Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
axios.com
axios.com
It is their job. You take decisions that are worth billions, you influence people that take decisions that are worth billions, and affect their countries.
They are going to study you for years. Your personality type and that of the people around you. Your weaknesses. Your problems and that of your family.
They will employ the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world to create the perfect Honey trap.
Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.
It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.
But another reason why as someone of such a high caliber you should never be alone with other women. Always have a bodyguard or something, surely you can afford someone…
I mean, each to his own, but there are times when I would not want a bodyguard involved.
That would preclude having a meeting with a female unless there's a bodyguard but not need one when you're meeting with a guy?
That would be quite weird.
Just keep your dick in your pants.
Lol, don't take out your anger for not being rich at random people on the internet. Affairs are common across diverse economic profiles of people, not just the rich. All that anger for nothing.
Yes affairs are unfortunately common but this whole honey pot thing is ridiculous. That doesn’t suddenly make me sympathetic to cheating.
I say this as someone who's family was torn apart by an affair, by a failure to update expectations. Well, that was the excuse; the issues were deeper, the affair was a focus-sink and an excuse not to address them. I wonder if that's the case here, too.
(I should make clear that I think Jensen Huang sucks for other reasons.)
lol I am not the richest man, not even close and nothing physical happened. But I once got into a parasocial relationship after decades of monogamy and no dalliances. Never planned for it, and in hindsight years later don't know what happened. And it was so cathartic.
Obviously the exec could have paid for the same service himself, but that wouldn't be called matchmaking (and it's not what most people seek).
This does exist as a service and is considered by many to be the oldest profession in the world.
> Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.
She’s a woman, not a sweet from Willy Wonka’s factory. If you find yourself thinking “wow, she couldn’t be more perfect, it’s like she’s too good to be true” then perhaps as the CEO of a billion dollar company with national security concerns you should consider hey, maybe she is too good to be true? Maybe look into that?
All else aside, if you find yourself being tempted, you make sure she isn’t around you. The CEO compensation more than makes up for your sacrifice.
Obviously the target has agency, I don't deny that, but it seems blindingly shortsighted to think it's as simple as "be suspicious of supermodels who are into you".
Perhaps as far as to say, the only suspicious thing about the perfect agent would be the lack of anything to be suspicious of.
we will never know
The people in here acting like they would be immune to all this are kidding themselves.
What in the world are you talking about? Most successful people you know get honeypotted by their high school crush? I don't know anybody like that. How did you determine it was a honeypot and not just a regular divorce?
> The people in here acting like they would be immune to all this are kidding themselves
Maybe speak for yourself.
That principle works for anyone with means to seize.
You just need to know few people to qualify for "multiple times"
I think most normal people have tried Doritos at some point, which are the flavour-equivalent of what you’re describing here. It’s food designed to satisfy your human needs and desires.
But if you're married, with kids, and you're willing to throw that away to chase someone else, I'd argue you have a serious personality flaw going on there.
There is no chase here. It is the other way round.
Jensen wasn't an innocent victim, he was still an active, voluntary participant.
It's not that easy to rebuff approaches from women you're very attracted to; it's much easier to avoid having the opportunity come up in the first place. I think at the very least the moral judgment should be accompanied by some empathy.
I am going to guess Jensen isn't even looking for beauty, although that is certainly part of the deal. But someone who is also business savvy, understands technology, smart and somehow well connected to AI as well as a business partner in some sense.
And perhaps it is worth pointing out the obvious, this isn't a simple beauty trap, it is a pys-op.
Although there is part of that thinks. Could Jensen knew of this all along. And it was just a way to get business going.
But that's not really a defense of the behavior, and it's perhaps a sign that we should stop valorizing billionaires.
What if Huang wasn't married/with family? Would he just never get to form close relationships after becoming successful?
That meant that the only way to attack these people was a soft attack in the form of social interactions or social media and as such it's always struck me as extremely foolish for these kinds of people to let themselves be preyed upon in this manner.
Like they have teams of people who keep them physically safe, but not mentally safe, so in the age of social media a motivated attacker can, with enough cleverness[0][1] directly reach the mind of someone who otherwise couldn't be reached.
Why does that happen?
I think it's not so much because they're juicy targets that entities with unlimited resources can meticulously target like you describe but because people like Jensen Huang or Bill Gates are very technically competent they probably lack the social skills so they're too often the Michael Scott to the Todd Packer in situations like this[2] and when a hint of opportunity to be sexually promiscuous is presented to them they seize on it without thinking of the consequences.
