it at the same time. I've seen CEO's who handled this in a much more orderly way, such as: getting a divorce, then announcing internally to the company that he is getting a divorce, then announcing he has found new love with a certain person at the company and in the same sentence announcing that the certain person effectively no longer answers to him, but to the board or something like that.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me. This is a man who could be fired just for OFFERING to have sex with a subordinate. The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind. But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
> sexual harassment in the workplace
I had only heard about a consensual relationship.
Which most company policies allow in some form. Peer-to-peer is straight forward. Supervisor-subordinate (relevant here) is less tolerated. You just have to disclose it and maybe sign a "love contract."
Parent is oblivious to this and has already made up their mind that these policies don't exist
> The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind.
I'm very aware that these policies exist, and I'm certain the CEO of Nvidia was also aware. That he decided to circumvent them says all you need to know, really. Even if it's consensual, what happens when she decides she wants to move on from the relationship? What about her peers that didn't receive promotions while she did? This is why these laws exist.
To be honest, even with those policies, a supervisor-subordinate relationship can be problematic. There is an undeniable power dynamic at play, so even when it looks consensual it's hard to be sure. I'm not saying it wasn't consensual in this case, but when person A can impact the future of person B, person B might feel coerced to "consent".
Anyway, not sure if that's the case here but it's hard to rule out entirely.
I think we can all read between the lines that no such thing existed in this case because he was married.
Interestingly, no!
These policies are intentionally narrowed to workplace conflicts of interest. HR doesn't want to manage morality clauses or stuff outside the workplace.
If you want to have a consensual relationship with someone you need to guarantee they don't work for you somehow first, really.
I think the real world is not that black and white, really... There is nuance in those interactions as well.
If there is an asymmetry in power, hardly consensual.
No such thing as consensual when saying no to the boss could result in getting fired.
If you go that route you can extrapolate to some absurd degree. Basically any relationship with a power imbalance becomes sexual harassment.
Yes, you can extrapolate, and our society does. This is why ministers aren't supposed to have relationships with their clergy, therapists are not supposed to have relationships with their clients, lawyers, doctors, etc. The list goes on and on.
Can become, yes. Depends a bit on what exactly the nature of the power imbalance is. Which is why there are usually strict rules about relationships with your reports and how to resolve the situation. Like reporting it to HR so the work positions can be shifted in a way to move positions so that there is no longer a reporting relationship between the two.
Congrats you just figured out divorce laws and alimony from first principles.
Wow you are mere inches from understanding the concept of sexual harassment. Keep going!
You mean infantilising adults and denying their agency to feel better about yourself.
Obviously it depends from case to case and there are certain lines that shouldn’t be crossed but otherwise consenting adults should be free to make their own decisions.
So is Huang only allowed to have sex with Lisa Su or something? But even then Nvidia dwarfs AMD in power.
100% of his relationships have been with nvidia subordinates and business partners. You realize there are more women on the planet right?
> 100% of his relationships
*that we know of
There is always Elon I guess…
Got it, that's why I only date girls who meet the following criteria:
* My age, +/- 2 years.
* Comparable emotional and intellectual development.
* Same level of education.
* Earn within 10% of what I earn.
* Total net worth within 10% of mine.
* Muscular, so we're of comparable strength.
* Exact same cultural and ethnic background.
* No chronic diseases or disabilities, since I don't have any and that would be an unfair advantage.
* Read Hacker News just as pathologically frequently, so we both know when to short NVIDIA at approximately the same time.
How do you reconcile "love contracts" [0]?
[0] https://www.woodsrogers.com/insights/publications/this-valen...
I've never worked at any company that used them or heard about them. Instead we take yearly training saying that even flirting with the idea is a cause for immediate termination.
Do you have stats on how common these are? Is it more popular in some non US country maybe?
Do you suppose Jensen had a love contract with his subordinate, when the breaking of the news of their extramarital relationship led to a 20% drop in stock and the removal of Jensen as CEO?
You're asking a leading question with flawed premises and assumptions.
1. The subordinate story broke yesterday. The stock dropped 12% (not 20) and recovered half.
2. But for the spy/export control subversion, do you think a CEO would be stepping down for banging a co-worker? LOL...
Considering he was fired it's the other way around. This at most only applies to very small companies or to people at the very bottom on the totem pole.
How do you know the boss initiated?
> could result in getting fired
When did they discover the quid-pro-quo aspect of this particular relationship? The news is moving so fast that I must have missed that part.
Not sure about the sexual harassment angle you're pushing... it's about trust isn't it? If you have consensual affairs as a CEO, you are still liable to be fired if it becomes public, that's my opinion anyway.
When the CEO starts hitting on you the word "consensual" doesn't really fit anymore.
Yeah you don’t want to be hit by your CEO. But that doesn’t immediately mean the specific case with Huang and his subordinate was a harassment.
What is known now is described a conflict of interest (which is bad already for a CEO). Whether it was a harassment - investigation should show.
In any scenario it’s not appropriate. Among peers, everyone knows about the “special relationship” and it directly attacks any perception of fairness and enables others to justify similar or worse behavior in the org.
A good point and the line of thinking you're describing implies that power should override anything else. Rather than rules that apply to everyone, what level of power within a company should no longer be subject to firing for engaging in a power-abuse sexual relationship?
Misbehavior without consequences seems to have become more noticeable in politics within the past ten years, with mainstream news outlets reporting on insider trading and potential bribes for favors. This ethos of power over accountability seems to be having a trickle down effect on general sentiment.
I think the angle is more so on lack of equal accountability.
Musk has done worse, yet nothing has really happened to him.
I agree there should be equal accountability. The response to that shouldn't be letting everyone do whatever the hell they want, though, in my opinion.
Do we know that he offered? It is possible that she went after him. These things aren't always so cut and dry.
Any company that wants to pass one of the many audits I'm sure Nvidia is subject to has policies around this. They would both know that not only do all employees need to disclose such relationships but that such a relationship is not appropriate if one is above the other on the org chart. Since the CEO is above everyone, that pretty much means if he wanted a relationship with an employee they would need to resign first.
> The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me.
It's mindboggling that you describe an apparently completely consensual affair as "sexual harassment". That's absurd.
Maybe you should expand your understanding of the term, then. It's a well-known thing, especially when it comes to extreme power imbalances.
