Jensen Huang resigns
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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everything only comes to light with the New York Times reporting on it. It would be fine if the government did it, but... they didn't.
If nothing else, this indicated to the board that JH is capable of thinking with his dick and that can be a problem for business.
> 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.
Do we have evidence that his legally-recognized other half consented to these relationships? If so, fine. That still doesn't remove the problems with those relationships, like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset, or the fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.
>while we excuse pedophilia.
Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???
https://khanna.house.gov/media/press-releases/khanna-massie-...
In this day and age of no-fault divorce, co-parenting, etc, where is this moral outrage coming from for a man cheating on his wife / girlfriend? I'm just so confused TBH. 'Legally-recognized other half'.... in no jurisdiction is it illegal to cheat on your wife.
> like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset,
The sole evidence that she is a Chinese intelligence asset is that she is Chinese.
> he fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.
Forgive me for not feeling sorry for a likely deca, probably centi, millionaire. This is not some secretary intern.
> Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???
Because, if we're going to be witchhunting CEOs for their personal lives, there are a helluva lot worse people than Huang that need to go.
If Huang had just slept with someone other than his wife, it wouldn't be a story. The outrage here isn't from the fire-and-brimstone perspective. I'm a single guy in my mid-30s; even here in Middle America there are plenty of people who practice ENM, no-fault divorce, and coparenting. It's now widely recognized that people aren't necessarily monogamous as soon as they get married.
At the same time, it's still an expectation that one should not do that sort of activity behind a spouse's back. It could result in other issues that could cause them issues, like STIs, or planning life around a child they didn't expect, or estate planning complications. Being open with your partner in life about the feelings you have on the matter is important, and puts the "ethical" in "ethical non-monogamy".
We don't know what the Huangs' arrangement was. I hope it was understood between them, and that all of that was sorted. If not, well, Jensen's going to get to deal with the fallout with that. Which brings us to the problems with the relationships themselves.
> The sole evidence that she is a Chinese intelligence asset is that she is Chinese.
Let's be honest here: that's not enough to get a story going in 2026. There's the fact that she set up a company in Singapore that had revenue figures that far outpaced what's expected for a company of its age, and the fact that they may have helped Chinese interests dodge US export restrictions on Nvidia's products. This was important enough that it was known to Nvidia corporate and the US government. You don't get attention like that just by dating someone from China.
> Forgive me for not feeling sorry for a likely deca, probably centi, millionaire. This is not some secretary intern.
Cultures like this impact everyone. Do we know if the executive was promoted or otherwise benefitted because of her relationship with Jensen? No, but it immediately opens up a conflict of interest for any request she has of the c-suite.
At worst, Huang was operating a Weinstein-like casting couch for roles within the company. If you can make an executive have to perform those sorts of actions in order to advance in her career, what does the secretary intern have to put up with?
> Because, if we're going to be witchhunting CEOs for their personal lives,
This isn't a witchhunt for the reasons stated above. It's SV, bud. People do all sorts of non-traditional relationship arrangements. Hell, even the Alice Huang affair was probably passable once the next news cycle hit. When he's sleeping with people who report to him, it's a problem on its face. It's unprofessional and it makes everyone at the company wonder just what they'll have to do to get ahead.
> there are a helluva lot worse people than Huang that need to go.
We can actually take care of both groups of people. That is actually possible, believe it or not.
It is true for anything with a board, of course. But there is no rule mandating boards.
> 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 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.
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.
Marriages of 41+ years can get into any kind of dynamic.
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
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.
He repeatedly and aggressively lied about violating export restrictions. "Our chips aren't potato chips. These GPUs weigh two tons. [So, how would you smuggle those? It'd be impossible!]" is an especially memorable deflection of his. He's obviously very willing to lie about very serious things when doing so is beneficial.
> He "literally" wrote about how his actions hurt his family...
He also spoke and wrote about how it was impossible to smuggle Nvidia hardware into China, and that everyone who was claiming that smuggling was going on were liars. CEOs will often lie when issuing Obligatory Standard Statements, whether they be brusque dismissals of accusations of the company's wrongdoing, or assertions of how shameful they consider their behavior that lead them to do whatever it was that they've been caught doing. CEOs make the expected public statement and get on with their lives.
Plus, given how most folks are -at best- confused by and -at worst- enraged by things like polyamory, why on earth would he publicly reveal it if his family was actually totally okay with regular extramarital sex and romance?
No, situations like this get the Standard Admission of Deep Shame and Regret For All The Harm Caused, regardless of whether or not what's said has any resemblance to what the family feels about the situation. The only folks who know how the members of the family feel about this are folks who actually know the family.
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
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.
If you have stronger evidence that the statement was untruthful when it said he hurt his family, you may present it.
Until such time, the statement strengthens the bayesian prior, which is that his affairs hurt his family, and thus that is what we can conclude. We need not be 100% confident to conclude this absent further evidence. >50% confidence suffices.
Yes, and it would have helped. CEOs have "exciting" relationships all the time, and folks seem entirely willing to accept this.
These are entirely different stories:
"My wife and I have a non-traditional relationship and would prefer to keep the specifics private, but no harm was caused by my actions."
"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."
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.
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.
Perhaps it’s you that is out of touch?
Both partners in this case know and/or participate, you don’t want drama at your games night after all. There is no wrong here, it turns out that many partners like seeing their partner have a great time.
Please don't make the mistake of assuming that American culture is homogeneous: It's not.
No, there isn't.
There is a significant part of American culture that separates personal life from professional life. IE, an affair is treated as a private matter to be handled by the married (or committed) couple. (IE, this is why many people in this thread focus on Huang's job performance over the affair.)
And I agree with the latter: The affair is a matter between Huang and his wife; it's a signal of his trustworthiness and honesty, and raises concerns about national security. But beyond that, it's not my place, or your place, to judge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2016, the choice was between Trump and Clinton. Clinton famously excused her husband's infidelity by calling the long list of women who claimed they were assaulted as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty".
In 2024, the choice was between Trump and Harris. Harris got into politics by being the mistress of a CA governor.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the US presidential election offered a choice between someone who was moral and someone who was as immoral as our existing political class. But that has not happened in my lifetime, and I don't expect that to change.
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.
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.
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.
*Everything on a spectrum.
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.
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.
I'm jealous!
Seems like a real analytical breakthrough that I'd legitimately love to learn more about.
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.
My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.
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.
If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract with a person to whom you've promised utter faithfulness, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy with regard to some boring, impersonal business contracts?
- Signed, another European
In a Goffman Front Stage/Back Stage sense, you are supposed to keep the front stage presentation on the level of a pious monk or nun.
The irony to me is this just another asymmetrical advantage for Chinese culture.
There's a reason why government background checks looks at financial records. Someone that has trouble paying their bills due to a gambling habit might be easy to turn by the enemy with some cash. Or someone that regularly cheats on their wife might be willing to do some favors for a pretty girl if she lets him sleep with her.
"Haha you mean the Chinese spy guy? Hey ask if you can get a discount if your secretary sleeps with their CEO haha"
"It's not the crime, it's the coverup."
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.
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.
For better or worse, this is the world we live in.
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
Although if you read his Wikipedia page, he had many, many wives, some concurrently, and the youngest was 19...so it's probably true, lol.
Then you read about a certain EV company CEO and his escapades and repopulating the planet, and you don't know what to think.
Or Charlie Sheen...
I guess politicians, celebrities and CEOs are another world from us mere mortals.....
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.
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.
This is an extremely unnecessary misogynistic comment.
It’s unambiguously a good thing that the next NVIDIA CEO (even if just an interim CEO) is a woman, and that the AMD CEO is a woman.
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.
I can hardly imagine anything more stupid than judging the aptitude of the CEO of a 5T$ business based on his private love life.
You should be concerned about corporate crime.
That doesn't change that there is a conflict of interest here and any company should fire someone who has a conflict of interest that they are not carefully managing to ensure they don't become real.
It's not entirely about humiliation.
Having an affair (or multiple, in this case) demonstrates poor decision making. You don't want someone who can't make wise choices running your company.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
no regulation?
regulation without representation?
If you've had a career in congress, parliament, whatever, you can live comfortably off of the various media appearances you're likely to have for much of the rest of your life.
Representatives in government should be able to keep it in their pants when it comes to investments at least while they're in government, and have a thick, thick wall between their jobs running a country (or state, or whatever) and the management of their investments. Blind trusts should be the bare minimum.
What I'd prefer to see is that while actively sitting in government, representatives must keep their savings invested in funds so diversified into low-risk instruments that almost no regulation can benefit them significantly more than it would an average passive investor.
However it is looking like his fellow adulterer donald knew and kept it under wraps for personal gain.
0 – https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy...
She is up 934% since 2014. This congresswoman is the greatest financial genius in the all history of mankind. She was beating S&P steadily, every year and since 2014 she is up more than 600% compared to the S&P.
For context, the next best investor - after all these great financial minds in congress - is Warren Buffet, and he is actually down 34.8% compared to the S&P since 2014.
You will only know that Nancy Pelosi was up to since the beginning of October next January. Congress members only have to submit their trades (their SEC fillings) every 3 months. [1]
[1] https://www.online-tech-tips.com/track-congressional-stock-t...
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.
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.
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)
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.
The ever closing gap between the capabilities of frontier models vs chinese open weight models.
That's not a strategy that leads to actually being the best.
The phrase is “fait accompli”, without a D, and is French for “accomplished feat”.
Suppose you want to build something that requires technical knowledge (a GPU, a fighter jet, ...). You have engineers, but they don't yet know how to build it.
If no one on earth has ever built this thing, you need to consider the possibility that it can't be done at a cost you can pay. Perhaps it violates some law of physics, or it can't be manufactured without knowing some chemistry/physics that we are 100+ years from discovering.
If a company in some other country is already building this thing, you can be sure it is possible to build it. That is a critical piece of information! It means you don't need to discover (much) new physics. It means you can buy/steal a working copy and look at it to learn about it. It means there are engineers you can hire/spy on to understand their design process. It means you can more easily convince a bank/government to fund development, as they have proof your goals are achievable.
Inventing a thing is much harder than inventing a clone of a thing. The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
Which broadly leads to two conclusions:
They can't do it. If they could they would. If you could invest and create your own Nvidia, ASML, TSMC, &c. you would do that especially if you are China due to its stated goals and actions it takes that we can all see toward those goals.
They can do it and so selling them the chips doesn't matter other than helping to speed up their ability to do it, so we don't want to sell them the chips and thus speed up their capabilities.
But your viewpoint also holds true for the United States and Europe. Anything China can do we can also do, otherwise you're just supposing Chinese Exceptionalism.
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.
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. Subsequently they managed to starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then righted 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. They make almost everything in the average household.
Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?
China is a trading partner but there is still a serious catalyst for war in the form of the South China Sea. If we went to war with China in 5 years time, why would we sell them the tech they need to match our ability now? Let them figure it out on their own.
An economy kept dependent on American tech is unlikely to drop bombs on America and vice versa. Co dependency prevents war.
Soon, China, if they aren’t already, will be the premier developer of Thorium reactors courtesy of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and they also are now number one or at the least 1A when it comes to high-speed rail, and if the Russians and the Ukrainians weren’t fighting each other, that high-speed rail probably would be already built out all the way to eastern Europe.
For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.
And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.
It's just myopia.
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.
There’s also the minor quibble that restricting food exports to starve another country are illegal under international law.
That sanctions only harm the civilian economy is not an argument against them. Kinetic sanctions agains oil refining are also primarily impacting the general population and the military have enough oil. But they still impact the ability of the Russians to fund the war. Civilian infrastructure and economic assets are used by militaries too.
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 here's a link to the podcast episode if you want to give it a listen. It will inform a lot to the discussion taking place here and help you understand a few of the things he said that are probably now wrong: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang
If they don't need NVIDIA then why is the now former CEO of NVIDIA trying so hard to allow exprt controls to be relaxed.
And it's because brute forcing only allows you to not fall behind, but you can't catch up to frontier models or surpass.
Let's assume for a second that the compromat story on Huang is true, how much would that have cost? It could be everywhere from 10k to 10m $, depending on how difficult it was to get access, but it would still be a rounding error for AI invest.
Chips aren't what maketh SI anyway. The US is ahead because of a trifecta of having the best (most) hardware, best data, and best talent. You might also throw in business culture. But the same way Google is leading from behind in the US AI eco system, China is behind the frontier on LLMs, but laying foundational work in robotics, multi-modal models and integrated factories that might prove a big advantage down the line.
WSJ reports that U.S. intelligence says Chinese intelligence approached Alice to become an asset after she met Jensen in March 2024. So, she was an opportunistic info source, not targeted in advance.
Unbeknownst to them, the Russian was actually at that time trying to make contact with western intelligence, as he was keen to defect! He was just a bit too awkward to respond to flirting.
He did eventually manage to defect to Britain, and died in 2025. His name was Oleg Gordievsky.
That said, I don't have any special insight into the specifics of who was driving the demand backing Megaspeed.
One other little crack in the dike. Was Sam Altman saying regular computer users shouldn’t have memory all memory should be allocated to data centers.
What will be the third crack in the dike?
Now that I explained it in detail for you, shall we move on to addition and subtraction? Or do you need a short pause because your head is hurting you?
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 don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure.
It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.
Cheating on your wife of 40 years OTOH...
But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught.
Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes.
If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue.
Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue.
I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality.
It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it.
But then it would be the thing that is sanctioned that is the immoral activity, not the breaking of a sanction, right?
It's like you said, unlawful != immoral.
It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p
Unless you're saying that disloyalty and betrayal are not issues of morality.
It's very interesting to read here that Jensen is immoral for betraying his wife but not for betraying his country.
IMO it's not a terribly strong case to make while Boeing sells whole jetliners to China, but the law was put in place for both moral and practical reasons.
In this case, though, I think Huang just believed these sanctions were the wrong move, and would end up long-term helping China and hurting the US. Which is fair to believe, but believing a law is counterproductive doesn't give you immunity if you break it.
This is a significant philosophical point.
The thing about that Lord Moulton said is that there are a bunch of things that are wrong that are not illegal, and we have to do that because people have to be capable of self-control. Patrick Deneen, in . . . The Failure of Liberalism said that he thinks liberalism is failing because it has come to the view that anything that is not illegal is moral.
What if he "believed fidelity was the wrong move" and that he'd end up divorced eventually anyways?
When is disloyalty and dishonesty immoral?
They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality.
People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck.
Jensen Huang cheated on his wife AND conspired to evade arms control regulations, but he's still a genius.
Since NVDA had such a flat corporate structure with Huang having ~60 direct reports, I expect that the company will be lost for a period of time as they try to get their bearings. This is an opportunity for AMD, INTC and others.
Ma Bell without the anti-trust (yet!).