Think of the married blue collar dudes who pick up bored divorcees at some dive sports bar after watching the big game and then drive home drunk, juggling multiple mistresses and a family life with relative ease for years.
A manager like Jensen Huang may be able to handle multiple business units but he can't manage a single mistress handling his unit because that just isn't his skill set.
[0] https://gwern.net/doc/www/web.archive.org/5e00c6993450adc597...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2010/06/08/127564512/for-the-love-of-goo...
So just hire women? Sounds like an incredibly simple solution to being security compromised.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Lol. Jensen Hueng's case was likely figured out in a smoke filled room somewhere in the bowels of some intelligence agency in China, agents passing around pictures of Jensen while puffing on cigarettes. One them tosses a picture on the table and just says 'he always wears that leather jacket'. The others nod, and one them sucks in the air while shaking the ashes into an ashtray, 'We have a few candidates in mind'.
“It takes the machinations of an intelligence apparatus more powerful than you can comprehend to make a rich guy cheat on his wife” lmaooo
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/49712639/49ers-owner-jed...
This is really not true. Spies are just people, there aren't that many of them, and they don't come "customized". The overlap of effective spies and "the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world" is very close to zero.
What you are describing is conspiracy-theory thinking or the kind of stuff you see in James Bond movies. Not real life.
Obviously spies exist, like here, but she's just... a normal woman who has a job as a spy and tried to seduce him and succeeded. He may have turned down five others who failed miserably in their attempts.
And sure they try to put together a psychological profile of the person, but that's also not really rocket science, and it's going to be pretty basic stuff. "Your weaknesses" is not going to be that exciting. Maybe he's really into expensive wines. It's not like he has a secret gambling addiction.
So let's just keep this reality-based and not fantasy-based.
A nerd thinking a woman is into them...that is the fantasy...No she did not happen to bump into you in the elevator, and no she is not there to attend the same AWS conference that you... and oh no... she does NOT happen to like the same SciFi you do ...and no ...you are not ohh so funny...
That
The overlap doesn’t have to be that great. The spies are also not random you don’t get random spies matching with random CEOs. They just have to have enough available agents and enough info on the target, physical proximity, and other factors to attempt something to work out. In many cases it’s not something that will be in the news either. It will be just a failed attempt, or just an affair.
Even the most powerful people can be really dumb.
> admitted to having a romantic relationship with a suspected Chinese spy
He admitted to having a relationship with a woman.
There's a separate question of whether the woman was a spy.
I mean, it's pretty clear it was a spy. Have a look at WSJ, NYT, etc. It isn't tabloidish to say so.
Whether tabloid, or completely inaccurate, Nvida make reference to it and that there is an independent investigation. It is reasonable for people to wonder what it is about.
I mean they are literally the same article in essence. One is from the official source and the other is paywalled with nothing worthy added.
The choice is clear.
This is just a total guess, but I assume what a lot of the board want is for him to sell as much to China or indirect channels as he can get away with. So whatever these deals were that involved this woman, they probably want him to get those deals through it he can get away with it (although they wouldn't admit it).
I see this more or less as Huang doing his job. And relative to international expectations at that level of wealth, one public affair is probably not something most of the board (presumably largely male) is going to (privately) judge him for.
So if the board is investigating, I assume what they are trying to figure out is if the US government is going to do anything (probably not) or waiting to see if there is going to be some kind of public demand for him to be removed. Or it there is something likely to come out that will cause either of those things.
Neither the board nor the US government nor investors nor the average person gives a shit about a CEO having an affair as long it doesn't compromise his ability to do his job well.
Also, just to be clear here: the story is that Jensen was also going to Taiwan to meet with this person who was helping Alibaba evade sanctions, when Jensen met with this person Alibaba reps were always there, and in the US Jensen was making media appearances saying that sanctions on China had to be lifted.
Bear in mind that multiple people at Supermicro were charged for allegedly smuggling servers to China, and that the reason Megaspeed is being investigated is for effectively the same thing. Jensen denied he had anything to do with Supermicro, it is going to be much harder to say the same thing here.
I don't think the affair itself is necessarily related to the direction this will shortly take.
MLK Jr. was being monitored by the FBI and CIA, who believed he was a Communist.
IMHO, I’m speculating, but I think the affair could’ve happened first, and then the MSS got involved for access and blackmail.
