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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban

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

Before Nov 11, it looked like NVIDIA might try to ride out the storm and keep Jensen at the helm especially if they saw that the China accusations and evidence wasn't strong enough to be a problem. Again, it was totally unnecessary for the board to publicly back him up if they had plans to get rid of him because of China allegations. However, the Board of Directors emergency Nov 11 meeting is inconsistent with the Nov 8 statement affirming Jensen's leadership.

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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."

Man’s been stockpiling affairs like his customers stockpile GPUs.

end of thread

Has he been bankrolling them like he's been bankrolling his customers?

https://glonce.com/nvidia-bankrolls-its-own-customers-the-ec...

We were getting ready to draw straws on who should join the anthill for some GPUs. Now we gotta find someone else to seduce.

Ironic, because in all likelihood, the Ants had a hand in his takedown.

My understanding is that the legal protections for the board of directors can quickly evaporate if they know about such lies and do not take actions. This is a major point of contention in the Oxford LLC bankruptcy proceedings per my understanding after the founder was found to have been persuing several kinds of fraud.

After they caught him in a lie, they may not have been able to not fire him.

I wonder if it's an elaborate dance.

They can't legally not fire him. But they can legally re-hire him after firing him. So ironically the ONLY way he can continue at nVidia is by being fired - we just have to wait a few days and there will be an Altman-like resurrection.

Where did the "ants" saying come from? i've kept seeing it here and there after the hacks to Hugging Face and others.

https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535

I just did a quick search and concluded the same. I wonder if he got it from somewhere before. If you have Twitter account please ask him!

This is a paraphrase of the less technical-sounding: "if you find two ants in the kitchen, you don't have a two-ant problem" which I definitely heard my mom say in the 90s (about actual ants, not metaphorically).

A fortune cookie I suspect.

More seriously, I was also curious. A quick search seems to say the earliest recent source is https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535

Nonsense, this is just folk wisdom. Ask your parents.

I have a feeling this one falls in the same category as "sweet summer child", which, while technically as old as the hills, only hit critical mass after game of thrones popularised it

People say it in real life about things that are often present in groups and are hard to spot. I most associate it with cockroaches and bedbugs.

It's likely a variation on the saying that, if you see two cockroaches, there are more. Here's a page with that saying from 2013: https://www.weekand.com/home-garden/article/see-two-cockroac...

I couldn't find any examples of this in a full-text book search, but besides some technical works about insects, and some material about noah's ark, I did find, from 1942:

> In the course of an experimental way, down in the depths of a science building, a beaker full of fermented sugar is left on a shelf. Sometime later one of the experimenters returned to the scene ... to find two cockroaches in the beaker, one of which had a family of about a dozen—the other had drowned itself in rum. AND WHO WOULDN'T IN THE FACE OF SUCH OVERWHELMING RESPONSIBILITIES.

Isn't it a common saying for all pests? I've heard it for ants, mice, and roaches

And CEOs, politicians, etc.

If I found two CEOs in my kitchen, I probably wouldn't be suspicious that there was a third hiding somewhere.

Don't live in Silicon Valley though.

Live in Silicon Valley. If I found two CEOs in my kitchen I would definitely be suspicious that there's a third hiding somewhere.

Can't confirm; replaced all my CEOs with AI

Lucky you. Probably better overall.

Turns out there were at least three ants.

https://nypost.com/2026/11/12/business/ousted-nvidia-ceo-jen...

Or, in this case, aunties.

The Powell affair has been well known for years inside the company.

One ant could just be an antomaly however

> and lost trust in him.

I don't think this has anything to do with trust. It's absurd not to trust Huang as the best possible CEO for the company that he brought from zero to 5 trillion dollars in value. It's about being afraid of public opinion, and especially fear of being blamed for not taking the expected decision.

Yeah, I'm wondering this too. Jensen's damn good at his job, love him or hate him. I genuinely am struggling to understand why they'd remove him unless there's more they know that we don't.

I don't think there is anything more to it than self preservation. All humans and I'd say living beings are good at it.

This is why martyrs are so praised. You have to overcome this instinct of self preservation to give up your life. I suspect most people can't do it in the heat of the moment.

Basically what others have said, it doesn't matter if Jensen is good at his job or even if nVidia prospers under Jensen. I don't think the board members care one lick about that. What matters to them is their own self interest and it takes a lot of experience to realize that executive leadership and even the board does not instinctively value the goals of the organization above their own self interest. I submit this is true because of the massive amount of bribing err I mean incentive alignment that the organization gives in terms of like stock options or bonuses for meeting certain targets.

He got honeypotted by a rival superpower and appears to have actively helped to circumvent national security concerns and export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

My god, how much more spectacular could his mistakes be? Does he have to eat a baby live on TikTok while proclaiming "transistors are dead, we're going back to vacuum tubes" or something?

