Former Nvidia CEO Huang had a relationship with a second employee, sources say
reuters.com
reuters.com
Three different news orgs have reported the different affairs.
Workers of the world unite! Seize the means of (re)production!
A lesson, apparently, for everyone asking "what the big deal is".
If ever you wanted to understand the meaning of the word "liability", here it is.
"Coordinated hits", as you put it, have as their prerequisite the creation of a "liability".
As the British police are fond of saying in cold case appeals: allegiances shift.
Turns out that taxing their wealth is an intervention.
We need to do it if only for their own good to save them from the pressures that cause them to act increasingly antisocial.
There's a Canadian billionaire who is famously always donating to hospitals and suchlike. He's had tens of thousands of employees for decades and I've never heard anyone say anything bad about him.
I know another billionaire in Vancouver who isn't known for donations. Actually most people don't know he's a billionaire. He is generous though; he just insists on being anonymous when he gives large amounts.
I suspect the issue is less "billionaires are horrible people" and more "the highest profile individuals from any group tend to be the narcissists".
The argument that, for the most part, you need to extract from and exploit others to get to this level of wealth is relatively strong and has correlates with other negative behaviours I would say is the core issue at play here.
That’s what is going on.
His security detail is also no longer worried about retribution and are likely complying with an internal investigation.
It's very likely his affairs were simply open secrets within the C suite.
We're not talking about sexual violence or harassment though, it's not about “being believed”.
... what?
It's much more likely that some people knew and journalists went around asking people.
It's surprising how far tittle-tattle can travel.
That's long enough ago that it seems likely that Huang got to know her in her current role. But if the affair started earlier than 2017, there is the suggestion of abuse of power. Not with Powell as victim, but everyone else who hoped to get that role instead of her
1. Stick to the facts - speculation helps no-one.
2. Don't assume to fight on behalf of people you don't know.
For example there appears to be an assumption that his wife has been deeply wronged and she is the victim. This may well be the case. but it also might not be. That part of this story is a private matter for them and not helped by speculation and assumptions.
In fact I'd go further - you have in effect just accused Powell of being promoted by sleeping with the boss based entirely on speculation. Not sure that's helpful either.
He might also feel he needed to do it for many reasons, some more self-serving than others.
My speculation is purely for its explaining or predictive power on the question why all of this is coming out at once, and who's behind revealing all this. I favor the "conspiracy" version (someone wants him gone and exposes his real secrets in the most damaging way). But if we consider that this might all be organically triggered by the revelation of the spy affair we can't discount that the numerically largest group that feels wronged by his affairs might be employees that were disadvantaged whenever affair partners got special treatment
Whether or not it’s the case, if the behavior is known to others in the company it also creates a hostile work environment for ambitious female employees who are not at Powell’s level but hope to reach it.
Everyone reports to the CEO, directly or indirectly, and in this case the CEO is also a founder. The appearance of abuse of power here is plain-as-day.
There's so much coping going on in the comments here it's mind-boggling. Sleeping with your subordinates is enough to get fired just about anywhere.
Also note that it's different from having an opinion about Jensen himself.
So it's perfectly possible for me to simultaneously think he has done something wrong ( for the reasons you mentioned ), but also not decide on X or Y were 'wronged'.
Not the same thing.
When anyone in the company is fucking the boss and get a raise or promotion, or a good project, everyone in the company who isn't fucking the boss now have a legitimate grievance to sue the company over - that they are being passed over for these things because they aren't fucking the boss.
It doesn't even have to be true. The sheer possibility that it is true is cyanide.
This is part of every sexual harassment training 101 that any manager has ever gone through. (If you haven't gone through it, your employer's opening itself up to a lot of liability...)
There's a lot of people who usually know.
People with power think their farts don't smell or that the rest are stupid and don't notice or some don't care that people know as long as they keep their moths shut, or they get careless over time -- but lots of people eventually know.