Let's be clear, she is just the interim CEO (primarily because Huang neglected to ever even start a transition plan) while NVidia searches for a permanent CEO. The names I've seen floated are Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, and Ian Buck, the creator of CUDA.
Let's expect better of leadership than to be criminal.
Jensen has two core points:
- stopping selling NVidia chips to China isn't going to stop China developing AI
- stopping NVidia selling to China will ultimately ceed US leadership in chips as Nvidia's commercial edge is as much about the dominant developer ecosystem as it is the chips per se.
ie the real risk is the default world tech stack shifts to open models on Chinese chips. End result Chinese lead in both.
He has spent his entire career competing and winning and he is being told he has to stop competing in order to achieve a goal that he knows won't actually be achieved by sacrificing NVidia.
In that scenario, where somebody is suggesting you throw away your life's work for nothing - I think anybody would be animated.
Nvidia thrived because it paired great hardware with great software.
AMD and Intel think hardware is enough; it’s not. There’s a reason neither has ever been able to compete with Nvidia.
They have a giant ego, but I’d argue it’s probably well deserved.
Apple is/was similar. They also see that hardware without great software is useless. Spend as much; if not more on software to make your hardware shine.
Another thing is wrong was thinking that Apple should run in and build some type of AI model that’s proving to be well wrong the only thing in Apple’s way right now is memory. certainly isn’t money, and they certainly have the talent and house to fix the memory problem. The question is whether or not they have the will to do so.
No one equals Apple at this point in time when it comes to seamlessly integrating multiple devices in a useful way. Be it a desktop computer, laptop a smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, Apple Vision, AirPods with each iteration, once again in comparison to their competition, they seem to have the best hand at this time.
Memory cost is the biggest problem Apple has right now and it’s not like they don’t lack the money and with the Apple Silicon design group they certainly have the capability to fix it, or I should say design around it.
Yes, it might take 2 to 5 years to do it, but it’s not impossible, the main question is, do they have the will? And they’ve certainly shown it when it comes to processors, GPUs, modems, and other support chips that they can execute over time.
They may not execute on what you want or what I want, but in comparison to their competition, who is out there right now that can combine both the software and the hardware at a high level across the board?
You can say it was luck but it was definitely not "average".
Yeah, it pretty much does. CUDA is why they are positioned where they are. Other players like AMD and Intel could have done that, but they didn't, and if they had, they wouldn't have persevered for 10+ years with essentially nothing to show for it.
Whether CUDA will continue to maintain dominance is less clear. It may become a literal victim of its own success, as CUDA-based models gain the ability to migrate themselves to new platforms.
He may not have 'invented' CUDA but he saw the potential and gave it resources to be created and continually developed.
How many "CUDA-like" ideas have be squashed at other companies by leaders that don't see the potential or are willing to take a multi-year loss?
IMO, it's like SpaceX vs other rocket companies - especially Blue Origin.
Bezos, at least at first, had just as much money if not more than Musk. So why did SpaceX do so much better than them and every other rocket company. I despise Musk personally, and he's generally not as smart as he makes himself out to be - but there is something there he does differently than others in his position, some with similar resources as he does as well.
Western companies have had that problem. when the visionary CEO bites the dust. I think the Eastern companies are even more susceptible.
Note: Nvidia is the very definition of a one trick company I think they were in trouble long-term no operating system, Microsoft is in trouble in the other direction. No real in-house hardware ability. Long-term you have to have the ability of both in-house to adjust and iterate over the long haul with the changing conditions in tech.
You can criticize his recent question actions all you want, but you can’t believe he is “average”.
Due to sanctions there’s one Chinese company that seems to have become a multi-dimensional company we won’t know for sure for another two years.
Being a vertical computer company appears to be coming back in style bring on the 1980s. early 1990s.
Nvidia is a highly technical company we’re gonna find out how important Jensen really was to that company tech wise?
And if you look closely at their company, what have they really innovated on over the last five or six years? from a distance, like Intel, it seems like they just turn up the juice/Wattage in short, they are just cruising along.
It clearly didn't - don't you remember the Deepseek launch where it came as a rude shock that the much vaunted concept of a compute capacity moat was blown away?
He kept repeating that while he made the best chips, computer science was more important.
Unless it's like super far in, if this counts as heated then I just don't know what you expect.
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.
If the sale is not about money or share price then maybe it's ideological.
Money is like oxygen. If you deny oxygen/money to the Chinese chip market, they can't grow as fast. By supplying China with chips, all the money will go back to the US and not enough money will go to Chinese chip manufacturers to help them advance the way Nvidia can.
This is what Jensen was saying and he is 100% correct here. The chip ban to China will really help them catch up because the money will recirculate since they have no choice but to buy Chinese chips, and in the end it will make them much stronger.
The best way of hampering China technologically has always been about keeping them completely dependent on foreign chip supply chain, e.g. ASML, TSMC, NVDA, ARM, AVGO, INTC, etc.
If you simply ban them from getting any western chips or chip tech you simply light a viciously hot fire underneath them to develop their own TSMC equivalent and their own chip designers, and we are now seeing them catching up rapidly. In fact, they are pretty close to catching up now, basically within one or two years...
The best reason to NOT ban exports is that it really doesn't work against a peer state, and China is close enough now to count. Given the significant economic trouble in the PRC (youth unemployment, unwinding the property bubble, overproduction of EVs) the US could definitely have played this better instead of creating a vibrant full-stack domestic AI sector in China.
They hired old asml employees.
This has crashed, check the markets.
They do not need a ban to light a fire under them. The fire is already lit and burning and nothing the west can do will even slightly dampen it.
You yourself claim they are within a couple of years. If that's the case you think they will stop developing if we sell them chips? That's laughable.
The fundamental contradiction of the AI maximalists like Huang is claiming that AI does not need regulated while simultaneously supporting chip exports to China. The supporting claim for the former is that we need to compete on AI with China and move as fast as possible and every day matters, while the latter implies that slowing down their compute is inconsequential.
Keeping adversaries X-behind discourages adversaries from developing a new ecosystem since X-behind is better than building new. If an adversary with tremendous resources must recreate the ecosystem, it will be adopted by US+global companies since it will be lower margin.
If this principle were true, then autarchies like North Korea would be the most advantaged since they never have to worry about international competition in their domestic market.
Your confidence is not backed by any data or observation, it's just an unfounded inference.
I do not know full details, but China did exactly that. There were articles about limiting Nvidia chip imports more than a year ago. It really highlighted the absurdity of the export ban.
To my non-expert knowledge, the reasoning behind the export ban has never been explained beyond a vague assertion that China would do some sort of evil with AI if they have bigger GPUs than some arbitrary number of transistors, and also some silliness where paying a 15% tax made some of the GPUs safe to export. It has been pretty great for Huawei.
There are. A lot of Nvidia chips are still stuck in Hong Kong.
What the government does is not always what corporations follow.
https://nationaltechnology.co.uk/Nvidia_GPUs_Sitting_Unused_...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/u-s-commerce-secr...
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.
The audit on the main contractor for that "ballroom" must be wild. I guess that auditor is going to make a pretty penny.
Corrupt from top to bottom.
birds of a feather, and all that
cost of doing business. kiss the ring, get the blessing, make fat stacks -- illegally.
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.
You're just NOW noticing that we have lost the rule of law?? The constitution has been continuously violated for over 100 years, we are clearly a post-constitutional republic? I guess? I think we entered full clown world in the 2000's where the currency, government and war systems started glitching out.
What I am noticing is that the high trust society we inherited has finally eroded to the point that we no longer tell ourselves that we have rules and laws that are equally (or sanely) applied.
Which is a good, scales dropping from eyes, innocence ending sort of thing. Makes me hopeful for change, in a way.
https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/trump-lutnick-nvidia-china-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...
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.
Is the problem that Nvidia was not making it as hard as it should have?
Realistically, how much does that even matter?
There's is no argument to be had about this specifically. You can argue whether this is true or not, but that's not relevant to this subject. If Nvidia still decides to ignore the government, it'd be not only completely, absolutely fair, to nationalize the corporation, but the country itself has a duty to its citizens to do such thing.
China should have infiltrated ASML, not much they can do without them until they get the blueprints. Unlikely they aren't doing it already.
these are actual weapons, does anyone use GPUs to kill humans?
There is more spelunking to that situation, but that's a different thread.
US congresspersons and international media outlets condemned the use of AI warfare against Iran, including the Department of Defense's (DoD) Project Maven—a target tagging system integrating elements of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Anthropic's Claude large language model.
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.
Particularly in the current political moment, saying essentially "we were using high demand in a market we can't legally sell in to increase prices for American customers" is not a good look.
(Yes,obviously, not all of this is Nvidia's doing, and demand at this volume through smuggling/front companies would still affect the legitimate market. But being an active participant in it is not a good look.)
OK sure .. obviously sleeping with Chinese agent is a security issue .. very bad .. but Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense. In fact, it is counterproductive because it closes a huge market to Nvidia and makes China less reliant on US Tech - forcing them to accelerate development of homegrown GPU business.
If Nvidia was skirting the law, then they should held accountable for that.
If Nvidia merely held a position that the particular law is, say, counter-productive and lobbied against it (but followed it) - what's illegal about that?
in corporate america haha
Jensen had the ear of the President. He could have lobbied this properly.
Doing so by obscuring Nvidia’s Singapore business, failing to apply for an export license to Megaspeed, corruptly quashing a Commerce investigation into Megaspeed, all while sleeping with its leader who turned out to be a Chinese spy, and then only coming clean when the Congress flipped…I don’t know how he could have flipped the bird stronger at the American people.
I'm squarely blaming the federal admin for this. Lutnick and Rubio both knew about this way ahead of time, and their negligence is what ended up screwing the American people over. Removing Jensen doesn't prevent this corruption, it just shuffles the blame around. Huang became the fall guy for corruption at a ludicrous scale, while Donald Trump ponders installing Tim Cook (?) as his replacement.
The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This is the Kardashian-ization of the American tech industry.
Everyone is. It's increasingly clear the administration helped Nvidia break the law [1].
But this is how corruption works. The mobster pays off the mayor to let him break the law. That doesn't mean they aren't both breaking the law.
> t just shuffles the blame around. Huang became the fall guy for corruption at a ludicrous scale
Fall guy implies innocence and the end of the line for blame. Neither looks likely with this case. Jensen wasn't innocent. And there is is bipartisan fury starting with Lutnick.
> while Donald Trump ponders installing Tim Cook (?)
I think he got this idea from a joke Kara Swisher made. In the end, Trump would love nothing more than for a media circus around Jensen's succession to distract from the above.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/12/business/nvidia-megaspeed...
Could you tell China this? Because they seem to not agree at all, given what we are seeing
It's not just NVIDIA that's extremely weak on China, the entire Executive branch is both weak and incompetent on what they claim is a chief concern, and Congress has been completely absent on the oversight role that it should be performing according to the US Constitution.
The incompetence and/or corruption is inexcusable. Teapot Dumb Scandal.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Sad day for developers.
This combines with the fact that it requires actual effort not to think China spreads propaganda regarding AI at this point, I'd rather err on the safe side.
I said the same thing a few days ago and got heavily downvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50417959
> Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. Ha! Who's going to wait until Jan? There's already a congressional hearing on Nov/18 https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/chairme...
I may sound arrogant, but I am not. Many people are a bit slow to catch on to these incidents or can't see beyond one layer, like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418215
How does it make sense that Jensen is compromised while advocating for exporting GPUs to China, which is something that primarily benefits NVIDIA (and arguably the US) while being against the Chinese interests? If he were compromised he would be like "well actually maybe I shouldn't export chips to China after all and give their domestic semiconductor industry a chance".
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-chips-pile-up-hon...
[2] https://ng.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/nvidia-ai-ch...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...
That’s not the same as China not wanting them legitimately.
As a public company its job is to sell as much stuff as possible to as many people as possible, they had every incentive, arguably a duty to advocate for exports to China. The incentive is there regardless of outside meddling.
Skirting the sanctions intentionally would be bad.
I don't really buy that. China was already like Nvidia's #2 or #3 market. It didn't take a Chinese agent to convince him that he wanted to sell to China.
but china refused to buy nvidia chips
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-12/china-urg...
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.
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?
This is obviously something that has been postponed for after the midterms.
I think NVIDIA lose more things by firing Jensen.
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.
It is far far worse than that - he lied to shareholders.
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.
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.
My god, the god complex
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?
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.
* — 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.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal
I'm rather confident that you would not be able to do that.
However, I'm also confident that instead of doing that you'll continue spreading information that is now obsolete and incorrect: in your original post you said that Musk has a bot, but when confronted with the current state of affairs continue to cite Wikipedia about what Musk had a year ago.
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.
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
According to who?
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
Hah. He doesn't have a prenup. That's going to lead to serious enough consequences for him in divorce court.
For someone not familiar with American law: How the fuck is that a bigger problem than the Chinese spy ?
Is there any explicit rules at NVidia forbidding that in a code of conduct somewhere ?
You really think Nvidia would let Huang go (without a replacement matching his skills, experience and knowledge in the field) because he cheated with an employee? It is the spy affair while Huang promoted an open export policy.
Plus thanks to Huang, Nvidia is now under investigation by federal agencies.
None of them care about a CEO cheating.
Also, being fired from the company you founded is a serious consequence.
A famous guy had an island and it was extrajudicially a place where alot of powerful people internationally could come to his island and interchange info and ideas and make deals and things could occur and he collected up all that kind of stuff, including arms deals and the sex stuff.
But Americans are only right now aware of the sex stuff in what he collected up.
The sex stuff is essentially a distraction, the oily film on the deeper ocean of truth.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
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.
If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
I know it's just speculation, but the fact that Nvidia hasn't tried to scapegoat some random compliance officer strongly suggests to me that Jensen did know, and that the board has seen the paper trail that proves it.
...maybe. Or maybe not. Consistency in application of the law is not exactly at an all-time high right now.
What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.
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.
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
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.
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.
> Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration
(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.
Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?
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.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.
Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
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".
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.
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.
People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.
Remind me: when did Huang direct NVDA funds to the Trump ballroom fund?
If the second affair didn’t come out, this wouldn’t be a discussion.
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.
The more sane explanation is that Jensen Huang just wanted to capture more revenue.
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.
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.
wong?
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?
That suggests no treason.
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.
dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open 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
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Of course, but perception matters.
Lots of this has been known since may, and it sounds like the president was informed she was a spy a year ago.
One wonders if this happened now since the Dems took control of the investigation bodies.
If they had not, would they have kept right on as is?
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Sad day for developers.
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
Interesting times
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got redirected or forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
> ban for national security reasons
These don't sound like they are on the same order of magnitude in terms of severity?
Mr. Huang, you’ve admitted that you violated Nvidia’s policy on relations with subordinates. Why should we believe you were faithful to Nvidia’s policy of compliance with national security export controls?
I don't think that is the least bit difficult for a board to ignore.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
Allows the influence of selection of next CEO that is more aligned with long term Chinese goals. Or punishment for not going along with the plan.