There are very few human beings in history who could have taken nVidia from zero to megatrillions like he did, but the idea of him continuing to run the company after this is absolute absurdity.

I wouldn't give people like that any ideas

if you think getting powned by chinese intelligence is 'stupid mistakes' you are extremely missinformed about the lengths they will go through and the resources they will deploy.

look at you over here all WOOO CHINA NATIONSTATE SUPERPOWERS WOOO RESOURCES WOO

it took a vagina. it literally just took a vagina.

you really dont understand or know how such a placement works. They can very easily do it to you regardless of how paranoid you are.

everyone can be fished.

the simple fact China had to deploy an operative to get yo him means he and Nvidia are well secured. its an expensive and risky option, not the first by far and intelligence agency would take to get to someone.

go shout in all caps in call of duty -_-

> there's more they know that we don't

They know that media and politicians were asking for his head, and that it was riskier for their own asses to resist than to concede. It's that simple.

> riskier for their own asses to resist than to concede.

I dunno, I bet the stocks would recover from the affair in less than a month. That they will recover from losing Huang as the CEO is less certain.

Exactly my thoughts. You put a typical corporate type ahead of NVIDIA and we'd manage to see AMD get ahead of them in datacenters.

>Jensen's damn good at his job, love him or hate him.

He can barely stay coherent to reality during interviews and on stage. Especially when the AI generated slides don't make sense.

To be fair, he evidently pulls a lot of late nights putting his body on the line for the company. It's exhausting, back-breaking work.

That's bad leadership.

I mean that goes without saying given that I was referring to his sexual escapades with coworkers and an alleged spy. Absolutely none of this is good leadership. The guy has to go testify before Congress, and that's probably only the beginning.

I think you missed the point. An average person may hold their alcohol and operate, but we don't approve cops being drunk on the job.

Huang betrayed 38 years of trust his wife put into him and recently betrayed the Board by lying to them. That's already admitted, no ifs or buts. He clearly had reasons, as he is a sane person. His reasons were romantic engagement with (alleged) spy. Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job. The Board needs to do bunch of "what ifs" in such situation, including paranoid ones, such as "what if this woman had such access to NVIDIA tech stack that each cheap is infused with some form of Chinese virus". We simply don't know how far this goes, but this firing certainly shows much further than just a consequence of a romantic fling.

> Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job.

Sane people still make irrational decisions.

It's one of the weird dichotomies of our species.

Or well thought out ones, that everyone views as irrational. Who can tell .. can't expect a cheater to be honest

Also worth noting that in the event his wife doesn't stand by him, this immediately becomes the second largest divorce settlement in history (behind only Bill and Melinda Gates). That's not the kind of headlines the PR department is love with either.

He produced a one-in-a-zillion success, and he certainly did it the hard way -- he was apparently unusually hands on. The word "genius" gets thrown around a lot, but I think it's apt.

But.

He put together a string of frankly insane mistakes that are now endangering that 5 trillion dollar company from both the inside and outside. There's no chance in hell that they're going to go from $5T back to 0, but you are not understanding the trouble they're in.

Internally, boinking your direct reports (who also happened to have a string of recent promotions) is incredibly ruinous to a company's internal culture, destroying notions of internal meritocracy. How would you feel if all your hard work was apparently not as important as putting out for the CEO? Do you think that would make you eager to do your best work for that CEO? And that's even before thinking about the insane legal liability.

Externally, he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed to simultaneously mess with national security and, it seems, circumvent export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. nVidia is in some extremely serious shit, and will have the government breathing down their necks between now and the end of time.

I think his unfair, and much of it not true.

Jensen is actually extremely well respected by his staff and has the highest staff approvals in almost all of tech.

I'm certain that his personal foibles won't engender him any love, but it's not unheard of.

Elon Musk has had sexual relations with at least 4 staffers, children with one - while he was having children with his wife.

Where's the scandal?

"he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed "

Where is the evidence of this? Give me one specific allegation?

His mistress was passing information to the government, ok, as will many nationals that have met with him, and as US nationals often do as well.

Elon is in direct contact with Putin several times a year since 2022 - and there's no good reason for that.

Consider putting all of that in context vis-a-vis much of the rest of corporate America and consider the rest of his contributions.

Obviously it's fair to bring all of this up, but it's intensely hypocritical for the most part.

Give me one specific allegation

https://archive.ph/c4kmF

---

Next to the Nvidia chief was a woman named Huang Le, or Alice Huang, an executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed, which was poised to buy $2 billion of Nvidia A.I. technology over the next year. Though Ms. Huang and Megaspeed are little-known players in the A.I. industry, their association with Nvidia and its chief executive has recently become a preoccupation in Washington.