Early in my career I shared an office with the mistress of a General Manager, she was on good terms with everybody in the office (kind of odd she was placed in the same office with nerdy devs she had zero work contact with) -- but everybody else hated her guts, can't really rember their grievances. Anyway I used to catch glimpses of phisical contact between them and the guy divorced and they married.
Relationships with colleagues were encouraged with some limitations, perhaps that's why they were so non-chalant about it (though the guy being married back home was kind of gross even for our european open minds).
In a nutshell, nobody wants to be the first.
(possibly obligatory disclaimer: I’m not saying this to minimize harassment and abuse claims. More the opposite: I worry that perceiving this phenomenon as something specific to harassment and abuse allegations can become a pretense for dismissing them out of hand.)
There isn't really even any point in this third story from the point of view of any "coordinated attack". He's already resigned.
A shell game. This is the distraction portion. Then comes the switch, the reveal and the swipe. Watch the market indicators. Nobody buying and selling shares in a trillion-dollar company cares one iota about extramarital affairs. Something else is happening.
There's probably some mildly interesting risk-balancing that happened behind the scenes because the intel community apparently knew mid-2026 and only spilled the beans now, but this is entirely of Jensen's own doing. He confessed.
He clearly is a top performer, though, managing four-plus relationships is a big job.
mid-2025*
When a real scandal happens, everything we know or will ever know gets dropped all at once. Anything else and you know someone is pulling the strings. The question is who? My money is on the arrow of time.
tbf, these side affairs i think are more just people piling on
Pretty sure the board asked the same question. Having finally been called to do their work, they can't just close the books without asking "what else do you have to declare" to both Jensen and at least all the direct reportees. And if there was a declaration, you can always find someone to leak it to the media.
Not saying that happened, just saying that it is likely such direct questions were asked and answered last few days.
him sleeping around, hth
It’s a common tactic to make sure the scandal stays on the front page and it’s untenable to try to stay on. Politicians do this all the time. Scandals happen constantly, it they’re saved for when they are most useful. Jensen is in politics, whether he realises it or not.
China may be behind it as an attempt to sabotage America’s economy. But I actually think more likely the Americans as Nvidia haven’t complied sufficiently.
I really feel for Jensen. He’s dedicated his life to Nvidia and really is heavily responsible for its success. It must be devastating to have to step away from it.
You can be poly and sleep with multiple people with the consent of your partners and it’s not an affair.
An affair, being unfaithful, cheating, etc. are all terms used for someone who has breached the terms of their relationship. We don’t need to be slow to judge because he judged himself by using those terms.
Sleeping with that person and the other affairs are just icing on a shit cake.
Reports that Lutnick and Trump knew about the spy situation for some time and allowed it to continue without informing Jensen goes a long way towards establishing a kind of coordination.
Once you start with the spy and national security angle, then you can get access to internal HR reports, and through these and media coordinating, a misrepresentation of the situation is doing the damage that was intended.
There is no public evidence that she was a spy, that Jensen revealed any secrets during the affair, or that Jensen was involved in any of the blackmarket dealings for GPUs. There is no evidence he exploited his power to have any affairs with anyone who works at nVidia either.
All thats left are two relationships he shouldnt have had with two nVidia employees and that is not criminal, or for many a reason to lose the company you basically created.
Meanwhile, its obvious that the commerce secretary worked with nVidia to slow roll the addition of shell companies where the blackmarket trades were happening. This is the most damning accusation, and if Jensens $25 million Trump ballroom donation was a payment to have them look the other way while nVidia knew they circumvented export controls, then that is a legitimate reason for him to resign. Because that is a series of criminal acts, and you know without a doubt that Lutnick, Trump and others were personally benefitting from this arrangement and is likely why they knew about the "spy" situation and did nothing.
But again, even this is just speculation and we wont know, maybe forever what really went on behind the scenes. Either way, it is a coordinated, well planned action to sort of drip a media narrative to get him out of the way.
