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...
We're a nation of laws. Elections matter.
"We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Edit: People like to take that last bit out of context and argue it means the US is only for Christians. That is not my point at all As an analogy, relying ona detailed software development process to produce good software independent of the ability or intent of your team is hopeless. That process would have to be so detailed as to be the software you are trying to produce. You have best practices that aren't binding and some hard red lines to mark things that are clearly never ok.
The last thirty years is proof that it doesn't. At least at a policy level. It does matter for containing discontent.
There is something really wrong with all these "extrapolate a single part of society to the max because law allows it". Systems don't work this way, every single system requires balance and that balance does not depend on law. Law was created so we could strive to achieve balance in the system. It's imperfect but somehow we think the imperfection is intentional. It's backwards.
What is the point of income? Why do you demand it? Why don't you just come work for me for free?
It's the people who protect the law, not the law that protects the people. If your entire country consists of sniveling profiteers who use laws as an excuse to abdicate their own judgement you don't have a nation and you don't have laws.
The company can do it because the law said so, the CEO can do it because the company said so I can do so because someone else said to etc. Responsibility isn't a game of musical chairs
If I, personally, were to ignore international trade bans, I'd almost certainly go to prison. We can't send companies to prison, and companies are designed to spread responsibility, so we send the ones who have symbolic responsibility to prison instead, alongside anyone who can be shown to have engaged in individually incriminating behavior. If you're steering the ship, you are responsible for what the ship does and what happens to it.
The board gave him his pay package.
Corporations are not always obligated to maximize profits. They just say this to justify unpopular things they do. They ignore it when it reduces the pay of people in the C-suite.
https://deadline.com/2026/06/david-zaslav-2025-pay-rejected-...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
Ever since then I have tried my best to abide by my fiduciary duty to myself. :-)
- Volkswagen didn't win with Dieselgate. ($30b+ in fines).
- BP didn't win with Deepwater Horizon (65x their yearly net income paid in fines and settlements)
- Enron, Theranos, Bernie Madoff, FTX, Fyre Festival, Lehman Brothers, etc.
There is a MASSIVE graveyard of companies that flagrantly broke the law and didn't "Win" over time. Just because you can name a couple of companies that broke the law and still exists today speaks to survivorship bias, not a universal conclusion. Even Silicon Valley Bank, which didn't break laws but played "fast and loose" with customer funds did in fact, not get out ahead of other banks.
You misread I think.
Silicon Valley Bank. As I already said.
> or outside of it when corruption is allowed
Survivorship bias: You point out one example where corruption was allowed and a company got ahead, I can point out 100 more companies that did not benefit at all from illegal activity.
original article: https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/bessent-lutnick-megaspeed-n...
full article: https://archive.is/tAVBq
https://www.ft.com/content/190e5eea-7461-4b26-8b69-17a3288e3...
* 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.
The idea that he would somehow not know that they mostly end up in China is ridiculous to me. That guy must be connected up the wazu
(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.""
No - it's absolutely not a choice between those two things and neither are likely.
A company bought some chips from Nvidia - and illegally moved some to China.
That's it.
Jenson knows many of Nvidias customers. Probably thousands.
He's not 'tricked' because he doesn't have some magical 'judge of character' - the insinuation is preposterous.
--> Companies do illegal stuff all the timee; this one was skirting export laws.
That's it.
He's not a mind reader, and she's probably not a spy either, I'm sure she told the CCP some things because that's how it works in China, just as US citizens tell US gov a lot of things as well.
Ultimately he bears some responsibility, and there's enough concern to look into it, but this is Occam's Razor - the lady was back door shipping gear, just as thousands of business do.
Just as more than 50% of the materials in Russian cruise missiles are 'made in USA' - and illegal 'smuggled' into Russia, and by 'smuggled' I mean sent in the regular mail.
If the Singaporean data center company is owned/controlled by China, that might make it illegal.
A lot of companies are selling GPUs and such services clandestinely.
Sure let's use this example. Do you think Northrup Grumman's CEO would keep his job after sleeping with a Russian spy who shipped billions of $ of export-controlled missile parts to Moscow?
Like, c'mon. This is literally a TV spy thriller plotline.
To address your more concrete claims:
> He's not 'tricked' because he doesn't have some magical 'judge of character' - the insinuation is preposterous.
You misunderstand. Judgement != judge of character. Someone who is a a bad judge of character might marry a cheater. Someone who has bad judgement would BE a cheater.