Im not much for conspiracy theories, but if you think about it, in the state that US is in, there is absolutely zero chance US will do anything retaliatory to China if they do spy shit on US soil. China is basically free to play spy games. My guess is that they have their fingers in Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, SpaceX, and AMD, and probably other agents within NVIDIA in high places.
Their game is basically rearrange the pieces so eventually China becomes the world number one superpower, while keeping the status quo as much as possible
bipartisan bill[1] needed to decapitate[2] opposition[3] to expanded controls/moratoria and install “neutral” caretakers[4] until passage
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/09/10/2026/bipartisan-ai-saf...
[2] https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2120745928722087948
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035303
[4] current CFO Kress or former Apple CEO Tim Cook (suggested by president in social media post)
This was blatantly obvious. Do we really think Malaysia was using Billions in GPUs on some secret AI project?
I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.
Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.
Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Nov 8 : Jensen issues apology. NVIDIA allows him to use nvidia.com for this
Nov 8 : The Board of Directors publicly backs him up with a "vote of confidence" by stating: *"no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that "The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team."* -- from https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-nvidia-board-of-directors
Nov 11 : 2nd affair gets exposed in the news
Nov 11 evening : emergency meeting of Board of Directors is called to fire Jensen Huang
Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.
Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
Yeah, this seems likely. It's also quite possible that he not only "didn't come totally clean" but outright lied to the board i.e. "this was a one-time thing"
Powerful interests want Nvidia to change directions and my guess is that they didn’t think that would happen under Jensen.
Nvidia’s Board is not a list of power players. They were, until now, largely pliant to Jensen. They flipped because they saw what everyone outside Silicon Valley did—that they personally, and Nvidia broadly, would pay the price for Jensen’s failures and potential crimes if his brand wasn’t severed from Nvidia’s.
So no, it's not literally about his sex life, but pretending like that doesn't factor into the whole things seems like a very strange point for people to keep making. It may not be that 90% of the cause is "he had sex out of his marriage" but it's also not 0% (it surely doesn't make him a "good leader(tm)" if he's having sex with subordinates)
- July 25: Amid the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP publicly stated that Hayward had the board's full support.
- July 27: BP formally announced that Hayward would step down as CEO, with Robert Dudley replacing him.
Similar situations with Bob Chapek, Travis Kalanick, the Boeing CEO in 2019 when all those crashes were happening, Carol Bartz, Bob Diamond...
I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.
My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it. From all appearances, NVidia was playing ball with the Trump administration. He was a frequent ally of President Trump, Trump supposedly knew about this information for the last year and sat on it, and even the CIA leaks that started it stressed how much Huang had praised the Trump administration. Reportedly they had already voluntarily stopped exports to MegaSpeed [2] as of June 2025. China, however, has a lot more to gain from his departure. It's going to harm NVidia very severely: reportedly he's very hands-on, "the conductor that makes a very complex operation work", and as a founder the whole knowledge pyramid that the company is based upon rests with him. If they want their domestic hardware industry to surpass NVidia, the easiest way to do that is to take out NVidia leadership.
I suspect that he was compromised by both the CIA and CCP, and with tensions rising between them, eventually found a situation where they each wanted him to do different things, and he couldn't satisfy both. Likely the CIA got wind that the CCP was going to move with their leverage, and published to stave that off. This also has the nice side benefit for U.S. power of letting the other side know the extent to which the CIA knows what you're doing, and showing that even the CEO of the richest company on earth is not immune to U.S laws. But it's still a net negative to U.S. power to have Huang out as CEO of NVidia, simply because it's such a net negative to NVidia. This is only a desirable outcome if he's going to be ousted anyway, or if he is otherwise compromised to become a Chinese puppet.
I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes. First affair, okay, it could be an indiscretion that happened in the past, cut ties and do damage control. But if there's a second (and third and fourth and many others?) affair and everybody knows about it, it becomes impossible for Huang to lead the company because everybody has so much leverage on him.
No they don't. They just lost access to Nvidia chips that they still rely on (even if not said out in the open). Alibaba's stock tanked on the news for example.
> I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes.
The role was to get the agenda off spying and export (the things you'd go to jail for)
They would prefer their companies buy local, as it will advance their local semiconductor infrastructure.
However, these companies would prefer Nvidia if they are allowed. All the advances in the past few years are due to advanced chips being restricted, so they had to step up.
They already do. Local produces maybe >5% of the volume needed. It's NOT prefer or not. It just doesn't exist.
Some people believe that the key moat for AI is the model, and under this model (hah) torpedoing NVidia would be bad for China and good for the U.S. because they won't have access to cutting-edge NVidia hardware for model-training. Other people believe the key moat for AI is the hardware, and under this model torpedoing NVidia would be good for China because it'd allow Chinese hardware makers to catch up and bad for the U.S. because it destroys our key competitive advantage.
Interesting that a policy decision depends so heavily on a question of fact, but that isn't unique to this issue. (I suspect that left and right would agree on abortion if they could agree on whether personhood begins at conception or birth, but they don't, so). There's also an element of time preferences here too: it's likely that model training is dominant now, but hardware will be dominant when you project out a few years, and so both factions could be right but on different timescales.
Exactly my read as well. "If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two."
After they caught him in a lie, they may not have been able to not fire him.
More seriously, I was also curious. A quick search seems to say the earliest recent source is https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
https://nypost.com/2026/11/12/business/ousted-nvidia-ceo-jen...
First, polyamory has been gaining popularity. But a lot of poly people I've met keep that strictly secret, because their friends and family wouldn't understand and would judge them harshly.
Second, the problem isn't that he slept with someone other than his wife (we don't know what kind of agreements they have in place, and ENM is a thing in 2026). It's that he slept with a subordinate. And that's a real problem due to the power differential that exists between him and his employees.
So it's not the second affair per se, but bad judgement. Dating at companies should only happen parallel in the hierarchy, not up or down.
What I'm pushing back on is the notion that someone should be judged simply for fucking someone who isn't his wife. There's a reason people keep ENM agreements a secret, due to the judgmental attitude from the public at large.
Hopefully alternative lifestyles will become normalized to the point where our descendants in 30 years will look back on us with the same disappointment that we look back in 1996 gay marriage laws.
ENM among older couples is particularly common. But sure, it's always possible that Jensen was just cheating on his wife without consent. The thing to watch for is whether his wife has expressed unhappiness publicly about the situation. Notice that in articles like https://archive.is/Ubg4k they'll do everything but ask her how she feels. Or if they have, it's possible she's refused to say anything on the topic. That silence means something, and we don't know what. So hold off on the judgments until we have confirmation that she's actually unhappy with it.
This isn't a story about the sex
It's normal for B2B companies screen for this before you even get a demo.
For a lot of people, it's about the sex. In fact if you only read the first paragraph, you'd come away thinking it was solely about the sex.
At least on HN the sentiment is more nuanced though, which is good.
That seems to be the most natural guess based on public information, but it's equally plausible that the board knows more than the public already, whether because they drove investigations, received disclosures from Huang, or received insider tips once the heat started rising. Trust aside, they may already might know worse and more materially or legally impactful things.
That's the kind of thing that a healthy class of professional journalists can help uncover and trace in a way that our post-journalism world is losing the opportunity to do. Even still, I wouldn't be surprised if further scandals for Huang or Nvidia started being reported in coming days and weeks. You might be right that it was just too many sex scandals and general loss of trust, but we just can't expect to know yet.
Reports are just breaking that this is indeed the case.
If we're just going to be purely speculative anyway, it could be the case Jensen is the one who himself leaked the 2nd affair, in order to continue this distraction strategy.
I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of the info we have on this is Jensen's PR. 1) Anonymous "leak" tweets are all PR agency slop -- real jouranalist scoopers would take credit to draw attention to themselves. 2) Any Federal investigators aren't going to say 1 word to the public. Ergo, it was always Jensen trying to keep the narrative on his affairs.
And if you want to be TRULY conspiratorial about it, perhaps one or both of the affairs never existed, only the smuggling.
There are certain lines CEOs of this level absolutely cannot cross, and a relationship with a subordinate is one of them. Hiding it, putting the entire company at risk for it, a board can’t trust a ceo that puts their extramarital dalliances ahead of the company’s interest.
Chips to China, on the other hand, is in the company’s interest. That’s what lawyers and lobbyists are for, and when they behave enough, that’s also what “rockstar” CEOs are for.
Jensen got too big for his leather jacket. Simple as.
If someone has been: 1. Managing the company well 2. Attracting and retaining good talent 3. Making money for shareholders 4. Building strong company fundamentals
Then forcing a resignation over this seems... odd. I was under the impression that barring this infidelity, Huang was one of the more sane tech CEOs. I feel like I could to literally any other CEO (Zuckerburg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Gates, Jobs) that have done something equally bad or worse, and haven't had to resign.
But in the big picture, isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?
Plus possible other events known to the board but not us. We’ll know eventually.
If an exec is lying about this, what else might they be lying about? Embezzlement? Corruption?
All 42,000 employees should be held to the same standard, otherwise you will end up with all kinds of problems within the company.
Company leadership should lead by example as well.
The problem is that Jensen destroyed Nvidia's plausible deniability.
The second affair with an employee likely just dealt a death blow (if it hadn't already been dealt) to Jensen in terms of his ability to ride the crisis out.
If our own government officials can't face justice, why should the CEO of a company?
If an executive suddenly starts wearing a leather jacket, watch out!
He controlled the trade and price for a global asset more valuable than gold as a single person. Some people didn't want that, it's that simple.
It's just unlikely that an affair would nuke his CEO's position.
Is rumor and conjecture enough?
In 50 years from now, some declassified documents will maybe shed light on this specific incident.
I would imagine it being a form of "So, China, we'll let our Jensen guy sell you X in chips, and in return, you do Y in relation to Russia, and Z in relation to Taiwan. Oh, and we need to use one of your spies, in case someone f*cks up".
Plus the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that the lady is a spy. All media report anonymous sources but treat the allegations as fact. Singapore said their investigation of the lady is not to spying, but no western media picked up that story. The lady traveled to Taiwan with her Hong Kong passport, and the Taiwanese govt also said they have no evidence she's a spy. Despite all this, the public still treats the spy allegations as a fact.
Jenssen Huang is a victim. Those who wanted to get rid of him and set this up, have succeeded. But everyone is under the mistaken belief that this hurts China somehow. China doesn't give a damn.
Nvidia is a profitmaxxing company in a profitmaxxing economy and so it is going to profitmaxx; the criticism should lie with the US government: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/republican-senator-urges...
original article: https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/bessent-lutnick-megaspeed-n...
full article: https://archive.is/tAVBq
* Megaspeed was evading US sanctions against China
* Megaspeed CEO was a Chinese state agent
* Huang was sleeping with Megaspeed CEO
Therefore, one of the following must be true:
(1) [Unlikely] Huang knowingly supported the evasion of sanctions. If so, he should be fired for breaking the law.
(2) Huang was tricked. If so, his judgement is now suspect.
Huang's argument is (2). In this case, the evalaution of his judgement is:
(A) Is this a one-off mistake? If so, he should be retained - he's human.
(B) Is this a pattern? If so, he should be fired - he's an ongoing risk (e.g., via regulatory action).
Huang resigned because the second affair indicated (B) - he's an ongoing risk.
As a result, the question of "who knew what when" is actually beside the point. Retaining Huang risks ongoing, overwhelming government action for evading sanctions - and the board members want 0 personal liability in that investigation.
I used to work at a company where the sanction was around something mundane like Excel or something, and we had to make it an urgent priority to ban all users from Russia to access ... spinning the wheel ... our spreadsheet functionality.
My co-workers and I found it funny that US decided to ban Russia from using an online Excel-like functionality.
A multi-billion dollar deal in Singapore would absolutely require some folks to physically go out there and do some inventory at the very least. It needs to be in the realm of, "We walked the data center and counted how many of our products were installed and we were shown their yet-installed inventory" documentation. "It matches what we sold them." A great big, fancy report. With pictures.
How much would that cost? Basically nothing compared to how much trouble they could get in for not doing that due diligence. Compare how much it would've cost against how much their stock just dropped.
Because the woman he has an affair with happens to run a shell company that funnels chips to China and skirts the export ban. What a coincidence, huh?
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that.
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.
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.
The demand for high-ram consumption applications is higher than ever and rising. That demand is not created by nvidia, but nvidia's customers. nvidia's customers are buying nvidia parts built with other's ram because they have customers renting the compute.
Whoever nvidia is buying ram from will simply sell to the next highest bidder, and the ram will still be sold out through the coming years.
If the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise.
RAM prices are a result of skyrocketing demand. That's hardly a fever dream.
You can hardly blame RAM suppliers for taking the money of people who are coming to them begging to pay more than the person before them in line. It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket.It's the customers who are willing trying to pay more for better access. The innovations and the price of RAM are so non-sequitur at this point; I can't understand what point you're making. Sure, if RAM were as easy to get as the circuit boards they're being put on, innovation would be the same (or accelerated!) but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that RAM is incredibly supply constrained and ramping production to meet the demand of a seemingly insatiable market takes a long time for a product this complicated and specialized.
If any of the manufacturing companies could have seen this coming, they'd have started ramping production to insane levels 5 years ago, and they'd be taking in just as much money as Nvidia is.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/ram-crisis-one...
"The lawsuit also points towards similar collusion between the companies in the past. In 2005, SK Hynix and Samsung were fined $180 million and $300 million respectively after pleading guilty to price-fixing DRAM pricing. It is suggested that the same occurred between 2016 and 2018 when prices spiked again, ..."
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).
What type of person are you referring to?
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?
Respectfully, I don't engage with conspiracy theorists
This is, frankly, an outlandish statement.
> Behaves like a fool, risks national security to get his dick wet, has unethical affair with subordinate.
> The problem is that people like this get held accountable for their misdeeds instead of being left to do what they want!
No. They have the same 24 hour day as you and I. They think at the same speed and talk at the same speed. Their "workload" whatever it may be, is finite, evidently finite enough to juggle several romatic relationships at the same time, with much actual work and decisionmaking delegated and informed by domain experts who will be there no matter the CEO.
So yes, you or I could in fact be CEO of NVIDIA. It would be easy. Reports would be made for us by the worlds experts in the fields on what is going on. Departments would be ran by the best available talent on earth. My emails are being read and written by a dozen plus secretaries. Every presser I make I have an ivy league grad writing me the speech making me look like Hemingway out there. Every decision I'd make informed by a team of experts. Every plan thought of already by a hundred people smarter than me. All we'd have to do in the role as NVIDIA CEO is smile, waive, and read the lines handed to us on the sheet of paper by someone else. The ship runs itself even though we all pretend it's the CEO paddling 24/7 making it possible.
Really, that's all any of these guys are doing. Very similar to say the job of a pop star. Are you charismatic? Can you read lines? You'd make a great CEO then.