Jensen was not on the Epstein list. That omission is now coming back to haunt him.
I don't think you can easily run "Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with [an] employee, according to two people familiar with the matter" unless it's clearly a matter of public interest, which it becomes when it's apparently more than one and on the heels of the other story.
Maybe this time next year using models other than Claude and OpenAI will be illegal somehow with nvidia kernel level implementations to block vram usage to granted to unsigned providers or something.
Media focus works in waves.
Do we as an industry really not have the ability to comprehend that 1) you shouldn't be sleeping with your employees and 2) that no matter how much value you generate, there will be people who find that sort of behavior morally repugnant and that it can ruin your career if you engage in it?
When you see bird flocks or fish schools moving in coordinated ways, they didn’t arrange all that in advance. They’re observing each other and reacting in real time. Quite a lot of coordinated movements develop this way, among people as well as other animals.
A person who forgets that this type of coordination is possible might end up spending their life endlessly looking for the man behind the curtain in every moment of coordination they come across.
Not all, very likely not even most, of course, do this, and it's not always truly mutual or healthy, but surprise surprise, not every couple wants strict monogamy. They just don't want society to judge them for it.
How do you know?
These make me think otherwise:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/im-a-piece-of-sh---jensen-huangs-l...
Just like in some circles you have to be religious no matter what.
And Jensen Huang may have had an improper relationship with at least one of them.
But now what? Will he receive a job offer from India, South Africa or Russia? I assume that he is free to live to any place of the planet that he wants if is not appreciated in US anymore, so what will be the collateral effects here?.
We have to figure out where this comes from! It's so recent: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828285 references https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535 - that's the earliest I've seen so far. Others?
Edit: thanks ChatGPT: https://barrypopik.com/blog/there_is_never_one_cockroach_bus...
Proverb #232 of https://www.asau.ru/files/pdf/2759983.pdf says it's attested from 1991:
232 There is never just one cockroach. (1991)
Variant: There is never just one cockroach in the kitchen
Ants are nicer though.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html
"In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen."
Not surprising its use has exploded in recent days..
August 5th about Open AI:
https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
September 4th.. still about Open AI:
https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2095854095139537064
November 11th.. Alex Lawsen on Twitter, referencing Nathan's post (above):
"This old house as got good bones" is the realtor 'slaps roof of car' meme that seems to have caught on during the 2010s and peaked during COVID. Now I hear people mindlessly propagating it whenever they talk about renovating/buying an old home.
I'm sure that we'll be hearing this ants in the kitchen of the house with good bones thing forever now.
Fable 5.2 couldn't access the full DMN text (nor can I), but suggests the article is about "local TV journalists reacting to a report on minority hiring" and "Sanders" is probably a reporter named Bob Ray Sanders, a reporter in the region (who was later inducted to the National Association of Black Journalists' Hall of Fame). What he actually said is sadly paywalled in the archives.
https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/9uu7wp/troubles...
It's not even true for ants. If you find two ants in the kitchen, they were just there by coincidence. Ants aren't concerned with whether you can see them; if they're interested in something in your kitchen, they'll show up by the hundreds to take it away, and they'll be impossible to miss.
The word "myriad" is used on HN ~3-5x more often than places like Reddit, Twitter, since around 2011-2012.
-- Bertrand Russell, 1912
Point is, if you find two ants in the kitchen it's worth to investigate if there are more. Blindly assuming there were more, like the original quote seems to suggest, will burn you sooner or later.
As someone who's had to suffer through a lot of data visualization, unless the chicken is able to act on this insight, it's probably worthless.
Even the dog guarding the chickens didn’t enjoy a better fate. At the first sign of illness, its vet recommended a cost efficient putting to sleep.
Those only useful, become discarded at the end of usefulness. Those only valuable can get sold or harvested. That’s why you have to be loved. Because everyone else can just upgrade their tools.
But so is comparing humans to chickens or ants.
