What difference is there between this and other tech CEOs who have had relationships with their staff? Musk and Gates come to mind
But the extramarital affair with Alice Huang is quite different. NYTimes reports that Alice Huang is a Chinese spy, with whom Jensen Huang may have conspired to break the law, selling advanced NVIDIA chips to China. That affair puts the whole company at extreme legal risk. Gates, Bezos, and Brin have nothing like this on their records that I'm aware of.
As I write this, the top post on HN speculates that this is "the tip of the iceberg," indicating that there at least may be more affairs yet to be uncovered, and, plausibly, Jensen Huang may have committed even more enormous mistakes with serious consequences for NVIDIA.
Troy 2.0
In addition Nvidia is incredibly tech-heavy company. You need another EE with experience with AI chip design and business. Just having good experienced businessman looking at simplified powerpoints before making decisions of technical issues is probably not enough.
certainly sounds like that's the case, yup
And I'm pretty sure Jenson resigning without a suitable, almost identical successor will kill NVIDIA, the way Intel and AMD and IBM became mere husks of what they were, with no possible road to another western replacement in sight.
It's odd that you seem to consider two /entirely opposed/ hypotheses as being similar to one another. Superficially, "I'm fairly convinced [this is an intel op of some kind]" makes the two seem similar, but each comes with an implicit set of consequences, right? So it's really "I'm fairly convinced [this is supposed to be really advantageous to the west because of these suspected consequences for the west] or that it's [really harmful to the west because of these other suspected consequences]". It seems odd to suspect two highly opposed set of consequences as both being reasonably likely and thus admitting to two diametrically opposed motivations for the same act.
Nvidia is incredibly valuable, in large part due to Jenson.
The US is aligned with Nvidia, but it does not have total control and so is largely beholden to its choices. Amung other things, the US is paranoid about the resource ever aligning with China (thus export controls). Jenson may refuse to cede more control.
China is misaligned with Nvidia, due to competition with the US. It will never have any control, and thus wants it removed from alignment with the US to mitigate their advantage.
Both superpowers have vast intelligence networks with a long history of causing untold human suffering in pursuit of their short-term, often meaningless goals.
Suddenly, Jenson is under attack from all angles over something relatively unrelated and meaningless to Nvidia - certainly disproportional to his role as arguably one of the most important people on the planet. Within a day, with no actual information of what happened, major media companies are calling for Jenson to be removed from his position.
This could benefit the US government, who can now get a replacement more amenable to, say, the surveillance state or more ideologically opposed to China. Destruction of Nvidia be damned, the CIA hasn't though more than 2 years ahead since the 60s.
This could benefit China, as this could cause a rapid decline in Nvidia's progress and therefore the West's ability to continue beating China - in particularly since there seems to be no one capable of filling the gap if it were to happen.
> And I'm pretty sure Jenson resigning without a suitable, almost identical successor will kill NVIDIA
Maybe, but Nvidia bears responsibility for having such poorly de-risked corporate governance. It's actually shocking that the company propping up the entire AI industry (and thus the US economy) is led by a CEO with no COO and dozens of direct reports. Jensen thought he was invincible because he positioned himself to have total control of the company operations, which certainly didn't encourage him to think twice about making the mistakes he did. He acted out because he felt empowered to, and it's easy why.
My argument isn't that Jensen didn't do it - I have no doubt he had multiple affairs. He already admitted to the first one!
My argument is that the President of the United States raped children and nobody even talks about it anymore. So Jensen fucking consenting 50 year-olds and suddenly having the CIA outing him (after knowing about it for a year apparently), and every major media company calling for his resignation over it, before any actual investigations finish and over something seemingly neither illegal or particularly related to his work is weird.
> Occam's razor.
In light of the above, I would say Occam's razor is someone is trying to get rid of Jensen.
Reporting by both NYT and WSJ has said there have been two opposing factions in the White House on China/AI policy since Trump was elected. The Model Hawks want to Keep America Strong by slowing China's progress in advanced AI models. They think the best way to do that is by stopping US advanced AI hardware going to China (as much as we can).