There is, after all, statistically a high correlation with rich billionaires and infidelity…
I know others have said this is a carefully written statement, but in my culture I would feel it would be rude not to keep it private? Sorry if this sounds autistic.
Perhaps this is a too big to fail scenario?
Unless the CEO happens to be the CEO of what is considered one of the most important company for national security and future, and his private life involves somebody who appears to be a spy for the biggest competitor for world hegemony. Then it's kind of big deal for everybody.
It also sounds like it was known something was going on with foreign agencies and Jensen, do this puts it out in the open and clears the air.
Lastly, if anyone was trying to use the affair as leverage over him, the best way to break the leverage is to just come out and spill the tea yourself (so to speak)
- Is this person susceptible to blackmail from the secrets they're keeping?
- Has this person performed a notable breach of trust?
- Has this person displayed a notable lack of judgement?
Even when the alleged misconduct is private, #1 is of particular concern. Airing it out is an obvious way to lessen that specific concern. The allegations here raise the other concerns too, however.
Bedding an adversarial entity's agent in a regulated field is a serious matter (for the company) with potentially serious consequences. It can lead to executive decapitation, it can even lead to / criminal investigations if the operative bypassed export controls using executive proximity.. the fallout can be great and widespread.
It can also be a nothingburger and an amusing page six divorce story in the end where we all read how rich cry as well. Time will tell. What's telling of where this might lead and how serious it is, is that it was US federal government that warned about this.
However if he cheated with a chinese spy then he was targeted by China and that raises this to a national security risk.
> “Our relationship, our interactions, have been related to Megaspeed, and it was all completely normal and not unusual,” [1]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-29/nvidia-ce... => https://archive.li/ljGPF#selection-1731.0-1731.119
Not long I suspect, we don't expect much from tech CEOs. Nobody even remembers when Bezos cheated on his wife.
Everyone has some preferred types, but same body, different person is pretty creepy.
I never got to (or wanted to) see the images, but, by all reports, he ... er ... had nothing to be ashamed of.
Technically, it was a saw. The Saudi King was mad at Bezos because of a column in the Washington Post (which Bezos had purchased).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/21/amazon-bo...
> "Saudi experts – dissidents and analysts – told the Guardian they believed Bezos was probably targeted because of his ownership of the Post and its coverage of Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi’s critical columns about Mohammed bin Salman and his campaign of repression against activists and intellectuals rankled the crown prince and his inner circle."
Jensen is as powerful as any politician, if not more so. Same with Elon, etc.
If you don't want that then get rid of the ability for such individuals to amass so much power.
That's the real reason that this affair is a problem. It made him blackmailable.
It's hard to say from the outside what the goals would be - pushing him in certain directions, extracting intel, etc.
For this it would be much easier if the Chinese spies banged Nvidia engineers.
I'd expect a board to fire a CEO over this, so he will have to be critical to the business, more than a normal CEO is critical, to survive. The market reaction to him going would also be interesting. Seems like the markets are starting to figure out what the value is here.
These aren't all entirely drop-in replacements, there are some trade-offs involved, but there are many companies with alternatives that could take Nvidia's market if they stall.
Which of those sell chips at the Nvidia caliber sell to AI model builders in the US (not use internally)?
The one big thing I will given Huang credit for is not going all-in on blockchain and recognizing it as a bubble. NVidia never really pivoted from their core business/customers to support crypto miners, unlike what they're doing with AI.
Nvidia boosts AI a lot. They are the central bank of AI. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673098
Even when AI boom was imminient but 10 times smaller 2-3 years ago they did not invested heavily enough and Nvidia went all in.
I have no clue what percent of that decision making was Huang, but all the competition leadership was certainly incompetent.
So at least he did built company with a good leadership. Its a fact. Even if I personally dont like Nvidia or its products.
that is generally what it looks like when someone is smarter than you
Maybe. This is also what everyone said about Elon for a long time, though.
He's the visionary behind what they do and the person who influences industries around him to make it real.
I made a boat load of money off of the Tesla IPO(and then holding for 12 years) but I only invested because I thought they wouldn't be a successful car company but would produce a bunch of patents that would be valuable when licensed to the big auto makers.
Obviously I got that wronged, but my investment still worked out - but I still have friends and family coming to me for investing advice because I made the right move but for the wrong reasons
God god, no.
There's very little he could ever accidentally tell someone that would matter that much.
Other than handing over very detailed schemas etc, there's almost nothing important he could tell them.
Maybe some future ideas and plans, maybe some government things about the Administration, it's small peanuts.