Commerce Department officials have been investigating whether Megaspeed, which has close ties to Chinese tech firms, is helping companies in China sidestep American export restrictions, according to more than a half dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an examination that is not public.

The inquiry, which is active, calls into question how closely Nvidia is tracking where its A.I. chips end up and highlights the possibility of American export laws easily being sidestepped. Megaspeed is also facing scrutiny from Singaporean police, who told The New York Times in a statement that they are investigating the company for breaching local laws, without elaborating further.

There are no allegations against Nvidia there.

It's absurd to suggest that Nvidia would need to secretly ship a handful of chips to some sketchy actor when Nvidia chips have a a mile a line long for sales.

Jensen can sell his inventory 10x over. You have to have buying power just to get a hold of them.

Anything is possible but it would be extra stupid for one of the smartest people in the world to risk everything for literally no reason at all.

>Anything is possible but it would be extra stupid for one of the smartest people in the world to risk everything for literally no reason at all.

a story as old as time

Fair enough - but there are zero specific allegations against him in terms of national security.

His mistress was talking to the Chines government - literally as all people over there are compelled to do - and - was hustling Nvidia chips - as thousands of people are doing.

The idea that Nvidia would knowingly help people do something bad would require some material evidence before it could be a headline.

I'm puzzled that so many Huang defenders point at Musk.

The bar shouldn't be Musk!!

How are you puzzled that people point out the radical hypocrisy?

Musk is 'below the bar'.

Jensen is 'just at the bar' for this maybe slightly above.

I'm not condoning, I'm contextualizing.

He didn't do anything wrong or illegal (that we know of), other than breach of trust with his wife.

This media around this is crazy and slanderous.

All of the press is screaming about 'affair with spy and possibly secrets' , which is very unfair.

She's not a 'spy' - she's a hustler looking to make money by reselling GPUs, and she's 'talking to the Chinese government' as literally they are all compelled to do.

Are Jensen and Elon 'spies' because they talk to the State Dept. and US Gov all the time about goings on in China?

In an ideal world - we would have to contend with Jensen's actions, but I'm doubtful he'd be nerfed for personal foibles, which are not material or public concern.

Assuming that he did not hand over key secrets or information, which I highly doubt and which there are no specific allegations, this is a media / meme wave, completely out of context.

The only saving grace in this, is that the Nvidia board may be friendly to him, in which case, maybe they 'know something' that is not public, and this is the 'nice way out' but even then I'm doubtful.

He's clearly not the best CEO for the company if his leadership has opened them up to a tonne of liability. The thing with Powell is problematic enough on its own, and yet it looks like a misdemeanor compared to the fact that he was sleeping with a Chinese spy and potentially knowingly sold chips to China in the face of a US-government-imposed ban. I just don't see why this is so hard. The best guy for the job is the one who doesn't risk the company and investor's money by overstepping into the geopolitical arena because he wants to poke some strange.

Probably still the best fit even if it costs the company billions.

Given that a third woman (another coworker) has just been alleged, I'd say that Jensen was the best fit in a few other ways too. I'd be furious if I were an investor.

Furious investor here. Lol. But I'm just as furious with Huang as with the board for firing him.

But it seems especially goofy because it appears it's only about the non-Chinese affairs, since the timeline suggests he was in the clear until the second one came out.

Does anyone here think that sleeping with a billionaire CEO is something that these successful, executive-level women were actually coerced into? That's the fear run-of-the-mill "boss sleeping with subordinates" harassment suits are (usually justifiably) about. That the subordinate was either pressured into the arrangement in the first place, or that she at some point would have wished to stop, but would credibly fear retaliation and thus be coerced to continue.

I'm trying to imagine concretely what that could have possibly been like. Somehow I don't think he could be that desperate to be with a specific woman who didn't want him, that he would threaten an executive to get her into bed, nor to be so obsessed with keeping the affair going that he would even think of threatening revenge against someone who, by definition, obviously had the ability to ruin his life just by opening her mouth. The women held all the power over him, as evidenced by the fact that they just used that power to end his career.

I think they ousted him because they figure there will be many more affairs, and it'll just bring extra heat on the company for the forseable future.

It's not about whether or not they were coerced, it's about the complications that it brings to the table. Has anyone he was sleeping with been promoted? Did the fact that they were sleeping with him compromise the validity of that process? Is he vulnerable to current or previous sexual partners (coercion goes both ways)? Is he vulnerable to people who weren't sleeping with him but knew about his affairs?

Remember, this a guy who shepherds a multitrillion dollar company. He needs to be able to demonstrate good judgement, and that generally means not screwing the crew, or Chinese spies.

That would be the best estimate, if the choice was 2 or another specific number.

> Is there another 3rd secret affair

Perfect timing: https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...