I mean I said in 2016 Hillary basically behaved this way with Bill in regards to others (notably monica lewinsky) and against basically anyone else (i.e. say whole democrat party field) except Trump that should have been a disqualifying thing (and worse, if the republicans put up a decent person, I suspect Hillary would have won!)
At the end of the day, I wouldn't bash everyone here too strongly when everyone who lined up early behind Hillary basically acted in the same way. (And yes, even though Bill did the act, Hillary lined up easily to defend him, much like the people you mention here)
Let's dispense with the theatrics. Having a relationship with someone in your chain is not even close to sexual harassment. Yes, it can lead to it but generally it doesn't. It's not at all illegal either.
When I entered the workforce not so long ago most companies didn't even have policies against it. My university didn't make a policy about it until 2012. I know a very happily married couple who got married this way (a little earlier - perhaps around 2006 or 2007). I don't think they'd be happy if I referred to their behavior as "sexual harrasment".
I think it's a good policy and it's fair they enforce it, but equating it to sexual harassment is nonsense.
They may not think about it that way, but if one of that couple got a promotion from the other then every other person on the team pretty much has grounds for a law suit. There are reasons these rules exist, and the CEO of a high profile company has no excuse not to know them all.
You can't prevent people from having relationships. It's not realistic. My company has specific rules about this. Typically, "problematic" relationships need to be disclosed to HR and leadership, but they're not forbidden per se.
The number of people here who don't think women can consent to sexual relationships is thankfully not quite as high.
Even if it were about consent (and it's not), it's difficult to show that a relationship with such a power imbalance is consensual. If it were consensual it should have been disclosed. And as a CEO he has a greater responsibility to follow these kinds of rules. He knows it, and he did it anyway, and then he got caught doing it. There's really no other action to take besides removing him.
Maybe it's a generational thing? The younger generations seem to have some sort of anxiety with respect to consent and power dynamics, where even something as trivial as a modest age difference is viewed with suspicion. The movie Obsession can be seen as that anxiety translated into the horror genre.
To be fair though, a CEO having an affair with a subordinate should be seen with at least some suspicion...
IDK, if you look at the messaging around Clancy where women are completely subordinate to hormones to the point it excuses chasing down three children and systematically murdering them, or the Cornell 7 case where a woman can willfully engage in sex with multiple men and then only decide it was rape retroactively after explicitly negotiating with the men what was ok during and after with text messages where she defended her own actions but then when rumors started she decided she didn’t actually give consent…
The people saying you can’t trust women… are mostly coming from women.
Wild time if you are dating! Yes could mean No if later she decides she didn’t like something about it.
> But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way
The irony is so sweet here.
money before principles. Not to be crass but this is the ycombinator forum, not bluesky. do not expect principles before money, this is the absolute opposite of trying to preach to the choir.
Who do you work for? Curious why you're pushing an unproven narrative? In America, we are innocent until proven guilty. Let's not forget that :)
Who do you work for? Curious whether they have annual sexual harassment training or not. I'm not pushing a narrative. Based on the facts that are public alone this is pretty cut and dry sexual harassment. You may not like the connotation of those words, but they contain a pretty broad set of improprieties.
Cornell 7 would like a word. That’s just the latest. The facts of that case so strongly outweigh the narrative that it’s comical that somehow innocent until proven guilty is now “misogynist rape culture” or something.
wait who said hn supported social justice and women's rights generally? that's not really been my impression wherever it comes up
The sex is a nothing burger. He would have been fine if they were for instance, latin American and not Chinese.
This is blatant racism. It has nothing to do with race.
If a billionaire can't have consensual sex with women what is the point of it all?
"Subordinate", get a grip!
That chick could very well be an American spy who did everything she could to get him into bed, you have no idea what the truth is.
I'm... not shocked. Politically, HN skews pretty heavily right. Some of them will claim otherwise, putting rainbow flags in bios and such, but here is where the rubber hits the road. I also believe that the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. He can paint himself a victim of a Chinse spy.
Consider the case of Regina Santos-Aviles [1]. She committed suicide by setting herself on fire and had revealed that she'd been having an affair with her boss.
The power dynamics here are insane. Huang was the CEO and a billionaire. The legal liability that NVidia has or could have because of this is huge, particularly if they did nothing. Now there are big questions about who knew what when.
The reporting says somebody say them in a San Jose hotel and was basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment (I'm guessing; I don't know). Was that from NVidia or Huang personally? What NVidia staff, if any, authorized that?
If the board wants to really clean house they should authorize a thorough external investigation of that and any other possible affairs.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-gonzales-aide-affair-texts...
> Politically, HN skews pretty heavily right.
I've found HN to be pretty hostile to DOGE (whereas conversation is usually respectful even for fringe viewpoints; something special happened here).
DOGE was less popular than most of the admins stuff, and more scandalous at various levels (the stuff they did cut was fairly popular, they didn't manage to cut the stuff people might have really seen as wasteful, they went about accessing data in strange ways, some of the employees were quite young and looked unqualified).
I don't think you can assume much just by knowing somebody disliked them.
That's totally fair, nobody is happy with DOGE at this point and a lot of people were skeptical and nervous as it was happening. I just don't recall anyone popping in to say "damn it, they're doing it wrong!".
lol, do you think it is a coincidence that going after DC’s money was met with more media attention than other things? I don’t.
The things they got the most attention for like USAID weren't really core dc money. if anything I think they failed to really touch federal programs much in the end, but they did wildly swing at other stuff (like infamously just word searching to cancel research grants etc).
One may interpret this as the Overton window having shifted quite a bit over the last several years. As in "HN skews pretty heavily right" can be correct *and* it can also be true that the wackadoo faction of the right has dominated the discourse for a while.
To spin it another way: if we ignore the rise of the faux-libertarian (you know, the more typical brand now, libertarian but all for a strong military and christian nationalism), I'd argue that the typical HN skews more old school small-l libertarian on the right wing spectrum. That's quite a bit different from the MAGA, christian nationalist, style of right wing politics that has been in vogue lately.
But DOGE (as conceived) is the wet dream of a libertarian from any era. If anything it's a bone that Trump threw to libertarians. It's not especially MAGA imho.