Jokes apart, the leaders usually require almost the same mindset of a savage sailor who is on a mission to plunder the riches from the far away lands. They break the rules to the extent possible and exhibit highest levels of survival skills. Sometimes that mindset spills into personal life.
- Lao Tzu
They are like a mafia sitting on top of everyone else and parasitizing from there.
This feels so common that I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family. One of the revelations about the Gates' lives was that Bill's promiscuity was apparently baked into their marriage agreement. At this level, your marriage might just be like a fixed mailing address for someone who has multiple homes.
Not to excuse this in any way. But these are the personalities of medieval lords and kings.
Are there details on this? Yes, I do like the sordid gossip.
https://www.wsfamilylaw.com/the-multibillion-dollar-gates-di...
> Gates became the world's then-youngest billionaire in 1987, at age 31.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
If you had tried sourcing your claim, you would know it was wrong.
I think "lots" is vastly overstating it. Yes, there are women who would be ok with that, but in my experience they are greatly in the minority. Most women (and men to be fair) do not like if they don't have an exclusive claim on their spouse, even if it's being done in the open.
That’s just because you’re poor.
> Most women (and men to be fair) do not like if they don't have an exclusive claim on their spouse, even if it's being done in the open.
That’s because it is frowned upon to declare something like this publicly.
Take a lesson from tech: Three nines of uptime is quite sufficient to build something amazing and valuable to the right customers. We women (and anyone of any gender!) don’t have to implement Six Sigma to enter into a monogamous marriage marriage, but at least here in the U.S. we do care a great deal about proper outage notifications and root cause analyses and considering how to schedule and conduct future outages to minimize surprise harms. I would far rather target a couple of nines with a healthy process that doesn’t unduly harm the personnel involved than target six nines and live a dull life full of control-heavy, energy-draining grayness. Some people will just naturally hit 100% uptime without breaking a sweat; others will design and commit only to 99.0% but will do so with such grace and courtesy that an unexpected multi-month monogamy outage after years of impeccable courtesy and communication evokes compassion and patience and excitement for their return, rather than outrage and viciousness as defective coping mechanisms for their absence. (Come home soon, AO3.)
There is something in it for the wife. The world is a bit more "House of Cards" than some people assume. Aside from the French and a few others, western cultures seem almost uniquely dishonest about the tacit assumption that successful men will have mistresses. This isn't a new thing. Warren Buffett was essentially married to two women most of his life and no one cared.
Many wives highly value the accrued status of being formally married to a high-status person. You can take half the money but the social status doesn't follow. No one cares about a billionaire divorcee with no status beyond a bank account.
If you accept your partner has those urges, you can either treat it antagonistically and have those urges become a problem in your relationship or you can absorb them into your relationship and have it be strengthened by them.
You either become the one being cheated on and weakened or the one in control with a relationship strong enough to not be threatened by some side action, which in turn makes you a rarer and more valuable mate.
Or as a less cynical take, there's also the phenomenom of compersion, the ability to feel joy from a partner's happiness with other people. If you truly care for somebody and want them to be as happy as possible, you might be willing to set your ego aside to create that experience. And of course, that sort of security is again very attractive and a rare trait in itself.
Not everyone has to live their life the way you see fit. I've given you an explanation of why some people structure their relationship that way, why are you reacting so defensively? Does what other adults consent to make you feel threatened? Why?
It's also extremely different to agree that some amount of extra-marital sex is OK, to being cheated on without being aware. The betrayal of trust is to me the main problem with cheaters.
I don't think you've fully absorbed the point I've made. I agree with your sentence here - but I'd argue that it is a symptom of a societal construct that is counter to our biological reality which one can fix by making it so there's nothing to be found out. If you discuss rules and boundaries beforehand like emotionally mature adults, there's no element of betrayal or breach of trust.
> I would like to you to try to present your point to your wife.