Nvidia is an operational success, their IP is embedded within deep layers of know how and expertise.
He's the 'father' of that org, he set the tone, they like him there.
Nvidia would risk being an Intel without him.
> There's very little he could ever accidentally tell someone that would matter that much.
I think the practical implications matter a lot less than the PR and legal ones.
If the stock price plummets tomorrow and doesn’t recover, the board may have to act.
Similarly, if the right governments start asking hard questions, the board may have to act.
This is likely going to be a slow-rolling shit show for a while. At the very least, it’s legitimate grounds for one or more congressional investigations, which may start here but could go anywhere.
The crime here isn't giving secrets to the Chinese, it is helping them evade export controls. Again, this is something that Nvidia and Jensen has been investigated on repeatedly. If he knew that Megaspeed was a front for China, quite hard to deny given that Alice Huang seems to have brought Chinese execs to every meeting with Jensen then it is very bad. And yes, the stuff that Jensen would have said would have been very useful because, I assume, the inference is that he would have been helping them evade sanctions.
The very best case from here is that the board fires him.
If that were true, then it's fair game, but I don't think that's what is going on.
US gov has not stated they are targeting him.
Also, there is a gigantic difference between 'avoidance' and 'evasion', like with taxes.
We'll see.
For over a decade CUDA was nothing but a money and silicon wasting function that brought in very little extra revenue for the amount of company resources it uses. And arguably it started even before CUDA with Cg. And I will say another unpopular thing, they are in hardware business, apart from the past 1 - 2 years which they are enjoying massive success, for most of the past 30 years hardware business are 10x tougher than Software side.
Most CEO would have given up. Paul Graham invented the term to describe it, Founder Mode.
And for another note about comments elsewhere in the thread that Open AI is what brought up the current AI craze. Nvidia was already selling to OpenAI via introduction of Elon Musk in 2016.
I seriously doubt Nvidia would have been anywhere close to what they are today without Jensen's Leadership.
I’m not sure if this will ruin Jensen’s life or not, but it’s a good opportunity for us all to remember that the short-term high is usually not worth it.
His likely ex-wife is about to be very rich tho.
How much of NVIDIA’s sales and revenues is actually to China? Would that be allowed to happen still?
If the camel had a back, then it was already broken, IMHO.
What? [0]
You just touch someone's lower back, throw an arm around their neck, and share seats for one at lounges with platonic friends?
[0] https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/jensen-huang-rom...
And there’s cheating on your wife and having the feds write up intelligence reports about it, the Financial Times running an article about it and having to send a public admission to every single employee at your company including your two kids who you employ there.
But I'm not sure how hard it would be to resist a honey trap.
I mean a state sponsored enterprise to get you to have sex with someone (or one of a group of people).
Getting him to have sex with her was literally this woman's day job and she was probably told it was a matter of national security.
It is quite absurd once you think about it.
This is just deeply embarrassing. His adult children both work for his company so they’d also receive this exact memo.
People continue to under-value the spank bank. SMH.
AI and chips are, for better or worse, considered a national security matter.
It might if he loves his wife.
I think what you've just described is "post nut clarity". I'm sure he knew what he did immediately, but the gravity of the consequences might've taken a bit to catch up to him.
That's Japan. Don't make it sound like other parts of Asia are like this.
As always, recovery under stress is more telling than speed on the happy path.
The other name founders - Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs - fell into the guise of their own image propagating down their leadership chain; Huang seems to be actually leading, often by example. I'd expect his team to do ok without him, but believe only he could make some of the hard decisions, particularly now that their success is bounded by their customers'.
They tried every persona: Sexy, shy, homely. Same sex. Confrontational. Open, but scared her overseers would punish her. Still get a ping now and then.
the reason bond was made - was the guy who the novel was based on - being a double-agent couldn't be honey-trapped as he was already womanizing.
Secondly if he's willing to lie to his wife and family he's obviously willing to lie to anyone for much less. It tells you something about the character of a person, how can anyone trust a cheater?
But it’s usually don’t ask don’t tell, not explicit lying.
To give a specific example, I’m currently traveling in Vietnam, and an entire floor of my allegedly “5-star” hotel (the most expensive in the city) is reserved for prostitution. This is a smaller city with almost no foreign tourists. The rest of the hotel operates as normal, with a fancy breakfast served everyday 6-9am.
When the money is this big, all ethics go out the window.
However if you lack the common sense to not fall for Chinese spies then your judgement really must be questioned.