On paper yes, but anyone with half a brain saw that the opposite was true in real life. They went in, made things worse, didn't save any money, and absconded with a lot of private data. My recollection from that time period was the tenor here shifted rapidly from generally positive to generally negative.
> Politically, HN skews pretty heavily right
If you truly believe this, you're living in a bubble. Economically it might be pro free markets, but socially it's heavily "progressive" -- see any discussions about Omarchy, LGBTQ, Elon, or Trump.
I'm socially progressive but economically conservative. That's why, whenever there's a tough situation where compromise is needed, I always compromise on the side of "let the free market run amok".
I’m entertained by how far left one must be to think HN “leans pretty heavily right”. Even the most die-hard socialist should be aware enough to find that funny.
I think media, social and traditional, has really done a number on people’s perspectives. I’m not sure why ideology replaces self-awareness.
Die-hard socialists often consider "liberals" to be soft-core right wingers. I'm not sure there's an objective center, it's all a matter of perspective.
> and a billionaire
That means he can’t have any affairs with anyone who isn’t a billionaire without it turning into sexual harassment due to the imbalance in power?
> basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment
So depending on how big the payment the alleged victim might be pretty happy with the outcome?
I mean if the board believes that the actions of the CEO resulted in financial damage to the company it’s up to them to investigate and deal with it. I just don’t get the whole morality police angle as long as the affair was between consenting rational adults.
Jensen's the most pro-open weight guy and calmest on China public figure at that level.
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
Tin foil hat take: I think Jensen's been sniped.
The difference between Musk and Huang is that Musk has engineered such control of his companies through dual class listings that there really is no one who can fire him. Having said that, people are very openly talking about the fact that Musk is going to spend the next couple of years spending quality time with the US congress explaining in minute detail why he's not a traitor.
It doesn't seem fair that you're being ousted from your own empire by a bunch of randos, an empire you built from scratch and nurtured.
One should never give up control it seems. Zuck is right.
[delayed]
From Game of Thrones: - Men without cocks. You wouldn't find me fighting in an army if I had no cock. What's left to fight for? - Gold? - I spent my life around soldiers. What do you think they spend that gold on? - Family. - Not without a cock, you don't. - Maybe it really is all cocks in the end.
I don't understand. Who's driving this change? The board, the administration, or who?
Given the report that the US gov knew about this for a while, it seems more likely that it's coming from the administration?
More likely the hardliners/security establishment. Rubio reportedly let Trump know of the affair/spy suspicion earlier this year (April? I don't recall), and he clearly ignored it because he likes Jensen and/or he wanted to get in on the action as Nvidia was making bank selling GPUs to China.
This breaking just before a meeting with Trump/Xi and just after the midterms show a changing wind in Washington is a hell of a coincidence—or not.
Securities lawyers, among others. All this scandal is going to lead to shareholder suits, which puts a LOT of pressure on the board to act. They have fiduciary duties!
Do you have any good materials on reading about Rubio? I wouldn't have clocked this at all.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/11/09/rubio-huang-tru...
I don't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
My understanding is that NVidia's organisation is very flat and Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type. Moreover there was no succession plan. I get that having an affair with a spy is not great but isn't it risky to replace him now?
I'm going to guess the 2nd affair with a direct report who rose quickly through the ranks is from the board's perspective the more egregious of the two failings.
And: the public only knows what's made it out. Who knows what else has come out in private.
I think that's a nothing-burger but it's enough to force him out. They probably have more cards in the play. Unfortunately we will never know of them.
Having sex with a report is a very serious no no. There are very valid questions of one's ability to consent when your boss is also your partner.
Oh come on, having sex with a coworker is rape now? This is getting ridiculous. Why not just go the whole way and require all sexual activity to come with with a signed and notarized consent form?
Quid pro quo sexual harassment is not a “nothing-burger”.
You don't think the board of a listed company care about the CEOs bit on the side is being promoted? That's really not a good look for a company to admit that.
It's one thing to happen and another to put that out in the open.
Officials are corrupted? CEOs sleeping with other women including his subordinates? Snow is white? What's the deal? People at that level are basically playing politics, not laws.
However, the fact that someone decided to release all those information as PUBLIC, and followed that up with ANOTHER scandal, means that they are determined to get rid of them. As you said, it is indeed serious matter.
As the Chineses say: "Something weights as light as a quarter of pound if it's left alone, but can weight a thousand tons if put on the scale".
> CEOs sleeping with other women including his subordinates? Snow is white? What's the deal?
The problem is that you don't think it is a problem. It goes on because there are no consequences.
Maybe in '29 the Epstein perps will actually be prosecuted
Because reality deems that this is not really the problem, I was about to mention the Epstein thing -- everything in that file is 100x worse than what Jensen did.
If we (the common people) really want consequences, we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
> we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
I'm with you on the first half, and see the second half changing. The fever may have broken in the US electorate.
But the original news was not what sealed the deal, it was the follow up.
Nvidia will be just fine
I feel like "not having a succession plan" should be a fireable offence on its own.
Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".
Imagine having to explain that line of reasoning to Congress in four months. "Yes, Senator, we know our CEO was facilitating chip smuggling to China while in a relationship with a Chinese spy, but we figured that it would just be too risky to replace him at this time."
> Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type
well, yeah.
"an affair with a spy is not great" rather undersells the situation - there could be criminal liability.
Lot of comments here stating with absolute certainty that China wanted Nvidia chips (they've previously ordered Chinese companies to not buy Nvidia chips https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...) and that Alice Huang is a CCP spy (zero public evidence of this).
> zero public evidence of this
is a bit of a stretch, given the reporting, intel briefings, comments from members of congress after the briefings, etc...
People who have worked in the national security sector in the US know how China operates. Any Chinese tech personage who is not a CCP spy but who somehow rises to a position of international influence will be recruited to work for the CCP by being made an offer they cannot refuse. In a typical case, there is plenty of evidence but most of it will never be made public for security reasons.
Of course China always denies this, but the evidence for this behavior over thousands of cases is such that the burden of proof is on those who claim such a person was not a spy.
This does not imply that the Chinese people or even its government are "evil" or that we shouldn't do business with them. It's just something that everybody who deals with China needs to be aware of.