Lawyer here - I actually would bet this is not the case. Whether he came clean or not, the 2nd affair with a subordinate is basically always a firing offense under the sexual harassment and/or code of conduct policy, whether you are a CEO or not.

The lies may be part of it, but if you didn't fire them for the COC/SH violation, you would be in for near infinite liability because it ends up as evidence that the culture from the top was tolerant of violations, etc. THis is not conjecture, it's what has basically always happened in the legal realm when companies try to work around it.

What’s the practical definition of “near infinite”? $1B, $100B, personal liability for board members, criminal liability?

Knowingly allowing ongoing misconduct or consciously ignoring resulting harm is considered bad faith

Protecting the CEO for the directors’ own interest is considered a loyalty problem.

Both of these things would make them personally liable in a shareholder derivative lawsuit.

California permits personal liability for directors perpetrating harassment and prohibits aiding or abetting prohibited conduct.

That's the directors.

Company wise - actions by the CEO are generally imputable directly to the company. This leads to potential hostile-environment claims even by employees who never had a relationship with the CEO, and those claims have been particularly cognizable in California.

Non-termination is also likely to lead to punitive damages, because it will be seen as "malice" or "reckless indifference".

Value wise - sexual harassment verdicts - depends who sued, but probably <150 million to start, long term cost maybe a billion very worst case.

Shareholder derivative lawsuits (where directors are personally liable if they end up with a finding of bad faith) - insanely more - hundreds of millions to billions.

The max value available for the company to pay out.

We are up to 3 now [1]. This is turning into a Bangarang.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...

Laughed out loud! Thanks for this new terminology.

So there is a third ant.

https://archive.is/nXQE3

I once owned an LP by Dr. John where he sang "Woman is the root of all evil. Money is bad but it's legal" :-)

He of course didn't mean women per se are evil, but that "affairs" with them are. Just his opinion.

Too much money is bad for most people, it corrupts their morality. But money is legal. It doesn't get you fired. You will have many friends because of it. You can get away with a lot of things with high-priced lawyers.

At this rate, I'd go with a bet of Jensen over 3.5 affairs

Isn’t musk a clear counterexample here? He has had numerous liaisons with subordinates. Yet I haven’t seen either SpaceX or Tesla (who actually could) move to fire him. Or is he the exception?

Musk has most of the voting power in his own companies, so he has loads more of freedom because he answers to himself.

That was not the argument the OP made though. Clearly not "unlimited" liability.

It's entirely up to company policy. Nvidia had no policy barring personal relationships among employees. When it's a direct report it creates some risk that staffers will claim coercion or favoritism. For many companies, that risk is too high to allow, but I've worked for publicly traded companies where that sort of thing happened openly.

Except at peer tech companies like, say, Google.

Some people get to have affairs with subordinates, others don't. It's a question of if they have the support of the people pulling the levers or not as to whether it's considered acceptable. Universal rules are for little people, once beyond a certain position they are merely tools for selectively shutting out opposition.

+1. I'm sure Danny is well aware of what happened/s at Google.

Google, Facebook, et al have dual class/super-voting shares. The top people have more than 51% of the vote.

Tesla is an outlier here -- Musk currently has 20%, and that's up from like 12%.

Jensen has like 5%. Jobs owned 11% of Apple when he was forced out.

It should be fairly obvious why people who control the vote of q company can get away with more than people who don't.

Google was a clusterfuck (literally?) of people boning other people they shouldn't have been.

It's not really a counterexample, though, because most of the people in question are no longer there, and lost their jobs over their affairs. As far as I've heard, Sundar is pretty clean, almost robotic, and has a low-profile personal life. He is the polar opposite in that regard of Sergey (who was a walking HR violation) and Eric (whose NDA-bound mistresses are legendary across Silicon Valley). Much of the reason why they have stepped back from operating roles and fucked off to being class-B shareholders only is because their personal lives are a liability to a major company operating in the environment that Google does today.

DannyBee is undoubtedly well aware of that, having been a lawyer for Google during the time period when this went down.

Sergey is still on the board and has been very active in the company's Gemini development. He may not be president any longer but he's still there.

> the 2nd affair with a subordinate is basically always a firing offense under the sexual harassment and/or code of conduct policy, whether you are a CEO or not.

In my company, it's explicitly not forbidden, but the relationship has to be disclosed to HR early on (source: yearly training). That being said, I'm not sure what HR is going to do with the information.

Fire you, probably.

Not fire you. It gives them the ability to fire the others who aren’t forthcoming.

I suppose this way they can warn you to date people who are not direct reports… which hopefully you are not doing. Or offer you options (being transferred).

HR will use the information to ensure the two are not subordinate to one another. Example: A is dating B at the same company. HR will make sure that A is not subordinate to B and vice versa. This will reduce conflict of interest.

You have a high opinion of HR. Often one or both are dumped for violating employment agreements.. making HR and the company's life easier with the least effort.