"We" don't. Media narratives over-focus on individuals and personalities because that's what humans focus on.
Markets can overreact emotionally on daily headlines and weekly narratives but tend to correct quarter to quarter. There's lots of data and examples: Apple after Jobs, Microsoft after Gates, etc. Even after losing iconic, long-time leaders, most industry-leading companies continue to make even more money, more profitably than ever over the following decade.
> That's what humans focus on.
I struggle to understand what narrative you're correcting here. "We" in this context seems to collectively mean "humanity". Markets, media narratives, etc. are all run by humans. That's "us", whether or not you personally want any of the blame/credit.
He has no magic, but he did make some good strategic decisions.
Everyone is a god and a genius (in retrospect) if they found a multi-trillion dollar company, but the causation seldom runs that way.
Jobs founded Apple to great success, left and failed then returned to Apple to great success, then he died and Apple was fine. The company is more important than the individual. Nvidia will also be fine.
And clearly the US economy doesn't rest on the shoulders of Nvidia or AI, no matter the level of hype.
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.
Absolutely correct. That's why I mentioned the niche in my comment.
But no bubble ever has been predominately detractors.
So online discourse doesn't matter much.
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.
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
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
This is demonstrably untrue. Jensen is an engineer through and through, and contributed significantly to Nvidia's early accelerators: from the NV1, at least to the earliest GeForces.
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.
I dont get how you can talk about the "hacker spirit" but then talk about "late-stage capitalism" (essentially the flat-earthism of economy) and tech founders.
> An engineer who singlehandedly created one of the most valuable companies on earth
Nvidia has 42k employees.
Nvidia chips are not the only chips AI runs on. Google for example runs everything on their own TPU's.
I don't know how you can talk so much out of your ass. Simping for billionaires is not "hacker spirit".
Can you elaborate on why you think not a single aspect of late stage capitalism is true in any capacity, like flat-earthism?
Anti-capitalists appealing to bourgeoisie values in their zeal to destroy a capitalist icon is pretty freakin' rich.
Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.
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.
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)
Nonsense. Nvidia's employees created that value, not Jensen. Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created, just like in every other company. CEO worship is absurd.
Like it's an extremely common sentiment when working for a large company to look at the SVP or CEO and go "that person is a dumbass, everyone in charge is a dumbass". Yet when looking at other companies somehow we forget about that and put the companies success on the CEO or top level execs. Instead of remembering "no, it's probably the small army below them figuring out how to manage upwards to prevent the idiot in charge from tanking everything"
Tell me you know nothing about running a company without telling me. Just because one CEO got caught screwing over a Chinese spy that doesn't mean all CEOs are useless people. That's just lazy generalization.
Edit: Guess I am arguing with a bot lol
It took the corporate structure and top-down direction decision ATTRIBUTABLE TO JENSEN to allow them to work so productively together.
Leadership matters. Labor Talent is only able to operate at 10% effectiveness with shitty leaders in place.
CEOs in large companies do not play a role like that.
I prefer the view that the engineers that made GPUs have a bigger hand in the value creation.
If you think about that for 2 seconds you'll see that this is just wrong?
I agree: we must do everything we possibly can to aggrandize the already wealthy and powerful. The glory must accumulate in their account, and the less that goes to their subordinates, the better.
Besides, individual contributors aren't incentivized to innovate insofar as we're not structurally positioned to capture a windfall.
I recognize the narrative that an army of world-class engineers is essentially inert until an executive visionary breathes purpose into them, but that's a structural property of the firm. It's a choice to route all surplus through the board and major shareholders, and to starve out any innovation that happens outside of those venues.
That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
A lot of people play crucial roles in a company. HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation.
If you've ever been in a company with poor leadership and one with great leadership, you'd see the impact of it on everyone working there and on the value being created.
Yup, all of it. And at no point have I considered myself as 10,000x more valuable than any of the team members I led. Yet that's exactly what is done to billionaire CEOs.
You'll notice I did not say Jensen didn't create ANY value.
Critical / hard decisions are worth more than just a manager telling / trusting his team to execute on x,y,z task.
Do you know for sure that Jensen personally was involved in recruiting Ian Buck and starting up the CUDA project? A project that's largely attributed to John Nickolls? What other major decisions did Nvidia even make over the last, say, 15 years?
The children yearn for a tyrant I guess.
Not sure about HR TBH
>That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
I can assure you that the people you are targeting the question at, have never/rarely done any of the things you asked. I call them the socialists. They sit in judgment of people who do things while they lead their petty lives and all they look forward is the next Superbowl game, or next Netflix series.
(p.s you might like the writings of author by name Ayn Rand, Disclaimer: I'm no worshiper of Rand)
Pumping billions of dollars, the source of which is obscured, into it looks like a cut out, is not just a national security problem. It undermines confidence in the numbers that you claim are the basis of shareholder value.
That's incredibly unlikely. NVidia and Megaspeed's relationship has been under constant separate parallel investigations by the Justice and Commerce Depts going back to the Biden administration. There have been no charges and Megaspeed was never even added to the blocked Entities List which would instantly ban all sales, despite the US govt being free to do so at any time with no justification or explanation needed.
It appears two things are simultaneously true:
- Thousands of banned GPUs were diverted to China.
- NVidia meticulously verified export licenses and complied with every U.S. law, export control and KYC regulation.
The under-reported fact is that while the US Govt chose not to add Megaspeed to the banned list, NVidia voluntarily placed Megaspeed on their own blocklist and stopped selling GPUs to them in June 2025. This was because the law requires NVidia to block any company they "know or reasonably suspect" is violating export controls. There is an extensive framework of Red Flags a supplier is required to check and certify are 'cleared'. The penalties for failing to do so are the same as violating export controls on cruise missiles (up to 20 years in jail, $1M per GPU ). And they can apply personally to each employee who knew. So, NVidia cut off one of their largest South Asian customers ~18 months ago, despite Jensen banging the customer's board member.
No, I can't explain it either. But those are the facts per WSJ & NYT reporting. The meta-subtext here is there have been two opposing factions on China policy inside the White House, NSC, and U.S. intelligence community since the Biden era. They are each constantly trying to sway Trump, who vacillates between them (as seen by inconsistent US policy swings). One of those factions leaked the 6 month-old Alice story a week ago in the hope of blocking Jensen's influence and access to Trump. It worked (probably better than expected). Now that Jensen is both out of NVidia and politically toxic, neither faction cares about him.
Unless you are a subsistence farmer, everything you have in your life is thanks to the economy and "shareholder value".
Its strange to me how many people will say stuff like "who cares about the economy, I care about people" when the economy is the thing that ensures people have food and shelter and dont starve.
No it's not, shareholder value as understood as owning a piece of a publicly traded company doesn't produce anything on its own and it's definitely independent of the economy of a society. Could even be argued that the wealth stuck in the shareholder value is reducing the investments that could be being made in the interest of the rest of the economy.
I can easily make something and sell it to you without creating shareholder value.
No one is talking about anything being easy or redefining a market (which, since you bring it up, has been done infinite times by private and state funded companies as well)
It's not just a chip company. Those trillions of value represent bets across the entire economy. When the casino goes bankrupt, all bets are off.
Also you act like those bets were group / government decisions. They weren’t my bets. They were NVIDIA’s bets. Equity holders should lose value if the bet fails - that will not be most of the economy by a long shot. The stock market is not the economy. The Casino should not have existed in the first place at the scale it did. This is the correction everyone has been talking about when discussing “bubbles”
> This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.
Tell that to Intel's ex-CEO.
Again, credit for putting yourself in the position to capitalize. Credit for executing. But it's pretty likely that the world would not be substantially different if Nvidia has been another company and Jensen was some guy working at MS.
They basically invested in pickaxes a decade before the gold rush, and people only found out about the gold because pickaxes were pretty convenient
The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.
I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".
The market has reacted this way for a reason - Nvidia share prices fell a lot over the past few days.
If the espionage probe was serious (and it was known about in intelligence circles going back as much as a year), it would be handle much differently, with charges brought agains him or his company being sanctioned.
Many people could just say the exact opposite of your sentence, i.e. "not a disqualification" and "can still be trusted". Furthermore, These people could supply many historical examples of leaders who did similar things and went on to remain great/effective leaders of the things they were charged to lead.
It may not be a fact per se, but in the United States it is widely agreed upon that romantic relationships with subordinates is a big no-no from an ethics perspective (due to power dynamics and high potential for abuse), in addition to being a serious liability for the company.
With a sane administration that hadn't possibly looked the other way due to emoluments (allegedly), maybe. Who knows what the response will be from the current mob (gentle pun intended).
It’s also absurd that you’d think this is totally fine when the smart shareholders will be suing Nvidia for their malfeasance in evading export controls and incompetence in making sure their CEO doesn’t violate sexual harassment laws
There is no doubt that his sexscapades were stupid, but at the same time there is only one question that should matter for the board. Will the shareholders make more money with him or without?
Sure, but his selling into China might be criminal. Or would you also excuse criminal behavior that's profitable?
But do they know more material information that we would all agree makes this not a hysterical witch hunt I don’t think we can be so confident about that.
Even if their information comes from American security personnel that should still be taken with the grain of salt.
We all remember Iraq, don’t we?
Supreme Court disagrees that a company is required “only required to maximize shareholder value”, do you have any evidence to support your claim otherwise?
[0]https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/13-354.ht...
I think "can we trust this person to act in the best interests of this company?" is a more accurate question
I don't think these scandals are in NVidias best interest, and the hits the share value have taken seem to support that
"He created so much shareholder value."
"Unlike Elon he shared the wealth with the company."
"The US is worse off without him."
I'm sorry but a patsy who is this gullible, or a CCP-friendly traitor that is this slimy (the jury is still out), should not be in this position of power.
Cool for all he accomplished so far. This isn't a situation that deserves a second chance.
If you want Exhibit A for the moral corruption of Silicon Valley’s culture, this is it. And it’s not tied to shareholdings. It’s the quasi-monarchic strain of worship that has been poisoning Valley culture for at least a decade now.
Meanwhile we have a felon in the white house (sexual assault) among an immeasurable number of other supposed crimes
Ah yes. Being gay disqualified you from security clearance. Why? Because if you are gay, then you can be blackmailed. Why? Because you might lose your security clearance.
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.
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
The comparison was drawn because when you are such a position of power, your actions have such a monumental sway. Thousands, millions of people’s of lives are impacted, for better or for worse. In Jensen’s case, that’s up to the court of public opinion.
However the thinking is that when you are in that position, a just and fair society would probably want to keep just and fair and morally tact people in those positions.
IMHO I don’t care what way you want to spin it, when you have that level of influence over one of the major drivers of the AI boom, you have INCREDIBLE power compared to what most people think of when you say “private citizen”.
My buddies and I were just talking about how Jensen is probably one of the MOST liked amongst all the leading big tech CEO/Owners. I feel like the amount of grace this thread is giving him is proof of that.
I don’t understand how that’s comparable to the perception of Musk.
Are you sure you are not over reacting?
These tech CEOs hold a lot of influence and power. Thus they hold a lot of responsibility and must be held accountable. Point blank.
The man is smart enough to know he was playing with fire, and he got burned. The literal definition of FAFO.
The thing he did that was actually wrong was that the NVIDIA executive he was in a sexual relationship with was herself married. That is actually wrong, that’s not “playing with fire”, that’s simply wrong.
And just to be clear in practice, stocks are not priced based on their voting rights but rather expectations of their future cash flows (dividends) or simply how much the stock is expected to go up or down by. A lot of modern financial activity is nonsense.
If you really want to actually understand what a company is you should go look up when corporations became a thing and why. It had to do with various legal protections to stimulate economic activity and tax revenues.
All of these modern notions and principles that you’re invoking or basing your arguments on about ownership are most likely just contrived nonsense. These aren’t necessarily eternal principles of anything.
What is the actual value add of a “board of directors” except to basically be weak willed PMC/non founder-type people with a lot to lose reputationally and financially who can be cowed and/or blackmailed very easily.
The typical person on the board of a public company would fold to pressure as soon as they saw a NY Times reporter called their phone.
Cheating on your wife and betraying your country is the right, non authoritarian thing? We arent having this discussion for any other reason than those two events happening. Its an insane lens of entitlement to view the situation as if he should indefinitely retain ownership due to ... what? Existing? But never have any of his actions have consequences. That's the promise you make by positioning the board shares in that manner: you promise to have accountability. Finding it a weakness to answer to others for your actions is definitely a popular style of thinking amongst the current group of wanna-be authoritarians in the presidential cabinet, "strange" how your first two examples of CEOs unwaveringly align with that political faction huh?
If you are competing in a neoliberal environment where other companies play by these rules, you are at a disadvantage if you are following some superset of them.
I am not saying that he has done 100% right things, I am just saying that if he set himself up in the same way as his competitors, he would have been fine. Maybe he would have to pay some fine/bribe, similar to what the prior 2 have done for their infractions against the people.
You don't have to agree with leftists but ignoring the premise just lets you talk past the point.
The biggest questions are:
1. Did Jensen knowingly compromise national security (criminal implications) 2. What is the fallout / impact in the AI arms race
Shareholders don't care that he's having sex outside his marriage.
Government could hold him accountable, and some of those gears have been turning over the last decade. In response he has spent a lot of money trying to steer elections and gain the influence of the ones in power to try to avoid accountability from that direction as well.
The double standard is that if you play capitalism well enough you are shielded from the consequences that others would face.
shocking illegal behavior? Buying votes in an election with his 1 million per day republican votes lottery.
The list is large and clearly Elon has been much more damaging to the public than Jensen but he has spent much more to be close to politicians so no consequences for him.
Yes Elon and Zuck are abhorrent, but when they have tried to break the law, they have been held accountable in some sense. Not to the extent that they deserve it, but still.
If they become as big a libility to their businesses, even their controling shares won't save them
There’s no actual evidence that Huang broke a national security law. Even if there is, we need the federal prosecutors to say so rather than random commentators on the internet. Even when prosecutors say so in this country we presume people to be innocent until proven by court to be guilty. I have personally looked into the rumors and I don’t believe Huang broke any law.
Second, there is no proof that any moral standard is being applied at all. This could (and in my opinion likely) have nothing to do with a moral standard and more to do with extenuating information uncovered in the investigation or a strategic shift to protect against the current admin. There is likely so much happening behind the scenes and so many people have so much money to lose, I think it’s prudent for us to first exhaust all non-moral possibilities (unfortunately).
What kind of a shill are you exactly? U post a lot about China
In my eyes, this all comes down to the perception that someone is able to be compromised by non-monogamy. Jensen came out, apologized to his wife, and (at least publicly) communicated that he broke the expectations and boundaries of their relationship. This clearly communicated that a secret relationship compromises his position. And, should there be more secret relationships they'd continue to be used as leverage.