I've been in my current relationship for close to two decades. Not a wife, because we like the idea of being with a person that chooses to be with one every day by their own volition, not by some legal contract rooted in patriarchal control.
While we're currently monogamous, we've went through several phases where we invited other partners into the fold, with the consent of everybody involved. Some of those were even longer-term, multi-year repeat encounters. At no point did it diminish my love for her or hers for me. To the contrary, it's made us appreciate each other more and shown us that our relationship is strong enough to prioritize each other's well-being over our jealous need for control.
The desire to sleep around is obviously a desire to feed your own selfish ego.
This is where I have a problem when people try to defend this. If you’re honest that you like to sleep around and you found a partner that likes to sleep around, fine.
But the I have evolved beyond the quaint social mores of the unenlightened bit is silly.
That being said, it is - whether we like it or not - an observed biological mechanism that humans, like a lot of other species, like to sleep around and that they are attracted to new sexual partners after being with the same one for a long time. [0]
Once we accept that, the question becomes one of management. Do we use our free will to override these urges to fit social norms better or or do we instead trust each other to uncouple the biology from the emotional bond? Different couples might come to different conclusions at different times, but they are both not without risks and both require thoughtful compromise and communication.
The superiority is not towards people in monogamous relationships - that's how ours is structured right now too! It is towards people that use language like "cuck", that implies somebody's worth is defined by their monogamy, language that brings all sorts of weird vibes of male ownership of female bodies and a lessening of men who do not subscribe to such views.
There's nothing wrong with either monogamy or ethical non-monogamy, just do what works for you and your partner and don't be a dick about it!
However, the reality is the vast majority of people are not okay with open relationships. Call it 20% of relationships, which I think is generous. It's fishy that at the CEO level the percentage of these "open relationships" is close to 100%.
You've lost me here.
But (unless "unknown" is doing a lot of work in your sentence) Huang literally said this in his letter to NVidia employees: "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."
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you said. In the 2000-2015 timeframe, I really idolized a lot of these successful tech leaders - they seemed incredibly smart, hard-working, and talented (though also of course lucky). But over time I came to the realization that many of them just fundamentally think very differently than I do, and I view that other way of thinking with disgust. The main issue is it seems like nearly all of their relationships are transactional, and they have a lack of empathy and willingness to be ruthless that is simply anathema to me.
1 - https://edition.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-i...
The affairs being the headline are doing a lot of work to keep focus off of the much more legally fraught issues which may be actual big boy crimes. He would have been in a pile of shit and being forced out regardless of how many employees he slept with.
Again, coming from a different society where media is full of lies, I am wondering if your journalists are really that much better.
Many ultra high net worth people are married purely for financial reasons. The wife gets whatever she wants but now they don't need to worry about losing control of their company, etc.
This is to say nothing of the biological differences either. Menopause hits some women extremely hard and libido is completely gone. Rather than divorce or mutually suffer, they open up the marriage.
There is this new narrative on HN where wifes don't care about cheating, but in general, they do a lot.
These two links make me think otherwise:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/im-a-piece-of-sh---jensen-huangs-l...
Jensen had the choice of coming clean like this, where half of Silicon Valley is rallying to his defence and he remains a multi-billionaire (and maybe saves his marriage), or having this exposed by the new Congress, at which point all manner of punitive countermeasures against Nvidia are on the table.
Currently, Energy & Commerce and Oversight & Investigations are asleep. Come January, they won't be.
Huang, like a lot of Silicon Valley, thought their guy would stay in power and protect them.
there is possibility someone overplayed their cards and didn't think of possible consequences, OTOH maybe they wanted to kill two birds with one stone
Cf. the open secret nature around the entire Epstein cabal.