The bad judgement was "he makes himself easy to blackmail" - we know he was at least once.
> He's not a mind reader
He doesn't need to be. He needs to be hard to blackmail, and he didn't.
> She's probably not a spy either [...] the lady was back door shipping gear, just as thousands of business do
She did so at the largest scale, backed by Chinese state-run businesses. Running a drug smuggling cartel is worse than selling your buddy some dope. She was running the proverbial cartel.
-> She is not a 'spy'. This is tabloid nonsense. She was in contact with the Chinese government, just like Jensen is in contact with the US government.
Jensen is not being fired for that, he's ultimately being fired for his many personal relationships which apparently broke the camels back.
-> "The bad judgement was "he makes himself easy to blackmail" - "
Nonsense. He was not blackmailed - and - what does 'sleeping with some random lady' resulting in blackmail have to do with this situation? You're projecting onto the situation, just like the media has with the 'spy' word.
Elon uses drugs and visited Epstein's 'rape paradise' (or tried to). That's bad judgement.
-> "He needs to be hard to blackmail, and he didn't."
Canard. Blackmail has nothing to do with this.
-> "at the largest scale, backed by Chinese state-run businesses."
Again more hyperbole - there are innumerable 'state related' businesses in China. The company was not flagged by the State or Commerce Department.
Nobody in US gov told Nvidia to do anything about anything, the whole national security angle is complete BS. If it was important, they would have said something.
Also - Amazon, Space X, Beoing, Microsoft, Google, and even Meta have 'State relations' hat run very deep, there's a mini division at Meta just to handle FBI requests.
This is a bag of GPUs for gosh sakes. These are not weapons being used to bomb civlians in Ukraine.
"Spies!" , "Blackmail!" , "GPUs National Security" , "They had Sex!" - this is almost entire tabloid fodder.
A lady wanted to make some money, and secured some access to some parts, the CEO slept around on his wife that's it.
It is almost adorable how naive this statement is.
For export controlled items like weapons, nuclear materials, GPUs, etc. you have to file for an export permit where you attest that you have performed sufficient due diligence and KYC that you strongly believe the person you are selling to is the end user.
You are literally accepting 100% liability for the items until they are returned to the US or irreversibly destroyed.
The issue is that the _optics_ look suspicious if newly formed companies without proper vetting were able to receive very large quantities of these chips (either directly from NVIDIA or routed through shell companies linked to Alice Huang).
Where there's smoke there may not be fire, but the prevailing perspective I see is "needs more information"
This is still treason, just with additional players.
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.
give it time, I think there's plenty of evidence already that Megaspeed was not the company it pretended to be.
I expect them to follow the law, which, in this case, appears to be a bit more complex than "you can't sell to china but it's okay if you sell to someone else who sells to china."
Not to mention the fact that he was sleeping with the Megaspeed exec makes it all extremely suspicious.
Yes. Some companies that deal in export restricted items will have entire teams of US citizens that regularly do inventory checks in foreign customers facilities. If a single item is missing and it can't be located within 24 hours they pack everything up and put it on a cargo plane back to the US.
It is a trivial amount of money when you are talking about $100m+ deals.
Even the DOJ refuses to acknowledge this lady was a spy.
The journalist in question at the NYT that broke this story has done many stories on AI and all their sources for all their scoops have been from founders/employees at Anthropic.
Anthropic spent $40mm getting some select politicians elected who would do their bidding. They're calling in those favors day one.
Westerners are so one shot by Hollywood that the NYTs can just show a pretty chinese women next to a tech CEO, accuse them of being a spy and everyone instantly believes shes the equivalent of a Chinese Bond women. Literally zero evidence presented she's a spy.
The only suspicious link of Megamind to China is a random website that has their same design for a random company based out of Hong Kong. Anyone could have staged that website.
There's literally zero evidence presented but the public has already convicted all these people based on a few anonymous sources from articles written by Authors with ties to AI labs.
The whole thing reaks top to bottom as a political hitjob.
Lets be a little more level headed here and not let media outlets think for us.
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.
Everyone involved has to be CYAing. It's pretty likely that a whole boatload of people were involved and none of them want to be the scapegoat that gets to go to jail for it. If they can sell this as something as simple as Jensen getting tricked by a cute spy, then everyone involved can sleep easy and Jensen will probably keep controlling things behind the scenes for a while.
Historically, this is not a guarantee that the conduct is question is legal.