Kind of hard to make anyone in the company not ultimately subordinate to the CEO, though, right? What are they gonna do, make her co-CEO?

Disclosing your secret affair to HR would be a hilarious move...

HR of course has no particular duty to out him to Mrs Huang. However, on the other hand, anyone with access to this personnel record, so long as the affair remains undiscovered, has an extremely inappropriate piece of kompromat against the CEO of a trillion dollar company. Maybe that's a small list of people but it seems like a terrible amount of power, to the point I don't think I'd be comfortable with anyone having this piece of information in their heads, let alone on a "consensual relationship disclosure form" Docusign.

Are you sure your company's policy allows this kind of relationship where cheating is involved? Infidelity might violate a morality clause, right?

The first woman he had an affair with was not just a spy, but also a customer. Isn't an affair with a customer also a fireable offense?

Generally I don't most handbooks have affair with a customer as being an offense. Arguably, that is just good business. On the other hand, having an affair with a vendor would be a problem.

No, not if it's consensual. That is, of course, another common human point of interaction that frequently leads to hookups/relationships.

Wait until you hear where Bill Gates met his (former) wife.

They are making the separation this public for a reason and it's not because of an HR issue.

The leather jackets were the red flag everyone missed. He needed to be validated as a sexy man.

Interesting observation, but leather jackets stopped functioning in that way decades ago. Fonzie made leather jackets safe for normies and totally white bread boring; we're no longer in the "On the Waterfront" or "Blackboard Jungle" era.

But sure, I'm willing to concede that for Huang the leather jacket might have signalled a mid-life crisis of some sort. All the more reason to beware of putting those types of guys in power, because they're always going to be the most susceptible to getting completely fished.

> Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?)

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.

We need to be careful not to equate the two affairs as being countable apples-to-apples. An affair with a customer executive that generates several billions dollars of revenue has a much different risk/reward profile for the board than an affair with a direct report employee within the company. The former also has much lower legal risk: bribery laws aren’t properly calibrated for this circumstance and sexual harassment laws are less applicable. As far as the board is concerned, I imagine they’re fine with him having an affair for every single $5B+ signature as long as he’s delivering the goods and doing so without getting caught so overtly that sales are impacted — thus the vote of confidence! — but that internal affair suggests bad judgment rather than greed-driven judgment, and exposes Nvidia to harassment discovery claims and/or exposes that he lied to the board about not having internal affairs, so he’s out.

When the affair with the customer executive involves deals that directly violate federal law? Don’t bet on it.

Assuming that federal law is enforced neutrally and uniformly, your point is completely correct.

That assumption has not held to date in this presidential cycle, and Jensen Huang has openly had the backing of that president. From a financial perspective, that would considerably lower their financial risk estimate of either having to pay a fine and/or hand over one or two C-level executives for some rich person prison-vacation time. I would assume the board is competent and has verbally, off the record, discussed how many billions of dollars they expect to be fined in the worst case and accepted that as the cost of doing (corrupt) business, but we could get lucky and find they did so with a paper trail that’ll come out in court someday :D

As long as the president has power….. current election makes him look like a lame duck.

Coincidence?

No, I’m assuming it’s not an applicable coincidence here in this specific instance, since the Board wouldn’t have made a statement of faith on November 8th if it was; they are likely an amoral entity but definitely neither an irrational nor oblivious one, and the elections outcomes were well understood by then.

Uh huh.

You are, of course, welcome to present a counter-argument.

Why, when you ignore it?

It’s like talking to the void.

Your two claims are that federal law will dissuade Nvidia’s board and execs from knowingly pursuing and profiting from illegal activity, and that Nvidia is throwing Jensen to the wolves to appease the populace after a failed AI election.

If I’ve misstated either of your claims, that’s unsurprising — given their paucity, no apology is due for that — but I’m still open to being corrected on understanding what you’re claiming. Or: If I’ve restated your two claims accurately, then I both haven’t ignored what you’ve said and I disagree with your claims as presented so far.

> Uh huh.

Note that I’ve disregarded this reply as either a claim or an argument, as I could discern neither when considering it under the ‘best possible interpretation’ site guidance. Perhaps a more plainspoken and less slang(?) reply would be more parseable.

> Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?

Reports are just breaking that this is indeed the case.

They love all hands meetings at NVIDIA

The source for this appears to be Reuters[1]:

> Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people familiar with the matter, Reuters has learned... Reuters is not naming the employee.

"That's the kind of thing that a healthy class of professional journalists can help uncover and trace"

don't has to be a journalist, it could be a spy too... :-)

Yes: https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/12/jensen-huang-was-having-a-...

So to preface, I do not condone adultery / office affairs, etc.

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?

