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...
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?
The relationship with his wife is neither here nor there, unless she wants to make it public. If she feels betrayed, wants a quick buck, or otherwise wants to for any reason, she will sue for divorce and, considering the publicity of the cases, she should get a favourable judgement.
It’s easy to impose our morals on others. But more than half of republicans believe that gay sex is immoral just as strongly as you believe that adultery is.
I'm trying to point out the inconsistecy with the OP who implied sanctions evasion is not implicitly immoral but that "cheating" is.
Huang may have had an agreement with his wife that this was fine.
But he did not have an agreement with the justice department to flaunt the law and funnel GPUs to China.
Neither did conscientious objectors? I don't think you mean to claim that the justice department is the final word on morality? Just that on this topic, you agree with the justice department (which is fine), but they will do things that you disagree with. They are no final arbiter and have helped enforce plenty of immoral laws in the past.
There is even a case to be made that flooding the Chinese market with advanced GPU's will hamstring China's ability to build their own, just like they have done to our ability to manufacture. In fact that is exactly the case Jensen has made plenty of times. By holding back exports you are actually creating the market conditions in China for building advanced GPU's indigenously, CCP doesn't even have to do much, the market is responding. Who's immoral and unpatriotic then?
But for more everyone else reading, not helping the enemy build better defenses is basically Sun Tzu 101. China keeps us addicted to their manufacturers, the least we could've done is kept them addicted to our GPU's (to be easily turned off during a time of war). But Mr.Moral Police can't look past one chess move, so we're screwed now.
To be clear, I'm not saying mine is the only moral move (like others), I'm saying being confident about the morality here is senseless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a $5T (well, I guess $4T now) company we are talking about. What is the board being paid for?
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.
They absolutely got incredibly lucky.
Also, your comment has a hefty dose of survivorship bias. Lots of companies have long term visions they think will be valuable, and work very hard towards making them a reality. Few succeed. You're counting the survivors, not the attempts.
Furthermore, you fail to demonstrate that a different CEO of NVIDIA would have done something different.
Jensen Huang cheated on his wife AND conspired to evade arms control regulations, but he's still a genius.
The NVIDIAs of the world are vastly outnumbered by corporations who made a long term bet that failed, but because you're counting the successes, not the attempts, you see vastly inflated outcomes. Count the attempts to make these long shots, and Huang appears very lucky indeed. Crystal ball? Hardly! He couldn't forsee the outcome of 3 (is it still 3, or has the body count grown) affairs.
To prove Huang is a genius, you'd have to demonstrate that a different CEO of NVIDIA would have done something different.
> Crystal ball? Hardly! He couldn't forsee the outcome of 3 (is it still 3, or has the body count grown) affairs.
Fortunately, I'm not claiming that Huang is a genius at getting away with affairs. I'm claiming that if any CEO can be called a genius at running their business, Huang can.
Your best claim is that Nvidia is the biggest company in the world; therefore Huang is a genius. Maybe; some days Apple is also in the running for biggest company in the world. By your metric Tim Cook is therefore a genius. This makes me seriously doubt your metric.
You can doubt my metric, but it is quite difficult to grow a company to a trillion dollars while staying in charge the whole time.
This is a $4T company for Pete's sake!