Common sense and judgement fluctuate. Humans, you know, we're prone to entirely unpredictable moments of emotional weakness. Maybe we're hungry, maybe we're tired, maybe the missus or the kids have been sick, maybe we just don't want to face leg-day after 12-hours of strategising. As per the attack and defense argument: A defender only needs to be wrong once.
As if it were that easy? Being that rich and influental means someone out there will attempt (and succeed) to game you.
Someone leaked intelligence assessments to the New York Times.
Maybe this was just a regular leak ... but ...
Jensen/Nvidia has not been playing ball with other parts of the AI industry and the administration, pushing heavily against export bans and promoting open source models/companies , which is clearly against the interests of SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic.
This is conspiracy theory territory, of course, but I wouldn't be too surprised if this was an intentional leak.
Consider the timing of the reporting - the first report from NYT comes out on Nov 6th - just enough time after mid-terms. Consider that follow up reporting clearly identifying Rubio as the author of the in-administration warning memo.
JD and Rubio (and who knows who else) are clearly trying to find ways to distance themselves from Trump without being completely cut to pieces, now that it's completely clear that the Trump brand is toxic.
I think everyone with a brain did.
It was done intentionally to send a message to him and to wrap him over the knuckles.
Great people all round.
Technically, they collect the company salary, and then the CIA reduces their pay by the same amount. (They have to be indistinguishable from ordinary employee, including to payroll.)
At one point, they couldn't keep any excess if the company pay was higher. Now, they're apparently allowed to keep an amount that doesn't significantly exceed comparable federal pay.
Props up the surveillance state with Palantir, requests privacy.
An "exposure" of affair[1] could very well be the best coverup: "couldn't control my dick" is the ultimate plausible deniability. Timing also makes sense. Better open an investigation and get it closed while this Congress is still in power, as the next one is going to be more in bed in LLM companies than hardware.
[1]: The other party is overtly a customer, not some random individual.
There was, no deflection "this is not who I am", No blaming the spy.
He owned up to his mistakes
It is one person, and your enemies have all the resources at your disposal.
It is very easy to say, “I would never do X” but when you literally have a nation trying to get you do X, I presume it’s a lot harder.
I don't mean to belittle the letter, but Jensen's PR firm undoubtedly helped with the letter and undoubtedly had advisors who specialize in this.
He's a big time CEO and his company is impacted by how well he handles it. So of course there are PR/crisis people around. They specialize in making psychopaths look human.
But leaders are where they are because they make good decisions - their character does matter. Calling in the image-fixer types to clean up your mistakes is easy mode.
Can we assume this was a one-off because she was uniquely persistent and persuasive?
Anyone who believes he personally agonised over this alone in a darkened room is being rather naive.
Even if he didn’t know she was an intelligence asset, it’s hard to believe he didn’t at least suspect Megaspeed was a conduit to China. If you read the press reports, there were a ton of red flags.
Nvidia has also said he’ll stay on as CEO while the investigation runs. I can’t think of many CEOs who would survive this, let alone without taking any time off.
His fate will probably follow the Boston tech company CEO that got caught cheating with HR executive at a Coldplay concert.
Statement from NVIDIA Board of Directors
i guess we'll actually find out if he gave away useful nvidia secrets in years from now, but by then the tech might not matter all that much to Nvidia.
he was cheating on his wife before now, and Nvidia was doing just fine
is it pre consumer level trading, with institutional trading happening on different time windows?
*Crash in progress.
Subject: A message to our company
Body: "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, and 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."
This letter is just part of the ceremony of events that is expected to happen afterwards.
There’s been recent power spats (JD Vance’s tweet, Susie being replaced by Steve Bannon, and probably more infighting).
As much as I want to believe there’s greater 4D chess and motivation, I assign a modest probability to someone going “fuck it”, opening a massive short on NVDA, and then leaking it just for the love of insider trading. Rather than anything strategic or real.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/coldplay-kiss-c...
Jensen Huang's case is even more high profile because of the spying accusation.
She was also a Chinese spy.
> It's 2026, we literally had a human child trafficking ring with multiple presidents involved and it didnt lead to anything or move the needle on stuff.
He admitted to the affair. No one has admitted to being a pedo. Much less forgivable.
Would that count?
Trump himself relaxed laws on chip exports to China.
P.S. If you have any other liquidity available, maybe 'buy the dip'?
No, you do not.
Looking at her picture might provide a hint.
The US National Security blob certainly cares, but not because of the infidelity.