First, his actions were alleged to have impact on national security, but that is not for sure. It is for sure that he was acting inappropriately as a boss, though. Second, I suspect that it is both events which led to his firing. If the affair with the subordinate had come out first, and then the affair with the alleged spy, I suspect he still would've been given grace for the first but not the second event.

> Second, I suspect that it is both events which led to his firing.

Plus possible other events known to the board but not us. We’ll know eventually.

Not necessarily.

Once I worked at a company where the sales VP got caught embezzling by setting up (large amounts of) fake affiliates.

It boosted the overall revenue numbers, and I think they were impressed at how long he had gotten away with it, so they let him be ‘stolen’ by a competitor (who didn’t know the circumstances) while they swept it under the rug.

Easy 8 figures of revenue impact per year.

Pretty ingeniously evil, IMO.

It's about lying. The proper procedure is to disclose consenting relationships with a subordinate so that HR and the board is aware of conflicts of interest

If an exec is lying about this, what else might they be lying about? Embezzlement? Corruption?

You’re right, because failing to disclose who you’re fucking is definitely at the same intellectual and moral level as embezzlement and corruption.

This batshit insane decision by the board is a timely reminder that prudes inexplicably truly do continue to thrive among us.

Nobody on the planet is better off with this guy resigning.

It’s a kind of corruption; specifically that the senior may have coerced the junior. And once it’s done, the junior can blackmail the senior. Since you can’t reliably determine that it was all mutually agreeable, you have to rule it out by policy. Same as emoluments.

you make it sound like hes the only person working at nvidia. he did good things but the company will continue to do good things as countless talented individuals make up the company.

It's against pretty much every company policy to have a relationship with someone who reports to you.

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.

Right, and to make it explicit for some people following along who are wondering why companies have that policy... It's to prevent predatory and abuses of power. There's a power imbalance that can easily lead to exploitation.

Adding on to that clarification: The leverage the boss has over the employee creates a rational pressure for the employee to ignore any boundary they might have otherwise had in order to avoid any chance of the boss using that leverage against them.

The reason companies care about this so much is more practical than moral. Bosses having sexual/romantic relationships with employees leads to irrational decisions that are bad for the business.

Because it's likely sexual harassment. In two ways:

1 - did she feel pressured to have a relationship with him? It's hard to have genuinely free consent when he can make or break her career; and

2 - sexual discrimination towards every other employee. Did she get benefits from the relationship? It's more than fair for the rest of the employees to wonder if they'd also been eg sucking his dick if they would have gotten better raises, faster promotions, etc.

It's not the affair, exactly. It's that he violated HR policy (which incidentally was by way of having that affair).

  > 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?

The issue with workplace relationships with subordinates is that the degree of consent is often not clear.

Nobody cares about the sex, it's about the abuse of power.

We established 28 years ago that it's not considered a big deal. The real story is somewhere else.

In the current state of consent, a subordinate cannot give free consent.

All of them are big deals, but being deceived by a spy isn't the same as choosing to break an important rule.

This exposes the true personality and that the person is a liar and betrays those who trust him. Now think, does he betray only women or shareholders as well?

Indeed. The world operates on trust. Once trust breaks down, there's no choice but to deal with it directly if you want to remain effective. Unfortunately for Jensen Huang, that meant NVIDIA choosing to not have a leader they can no longer trust.

I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.

I’d love if that were true. But actually what the world operates on in selfish money grabbing.

Nobody trusted Trump yet he had the loyalty of all the tech giants because they needed him to make money.

And likewise, AI, and thus the global economy, are dependent on Nvidia. So there was no financial incentive for him to leave if it were just a matter of trust over his inability to keep his penis in his pants.

And let’s remember, this isn’t new news. Nvidia have been aware of this for a year already and it wasn’t a problem until recently.

So what’s changed? The obvious big thing is American government. The Democrats have made it very clear that they’re not going to tolerate any more shenanigans. So removing Haung is a great way to reduce the risk of any financial penalties for Nvidia’s deals with China et al.

> 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

This is the right line of thinking, but I don't think a second affair is enough. To me, it says there is more we don't know. Possibly a lot more, and a lot worse than a second affair. Apart from anything else, that is the only reason to act this fast. You don't fire a CEO like Jensen in 24 hours over an HR indiscretion.

So I think both you and the parent are correct, but its a combo: he didn't come fully clean, but there is a non-public part that probably looks a lot more like treason that the board knows and we don't.

come on man people have multiple through out the lifetime lol

It also gives them an affair not connected to export issues to hang it on.

It may be that, but I feel it's more about managing public perception. Potentially leaking secrets to a literal (stated) enemy of state feels much more catastrophic than infidelity (obviously his wife may not feel that way).

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.

> I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang

Hasn't Musk done this multiple times (including having children with subordinates)? He's still the CEO of a few companies. Bill Gates married one!