The Hardware Hawks wants to Keep America Strong by slowing the development of China's homegrown advanced AI hardware industry. They think the best way to do that is by ONLY selling US semi-advanced AI hardware to China that's slightly more powerful than what China could make on their own now.
Trump vacillates between the two factions (sometimes daily), as indicated by banning the sale of certain semi-advanced chips, then later reversing that ban. The argument to reverse the ban was because before any ban, NVidia had >90% of China's domestic market and after a couple years of ban that was down to ~50%, with the difference funding the development of China's AI hardware industry.
I think both factions actually have valid points and don't know which would be better. However, to your point about the reason for these leaks of >6 month-old intelligence reports now - it's that Jensen (and NVidia) have always been pro "Keep America Strong by slowing China's domestic hardware industry." Sure, that's in their interest but there are a lot of serious people who aren't at NVidia who are Hardware Hawks too. If China's domestic AI hardware companies are Mice, NVidia is the Cat saying, "I was keeping your mouse problem under 10% until you locked me out and now it's 50%. Let me back in and I'll get it under control again."
Jensen has developed a pretty good relationship with Trump and is able to sometimes sway his opinion. Whether this is good or bad depends on which kind of Hawk you are. For example, Jensen was invited to go on Trump's first China trip and the Model Hawks were not happy. On Trump's second trip, the Model Hawks managed to keep Jensen from being invited and the Hardware Hawks were not happy. Air Force One left Washington without Jensen, but then stopped in Alaska and picked up Jensen - which made the Model Hawks crazy. The Model Hawks made sure the intelligence report about Alice being a suspected asset for Chinese intelligence was included in briefing report sent to Trump back in May. But that didn't get Trump to stop listening to Jensen sometimes (Today, Trump claimed he "doesn't remember seeing the report, or if I did see it, it didn't make a big impression on me").
So who benefits by these old reports about Alice from May leaking now and blowing up all over the news? Maybe people upset that Jensen keeps unswaying Trump after he's been swayed?
BTW, Jensen and NVidia have consistently been Hardware Hawks since long before Jensen met Alice in March 2024. Arguably, any NVidia CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to be a law-abiding Hardware Hawk. Also, the WSJ has reported that Chinese intelligence first developed Alice into an asset because of her relationship with Jensen. Because export controls were bad for her data center company, Alice was obviously already on the Hardware Hawk side before being an info source for Chinese intelligence.
The under-reported story (dig a little on WSJ) is that after nearly two years of Commerce and Justice Dept investigating Megaspeed, the US govt still hasn't put Megaspeed on the blocked Entity List (which they can do anytime without explanation). No one knows why and congress is starting to ask about it. BUT, strangely, NVidia voluntarily placed Megaspeed on their own blocked list in June 2025 and hasn't sold any new GPUs to Megaspeed since then (they did ship a few repair parts and replacement components after June for warranty support). So... "Good Guy NVidia?" Well, maybe more like "Don't-want-to-go-to-jail-for-decades NVidia." You see, these export controls have the same severe penalties as selling cruise missiles and it's a 'strict liability' regulation on suppliers. That means if a supplier "knew, or should have known" that GPUs were being diverted, they would be guilty - and that's potentially serious jail time for every individual employee who knew and personal fines up to $1M per card. So... yeah, Alice banging Jensen didn't stop Megaspeed getting cut-off by NVidia just over a year after she met him. What do those confusing and conflicting bits mean? I have no idea - other than this whole thing is a shit show all around and it's not even a blue vs red thing. There are Model and Hardware Hawks in both parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hurd
Rest in peace.
Musk is also very "out" about it. Kinda like how it's okay to be gay in the CIA, as long as you're out. Being in the closet gets you fired because it makes you blackmailable.
Not a lifestyle I could ever be proud of living personally but ymmv and elon seems to be enjoying himself.
morally I don't really disagree with you, but practically I do.