Musk isn't subject to this leverage because it's pretty clear that his relationships are not built on traditional definitions. Non-monogamy is either a clearly defined boundary in his relationship or simply not something that concerns him as leverage.
the board must know that the risk of Jensen staying on (likely due to whatever hasn't yet been brought to light) is greater than the risk of instability by firing him; whatever is unknown to us must be pretty serious (again, not in terms of more affairs, but other stuff, like selling chips to China or whatever)
Meta's board probably would have fired Zuck over the CA scandal but they were unable to because of the company structure
That's not certain. I tend to agree with you, but it is possible that the concern is for the effect on the employees. Especially the 2nd known affair is a violation of HR rules that are supposed to apply to everyone, and it's hard to argue that when you don't apply them to your CEO. By itself, I'm highly doubtful it would be enough (you can slap him on the wrist or something), but the effect on morale and company culture is a much larger concern. If people lose confidence in the company, they're more likely to jump ship, so you pay them more. And if investors lose confidence over any of this, then that's a much bigger and more expensive problem. There's a moral standard behind these types of things, even if it doesn't directly matter.
What we don't know and what really happened at the emergency board meeting are probably the key here. I'm sure there's plenty more going on that we can't see. More affairs are obviously possible, which is kind of meh until you find out who they were with and what deals they were part of.
It's even possible that Huang made the call -- it's not like he's going to escape public shaming at this point, and depending on his calculations of the repercussions, he could easily have tens of billions of dollars riding on this. He is clearly good at taking actions that maximize the market value of his company -- might this be another such action? Our armchairs aren't the best perspective from which to evaluate that.
Elon’s comparable fuck-up was betraying Ukraine with his Starlink intervention. It’s a huge deal. Unlike Nvidia, he has no Board to hold him accountable, it will have to be done by the Congress and states. (Europe will be useless as usual.)
As a result, that hammer will fall much more directly on his companies. It will just take more time to do so.
Zuckerberg, to my knowledge, hasn’t compromised American security in a comparable way to these two.
I had this exact conversation about Jensen with a Silicon Valley executive checks notes on Monday night.
There is a bubble that doesn’t seem to see the wave of contempt across the American political spectrum for these executives.
Or if they do see it they don't care. This bubble is convinced they are untouchable
If this were just the elites being out of touch, that would be one thing. It's more. There are rafts of folks–you can see them on here–who are convinced the only reason Jensen could be facing any wrath right now is because of a hare-brained conspiracy. This is honestly-felt fandom bordering on zeal.
Never said anything close to that.
I think it's horrible. And it's an issue that's gotten multiple Fortune 100 CEOs fired [1]. It's categorically distinct from corruption and compromise of national-security laws.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/12/business/nvidia-jensen-hu...
Certainly feels to me like compromising American security
Corporate governance was apparently not a strength of Mr Huang.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
He fucked a communist spy and he admitted he did it.
Not only that, everyone in his orbit was running interference for months before that on a DIFFERENT affair with a subordinate[0]. Why was everyone covering for him if there really was some conspiracy to "railroad" him? Or maybe Sam Altman's coordinating with China to honeypot CEOs because reasons?
0. https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/nvidia-jensen-huang-affair-...
I am saying it here:
> Jensen having an alleged affair makes it easier for them, and that's it.
The communist spy is the invented reason. There has been zero evidence presented that Alice Huang is a spy for the CCP[1], and if they did have evidence it would have been more appropriate to charge Jenson last year when the Trump administration was made aware of the relationship.
Everything about Alice being a honeypot has largely been hearsay.
To me, it's far more likely that someone in the state department did not like that Jenson was circumventing export controls and manufactured this to bury him.
[1]https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/jim-himes-alice-hua...
“Show me the man, and I will show you the crime”
I don’t think he was even making the case that his rivals were involved in this, only that if they really wanted him gone for advocating for open source models, it’s not like they needed this specific scandal to pull it off.
There would be another smear campaign, sexual assault allegation or shady dealings.
It's easy to find dirt on everyone and coordinate the media to take them down. He had to go because of geopolitics due to US/China relations and the AI race.
It has nothing with his "dick", that's just a story they sold to public.
Why? By all accounts everyone in the US loved him and thought he was the "le face of AI" or whatever. Would he have been ensnared in this scheme to smuggle chips to China if he hadn't slept with a Chinese spy who just happened to be a top exec at Megaspeed? If he didn't have this proclivity for affairs in the first place? The world may never know, but it can speculate.
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.
By whom?
The normal pathway would be that this would be disclosed to said horny capitalist via state security, with the understanding that they'll behave in certain circumstances and that it will be ensured that things go no further. This is a win for Uncle Sam.
That this didn't happen is telling. Obviously, cui bono gives quite a long list, but the state would have needed to be on side.
Like what
So as not to violate ITAR? That thing where Ukraine used a gift in the way they were explicitly asked not to?
The others do not have a board capable of outing them. It has, in fact, been tried and discussed at length.
It's not a conspiracy, this is what happens when you don't give one person total control through manipulating the board and stock. You fuck up and get the axe.
This is, in theory, feature not a bug territory. Your CEO did something they shouldn't of (allegedly). The board now fires them rather than having the stock and the company ride or die based on it.
Will the short term stock suffer, sure. Will the company do better for it, maybe/maybe not? I don't totally agree with one great man but I get the idea and once you start working at a certain level you do see products often as a reflection of the values of the top of the chain.
Either way, there's no doubt this is a complicated and "unique" circumstance given the behavior of the US government, and I wouldn't be totally shocked if he DID knowingly break the law and did so with the help of the POTUS, and that's an entire quagmire.
The board/company distancing itself from that makes sense, and bluntly, it's not like jensen staying on was going to save the stock or AI. This is a symptom of what's going on not the cause, and him somehow not being voted out likely changes nothing, even for the board or NVIDIA who are all going to have uncomfortable questions about behavior and decisions even with Jensen out the door. Hell it might be the best place for him.
Huh, hadn’t heard of any actually, examples?
i wonder what will happen to nvidia's relationship with TMSC now.
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 includes his family and the family of those involved in the affair. Many lives were turned upside down.
In 10 years he will have a new family and new friends and this will be a distant memory for him.
Trump will get away with everything he's done. Rubio, Vance, Kennedy and Hegseth won't.
https://www.criminallawlibraryblog.com/preemptive-pardons-co...
Well, there's a first time for everything I guess. Trump can just pardon them in return for a bribe after all.
Apparently I am able to, what was that?
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
Maybe that's the lesson he learned and why he _supposedly_ was making sure his GPUs were still getting to China. Because he knows that the alternative would lead to good Nvidia Chinese competitor later on
Pretty sure all those nVidia employees over the years had a bigger hand in building it.
The idea that only one person matters is a plague on society
> 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
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...
Talking is the cheapest thing you can do and his actions say more. Rather than helping make a free and safer society for Americans, he chose to ignore export bans and work with an adversarial government.
No, this is obviously false.
If you're bringing up buying clothes at Walmart, then I don't think you understand how much money a billion dollars is. A billion dollars in a HYSA giving 3.5% yields 35 million dollars a year, with zero work and zero risk. It takes a married couple ballpark 5 million dollars to basically never need to work again. So a billion dollars earning guaranteed interest gives you enough money to never need to work again, seven times over, every single year. After just one year, you already have more money just in interest than you could ever reasonably spend, and you haven't even tapped in to your principle. A billion dollars is an absolutely insane amount of wealth.
Jensen Huang has eighty times that much money. There is no difference between eighty billion dollars and one billion dollars. It's the same amount of money. It's effectively infinite. He can give away 79 of those 80 billions and he would not notice, it would have zero impact on his life. He wouldn't have to drive a Walmart car or live in a small apartment, he can still have every lifestyle choice he could possibly want after giving away 95% of his money. The difference would not even be negligible to him. There would literally be no difference.
If they were, how could he hoard so much of their output?
The only people that should be wealth taxed is leeches like you that see how utterly corrupt the state is with how it handles tax dollars and wants to give it more money.
(I personally don’t care about Jensen. I just don’t think that “people don’t deserve sympathy because they are billionaires” makes any sense.)
Why? He caused this. He chose to have affairs with a spy and a subordinate. Now he has to deal with the consequences.
It does remain possible; he's a parasite and someone who's just had an affair. He wouldn't value the sympathy given, Neither himself or Nvidia would return the gesture.
They give null shit about you.
> He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
He chose to have the affair and as having my father do the same to my mother; you get no sympathy for cheating. Let them feel pretty terrible, maybe they will find what it's like to be human for a change.
Nothing more than a parasite in the corporate playground. His actions caught up with him; woe is me. What will I ever do with so much money.
based on the reporting about the second affair, it's possible his security has had to shut down similar witnesses in the past.
Me too. If he needs somebody to take his place he can reach me at my HN profile page. I'll take the bullet and try to struggle through with just billions of dollars.
This stuff has probably been going on behind the scenes for a while. The leak about the affair is just the catalyst that accelerated it all.
I’ll believe it when I see it. In the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, a single low level executive was prosecuted during the whole ordeal.
Makes you wonder what would happen if the US ever wanted to enforce "certified US AI" on its chips
Nvidia can certainly put up some guardrails that will sound impressive to the dinosaurs in Congress, but can it really stop China from using those GPUs anyway?
This is a simplification, but is this not in some way similar to how the Switch 1 has hacked due to a design flaw on Nvidia's Tegra chip?
In the same way, even if their GPUs get this protection, wouldn't a state actor figure out how to get around it?
Most of the hardware functionality from a GPU that models need is generic and used every time you use a GPU for any compute. You can implement language models in a GLSL shader; modern GPUs have been programmable for 20 years, that's the point of their existence. The best thing they could do is just literally nerf the consumer hardware substantially to make tokens unusable or stop selling consumer hardware. They don't need spyware to do that. It would also make their products dogshit.
More broadly, "Compute" is basically a resource that our economy relies on to a large degree, it has been that way for decades. And it turns out it's very bad when you just destroy the thing your economy relies on. And doing so doesn't solve problems like "Current computers exist today" or "Other people make computers". So who gives a shit about Jensen? Comments here talking about "taking him out"? What's actually more likely is just that really powerful people today are often corrupt and also really fucking stupid. He played a stupid game and lost.
None of this stuff is putting the current open weights genie back in the bottle IMO. Amodei using RoboStormtrooperGruppen9000 bots and going door to door to take peoples GPUs at gunpoint is a more plausible method of doing so.
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
lol had to read this several times due to all the negatives
finally got it - "I hope NVIDIA continue to allow inference..."
This is a CYA move by the board as all this is becoming public.
They did ~$90B in revenue last quarter.
I sometimes can't imagine the avarice it takes to do things like this. Could you imagine having a $100 bill in your hand and going "Yea, I'll break the law and possibly destroy my life to steal $7.50"
Another way to put it is the difference between 75 MILLION and 7.5 BILLION is rounded to 7.4 BILLION.
The scale of numbers is huge and it is not just another 7.5 billion dollars.
Sounds like this was known or suspected at the highest levels of the administration (Rubio was discussing it per recent reporting). So the question becomes: did Nvidia use a cut out to knowingly avoid the export ban, and if so, did the administration know this?
A relationship with a foreign agent
An inappropriate relationship with a subordinate
Two of these potentially have serious legal consequences.
Oh sorry Jensen you broke one of the rules in the HR handbook we have to fire you now nothing we can do.
It isn't an arbitrary policy.
U.S. officials believe that China’s intelligence services recruited Alice Huang as an asset because of her access to the chip-designer chief
-----
Read between the lines: "believe", we do not have any real evidences, but we believe.
Alice might have to interact with someone from Chinese government ---> that's evidence of being recruited as spy.
Let's forget about the fact that anyone who do business in China (or any country) needs to interact with government employees at some time point.
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.
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.
What's your definition? People he sold a GPU to at extortionate markups?
Ask someone in Bangladesh who the fuck Harriet Tubman is.
I hope I am wrong but I am starting to think the US left is about to walk into a historical economic collapse that they are inevitably increasing the chances of by 'doing the right thing'.
I suspect you hypocritically have and will continue to benefit from his work that he started as their CEO 33 years ago.
I hope this kicks the legs out from under the "circular financing"[0] that has enabled slop to permeate seemingly everything good about computing.
I'll be sure to tell that to my kids while I put them to bed today.
I honestly don't care. It's not a balance sheet to me.
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.
You don't get to cheat on your wife, company and country and get support lmao, what a strange things to say.
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.
And you’re a bot so as if you’d know.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
The world as a whole is pretty conservative, people like to project the happily married couple image regardless of reality of the relationship.
I don't understand what compels people to make up scenarios to defend people who have come out and said the opposite.
You are, in fact, defending.
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.
So much hate for him, it is sad.
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 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.
Not a single inch of empathy for his wife and family, nor the misled investors and staff.
The Chinese government wants Chinese companies to buy Chinese chips.
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.
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.
To clarify, there is a possibility that the President of the United States and members of his team knowingly concealed and aided Conspiracy and Espionage against the United States.
I mean yes, he shouldn't be hounded, but if he'd kept it in his pants, he could have avoided all this nastiness.
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.
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
I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!
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.
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.
Are you serious?
I for one hope all humans are ok, regardless of their status.
He's worth like $140 billion. $70 billion if he gets divorced. He'll be fine.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy. Jensen gets to retire with $100B+ and not deal with the crap.
He didn't seem to have a long-term mindset when he knowingly violated export control laws (the feds are, in general, super serious about export controls) and securities laws (the feds are also, in general, super serious about whatever they consider securities fraud) over the course of at least the last six months.
It's frustrating because it was so easily avoidable. Just don't do crimes with nation-states.
I'm no pro-US nationalist or anything, but I am very very much anti-CCP.
> He should be thankful he's not in prison. Even without the spy and affair scandals, his lobbying to sell chips to China is treasonous due to how geopolitically critical AI will soon become. (That alone is not criminally treasonous,
He should be thankful he's not jailed for advocating something which is not even declared illegal yet? Is that the famous "rule of the law" I heard so much about?
We're in the find-out phase of the merger of the corporation and the state, where everything is permitted as long as you send some considerations to the dear leader...
Until it's not. :)
Yes, the famous "rule for thee, not for me".
The other part is me subjectively calling him treasonous, unrelatedly; not in a criminal way.
I should've said "depending on the results of the investigation, he may end up just being thankful he won't get a prison sentence". (Or maybe he will get a prison sentence, depending on what the investigation finds. We'll see.)
Did he? A singular CEO with 40+ direct reports and no succession plan... that alone feels like a very short term mindset to me. He could have been hit by a car tomorrow, what's the contingency plan there? Not to mention the whole 'violating export restrictions' thing, that's typically not great for the long term viability of a company either.
Musk, Vivek, etc.
I have a feeling we'll know the reasons for certain when Nvidia's stance on open models and local AI does an about-face.