Boards don't care about this kind of thing unless they are already looking to get rid of someone. Worst case they pay the person off, and the cost will probably be less than a principal engineer earns in a year.

This doesn't pass the smell test. My guess is damning evidence was discovered which incriminates several high-level individuals at Nvidia with willfully bypassing the export ban. The second affair was leaked as a cover for why they were letting him go.

I'm sure it will all come out after a bit.

Musk has controlling shares of his companies. Of course he's not going to be fired if he answers to himself. And Bill did all that ~40 years ago, not today.

I don't know why people find this so hard to believe. CEOs of Nestle, Intel, McDonalds, Best Buy, Boeing have been booted once similar affairs came to light. Like this is an express ticket to getting fired no matter who you are.

What about President Clinton?

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"

Well, turns out there really might be a 3rd affair based on how the internet is buzzing. Seems to have been found out a bit after the resignation: https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...

Reuters is now reporting a 3rd affair...

Just saw an "Exclusive" announcement that there is indeed a reported additional relationship with (as of now unnamed) female Nvidia employee.

I really feel sorry for his family.

Many times, a board will maintain that they have full confidence in a CEO right up until they actually fire him. Their non-binding vote of confidence means nothing. Just as one example:

- 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...

No board is going to say “we think the CEO is a bit crap, but we’re going to stick with them for now and see how it goes.”

What about a board that says: "We think the CEO is a bit crap, but due to how the business is structured we have no actual power over him"? cough meta.

There are ways to say this without saying it

But are there reasons for them to say it? They don't say it because there's no benefit to the company by saying it, either outright or implicit.

“His moral failings are secondary to their commercial successes and clear delivery of shareholder value”

Did you expect anything else in a country that choose trump as their president?

Oh, c’mon. I’m not condoning anything that’s happening here, but CEOs having affairs is hardly unique to the US or a US government or trump.

The original post was about it being difficult to say they don't mind the ethical problems because the executive is important to the company. I was suggesting example phrasing. This has nothing to do with politics - it has always been the case, and always will be.

As folks have said in other contexts recently - if you see two ants in your kitchen, the total number of ants in your kitchen is probably not 2.

Jensen's PR strategy with his open letter was to draw attention TO his affairs. It's a "limited hangout" strategy.

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.

I have seen a weird number of posts/responses trying to say "this isn't because he had an affair" and like, I guess it's not, it's that he had multiple affairs that have confounding effects on the business (with subordinates, with people who got chips to China).

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)

Another weird thing, and a TIL - people love the line about two ants.

people?

entities posting comments at Hacker News

I don't know if you intended that to be funny, but I had a chuckle. I am an entity that pets my dog.

Also, implies anyone not posting on HN forfeits personhood by default

I took it as “here there be bots/non-people”.

If you see two comments about ants in the comments section, the total number of comments about ants in your comments section is probably not 2.

Two ants are better than one. Unless they’re in my kitchen.

I’m starting to think a lot of people around here aren’t entomologists.

Sex with spy of country actively tariffed and greatest active threat to US. Billions in tariff bypass. That puts you in jail for decades territory. People magazine cares about who he is banging. Legal and possible company nationalization care about bypassing tariffs.

Sex with a spy isn’t relevant any more than it was to Congress because you can’t prove it was knowingly.

Selling chips to China is pretty easily provable. Who cares what pussy he is diddling, it matters that such a large company might have their assets seized due to such blatant shenanigans.

Did you mean rationalization?

No. If Nvidia's leadership is incapable of abiding by US law they could have their company and assets seized.

National defense makes this a much bigger deal than people seem to understand.

All of this is based on leaks, mainly from the US government. So the November 8 board decision might've been the cause for the November 11 leak, because the original leak failed to achieve the goal of removing Huang. Remember we're talking about stuff that's over a year old. None of this is an evolving situation.

This was my original read of the whole thing. The timing on this, happening immediately after the Republicans lose big-time? This all seems so incredibly convenient and weird. I sincerely believe this is retaliation for something that he did or didn’t do.

The Dem plan for AI was to work with Anthropic and lock down GPUs to prevent running open / unapproved models. Basically limit AI development and inference to a handful of regulated companies.

Jensen Huang wasn't on board with that so now he's gone.

Getting downvoted, but if it's not a deliberate outcome it's certain an interesting and relevant one.

Huang was famously loyal to the gaming GPU markets, and there's been a subindustry of people running open inference on high-end consumer GPUs.

If NVIDIA kills those product ranges that subindustry will die, AI hardware will be limited to corporates and the small number of individuals who can drop five figures on an AI rig, and open models will become less valuable/dangerous.

Meanwhile I find it hard to believe the board had no idea what was happening and they're suddenly shocked - shocked! - to discover that Huang was plugging his CPU into the corporate motherboard.