> zero public evidence of this
yet it was an open secret among those in the know, both the affairs and the export violations
Can't help that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the China hawk fraction of the US government and associated entities (i.e. Anthropic) obviously brought the hammer down on Jensen here, even if he arguably brought about his own downfall with the affair.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
It is also tanking the Nvidia stock price causing many to sell, freeing up a lot of capital ... just before the Anthropic IPO...
What an incredibly embarrassing downfall.
It’s only embarrassing because of the GPUs that ended up in China.
I don't know, I just have a feeling he'll be back. Steve Jobs style.
That would be so awesome.
Sure, that Steve Jobs, the guy who had an affair with a Chinese spy and slept with an employee. What an egregious comparison.
Frankly, you're being naive. When it comes to a massive $4 trillion market-cap US corporation and one of the most important companies on planet Earth, money is everything.
If the company struggles without him and it's obvious they need his leadership, he'll be back. Morals be damned.
Thanks for clarifying where you stand on "morals" v. "money", despite the nature of both of the allegations here.
Now, back to the main point: your egregious comparison of a potential Huang-return to Jobs-return unfortunately still remains just as terrible.
He's going to have a 6 year vacation. putting my bet here on the internet history books.
Anyone has internal views of what Jensen bringing, and how the company would be missing without him?
Affairs and jokes aside
He's the hero we needed but didn't deserve. If this thing didn't happen my guess is open models wouldn't exist and we would be deeper and darker into the whole AI boom
o7
The big question for NVIDIA investors is how much of their sales came from skirting export sanctions because you can bet there is an investigation coming.
I'm afraid this will only hurt open source.
The board is considering both internal and external candidates. Who has experience in hardware, has led a trillion-dollar company, has deep connections in Asia, and might be available?
It's possible Tim Cook's phone is ringing right now.
It would be interesting if the story unfolded with Jensen going to TSMC [1] and Tim Cook taking over NVIDIA.
[1] https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-founder-morris-chang-...
It's hard for me to imagine Cook taking over Nvidia unless it was strictly temporary. I get the impression Cook retired because he wanted to relax and enjoy his golden years. But I agree he'd be a good choice to manage the chaos at Nvidia.
I got the same impression about Cook's retirement. But experience leading a trillion-dollar company is not a credential every executive has.
I'm not saying this will happen, just mentioning that it would be interesting to see it happen.
For intents and purposes, consider NVIDIA compromised for some foreseeable future. For operations and future purchases/CAPEX, more than a passing due dilligence is warranted if considering NVIDIA.
idk how people can symphatize a cheater. he could divorce his wife and continue to do his private affairs but he chose to lie
eh, there is a rumour that it was one of those 'open' marriages, given that his daughter was seen with him and Alice Huang in a video, implying they were ok with it. (dunno about the second one though, but given the first, the second seems excused as well)
Nah, this is about the indirect Chinese access to chips, and this whole cheating thing is a cover. He's confessing to a 'lesser' crime to save himself for the real threat of jail.
Weird move. There is something more to it. My guess is that he spilled some stuff.
I only wish he got ousted for being a liar about where the money was coming from during the crypto boom, or the super anti consumer policies like prohibiting OEMs from having a top of the line series with anything other than nvidia, refusing for years to support standard vrr and pushing for g-sync, artificially nerfing silicon capabilities in consumer grade dies and helping this bubble get bigger and bigger with bad accounting practices.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
Despite his personal affairs, he brought significant growth and stability to NVIDIA thanks to which we all have access to excellent products so his dismissal does not seem like a wise decision. I wonder if his successor will be able to measure up to him. And what would be the cost for nvidia? It all seems political and every politician has an affair to hide...
This might be due to violations or breach of his duties as the CEO, especially given the nature of who the other party has loyalties too, but nonetheless, its a lesson for us all. Because even if he didn't directly provide any IP, would that party have reasonable access to any IP during the events. Guess only time will tell
This will be a disaster for NVDA losing their leader. The company will eventually descend into chaos when the roadmap dries up.
The obvious succession choice is Lisa Su, but AMD is now almost a trillion dollar company. I can't imagine her actually jumping ship at this point.
“Hey Lisa! How’s it going? So ya we just fired your cousin who created our company. We were wondering if we could get on a call with you about replacing him and leaving your rival company? If you could call us back on 1-800-NVDA that would be great.”
i mean if she puts on a leather jacket she looks just like him lol. evidently they are actually related
There is a lot of discussions on Export Ban. Does selling to a Singapore Company with Chinese Stakeholders considered illegal under those ban? Does Nvidia have to track every single GPU sold or even resold?
I was under the impression he sold it to a Singapore company, or even any other companies. What those companies do with those GPU is not his fault.
This whole thing is just a sad story.
'Singaporean' company whose former managing director (Chinese national Alice Huang / Huang Le) and owner (through a self-titled company) is the same person he's had an extramarital affair with.
The same company they've audited the datacentres of, and saw dummy non-running servers within which had been stripped of their GPUs, and were 'fooled' that they were simply yet to be commissioned.
Plenty of companies are started by Chinese Nationals. Including inside US.
On 2nd point, even Hyperscalers have large stack of GPU sitting idle yet to be commissioned.
The investigation was also halted
i hate this moral outrage. what's wrong if he was sleeping around? let him just print gpu. his ability to print gpus has nothing to do what he does in his bedroom. i can sympathaize with the wife and infidelity is a sin. but he was supplying everybody with gpu. so that makes him a great guy too.
The specific truths about anything hardly matter when a story becomes this big. The hubbub is too much of a distraction and Jensen was going to get hauled in front of Congress by reps trying to score points with anti-AI constituents.
There’s a lot of questions without good answers but what’s clear is this is almost certainly about a lot more than just the CEO cheating on his wife.
Completely unrelated, but he was the last CEO I really enjoyed watching speak at conferences.
Felt like he knew what he was talking about, and spoke with real passion and vision.
Watching tech keynotes these days feels like the same boring marketing script on repeat.
I’ll miss that.
> Felt like he knew what he was talking about
I lost faith when he was on Ezra Klein's show and said he doesn't think kids should learn math any more.
So does this pretty much confirms the spy thing? I think it was only an assumption
Regardless of the implications, even just as a change for NVIDIA this will be one of the moments we look back on. Keep hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times!
What would happen if a Chinese company CEO did similar?
I've seen some people speculate whether or not he'll be a prosecuted/arrested. It's difficult to believe, but surely would be the biggest imprisonment that I can remember from recent memory.