That change is still material to the future outlook as the price is the intersection of supply and demand and the predicted supply of $NVDA shares for sale just increased by scores of billions of dollars worth.
How can you trust anything he says after this?
Why should regulators or other customers believe any promises made by him?
His credibility is shot - the day to day stock prices changes are irrelevant.
Imo that’s danger zone shit for the company, whether you’re offended by the morality bits or not.
Maybe he will donate his proceeds to charity...
OP said
>A CEO admitting to an affair with a customer *after previously denying it*, seems like a sufficient reason for removal
It's not the crime. It's the cover up.
In this case Jensen either 1) lied to the board about the affair, 2) directed the Nvidia PR to publish a materially false statement about it, or 3) both.
From a company governance standpoint it's incredibly hard to trust Jensen when he's either lying to you, using the company to protect his personal life, or (again) both.
Admitting to the affair with a customer is a nothingburger. Directing the company to release a false statement about it, and that customer turns out to be a Chinese asset if a BIG fucking deal.
Lying about it served no one's interest but Jensen's, and ended up hurting the company significantly.
It would be very difficult for the board to regain trust in his ability to make choices that are correct for Nvidia, rather than himself.
Right now, he made them lose 700 Billion dollars. So the investors lawsuit also will be the biggest in history.
The spy thing is juicy, maybe it's surface level, maybe it's deeper.
If we fired people for infidelity the entire stock market and greater economy would tank and most of congress would be empty seats.
You've seen the picture of the couple holding one another at the concert, right?
No they don't. They get fired for undisclosed workplace conflicts of interest and fiduciary liability, not infidelity.
An adult woman being wronged by infidelity is not remotely like a child being molested. Wth is wrong with you?
No one cares about the sex life of a ceo of a company that big except their own direct family. Investors don't care, customers don't care, vendors don't care, the government doesn't care, and that's the entire list of people that matter. His wife and other immediate family care and that's it.
The only reason anyone (of any relevance or significance) cares in this case is becsuse of the embargo & national security angle.
If they are willing to betray their own spouse then they are absolutely capable of deceiving and betraying their employees and shareholders.
This separation you seem to see between business and personal life doesn't actually exist. That's an unrealistic fantasy.
We may conceal parts of ourselves at work for politics and professionalism but you are the same person inside of work and out.
If I was them, I'd be worried that the government invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) or impose National Security Agreements and Clearances which would require NVIDIA to isolate sensitive R/D, restrict foreign nationals from accessing specific chip designs, and place government-vetted compliance monitors on its board or security teams. ALSO there definately will be subpeonos and probes and those are never fun.
Easier to say we cut out the guy responsible and hopefully that lessons the troubles
edit: btw the board has a director that’s ex-Cooley, no greenhorn I imagine to congressional investigational scrutiny. It had to be something that made them realize cutting ties with Jensen immediately was the only way to survive.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
You are gross
There will be a lot of noise, it will be embarrassing, but I just can't imagine a situation where it significantly impacts their bottom line.
The bear case here is pretty much that you think AI is a bubble anyway, and this just accelerates it.
It would be hypocritical to both use DeepSeek and also be outraged at the (alleged) mechanisms through which China acquires GPUs.
Ezra Klein interviewed Jensen about 1.5 months ago and I had an off-putting feeling from it, and thought a lot of his answers were laughable. He sounded like he was obviously lying. A few days later, Klein interviewed Bill Gates and sort of anonymously brought up the arguments that Jensen made. You could see a visible disbelief of the arguments in Gates' face and posture, even saying "I almost can't believe you're asking that". (Not that Bill Gates is some paragon, but it wasn't close to a respectful disagreement.)
1. The whole spy / compromising national security thing are as far as I know unproven.
2. Affairs by themselves, while not ethical, are fairly tame compare to other prominent tech figures like Musk.
If it comes out that he did indeed compromise national security knowingly, then that's a different matter of course.
> We believe that despite essentially no direct compute sales into China after April 2025, Nvidia continued to service Chinese demand via sales to non-restricted intermediaries and diversion.
That’s not at all breaking export control laws. In fact it is the government’s responsibility to identify these non-restricted intermediaries and make them restricted. The government has done this plenty of times in the past and it should again do so here. It is not a company’s job to infer what the government wants it to do. The difference between selling to China and servicing China-originated demand is huge.
And then in a massive game of telephone many people on this thread actually believes that Nvidia allowed direct sales to China, which is how they conclude Huang is breaking the law.
I'm not even that bothered about those chips going to China. But, like a lot of other aspects that leave us wondering how big and how fragile an AI bubble exists, the fact that billions of dollars of Nvidia revenue is from a reportedly priority customer that isn't actually using the chips is the problem.
But one of the wealthiest people on the planet gets fired, suffering zero personal hardship as a result, and everybody's up in arms. How could you do this! They all do this, how dare you single him out!
I think that there's a pervasive idea, especially in the tech/startup space, that making money is a moral good. Not merely that making money is compatible with being a good person, but that it makes you a good person, and the more you make the more good you are. Firing an ultra-rich person is therefore basically an affront to a saint. Never mind that it doesn't put them under any hardship, that they and their heirs will still be wealthier than any of us can even conceive of. It's morally wrong to do anything bad to such a good person.
Really now. Let's get some examples of his being ruthless.
Bro, this is what the tech industry is all about: fucking over society to make a dollar.
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.
Apple was saved because it abandoned all its pre-1997 software and adopted NEXTSTEP, which Jobs created.
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.
If someone else that wasn't directly trained by Jobs for years was hired, i'd argue that the culture would start to falter because one thing slides somewhere, then another, then another an soon enough 'A players' don't want to sacrifice their core years at a company that isn't instilling the values they want to work under. Cook himself almost went down that path with his budding career at Compaq. His family thought he was nuts to leave the growing company for Apple of all places. They didn't see the values that Cook saw in Jobs.
I don't think that Nvidias board will have any problem though finding an A tier CEO to run the company.
They probably will not get an S-tier visionary, but mature companies with deeply established roots don't necessarily need that like nascent companies do.
And: the public only knows what's made it out. Who knows what else has come out in private.
Go forth and consensually bang your coworkers. Knock yourselves out.
When you have the ability to fire or promote someone, however, you hold significant power over their life -- potentially impacting their ability to eat, house themselves, etc. In those cases, it's valid to ask, "Is there a possibility someone is being coerced into sex because they can't afford to say no?"
This is question of consent. It's not an allegation of rape. It's only a question and there are probably times the answer is no.
You don't have to knee jerk react to someone pointing out an obvious potential conflict of interest and go "so everything is rape now?"
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".
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
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.
I'm with you on the first half, and see the second half changing. The fever may have broken in the US electorate.
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".
well, yeah.
is a bit of a stretch, given the reporting, intel briefings, comments from members of congress after the briefings, etc...
yet it was an open secret among those in the know, both the affairs and the export violations
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.
Given the report that the US gov knew about this for a while, it seems more likely that it's coming from the administration?
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.
I had only heard about a consensual relationship.
[0] https://www.woodsrogers.com/insights/publications/this-valen...
Do you have stats on how common these are? Is it more popular in some non US country maybe?
Good idea about stats. Please share what you find.
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...
*that we know of
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.
* 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.
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.
You could just as easily say she did sexual favors to get a leg-up over more qualified peers and get/maintain her position.
If anything, the fact he got fired seems to imply she has all the power in their relationship being outed. I haven't seen anyone calling for her head.
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.
These policies are intentionally narrowed to workplace conflicts of interest. HR doesn't want to manage morality clauses or stuff outside the workplace.
Anyway, not sure if that's the case here but it's hard to rule out entirely.
> Even if it's consensual, what happens when she decides she wants to move on from the relationship?
Then they're no longer in a relationship and still have to follow HR/company policies.
>What about her peers that didn't receive promotions while she did?
Did they follow the company policy (e.g., hiring committee recusal) or not for the promotions?
>This is why these laws exist.
Did the company policies follow employment regulations when setting and enforcing their policy?
I see your opinion. In MY opinion, this wouldn't be an issue but for the spy scandal. Now, anything that comes up (complying or not complying with policy) triggers more urgency by shareholders and the board to make change. They don't care about HR due process.
To be fair though, a CEO having an affair with a subordinate should be seen with at least some suspicion...
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.
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.
Extremely rare (winning such a lawsuit). Prior to these kinds of rules becoming the norm, how often did anyone win such a lawsuit? It's a rounding error close to 0.
There are plenty of publicized cases where one party openly stated she got promotions because of her affair with a senior. No lawsuits were even filed in the ones I know.
I'm in favor of such rules precisely because it's hard to win such a suit.
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.
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...
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 think media, social and traditional, has really done a number on people’s perspectives. I’m not sure why ideology replaces self-awareness.
Politics is about economics. All of the so-called "culture war" issues (eg LGBT rights, bodily autonomy, etc) don't make you left wing if you are still an avowed capitalist. The success of the Republican Party hinges on the success they've had in propagandizing culture war issues to avoid talking about economics. And the establishment Democrat Party is complicit because they have the exact same paymasters.
On this issue you see a ton of people in the comments saying "yeah but Jensen made so much money" as a reason why he shouldn't suffer the consequences. If making money has primacy in your decision making well... you're right wing, definitionally.
As other commenters have noted, every time Elon comes up there are a ton of HN defenders, despite him being a complete fascist (in technical terms, not a pejorative) and doing the Nazi salute on national TV (twice).
> Economically it might be pro free markets, ...
Well, first there's no such thing as "free markets". Second, you're basically saying "capitalism". As I said, right wing.
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.
I've found HN to be pretty hostile to DOGE (whereas conversation is usually respectful even for fringe viewpoints; something special happened here).
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.
I don't think you can assume much just by knowing somebody disliked them.
The irony is so sweet here.
"Subordinate", get a grip!
What's very "Cut and Dry" is that so many of you are very obviously not paying attention to the yearly training, which isn't exactly complicated or difficult material.
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.
It's mindboggling that you describe an apparently completely consensual affair as "sexual harassment". That's absurd.
Also, I don't think there was an "extreme power imbalance". If anything, she had far more power over him than the other way around, since he had much more to lose and she could blackmail him with making the affair public or other allegations.
Musk has done worse, yet nothing has really happened to him.
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)
People in these threads are pretending that 75% of the story doesn't exist and it's just about an affair... insane.
EDIT: Is this just X infecting HN? I don't go on X so I don't know what it's like.
This one tip gets you off the hook of any company slander; just release a LLM model.
The Demographics of HN are coming very sharply into focus the past few weeks, and it's awful.
It does sort of explain a lot though.
A shocking amount of these comments are very loudly ignorant of basic concepts of consent, and some seem to be rather proud of it.
- we can't allow China access to buy or lease any GPUs
and
- turns out China is half the customer base, so cutting them off will crash the market, and the Chinese will just build their own anyways
Considering Trump & Jensen traveled to China just to sell more GPUs and despite that the CCP banned Chinese companies from importing Western Hardware in favor of domestic alternatives, I have my doubts this story makes sense
https://tech-insider.org/huawei-ascend-950pr-ai-chip-nvidia-...
Everyone, including the Chinese labs, seem to understand that Huawei's chips are not as capable as their press releases make them out to be.
Also, for what it's worth, tech-insider.org is an embarrassingly lazy AI-generated content farm: https://tech-insider.org/about/
I would hazard a guess that Huawei is paying to get positive stories about their chips on the English-language internet, because they certainly aren't getting any organically!
Also like OpenAI's Jalapeno, with LLMs it might be feasible to deploy relatively simpler silicon that's hard to program for, and farm out implementation to AI so the CUDA moat might be shallower than before.
>I would hazard a guess that Huawei is paying to get positive stories about their chips on the English-language internet, because they certainly aren't getting any organically
Jensen has said that 7nm Huawei chips are comparable to A100-level chips, and even fairly recent models as of 1>year ago were trained on those and process improvements are not what they used to be
More likely would be large fines and possibly restrictions and audits of all future exports.
I could easily see Trump pardoning him, but I could also see him getting thrown under the bus.
Death/execution is also a possibility in the US for the offense
On a more mundane level, since he can neither go to office, nor to the house, any guesses what his routine will be over next couple weeks? Not a perfect example, but for some reason, this reminds me of the last scene in Fargo where WH Macy gets holed up in a motel buying time.
Not if people with agendas keep squashing it. They don't even have to be sophisticated agendas - just look at the comments in this thread.
What we can prove in the near future likely changed a bit when Congress went to the Dems a few days ago. Republicans weren't gonna make a scene about their $25M donation to the ballroom project.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/14/us-clears-h200-chip-sales-to...
I need to find the links but the reporting in Europe was that this was part of a deal where Trump got given a 20% fee for it (I believe those were his own words!).
It was reported together with the victim statements of the children Trump allegedly raped. I understand that the US media aren't allowed to publish any of these stories though so I can understand why few people would know about them.
Not particularly new situation in the recent US times. Far from the last time this will happen.
The French and Italians wouldn't blink an eye. Us Brits, we'd talk about it, he's get a slap on the wrist but wouldn't be sacked.
It seems to be a uniquely American thing that the CEO can basically do anything (lie, cheat, fraud etc) just as long as he doesn't get caught with his pants down.
Several BP executives resigned in a sex scandal just this year
https://news.sky.com/story/bp-chairman-removed-from-role-aft...
These aren't just affairs.
Also, fraud remains to be seen, and shopping chips to China sure seems like questionable judgement.
I think you are too narrowly focused.
Do you remember how Monica Lewinsky was treated? Decades of jokes at her expense, mockery of her and her features, jokes about dresses and semen and blowjobs. Can you imagine how hard it still must be to deal with all that shit day to day?
Bill Clinton still has enormous power. He's had to face nowhere near the burden she has, and yet he's the one who cheated and he's the one who did so with a report.
These shipments to China - I remember there being a deal made with the President which allowed these sales to happen contingent on some kind of "risk fee" being paid.. to the President.
Now cheating on your wife with a FOREIGN SPY, yea that's a big deal no matter what the country.
Speak for yourself. The sanctity of marriage is pretty important to a lot of Americans. Not everyone lives in a Berkeley polycule.
he resigned because there's some proof that he knew that nvidia was selling cards/chips to china -- the affair only made that extremely public.
American CEO would get meetoed. Any sort of sex (even consensual) is illegal, if you have no way to prove it! Lets way a few weeks...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/06/lululemon-ceo-laurent-potdev...
https://fortune.com/europe/2024/06/11/bp-managers-given-ulti...
And also puts doubt on any decisions by the boss that affect the employee - companies don't want people "sleeping their way to the top" as that's not putting the business' needs first.
(Your second statement carries far more weight)
It's why we generally frown upon relationships if there's any direct business link.
As an aside, the above applies to any one of any gender sleeping with their boss (again of any gender)
What the hell are you talking about? Nobody is saying anything like that. Why are you even bringing culture war garbage into this conversation?