What could he have done to swing the election in their favor? I think it’s more likely that with Democrats in power, NVIDIA can no longer count on the Trump administration’s corruption to prevent investigations. There may be a lot more left to uncover, and they now have a convenient fall-guy to pin everything on.

Classic: It's not the crime. It's the cover-up.

even MULTIPLE affairs ?

Or the board realized these things are going to keep coming.

Powerful interests want Nvidia to change directions and my guess is that they didn’t think that would happen under Jensen.

> Powerful interests

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.

This is the same sort of timeline argument Noam Chomsky gave me regarding why he thinks that Zelensky stopped negotiating with Russia after Boris Johnson’s visit. After the firefights in Bucha he was still saying they’ll have to make a deal, then Johnson arrived and said Putin is not a man to make deals with. And then Zelensky stopped saying it. I asked Chomsky about this explicitly (whether the discovery of bodies shot point blank in the aftermath of the Russian withdrawal from Bucha was the decisive factor) and he pointed to the timeline. I don’t know if I fully buy that argument:

https://youtu.be/_BypvatagNQ?si=1CDGUZKSd6r3jz_n

Would love to hear more about this - is there a timestamp within the video where the relevant discussion is? Other sources? Ukraine shifted pretty dramatically to offensive operations within Russia in late-2025/early-2026 and I'm curious why.

It starts about 1:25:00 in, I confront chomsky for the receipts

Chomsky has pretty terrible track record on ascribing motivations in the conflict, going back to Khmer Rouge. Should have really stuck to formal languages.

It's absurd that they're going to drop a guy that build the most profitable company in the world over 35 years of working every day, and is basically beloved by his own staff and the industry.

Something stinks to high heaven here.

Elon Musk has multiple allegations of sexual assault against him - he's had sexual relations with at least 4 of his staff including children with one of them while he had children with another women.

Elon solicits young women over social media to have children with (which is also soliciting sex).

He attacked his own regulators during DOGE, has direct meetings with Putin several times since 2022 (still ongoing), he's taken $100's of Millions in investment from Chinese state banks, special deals re: factories and data capture and sharing rights.

And more.

The difference is that Elon has 1) and iron grip over the board and 2) is an aggressive, spiteful person who will attack anyone and everyone - and everyone lives in fear about saying anything negative about Elon.

Jensen is paying the price for being a nice guy.

Apparently he should have been dragging the board over the coals, and threatening the press and industry to keep quiet, to quash the stories, to kiss up to Trump and make sure there's nothing but love from the government etc. etc..

" It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances"

I'm sorry but this is very not true and ... I don't want to be mean but it's effectively naive.

Elon tells his board whatever he wants to tell them including ridiculous fabrications about products, roadmaps, and handles them with total contempt.

This is game of power, not trust.

The fact that someone's sex life would factor into the decision at all is so backwards.

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.

Do you think Bill and Melinda Gates should never of happened?

1. He had sex with a spy 2. He had sex with a direct report.

This isn't a story about the sex

The spy was also a customer. This is two pretty broad violations of your usual HR policies at minimum even if you remove “spy” from the equation and ignore all the sales to sketchy parties.

The spy being a customer is not an excuse -- it raises more questions as to how they passed KYC and compliance requirements to be a customer.

It's normal for B2B companies screen for this before you even get a demo.

Who's to say "know your customer" isn't to be taken in the biblical sense?

From the article's first paragraph: "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned Thursday, capping a spectacular downfall for a poster boy of the artificial intelligence boom whose exit following reports of extramarital affairs now thrusts the chipmaker into an uncertain future."

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.

The sex is quite the nuisance. Maybe in the future we'll have AI CEOs that don't have these nuisanced lifestyles.

The issue is not his personal life -- the issue is that he has brought a spy into a position to compromise the company.

And you know you haven’t had sex with a spy because?

I mean, I think most people know they haven't had an extramarital affair with a spy for one very obvious reason!

So I guess a marital affair with a spy is okay?

Do you think you might have?

Sex or not “catastrophically bad judgement” and “CEO” are fundamentally incompatible.

Than every CEO would need to be replaced.

Sounds like a solid plan to me. I'll get the woodchipper.

There was a comment yesterday that suggested this was either a Chinese intelligence to destroy NVidia, or CIA operation to get Nvidia under control of a friendly puppet. [1]

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50462327

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121

> My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it.

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)

Yes, they do.

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 would prefer their companies buy local

They already do. Local produces maybe >5% of the volume needed. It's NOT prefer or not. It just doesn't exist.

It's interesting, the second comment I linked to was about the divide between Model Hawks vs. Hardware Hawks within the state department, and this comment thread is a great example of that.

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.

This is the right read.

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.

Exactly how was the entire company put at risk?

Optics and lack of trust seem to have done plenty in the markets, no?

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