He'll be back one way or another, Jensen is NVIDIA, and a finance person for sure cannot fill the shoes of an innovator
I can think of one company that rose from $347 billion to $4.6 trillion market cap after their finance person successfully filled the shoes of an innovator
I am almost sure now that there is a lot worse thing being hidden here, beyond an extra marital affair.
Now I'm in danger of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I think there are several layers to this current drama. Most of the reporting is very "surface level". I also don't pretend to have the full picture myself, but there are many players and many agendas at play, and those can agendas change over time.
The board, made of 10 members, only has 3.94% of Nvidia share in total, out of which 3.58% is owned by Huang.
Meaning that the 9 people pushing him out add up to own 0.36% of Nvidia share, only 0.36%
This is betray of shareholder interest. The board doesn't own Nvidia, this is not their business, yet only they can vote. they just want to finish as soon as possible, and you get a mad result.
The board of Nvidia is elected by the shareholders.
Shareholders voted on them in June:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026...
They have the legality, but this particular decision is still a betrayal.
Just look at the stock price plunge after he resigns, and I think this is structural in loss of company value instead of temporary sentiment.
He IS the company's value.
If the board cannot fire the CEO they are not really a board
Huang has shown catastrophically bad judgement and lied publicly [0]. Many commenters here harbor lots of sympathy for him, I assume out of respect for the technology and company he's built, but that doesn't exonerate him.
He was sleeping with one of his customers—a huge conflict of interest. That alone is good grounds to get a CEO fired, but it only gets worse! Alice Huang, a Chinese national, was previously working for a CCP propaganda channel network with an impeccable acronym: CCTV. Her company was accused publicly and investigated by the government for suspected smuggling of sanctioned NVIDIA hardware into China. Now we learned he also had an affair with one of his direct reports — another diabolical conflict of interest, which alone could be good reason to oust the CEO and possibly the VP as well.
It's yet to be determined whether he disclosed secrets to the Chinese spy, or whether he at least privately admitted to the second affair (if not, that's even worse!)
It's not a single, horrendous mistake anymore but a pattern of disastrously poor judgement. Building an extraordinary company and technology shouldn't mean lack of accountability, and thankfully we found out today that even at the highest level it doesn't.
[0] https://fortune.com/2026/11/09/nvidia-board-probe-jensen-hua...
I don’t get why no one seems to talk about the first point
All the china stuff aside you cannot have a relationship with someone you made a business deal with
That’s like conflict of interest 101
Huh, between the Anthropic IPO, the big shift in political environment, and the change in outlook for tech stocks, this comes at a pretty pivotal moment to see if AI train keeps accelerating at the same pace or if we start to see the end of the bubble.
I don't want to sound like a Jensen apologist, obviously huge missteps on his part, but he was quite a figure in shaping the last few years broad economic narrative. Good or bad, he was a force in shaping one of the largest investments ever. Does that shift without him? Does it shift really quick?
I would have preferred a slow fade into the sunset as a opposed to a dramatic exit. Yes, there would have always been a correction, but the bubble bursting explosively vs a more measured, slower correction will have different broader impacts and I just hope this doesn't push more towards the outcome that hurts a lot more.
My conspiracy theory is that its American spies who let this go public to pressure him out because Jensen was fighting their agenda of stopping China getting advanced chips. The flow will probably slow for a while, domestic Chinese companies will be forced to adapt, and as a bonus the USA wont even be competitive because they took their best horse out behind the woodshed and shot it to stop someone else from getting a ride. 12 months from now Jensen is gonna be VP of AI hardware at Huaweii or similar, calling it now. Another A+ geopolitical move from an administration that has been in a class of its own right from the beginning. Im a nobody who knows nothing but if I had to bet it would be on this.
This is insane. This is the best case scenario for China, much better than just getting the chips. They just crippled their biggest competitor. The stock might not crater immediately because of ongoing AI demand, but it will at some point.
Looks like there are a lot of duplicate threads that will have to get folded together...
Huang does owe permanent allegiance to the United States. Treason comes with a price.
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA. Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
Be interesting to see if he ends up hollowing out Nvidia if the talent moves with him to his next venture.
I suspect the real reason the board fired him is he's been lying to the board. It's not the indiscretion it's the lie that gets you.
If he was lying about his affairs with staff then maybe he's been lying to the board about following export controls and other things.
Who of you guys is applying?
https://jobs.nvidia.com/careers
Anthropic is behind this.
Jack Clark Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic / head of the Anthropic Institute is the nyt and @AnaSwanson "source" he is the one coordinating a coup against Jensen.
interesting. the timing would favor their IPO in terms of flexing their ability to move policy through extra-judicial means. but it would also benefit them to coattail the narrative even if they weren't players so I wouldn't assume it without evidence.
But they are going to be hit by this as well - this is a strike against the whole AI ecosystem and honestly, the US economy as a whole considering how propped up it is by the hype.
is today the best day in over a year to buy NVDA? From a long-term perspective, how much was he the one driving innovation, and can they be something like an Apple who overcame founder's reliance?
never catch a falling knife with your hands.
the market is reflecting the risk. youre not smarter than the market
it's not a risk, it's definite nosedive. How the f*cking board selected the replacement? Unbelievable stupidity!
imo no. not yet. The world moves fast but it can get worse.
What I think is hard to argue: Jensen did a remarkable job leading his company, especially during the development of CUDA, which required an enormous investment in the 2000s but eventually created an ecosystem that outside developers and companies now help sustain and expand. CUDA is a major reason Nvidia has such a dominant market position and should continue to achieve far into the future, regardless of who is CEO. Nvidia's massive risk and its extraordinary payoff will likely be studied for a long time.
AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.
What would the severance package be in a situation like this?
He resigns so he would forfeit much of contractual severance in most cases. A negotiated settlement is likely as part of the resignation and if he’s rehired elsewhere (eg at terafab or tsmc) it will generally terminate ongoing payments, healthcare, access to private aircraft and security.
He co-owns ~800mn shares in the company with his wife, so losing severance isn't going to be much of an issue to him.
oh 6 months or whatever at Terafab then succeeding Musk after he's kicked out would be funny to watch
3 leather jackets
And a gift card for Spatula City!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE
Oooh Red Snapper, very tasty
Hopefully this will not cause a shift in the way nvidia operates, for example in relation to research and open source.