You're the one that's flaming by introducing culture war garbage where none is necessary.
> I was responding to the OP’s framing as the women as passive participants in this saga.
I don't know who you think you're talking about, but you responded to my comment, and I didn't say or suggest anything like that.
Narrow-minded? I don't know, given the levels of insanity and in-your-face corruption we've seen pretty much every day coming from the US and particularly from the entire tech ecosystem it's really hard to understand the "norms".
I've read about how the US President raped a young girl (13) and multiple other victim accounts. I've watched how we've shown consequences to Prince Andrew, Mandelson and many others. I also see on Twitter the owners of this very site standing behind the disgusting people on the US.
I can't square that with the Jensen situation.
I should add that I'm personally in the camp of leaders who cheat on their wives or who make or accept bribes should be removed from their position. I don't agree with the British (or French/Italian) takes at all.
But yeah how can US folks stomach child rapists at the top of their power is beyond me, I've met plenty of folks with flexible spines while working in banking but this is on completely another level and that level is whole nation.
The problem is that a whole layer of society have been completely and utterly corrupted to an extent which makes say a country like India seem to be a paradise.
However he will lose is job over an affair with someone that he has any form of business relationship with. He can have an affair with a nurse in the local hospital of the waitress of a local cafe and we will ignore it. However the girls he had an affair with are off-limits, and should be for any culture for reasons that we think should be obvious.
Did he do anything besides infidelity, as it seems that the "board" knew about that anyway.
In any case, he fell on his sword, and I wish him well in the afterlife, nothing is black and white.
Who you have an affair with matters more, in this case a Chinese spy wasn't enough, which almost makes you think, he was not the only one at Nvidia who knew.
About their new interim CEO Colette Kress:
>'She starts her day talking with Israeli execs because Nvidia's major Israel operations (post-Mellanox acquisition, ~6k staff, ~18% of revenue via networking chips) are business-critical'
Nvidia is just about the only company that's both a monopoly and captured most of the value.
If the company struggles without him and it's obvious they need his leadership, he'll be back. Morals be damned.
Now, back to the main point: your egregious comparison of a potential Huang-return to Jobs-return unfortunately still remains just as terrible.
OP wasn't talking about his morals, unless you think OP is on Nvidia's board.
One thing is clear: his extramarital affairs are not the reason why he did it.
There is something extremely important we don't yet know and may never know.
None of them are able to put two and two together that this was a deliberate coup
And it seems like nobody is paying attention to what Jensen Huang was fighting for. He was against regulation of open source local models. He was against regulation shifting liability of local model developers as well as frontier models.
All in all without Jensen, it isn't just about NVIDIA, there's no one to champion for open source models and running them locally is going to get a lot harder and expensive. It's actually going to accelerate the monopolization of closed models and they will have to pass on the costs to consumers.
It's an L across the board and I'm noting the degraded quality of discourse on HN and that nobody is seeing through the veil here.
You may think that's a ridiculous bigger picture, but that's the bigger picture I'm looking at. I think your bigger picture of, "this is an inside-the-industry coup to remove the one champion of open weights models," is even more ridiculous.
Both of these notwithstanding, what makes you believe nvidia's new permanent CEO won't also be a champion for open weights? An open weights ecosystem is better for their business long term.
Jepsen survived in an industry of failures, he is an incredibly talented CEO
1. Jensen Huang - Co-founder, President & CEO
2. Tench Coxe - Former Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures
3. John O. Dabiri - Professor of Aeronautics & Mechanical Engineering, Caltech
4. Dawn Hudson - Former CMO of the NFL, former CEO Pepsi-Cola North America
5. Harvey C. Jones - Managing Partner, Square Wave Ventures
6. Melissa B. Lora - Former President, Taco Bell International
7. Stephen C. Neal - Lead Independent Director; Chairman Emeritus, Cooley LLP
8. Suzanne Nora Johnson - former Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs
9. A. Brooke Seawell - Venture Partner, New Enterprise Associates
10. Aarti Shah - Former SVP & Chief Information/Digital Officer, Eli Lilly
11. Mark A. Stevens - former Managing Partner at Sequoia Capital"
Huawei just announced a fully domestic computer, Deepseek is rumored to be training v5 right now on entirely domestic Ascend chips.
I know eventually there will come out all the justifications for how this was to protect AGI, etc. But this move has also now tipped the scale beyond just the hardware bifurcation, but also the open vs. closed and commons vs. sovereign models. This isn't just chopping off your nose, this is America purposely gouging out it's eyes and removing it's ability to see down the road. Jensen Huang was the world's best shot and trying to keep a global AI world together, but one side has made their voice on that extremely loud and clear.
The investigation is just starting. He's been indicted but not proven guilty yet. What if the facts come to light and the issue is overblown or wrong?
He also hasn't had the chance to properly defend himself.
This is a permanent fix for a potentially temporary problem, and that is short sighted
One should never give up control it seems. Zuck is right.
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.
But yeah, the "model" memes are completely offtopic. She's nearly 50.
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.
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.
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.
On 2nd point, even Hyperscalers have large stack of GPU sitting idle yet to be commissioned.
Yes US hyperscalers have plenty of hardware but are running out of 'warm shells' to put them into. It's not much of a problem in Southeast Asia.
Very very few HW CEOs have even the slightest ability to appreciate the key strength of Nvidia which is ability to build hardware and then drive it with outstanding software.
Look at AMD. Great hardware but hamstrung by their software for 20 years.
Hardware is not enough.
Suggestion:
Replace Jensen the President with Tim Cook.
Replace Jensen the CEO with Ian Buck (Inventor of CUDA, PhD, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing).
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.
I lost faith when he was on Ezra Klein's show and said he doesn't think kids should learn math any more.
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
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-...
I'm not saying this will happen, just mentioning that it would be interesting to see it happen.
There’s a rumor that Apple’s Johny Srouji may be tapped to be Nvidia’s CEO. But I’m guessing Apple will do whatever it takes to retain him.
Create a charity, move to a rural town and become a farmer?
Export controls have been skirted since the Bronze Age.
Sure on the merits, there’s enough for the board to ask him to resign.
But it’s his company. He built it from nothing. You have to start with that.
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...
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
IMO, should be illegal for company policy to retaliate against someone for a personal romantic relationship.
- Conflicts of interest compromise trust and judgement
- Relationships with direct reports create a conflict of interest
- Relationships with direct customers create a conflict of interest
- Policies should be set such relationships are either disallowed or require strict oversight / disclosure
- Companies should enforce their stated policies equally as required by employment law
- Affairs demonstrate a lack of judgement, a lack of candor, and are problematic for positions of trust
- An executive that lies about an affair creates a risk of blackmail and a liability for the company
- Relationships with subordinates is a violation of policy, demonstrating a lack of judgement and a willingness to break the rules
- Relationships with subordinates create legal liability for the company by enabling claims of sexual harassment, hostile workplace, coercion/abuse of authority
but I’m the CEO!
- every trivial action, or lack of it, is not garanteed to break some of the mountains of existing including set of rules one is supposed to obey when it's physically impossible to even assimilate them all
- people that do respect the rules can have decent level of certitude they will have a fine life without major troubles that could be avoided by breaking some rules
- the culture promote to respect rules as a viable flexible path, as opposed to actively promote one that states "it's easier to get pardon than to be granted authorization".
Everyone is welcome to assess their own society from what they experienced in life.
A leader who can be blackmailed or is untrustworthy is compromised in their role. Profit, nonprofit, government: it does not matter.
That is perhaps why affairs and lack of candor are both (usually) bars to obtaining a clearance.
Are you serious?
Regardless, there is no federal law that bans relationships between bosses and subordinates, and no law that requires companies to police them.
And a law banning companies from retaliating against people for romantic relationships would not go against any current written law.
Even so, HR didn't do this.
Reconcile that error in thinking and things will start making more sense to you.
A bunch of you on here think this is about sex, it's not, it's about signals that point to extremely poor leadership decisions and threats to the US economy and national security.
A corporate conflict of interest occurs when an individual's or entity's personal, financial, or outside relationships interfere or appear to interfere with their ability to act in the best interests of the company or its stakeholders
I don't need to hear why you think they did it. I'm already familiar with the "why" behind this crazy theory. I would like to know how you think it's possible they did this.
"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."
Wish the interviewer would have let him talk more instead of changing the subject.
whether that's good for nvidia or the u.s at large - I doubt - but time will tell.
Whether one deserves such ruination is a moral matter, and everyone is entitled to their own judgement, but it seems wrong to concentrate such power in a private for-profit entity. The entire basis of anti-fascist doctrine is infringement of individual liberties and modern societies, while mostly conditioned to be against government coercion are remarkably comfortable with corporate coercion, dressed up in the pretty language of compliance and organizational reputation. A company is an economic entity, not a moral entity. It is fine with being a moral entity when it comes to matters of its own reputation and operations, but conveniently becomes an economic entity when it is time for layoffs. Ultimately, it comes down to who has a bigger stick
The thing is an organization is not just a place where you work; it is a provider of economic security, livelihood, and dignity. This concentrates extraordinary power in your place of employment; you are to clock in 5 days a week for at least 8 hours a week; and then work in a highly locked down corporate machine, which you are not allowed to customize even though this is where you will spend the majority of your week in, and one has to ask the question to what extent a company owns your life.
I think that we must also identify the cultural contradiction here; where Hollywood and the like in a sense glorify promiscuity and depict wealth as flaunted with assets and women, as a cultural ideal, and then turn around and hound creatures who are products of such a culture.
Of course, in this case it is far more likely that Jensen was involved with some national security incident.
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.
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.
Shareholders voted on them in June:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026...
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.
Outside of the continued selling to China/skirting the export ban I’m of the belief that he was offered a better deal in China, took it, then signaled he was departing, the timing on this seems…suspect.
Recalling the May POTUS and CEO field trip to china, the lot returned together with Jenson extending his stay nearly two weeks afterwards.
IMO this ongoing theatre provides cover to oust Jenson and vilify him before he appears somewhere in China —- imagine how the share price would fair if it came to light that he was leaving as CEO to take a position in Huawei…
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy.
Someone with an actual long term mindset and who had the interests of the company would have groomed one or more successors, and, if, for some reason, they felt they were indispensable, would have probably avoided jeopardizing the company by allegedly having an affair with a subordinate.
There are plenty of people in the world to sleep with besides subordinates and spies. Failing the most basic of marshmallow tests is not a indication of a consistent long-term mindset.
Jensen is a colorful, important figure in the history of technology. He did make many solid long term bets. But if the company falls apart because of his reckless actions, that that's on him too.
And if it doesn't fall apart, then the credit goes to him for resigning.
All I've seen is his personal relationships drama and advocating for softening of useless export laws that didn't stop a single CPU or GPU get into China in the first place, selling to Megaspeed is hardly anything unlike what AMD or other suppliers does right now.
It's a hitjob and he probably could have fought it but chose not to.
Much like the broken unenforced rules that lets OpenAI/ycombinator sell trillions upon trillions of tokens into China each week despite all the export restriction laws against them doing it.
You really think the Chinese can't pay and access ChatGPT/Anthropic/Google premium models today?
I’m not even a billionaire, but the only people I interact with are people who I work with or who insert themselves into my life because they want something.
If others want him out, it was still Huang who loaded the gun and handed it to them.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
Though I think it's best for everyone atm for him to have checked out, it's not fun to have your life be out through this nonsense.
I would have to assume that that the amazing almost rockstar esque popularity was the cause of the mistakes he made.
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.
If he knowingly sent GPUs to Megaspeed knowing they would get in Chinese hands, he is guilty of Conspiracy, Espionage, SEC violations, and Export Control violations.
Just the Espionage charge alone is 20yr to life, with the possibility of execution/death penalty.
He is superfucked.
It’s really not hard.
Extramarital affairs are pretty common in our ruling class, so unless the media is conveniently withholding information, think he got in bed with the wrong folks.
This was the founder? Damn!
I get that hardware requires much more capital and investment than a pure software company, but he had crossed the board-being-able-to-fire-you rubicon looong ago
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
And nvidia could segment markets more strictly, e.g. starting an AI app store for the consumer segment.
To be clear: I don't want this, I just wonder what would happen if an Apple-minded CEO would take the helm at nvidia.
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.
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 affair with his subordinate brings this into question. The power dynamic makes consent extremely iffy. There is a reason it is not allowed.
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...
tl;dr - how much of this might be motivated about internal politics and board views vs. CEO views ?
Perhaps this may help explain why it's unethical to date a direct report to those HNers:
- It's unfair to the coworkers of the subordinate, because the affair can give the impression of influencing promotion, personnel and monetary decisions you make in favour of the subordinate.
- It places your direct report in a compromising position. Such a relationship is potentially coercive, because the direct report may fear reprisal, rendering any consent invalid. Many have commented that imputing coercion to any power imbalance leads to the absurd conclusion a rich person shouldn't date at all - however, this use of "slippery slope" doesn't offset your ethical duty as a leader. As the boss, you have to protect your employees, and placing them in this situation in the first place violates that commitment.
tl;dr you violate your duty of care, plain and simple, to everyone underneath you by doing this.
A pragmatic, ethical workplace policy is to instead date people not in your reporting chain. If that means you shouldn't date your employees as CEO, then that's responsible behaviour, not a chafing limitation.
---
Others have commented that Jensen's affair is plausibly fine because "we don't know his private affairs". Jensen has made an unambiguous statement about hurting his wife and family - if they were non-monogamous, Jensen has had the opportunity to disclose it. Absent that, you have to assume this was an illicit affair. Moreover, none of this changes the fact that having an affair with a direct report was entirely unethical.
Still others have attempted a whataboutism by asking why "other CEOs" haven't had this level of blowback for having an affair with a subordinate. Unfortunately, not every tragedy gets the same level of public reaction, for no other reason than timing, luck, or lack if engagement. We should be equally upset about all the other cases as a general rule, rather than relying on normalized apathy to lull us into complacence.
Bad luck for Microsoft. That Surface computer, team up probably goes up in smoke.
There's huge risk in firing a very successful CEO without anyone ready to replace him.
No one really cares about the affairs, so I think the only thing that could push the board do this would be the threat of more damaging stuff coming out, like nVidia skirting the China ban, or a legal threat to Jensen that envelops the company. Or back-channel pressure from the US Gov.
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.
How much of Nvidia’s revenue came from infringing sales to china? If so, that revenue is probably going to disappear as now they will have to really be serious about export controls or face much greater pain. Some estimates I’ve seen is 30% of their revenue perhaps disappearing overnight!
And I'm pretty sure any CEO with at least a bachelors degree knows about the De beers diamonds story, so, I really find it hard to believe they will struggle with the concept of maintaining their artifical scarcity/demand.
Plus whole lot of people waiting for that signal that the "AI bubble " is about to burst. No bubble will be bursting as a cause of this.
