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Comment by u1hcw9nx | Hacker News Reader

Huang Holds 3.4% of Nvidia and has no dual-class voting rights. He can't prevent getting removed if the board thinks it's time.

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We have become a permissive society in regard to sex and extramarital affairs. What’s so wrong about having an affair with another employee in the company? I think they are making a big deal about this.

Do you really think there is no issue with a person in a position of power engaging in an affair with a subordinate?

Can’t say I’m particularly bothered by it when the subordinate is 48 years old.

"Position of power" is a bit of a stretch when we're talking about two high-ranking execs who presumably make tens of millions of dollars. I doubt there's any problem related to consent / coercion here. They just wanted to bonk.

It's a corporate governance problem because the relationship can be seen as tainting personnel decisions. But that's HR optics versus morality.

Note that I'm not defending Huang, but I think he's done for because of the spy thing more than because of this.

Well seeing how he also had an affair with a Chinese spy and broke federal law in assisting the Chinese government to access to billions of dollars worth of frontier AI chips, it's a little more than just worrying about extramarital affairs.

This is why you should only do one shitty thing at a time and not multiple.

It is inappropriate to have relationships with subordinates.

No it's not. We are adults. Adults can consent to sex with other adults.

It's inappropriate to use coercion.

Boss-subordinate relationships are a lot like conflicts of interest. You can’t really rule out something nefarious without the ability read minds because coercion and self-dealing can happen at an unstated or even subconscious level.

> Adults can consent to sex with other adults.

This is questionable in the context of one of the adults holding a position of power. Also, even when assuming the adults are peers, there's another saying 'Don't shit where you eat' which is rooted in a lot of stories of workplace relationships going wrong in very creative ways.

All adults are equal, but some are more equal than others.

propriety is a higher bar than what you're referring here. it IS inappropriate to date in that power dynamic. but it is legal. and it can even be ethical with mutual consent and management of consequences. dont confuse them.

There cannot reasonably be consent when a subordinate is involved. The power dynamic prevents the relationship from being on an equal footing.

1. An employee might feel obligated to have sex with their manager knowing that it might affect their careers.

2. Other employees might feel that the employee having sex with the manager is getting better treatment at work.

It's not "another employee" it's a direct report, a power imbalance so cliched that it's the first dot point in any HR/P&C management course

Making it company policy also means the subordinate can now easily get the boss humiliated & fired.

Which, ironically, swaps the power imbalance.

Which, unironically, is just one of the many reasons why it's a bad idea.

Bad idea, bad policy, and bad law.

The Chinese spy who he was having sex with and probably helping break export controls and smuggle Nvidia tech into China through singapore is probably a bigger deal than this one

Which could result in congressional investigations or worse, a tightening of export controls.

I don't think they are firinf him for having an affair with hus subordinate. It's because of the Chinese spy allegations. This is just an add on

It shows you are easily manipulated, can make bad decisions.

Huge mistake of not trying to have dual class shares during the height of AI mania (or crypto)

Or Nvidia comes out of this damaged but not nearly as much as if they were glued to Jensen. "Superstar" CEOs that have complete control over a company are only benefits until they become enormous risks.

Reminded me to that Osborn scene at 2002 Spiderman.

There is no way that would have been possible. And as I saw another commenter mention, even if NVidia were founded much more recently when dual share structures became much more common, you rarely (or maybe never, I can't think of any cases) see that dual share structure in very capital intensive industries like hardware where you have to sink a ton of money into the enterprise before you even see any revenue. Software is a whole different ball game.

But Elon Musk has supermajority through dual-class shares in SpaceX which is obviously a capital-intensive business even more so than making GPUs.

You are correct, and I was wrong. I originally thought SpaceX was a bit of a special case because the board (pretty much Musk loyalists) gave Musk a ton of restricted stock right before the IPO, but the voting rights vested immediately. But the part I was wrong about is thinking that was just an IPO thing. All the many billions that SpaceX got pre-IPO was done with investors being fine having Musk alone having majority voting control.

Assuming the board is truly independent.

They all are. No Jensen connections at all. All from finance or non related business.

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