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
I wonder who thought they would make more money with him gone.
> NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
Who are the insiders that arrange the coup?
Those who were against supporting open weight models and specifically selling Nvidia GPUs into China.
The AI labs do not want any of that and there is one that certainly has never released an open weight model.
You can take a good guess on the sort of people that are also associated with that AI lab.
Yeah, that could be the case.
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
Who is incentivized to mount such a coup, I wonder....? Could it be the nation accused of inserting a spy into his life?
Sam and Dario, along with the NatSec hawks
The irony isn't lost on me that Jensen Huang suffered consequences for his involvement with mature, consenting adults and a whole bunch of other tech billionaires didn't for their island antics.
I think the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. That opens up NVidia to a lot of legal exposure.
The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Skirting export bans is an unknown. I honestly don't believe this administration would let anything bad happen there. Jensen Huang is simply too rich and NVidia too big.
> The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Yeah, this is the most interesting part to me.
It points to the US government knowing about this, and holding onto it as compromat until the time was right to kick him out. But I don't even have a guess as to why this was viewed as the right time...
> consenting adults
The affair with his subordinate brings this into question. The power dynamic makes consent extremely iffy. There is a reason it is not allowed.
You know the industry has concentrated too much power into too few people when one person's midlife crisis can wipe ~$600 billion in market cap
Yeah, just buy a corvette and another leather jacket... sheesh.
Who appointed this clown of an interim CEO??? Mark my words... It's gonna be long way down for NVDA from here. SAD. REAL SAD
maybe denny's will offer him a role
(bad) jokes aside, it seems that the us gov probably dont believe enough on the affair case for gpus to appear in china and they got rid of the guy
i think this might be the end of an evolution era for nvidia.
> Jensen Huang was fighting hard to hang onto his role with the company he founded, according to several people briefed on the discussions. But an interim plan for the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, to take over Nvidia was well underway yesterday.
From the NYT live updates.
Ah well, I'm somewhat seeing parallels to the 2023 OpenAI drama, not sure if this is gonna be how things end quite yet.
The "state of the world economy and the future of open models would be in turmoil due to affairs of a single person who's not even a politician" situation was not on my 2026 bingo card.
we'll see whether it was about the affairs if Nvidia keeps promoting open weight models or just becomes a supplier for openai and anthropic's closed ecosystems for 'national security' reasons.
At the point, the lesson is to have affairs big and early, so you are invincible to media-coordinated attacks. What a tragedy.
No, the alternative is not to “not having affairs”. Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.
> Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.
Except that we have evidence in this case: he literally admitted to the affair. I don't see any "spin."
Would anyone bat an eye for “one admitted affair”? It is the “spy, Chinese, export ban, a blonde” caught on. No evidence whatsoever on these. It is the imagination of if you have “two ANT in the kitchen…”
It’s crazy how many powerful people are brought down by a seemingly super easy thing: using your conscious mind to decide who to have sex with.
Through abstinence-only sex ed programs, we ask millions of teenagers in the throes of puberty to do this. But somehow fully adult leaders with everything to lose, can’t.
The affairs are horrible behavior. Going around export restrictions.
But talk about ruining a legacy before it really took off. I don't really have sympathy. But this guy should have carried around a piece of paper with some short aphorisms to look at everyday to anchor him back to reality.
Have to stay positive, AMD stock price is up!
I remember Jensen saying he doesn’t have a contract with TSMC. The whole supply is based on a trusted relationship and handshake deals between the two CEOs. I wonder if that relationship is transferable to his successor.
How do you have $150B and squander your 30 year position at the head of this company for either of those two affair partners. Wild work.
Who ordered the hit? This was coordinated. None of the info was new, it was dwelling for years.
himself
Meanwhile, twitter is all up on Elon hiring Jensen as CEO of Terafab!
I mean its not like Jensen needs to work anymore, but that would be an interesting alliance
I’m sure Nvidia will have great leadership to substitute Jensen, but man is this a generational fumble from Jensen.
The king’s crown tumbles. Stock is already down 10% this morning.
I wonder if this will be the catalyst for Nvidia losing the lead
NoKings is about more than Trump
I guess everyone looks at infidelity and goes oh the horror. Thing is these are puritanical views and has no bearing on the companys wider performance. Not to mention the fact we dont really know what was going on with these people's personal lives. Now going around sanctions otoh is a whole different problem. Although tbf, given the clown that is the US president right now, I am not sure the US has the moral high ground to suggest selling to China is a problem or anything. I dont see the point of these sanctions, so I understand if Nvidia found a way of going around the sanctioned pathways.
I guess no one wants an Emperor, and someone needs to teach the tech lords a lesson after mid-term, let's see how NVIDIA holds up.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
Those are some world-changing, high impact, most consequential genitals right there. Impressive.
The memeing on r/wallstreetbets is off the chart today. At least we have that...
Oh no. They're giving the reins to the Chief Financial Officer.
May God have mercy on us all.
The American empire cutting off its nose to spite China.
Not surprising at all is it?
Were he gay this could have probably been avoided. Oh well...
Supposedly this was known a while ago.
Handy thing for Trump to keep in his back pocket to distract Democrats attention if they won the midterms.
coup brought to you by anthropic?
I believe Jensen is still the largest individual shareholder for Nvidia.
Waiting to see how market reacts, I am selling my shares.
Dear Jensen, time to start another company.
And if you believe in conspiracy theory, I guess anthropic is very happy.
Elon knocking on his door rn ;p
Eh, i think he's acting as a heatshield for Nvidia, his affairs are irrelevant, but the Chinese sales could put both Nvidia as a company and him as CEO in jail... this allows them both to pretends it's a 'personal issue' and get away with it.
That bit with Dwarkesh was very prophetic in hindsight.
Chinese spy? or a plant from one of the AI companies to install a CEO?
He got tired of winning.
So … Johnny Siruji the new CEO when?
[macrumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/12/johny-srouji-eyed-as-po...)
a night with venus, a lifetime with mercury
> NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people...
Think they take this stance when it's time to hand out yearly bonuses?
always helps to keep it in your pants
Moving fast, I see.
I love the stock dive for nvidia. I hope it never stops.