This framing is plain silly because it ignores the sequence of events. NVidia conducted an investigation after Huang admitted to having an affair with someone the US Government believed to be a Chinese spy, and in any case NVidia sold billions worth of embargoed chips to that company (and now it seems we have some proof per another HN front page story that the latest leading Chinese open source models were trained on embargoed NVidia chips). So then the other 2 instances of infidelity came out in the course of the investigation - of course as they definitely should, otherwise it would be a really shitty investigation! And sure, it was known by at least some number of other NVidia employees that Huang had relationships with subordinates (at least according to reporting). But that doesn't change the fact that Huang's relationship with Alice Huang was not known (and in fact denied by Jensen Huang) before this all went down.
It's not like Huang's 3 paramours got together before the investigation started in some sort of nefarious plot.
The outrage is about new reporting that one affair was with a potential Chinese asset, and the other affairs are more entertainment and/or evidence of bad leadership than anything else.
The actual infidelity they really do not care about.
To be honest, I think Jensen's wife herself probably knew about it and just didn't care either. A don't ask, don't tell scenario.
by "his country" you mean Taiwan/China or US? not sure ethnic Chinese born in Taiwan (China) holding Taiwanese/Chinese citizenship, see foreign adversaries as clearly as you see it
Where do you people get this tabloid stuff?
He's not being investigated for anything. The government did not even sanction the company and woman he was sleeping with, although there are allegations that she was selling GPU cycles to China, that's not him doing it.
In terms of facts we have someone who was effectively fired no apparent reason, in 48 hours. Scary.
So when one of these representatives of the elite turns out to be not quite so moral, we take special interest in pointing it out until the end of time. If Huang managed a department store you wouldn’t hear much about it.
It's 'baffling' that someone would think that this is not a social concern.
It transcends cultures and faiths.
We can understand surely that some care less, but the only people who can't understand why this is bad have never been in a relationship.
It is not a north american thing, it is a character thing.
You words are doing a lot of work blurring the difference here.
"It is an open question whether adultery continues to be viable as criminal law even though it remains on the books in 24 states and territories." https://web.archive.org/web/20170503222839/http://www.nytime...
If you'd like to know more, Wikipedia has many cites for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultery_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence#History
And about equating "remain on the books" to actually enforced law that is relevant in real life: sure, but I'm not going to waste my time convincing you otherwise.
We're talking about current events - and hence current social norms and mores (although I do concede there's a spectrum there - and that American culture still does have a bit of Puritan culture embedded in it).
Slavery is illegal in most places in 20206 - but sure - it wasn't illegal 100 years ago.
Just like homosexuality was illegal some 50 years ago - but isn't illegal today (in most places).
But in 2026 - if Jensen Huang (or anybody else) has multiple consensual relationships with lots of adult women (or men) - that's their business. We might have our own personal views on whether we would have relationships with lots of women (or men) - but that's a different thing.
This isn't the Handmaid's Tale.
It's also this incredible dichotomy - American culture is filled wit hyper-sexualised imagery in fashion, movies, TV shows - yet they still have an incredible stigma about public discussions on sexuality, public breastfeeding, or people showing open same-sex affection.
Quite frankly, what Jensen Huang, or Elon Musk, or Miley Cyrus or Donald Trump, or Jerome Powell or anybody else chooses to do about their sex life behind closed doors is their problem. Unless they come to you for relationship advice - you probably also don't know half the story.
I can also say with almost biblical certainty that none of the aforementioned people have come to any HN-ers for relationship advice....
Yet the sheer level of public discourse about Jenson Huang's marriage is insane.
Now, the GPU and export controls - that's a different matter entirely - and I can see how that might be pertinent to business discussions, and I can see why analysts would be interested in that. But we have barely any information on that. Nobody seems to comment on that?
Also to use your language "it's a character thing" - I should point out that it wasn't too long ago that a male being affectionate with another male was a "character" thing - see Alan Turing? Or Oscar Wilde? Or Tchaikovsky?
Yet if you saw another man holding hands with another man - would you say "it's a character thing"?