We have a new equivalent to something like Web 2.0 boom, Its not like the dot com bubble, because its not actually made up of a lot of empty unimplemented websites with too few users.
Rather its already able and in my opinion has met Dario's claim about 'replacing all developer jobs' if a bit later than he claimed, alongside every other single job, nearly bar none, able to be replaced if it can be done via a computer.
For example, Fable 5.2. I wish it was cheaper. It's able to perform a build out of and then run an entire complex software stack, including dependencies/servers for internal opensource git servers with ci/cd and the full git and jira featureset combined, with spin up/server management across every major cloud provider and then use said stack to run a swarm as a collaborating dev team from every major llm provider.
I know that because I've done most of it (or rather Fable has). I started this project 24 hours ago. I now have:
Complete containerized customized claude code + codex deployment package with tacked on feature set 'plugin' mostly for claude + a custom-agent mcp that drives mostly codex for now, allowing claude to call codex subagents (so I can farm that subscription too), that allows multi level sub-orchs which make sub agents via said mcp with future work items being bringing in a modified hermes or pi harness to use across the board (Claude code stays until I can afford 20k usd monthly api usage).
This also includes a custom ci/cd deployment set of pipelines/management to aws servers easily integrated with necessary accounts, which was done adhoc as a replacement for gh actions, because of course I've used all 18 usd of my free usage on my private account, and then all 18 usd of my free usage on the git enterprise trial about 14 hours ago.
This is alongside getting ready to finally ship to prod several high complexity SaaS including international supplier integration, and a 'contact suppliers' module/role for high tier llm models only and an entire suite of CAD design and 3d model design with an array of custom tools for both.... which is now good enough that its actually production ready for my niche market. And I'm not even bullshitting. Its a good thing somebody on my team speaks mandarin and it isn't me. So far its been fine surprisingly.
Anyways apologies for the ramble, I need some sleep.
Its just so bewildering to me though. All that gobbledygook I just typed out is actually true, and I've tested the hell out of it, myself, I've had my wife test it, etc. It actually works. I can't think of anything I would need a technical employee even for now at this point. Because every bug I find I tell a fable session to make a git issue for and fix and then it does that and the bug is actually gone...
Now its more just the gatekeeping/relationship building hand shaking part that seems to need people still. I was thinking about a marketing lead but then I dipped Fables toes into that too...
I guess the AI vibe code everything bros that were infuriating 12 months ago, had the right mentality.
Personally I think a bigger risk than that is AI models getting good enough to legitimately just reverse engineer and open source CUDA directly.
The key is that NVIDIA is in a fast-changing technology sector and that means the core business requires NVIDIA to keep innovating new and better products that beat the competition. Having a company continuously adapt and iterate future products requires a visionary leader that pushes the company to stay on the cutting edge. Competitors and alternative products like Google TPU, Amazon Trainium, AMD, Cerebrus, etc are not standing still; they're innovating too.
Many shareholders (including employees with RSU stock) are worried that NVIDIA without Jensen puts them in a weaker position for the future unless they can find someone with equivalent influence and vision.
Intel was once on top of the world with CEO Andy Grove running things. But then the followup CEOs didn't keep Intel at the cutting edge and they lost market leadership to TSMC, AMD, and Apple Silicon in various areas. The world kept changing and Intel didn't adapt fast enough.
Everyone is somewhat replaceable but the work they historically have done might have been critical to reach current stage. And Nvidia may miss on what he could have done but it will take a while for the downturn to happen and others are just as capable. They may find another internal or external candidate that may be able to push further. Market will price the uncertainty until then.
Its more of a 'race to the bottom' for price efficiency/hardware deg efficiency against price of electricity and price of the chips over lifetime, than it is a fast changing tech sector where breakthroughs are being made everyday that change the entire game like say with OpenAI and Anthropic.
So basically like a blue chip.
And it was all high risk. It may be only a once in a generation founder who wants to orchestrate that risk.
And again, no one was expecting NVIDIA to stay flat, massive growth was priced in.
I would say it’s under-priced, but I get really nervous when my thinking diverges this strongly from the market. Previous confidence in my thinking has not gone well.
And I doubt it'll cost him much. What could you pay the founder of the second most valuable company on the planet who already holds $150B in equity? It'd be as absurd as paying Donald Trump.
So if he held 150B stock say before, now he has 100B.
The rest of the market isn’t looking very solid either.
I am not sure if you and I are looking at the same chart. Down 12% Pre Market.
Not in premarket so far, 12% down sing yesterday.
Also why would it do better? Overall Huang seems to be a highly competent CEO. Replacing him with someone seems risky (especially if the board is influenced by Trump & co.). Especially given that Nvidia never had any other CEO.
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
If this was about national security or evading the law, it would have happened when it was discovered.
The board didn't have the determination either to fire him or to protect him, and he realized they wouldn't be able to make a decision, so he did it for them.
Now we'll see yet another jewel taken over by bean counters because the board was so dependent.
Let's hope other founders have boards who can actially handle their responsibilities.
I hear they're (temporarily) replacing him with a non-engineer finance suit.
It would be shocking, but with gaming making up just 1/20 of their revenue, maybe someone who doesn't actually care just says "we're pulling back from the consumer market to focus on our real business."
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.
Ocarina of time, on the other hand...
Nvidia was/is such a fundamental cog in the american ai economy/ machine, what spies, what cheating are people obsessed about? Nvidia created the capital for its own success; read about it, think about it, be against it, be for it. The capital did not exist, they created it by neoclouds buying hardware which they wouldnt need for two years ahead by lender and vendor-backed financing; hardware, which would be replaced in another 2-4 years.
Will nVidia continue to provide the same backing to neo-clouds? Without nVidia backing are lenders willing to give more or less?
Forget about chinese openweight models, antropic or oai, I see this development as a huge spanner in the us ai economy, maybe the biggest blunder of the year, the biggest own goal if it came from within the us administration under or without guidance.
And finally: Jensen selling to the chinese iron. Okay, was he the only one, god amongst mortals, in the fricking room. Who the heck comes up with these shallow plots...
I honestly have no feelings one way or another about this.
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.
Oh good, a business suit with no engineering experience. Nvidia is doomed.
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.
Gives some light to understanding why the world is the way it is. No further comment :P
No, the alternative is not to “not having affairs”. 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."
Sleeping with a spy or sleeping with a subordinate are both f**ing with the business.
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.
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
(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.
Banging 1000 women while married is Chinese "Boss" behavior.
The cause and effect is that any and all future CEOs caught in a honeypot will be easier to compromise. Xi loves the news. Nerds with one billion dollars hoping to attain unlimited groupies will need proper Hollywood Handlers. HR for whore intake if you will. Until the sex robots arrive.
Since this company has abandoned gamers for AI. Plus allegedly giving away a few million plus chips (gamers get fucked) to China. I am fully on his wife's side. She was there at the beginning.
Luckily we know that American courts are one sided. Making the upcoming divorce more costly then the Bill Gate's Foundation implosion. What's the over/under divorce cost trending on Polymarket right now? Seems undervalued.
We will never change, thank god AI doesn't have sexual instincts... yet
Maybe as a little test of the necessity of CEO's.
Maybe plug in an AI CEO to see what happens.
This event = some stuff that happens in book 2/ movie part 3 Stuff
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.
At least the Chinese spy story is more charitable than if they had found his name in Epstein files.
Conspiracy reaction: Something is going on here... obviously not due to sleeping with a spy...
May God have mercy on us all.
Handy thing for Trump to keep in his back pocket to distract Democrats attention if they won the midterms.
[macrumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/12/johny-srouji-eyed-as-po...)
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.
Think they take this stance when it's time to hand out yearly bonuses?
The criminal ones might, though.
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
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 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.
This proves that not selling to China was a good idea, and throws into question every narrative pointing otherwise. It also should make it evident that yes, China is most certainly spreading propaganda regarding these points, there's just no way it's not happening.
Every influential person, even middle managers, have a laundry list of “scandals” . The real question is why now and why him.
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.
We're just gonna keep shoving the illegal GPU trade with China under the rug I guess.
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.
You want leaders to be held accountable? Look, a leader who clearly made bad and dumb and wrong choices, and a simple opportunity to celebrate them facing accountability. Can you support that?
The jury is still out on this, re the circular financing mess with AI
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 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.
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.
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"?
"Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that."
Fair though you didn't say cheating, but it undermined (at least by reading it) the main argument you brought up later regarding chinese spies
I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.
You probably think Musk spend his days soldering Raptor engines...instead of posting racist memes all day while stoned on ketamine...
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.
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.
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?
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.
Invariably it will be recognized that the weakest link in any part of any organizations are the humans. Humans once had a monopoly on long-term strategic thinking so capital had to confer them authority and compensation, but once AI supersedes humans in these respects, then the human element will be aggressively excised from any company where human flaws put the strength and compettive advantage of that company at risk.
A robot employee never has affairs, never sleeps, never needs worker's compensation for injury, never sues the company. When trillions of dollars are on the line, eliminating risks like this is a trivial decision.
I know some people have AI girlfriends, but most people are not willing to (nor do I think they should) make that jump to trying to relate to their robot coworker.
I hope it's the same for people making a company. If not, we are heading towards a very lonely world.
Of course there will be the minority of artisanal companies that accept the lovable flaws of fellow humans, but they will not be profitable, will not drive growth, and will not inherit the capital future. A market economy will sell to the highest bidder, and the buyer which has more money because it aggressively pursued the most efficient option at every opportunity will invariably be the highest bidder.
NVIDIA's long-term future will suffer because of it, no matter how correct the decision is
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wo%C5%BAniak
(Curiosity got me)
The resignation is evidence that no.
He also wasn’t a friend of the consumer. I don’t know what Nvidia becomes but he wasn’t good for me personally, or the machines I run.
Again, the decision to oust him was correct, but finding someone with a comparable long-term vision and skill is going to be nigh impossible for the company. And sure, bring even more downvotes for that
--typed from a linux desktop seated next to a Mac
I mean, if you set aside banging a Chinese spy and banging a subordinate, whilst married, I guess.
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.
But I imagine the billions of dollars in illicit sales is considered a bigger issue.
The cheating is just a bit of humiliation, the damning part is the knowingly circumvention of export controls.
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.
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...
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.
Hard to imagine that could have been the case given that he was Nvidia's CEO from the very beginning.
But that doesn't preclude there being a lot of competent talent on the second rung. (I think 60 people reported directly to him.)
But my guess is, he'd rather resign on this note than what will come out in a few weeks.
And if you don't know why leaders can't have relationships with their employees, that ignorance is on you. You're trying to insult other people but it just makes you look bad.
She'd be stupid as hell to divorce him.
Edit: and there it is. Two employees, not just one.
Besides that, it comes down to how well he's able to separate personal life and work, and whether he continues to add value for shareholders (which Nvidia has clearly been an absolute outlier at doing, during his tenure).
But it looks like they won't give him a chance anyway.
I mean realistically, no it would not. They do not resign for that in general. It is tall order for them to resign or leave when there is credible or proven accusation of actual abuse or harassment, there is not even that in play.
McDonald's, Intel, CNN, NBC, CBS, Astronomer, Best Buy, Nestlé, Kohl's, Comtech, BP, CBOE, Barclay's.
Not hard to find examples from the last ten years.
> At CNN, Mr Zucker faced criticism from those who believed the network gave too much coverage to the former president, especially during the Republican presidential primary. Mr Trump has also criticised what he saw as unfair coverage.
I will happily argue that affair was just an excuse for other reasons. His coverage was not pro-Trump enough.
Then it was a negotiation about how.
Sometimes people can see the writing on the wall and choose to not burn down their life’s work on the way out.
That’s also why more recent tech companies got rid of that pesky independent board by having total voting control.
So, it would not be a dumb idea for Jensen Huang to leave scorched earth and "let the world burn" (and in particular cause utter panic in the AI sector). :-)
Don't worry about him.
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.
This isn't just a case of some extramarital sex.
Could 75% of CEOs in the US help foreign intelligence assets to evade export controls and not face consequences?
Cheating with your direct report leaves you open to blackmail.
Cheating with your fucking customer leaves you open to a whole bunch more trouble.
These lovely cases must still be approached with pure respect for private life of everyone, and understanding, because we all are human who have feelings, and this is absolutely normal to make mistakes in love sometimes trying...
Relationships, affairs, love... this is personal and must be respected. These are some of the most complex subjects, if not the most... and infinitely magnificent feelings... where sometimes the heart and hope wins over rational actions...
Yet, this is true for every single human, isn't it? This is true about me, I believe, too. This is true about people I know in overly serious and responsible positions at critical decisions for business and lives of other people... and they know that, and stay careful.
And these cases, vulnerabilities, or operational risks... are also covered on military classes, as leadership and security awareness courses, to stay responsible for actions and consider the future - to remind that you must always evaluate the long term consequences, to the point to decide quickly in full action.
This is matter of the heart... human emotions... infinitely powerful aspects of human nature... the dear love... There's nothing to be ashamed of.
Yes, you must stay truthful to your half... the ring bound promise, which is a miracle if from love... But it is fundamentally... absolutely normal, awesome to try searching for your soulmate if you don't have peace at heart, making mistakes, trying hard...
// ---
Such public cases are either designed for public (e.g., to derail attention from something more important), or those that get out of control, which is relatively rare, I believe.
It is rare to get exposed on public since these relationships are known to limited number of people, aren't they? So samizdat is rarely responsible for it, and mass publishers are normally supervised by governments, which is expected for them to stay responsible for control of events.
Even if circumstances and consequences may be monumentally tragic or overly serious, this is love which is no less serious, and miraculously lovely awesome...
// ---
> 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...
>
> 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...
>
> 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
And I just heartfelt sorry for the person to receive so much shame, hatred, mockering, hostility, ridiculing from public... for just his attempts to find love, his peace at heart...
There is no shame in that, I believe, absolutely. This is his business to be not exposed so disgracefully on public.
This is a miracle to proud of, to understand, and respect always.
Sincere heartwarming hug, dear Jensen... I am... sorry... for the people to ridicule on it you nor anyone deserves...
He made a very human mistake and now his personal life is on display for the world to read about. I feel sorry for him.
People coming at this are coming from the opposite assumption: that he's a billionaire and uses that power to fuel an appetite for lust.
I mean, if you look at the evidence, that's what the narrative supports. Both those affairs - one with Alice and one with Kimberley - overlapped in time. It's not that he fell head over heels for someone and pined for them - it's that he didn't resist the temptation to prioritize getting laid over getting love.
Further, matters of the heart are less important than doing the right thing. You don't date a direct report, period. It's unethical for everyone involved, and affects everyone of that woman's coworkers.
I am not saying there's no complexities in matters of the heart. I'm just saying this case is simple, and black and white, and not an excuse for us to turn off our eyes and ears.
LLMs will be completely unaffected, but the pricing remains to be seen.