Let this be a learning experience for everyone here: if you ever get the CEO if a US tech giant, then never f** a Chinese spy! (and never circumvent export bans while you are at it)
Someone of incredible wealth and influence suffering negative outcomes for something wrong that they did?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
These kinds of fines and CEO drama pass.
The real question we must ask is if a current $30k consumer GPU that initially sold for $2.7k is just as inflated as the 'AI' holdings revenue predictions.
The smart money will wait till the legal mess starts, as the dead cat bounce in the panic sell off is probable as people try to buy the dip. ymmv =3
He was at the top of the world just last week and now his career is over. Slept with a direct subordinate - who btw rose quickly through the ranks - also slept with a Chinese spy and allegedly sold one of the most precious commodities in modern times illegally to an economic adversary. Hit job or not, he really fucked up.
So when Musk sleeps with anything with 3 adjacent holes it's fine, the one asian nerd screws two women and is ousted imnmediately. Yet people think there's nothing behind this?
Mind you, when these affairs happened is also literally when he took the company to 5T market cap
Anyway, Nvidia is screwed.
There’s no need to post this cut-and-paste in every thread.
You don't have to read it
Musk has total control of his boards and still gets sued by shareholders on occasion for stuff. Just because he's impossible to fire doesn't mean it's fine when he does it to anyone though.
One tech oligarch down, many to go.
The volume of glee in this thread is alarming.
There's very little glee? There's lots of "no big deal, why is he fired" and lots of "these are firable offenses", but no glee.
Guy sleeps with spy
Conspiracy reaction: Something is going on here... obviously not due to sleeping with a spy...
Not sure about the people thinking he didn't do much wrong.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
I think he clearly did something wrong. It just doesn't seem that bad in comparison to the current shit our leaders do weekly. We're in an age of morally corrupt leadership across the board in the United States.
We don't know anything about his cheating and it shouldn't matter.
We don't know his relationship with his wife, what their stands on cheating even stands.
You can argue its an image issue, but thats a problem of the press and marketing and not that he might have cheated.
His wife is an adult and is for sure not poor, so its not a situation were she has to stay with him.
I do believe it either has to do with the whole spy story or he did something he really shouldn't have.
I never mentioned cheating? Not sure why are you bringing it up.
I said that the missteps was having sex with subordinates and chinese spies.
Now start connecting the dots with Nvidia being one of the major advocates for relaxing exports to China and selling billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies that the chinese spy represented and you understand why the board finds him a liability.
Even the "chinese spies" is just unsubstantiated 'she's chinese so she should be a spy". She's not even chinese iirc, isn't she singaporean? so it's like suspect by ethnicity.
> so it's like suspect by ethnicity.
Suspect by payment from ... TenCent? AFAIK. Her company got money from Tencent and after every longer meeting with Jensen, someone from Tencent flew in and had a meeting with her. At least that is what I remember hearing.
In Wikipedia no mention of TenCent at all. In another writeup it's mentioned, but nothing clear.
Was Alice's company supposed to be the only company getting Nvidia chips (which they deny doing anyway). Or one of many and Chinese companies did it with many different others?
If many, why is her relationship specifically important or special from that aspect?
Again, I can understand snooping for confidential early information from him. But "she got with him so that this single company gets chips"?
If, as a CEO, the location and interaction of your penis ever becomes well known, then you are failing as a CEO, outside of a few very specific cases.
>or committed fraud
We're just gonna keep shoving the illegal GPU trade with China under the rug I guess.
Innocent unless proven guilty.
But yes, the fact that Nvidia advocated for relaxing exports to China and that he sold billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies is now obviously under major scrutiny.
If it was some middle manager who got fired for screwing a subordinate you'd see the typical "don't shit where you eat" comments. My guess is people are upset because their stock is down 20% over the last month because of this drama.
I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.
I agree. And to the conspiracy theorists: what is more likely? That an impossibly rich guy who thinks he is the center of the universe does something as entitled as this? Or that there is some shadowy coup going on that just checkmated him? Human nature doesn’t need that much encouragement.
> committed fraud
The jury is still out on this, re the circular financing mess with AI
I really hope the NVIDIA GeForce Now service sticks around and doesn't get enshittified.
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
You better hope they keep producing consumer gpus at all
He can not resist the pretty girls.
What is, however had, more interesting is that many of his statements did not age well. Now, mind you - I still think it is his private life at the end of the day; one can reason about foreign spies, but then the same question can be asked about Trump and his strange addiction to Putin. As well as how Jen-Hsun was so obedient to a mainland-China female, when the other Taiwanese are scared of being possibly invaded and subsequently killed by dictator Xi, just as dictator Putin commits to his own personal genocide against Ukrainians right now.
But, with regards to statements, I distinctly remember Jen-Hsun berating the british as incompetent economists. I watched that on a shorts on youtube; can not find it right now (google search AND youtube search sucks to no ends now). Well - he may be right that the UK suffers huge economic problems, but boy, this has not aged well. People will poke fun at his love of women potentially being spies while berating the british as being too incompetent in economics. Perhaps he was too incompetent in his own love life?
>NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition (nvidia.com)
One Blue Tsunami, and now all the oligarchs are suddenly turning progressive and transitioning! Trump was right all along. This is exactly what he was trying to warn us about.
Think of all the mistresses who will now have to accept and adapt to their oligarch lover's new gender -- Jensen has at least two that we know of, but when you see two ants in the kitchen, you know there are a lot more. I can't wait to see the wig Bezos picks out.
The reason this is all going so quickly now is because they realised how deep the shit is Jensen put the company in.
There will be an endless walk of shame for Jensen that would constantly drag the price of the company down, because this is the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to fly out of the gate in January and put the fear of god into the other billionaire oligarchs again. Punish one with extreme measures the others will fall in line, because at the end of the day they are all pussys.
Remember Elon wanted to do cagefighting with Zuckerberg. Those two losers had every excuse ready not to fight in the end. They didn’t even touch gloves for a single sparring. Manly men. All they can do is tough talk.
Plus the voters will see at least one party is doing something against blatant billionaire corruption, with corruption being the third most important topic in the elections.
There needs to be made an example of what happens to you if you start selling weapons-grade technology to the enemies of the United States for personal profit, and then think you are above the law.
This is not over for Jensen. And also not over for Nvidia, so the only sane thing to do is get as much distance between the "rogue" CEO and the company. Same for the White House, let’s see how often we see Jensen and Trump still together.
They are going to throw him under the bus and say he had the opportunity and the access and the power to do this without anyone else noticing, especially as he was sexually manipulating managers that directly report to him on important corporate issues.
They will make it look as though it’s all Jensen’s fault because otherwise they stop being a trillion-dollar company.
It’s a fitting end for Jensen Huang.
He gets taken down by the holy trifecta of power, money and politics he valued above his own marriage or what this whole mess would do to his kids.
He even lied in his public apology because he still was confident the other affair with his married manager would never surface because he truly believes he is smarter than anyone else.
What a loser. 140B deep pockets and still a loser.
Money is only paper. All that counts is family.
Threw away his life’s work, his marriage and every last drop of respect for him as a man, father and husband his kids could ever have for pocket change and some ass.
If shareholders want to save the company fu-g board of directors should be replaced completely and Jensen back.
Colette Kress has brain of Marisa Mayer who destroyed Yahoo. A woke clown to lead technology company? No vision, no skills, no understanding of technology.
You and CurbStomper7 sound like angry misogynistic MAGA incel trolls. How'd the midterms go for you?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50467465
CurbStomper7 27 minutes ago [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition
Nvidia just put a woman in charge. Time to short the stock.
Because he cheated on his wife?? Or what am I missing? If that's the official reason, I don't buy it. I don't think those who can influence this decision give two shits about this type of morality. It's silly on its face. Obviously it's cover for some other agenda. I'm just surprised people buy this silly excuse instead of getting to the bottom of what is really happening.
That he conspired to smuggle NVIDIA GPUs into China to bypass a US embargo working with the Chinese government via a spy (either willingly or via blackmail). Impropriety adds insult to injury - the board have rightly seen that the market will view it more negatively if he stays than if he leaves.
> Because he cheated on his wife??
And a lot of other shady things around nvidia, half of it we probably will never know about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...
Cheated on his wife with a spy who was using her connection to Jensen to move GPUs into China through Singapore in breach of the export controls.
The cheating is just a bit of humiliation, the damning part is the knowingly circumvention of export controls.
Oh if he knew all of that, then that's what I'm missing, thanks.
Nvidia bulls are still processing
the impending investigation regarding the sanctions might have more to do with it, to be honest.
It's only been like a year since the last CEO resigned for viral infidelity.
And that was only with a subordinate, not a subordinate AND with a foreign spy (alleged). Reports say China got billions in chips imported thanks to this operation.
Politicians also drop like flies. The only person impervious to consequences has been Trump. None of his supporters care that he's the devil.
No, it's because he repeatedly lied. 20% of the company's profits were/are coming from selling sanctioned chips to China and he said 0% 0% 0% (in official filings)
The news made it sound like she was a sophisticated person using him as a simpleton, but if anything he was using her to move his products against sanctions.
...with an actual spy.
And a subordinate executive. And god knows who else.
But I imagine the billions of dollars in illicit sales is considered a bigger issue.
The board should've: "Fire you? We’ve just spent billions of our market cap educating you to be careful with spies. Why would we fire you?"
allegedly?
I have to say, this seems like a ridiculous over-reaction on the part of the board.
I think if you could know the truth, 75% of CEOs in the US probably cheat on their wives. They are not hired to be faithful to their wives, they are hired to increase the stock prices of their companies.
Like sure, if you're a good Christian, it's not good behavior, but ultimately, it's just having sex with someone. I want the guy to make me money and build a great company, I don't care who he has sex with.
It’s quid pro quo sexual harassment.
They don’t care about some paltry affairs
It's not about the sex. It's about the judgement shown in cheating with a Chinese spy and a direct report, specifically. It's the lack of trustworthiness shown by someone who is willing to cheat in their marriage (presumably they are then fine lying to their company). And finally it's about exporting gpus to China illegally.
This isn't just a case of some extramarital sex.
was it confirmed she was a spy? or is that just rumors?
Cheating in private is up to you.
Cheating with your direct report leaves you open to blackmail.
Cheating with your fucking customer leaves you open to a whole bunch more trouble.
Sure, but what about the relevant accusations?
Could 75% of CEOs in the US help foreign intelligence assets to evade export controls and not face consequences?
I think the whole "selling chips to a country we have an export ban with" thing might be more of their concern.
As per our Law 3, the shortselling companies responsible for this will now be liquidated:
https://stateofutopia.com/laws/3/law3.html
I'd like to give some insight into this process. A few days ago, we learned that market disrupters were planning negative news to artificially collapse the AI economy, we investigated it at the time and considered completely outlawing short selling. Here is our investigation: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_e05fb23d-aa67-43e4-a7c1-df...
As you can see, it was not clear that we should completely eliminate short selling.
When the character assassination process began against Jensen (who is the Founder of NVidia; he currently owns around 3% of the stock; his stake is worth around $100 billion) we gave our feedback that this is not newsworthy.
Yesterday, we learned of plans to remove him from his position and passed the law linked above, making this illegal.
We will now begin the process of liquidating and delisting the short seller companies involved. These are some investment banks.
We do not consider any of the recent reporting to be newsworthy or material.
What on earth are you talking about
I thought he resigned
"our" and "we"?
Did you read what Grok told you? You asked whether restricting short selling would help, and it said "No" and explained why. Somehow that became "we uncovered a conspiracy and will liquidate the investment banks."
And who's "we"? You and Grok? Because Grok said no. You've lost half your government before issuing your first decree.
You've managed to make MechaHitler the voice of reason in this conversation.
Its explanation was incorrect.
The only reason Jensen is out is because he doesn't pretend AI is an existential threat like Anthropic and OpenAI do to boost their own valuation/moats and to boost the anti-China sentiment for the administration.
another poor chinese guy. they will never be trusted in the america system.
Jensen Huang called Israel a "second home" while it was committing genocide against Palestinians. This is just a continuation of a pattern of corruption. I think he resented his own success because these are not honest mistakes. Jensen Huang is the AI Great Gatsby.
fwiw, this was seen at the time as a gesture to the large number of NVIDIA (Mellanox) employees in Israel. Both due to it being a major center for the company and because he had personally been spending a lot of time there meeting with the networking org.