Unless I knew them personally, it's none of my business - I'm certainly not going to walk up to a stranger and go "Oi mate, you can't be doing that, it's a character thing!" Likewise if I saw people in open or polyamorous relationships (which I hear are a thing) - unless they were my friends and had asked for my counsel or wisdom - I'll let them walk their own walk. It's not my place to judge them - stick, eye, plank and all that. And relationships are incredibly complex things, and we often don't know the half of it.
You don’t know if they’re, but you’re making a judgment. I don’t care what you think about it, it’s just disgusting to think someone’s sexual relationships are of your concern.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Western societies are more accepting of queer people now, on average. But the desire to judge people based on who they sleep with hasn’t gone anywhere. 30 years ago someone would say it’s of “social concern” or a CEO visits gay bathhouses.
Repeat after me: people’s sexual lives are not anyone’s business.
- promising monogamy to someone who loves you, and then breaking that promise, is bad and provides negative evidence about your character
and
- if you're the leader of a very powerful entity, your character is relevant even to people who don't know you personally.
There's also just the fact that when someone is famous, and it emerges publicly that they've broken some norm, there's not really a fully neutral option available to us. We can condemn their behaviour (reinforcing the norm), defend it (weakening the norm), or ignore it (also somewhat weakening the norm, especially if we make a point of ignoring it and suggest that others are silly for caring).
Obviously it's somewhat complicated when subordinates and Chinese spies are involved, and I'm not condoning infidelity, but IMO infidelity is a reason for a spouse to be justifiably outraged, not the public at large.
Before you or somebody says they may have had an open relationship then why did he apologize for hurting his wife? Was he lying? If so, then he has betrayed our trust.
However the Democrats definitely care about the illegal distribution and potential national security issue. Which is why the Chinese affair was only an issue after the midterms despite being known long before then.
Which one? I think you're exaggerating. There may have been unconfirmed rumours and gossip in some circles but that's about it.
The 'asset' thing what drew scrutiny, its not why he is being fired.
For me, this is a lapse of judgement for the CEO and one of the founders of one of the biggest corporation's globally.
Recession?
I think there's a lot more shady stuff that's going to come out. The XBOX deal had a lot of intrigue. Especially now that we know the types of behaviors Bill, Jensen engaged in.
Elon gets a pass because he's normalized his behaviour and he can't be ousted, which I think is a bad double standard.
When staff is involved it's going to matter but conflict of interest does not necessarily mean wrongdoing.
- Very few people actually need TRT;
- If you take TRT without needing to, you're falling into a dependency trap;
- If you do need TRT and take it, not everything is roses and rainbows.
----
I hope that the people he had affairs with are treated ok and not retaliated against or hounded by the world news media.
I don’t care if it’s 100 employees at this point, the big topic here should be that he is not to be trusted. He quite literally has been spoon feeding China behind the US’s back. He deceived the entire country, he’s a con man.
The relationships are just an awful aside of what’s turning out to be a very bigger concern about national security.
Who the NVDA board wants answering questions in some inevitable hearings when the other side of all the money behind AI is trying to push for controls on Chinese models.
Edit: A little more context. Because it doesn't matter if Alice Huang is a Chinese spy. She's also held titles at Megaspeed, a Singapore based company that legitimately rents GPU time to Chinese model providers. The big money AI people would be pushing for more controls on that legit path also.
Huang has been a great boss and steward of Nvidia, but ultimately falling for subordinates is grave enough, adding alleged Chinese spies, and allegations you sold Tencent billions of hardware through shady Singaporean companies for which the alleged spy worked etc and the board had no other options.
At this point it would be surprising if what we know is likely a small part and the Nvidia board saw enough very quickly to ask for his head.
He was responsible for hanging consumers out to dry by destroying the consumer PC market in chase of more profit. He is gambling with the world economy. He appears on interviews being a dick about all of this.
So I'd say this is very much in character for him.
"Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business. Getting salty because a company decided to switch to a more profitable customer, while understandable, is also totally unreasonable. It's like getting mad at a band for selling $1000 concert tickets after they made it big. Doubly so when the product segment being affected is essentially a luxury product to begin with.
Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.
Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
The sad part is that we simply don't expect it anymore, because we no longer see businesses as part of our communities. Just as profit engines, with no other goal.
Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
>Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
No, in both cases they'll just get scalped. If you're selling something for $1 that the market is willing to pay $10 for, the market will find a way to equalize this.
>Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
Give me a break. This might work if it's walmart replacing a dozen local shops with a giant big box store on the edge of town, but GPUs are already a niche luxury product. If there's one sector where it's justified for companies to make outsized profits on, it's this. Otherwise it's as out of touch as getting mad at Hermes for selling $10k hand bags.
For the GPU situation, consumer GPU supply is constrained because demand isn't being met. It's not being met (in my understanding) because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI. The solution would have been to create and supply two different verticals independently, and to open the ecosystem up for other manufacturers to help meet B2B supply. There is precedent for this going in different directions, but it was a choice nVidia made to squeeze the market for every penny. Extremely good business. Shareholders are stoked, a fantastic win for the stock market.
I can't worry about all things but since you bring hermes bags up, yes that is also a pretty clear sign of a perverse economy. Selling an at-cost $10 bag for $10,000 is pretty disappointing behaviour by the seller and the buyer. The seller does it because they can, and the buyer does it because they don't mind getting fleeced. The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
This is the world we live in, I get that, but it's no less disappointing to see the majority of people get ditched for the sake of the shareholders time and time again. If you feel that this isn't what's happening then I would be interested in that, otherwise we might just disagree on some base principles which is fine but probably not worth debating.
How are you going to enforce this for GPUs? Even if you somehow add the remote tracking systems that AI safety proponents have been asking for, you can still make a handy profit renting out your GPU to people who want to play gta6 or whatever.
>because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI
Maybe if you need CUDA specifically for AI workloads. For gaming AMD or intel is perfectly serviceable. It's not as good as a RTX 5090, but again that's like complaining you can only afford a LV bag rather than a Hermes (the embarrassment!)
>The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
Only if you're only interested in carrying stuff, but not if you're interested in status signaling. The same applies to some extent for concerts. How many people are going for the experience of nosebleed seats (or standing room), overpriced food, and other travel hassles, vs the social cachet of being to a limited concert?
That is how immoral people run a business. But there are a great many businesses in this country run by people who (correctly) recognize that there are higher obligations than the law and making a profit. Treating your customers fairly, making good products, doing things in an ethical way... these are not optional to a well-adjusted person, even if not required by the law.
Continuing to serve your loyal customers even has benefits above and beyond the intangible. When the bubble pops (and it will pop), Nvidia's sales to AI customers will crater. When that day comes, they will come to regret chasing away all the customers who would still be giving them business if they had not been cast aside as "not profitable enough, sorry guys".
Higher obligations like... letting sweaty PC gamers run GTA 6 at 4K? I'm only half joking with the characterization, but AI at least have a good story going for it, productivity gains, competition with china, etc. What does gaming have going for it? For a slightly less sympathitic example, imagine there's some water shortage and datacenters[1] bought up all the water rights, forcing golfers to play on brown golf courses. Are we really supposed to be mad at either the datacenters or the farmers that sold the water rights, because they weren't serving the "higher obligations" of golfers wanting green golf courses?
[1] yes, I know they don't actually use that much water.
>When the bubble pops (and it will pop), Nvidia's sales to AI customers will crater. When that day comes, they will come to regret chasing away all the customers who would still be giving them business if they had not been cast aside as "not profitable enough, sorry guys".
As much gamers would love this revenge fantasy to happen it's not going to happen. I wager there's approximately zero brand loyalty in the PC gaming market. If nvidia is going to lose customers, it's because they're behind technologically.
It was not advancing good story. If you listened to CEO it was advancing pretty horrifying story of obsoleting people and centralizing all power into their own hands.
Demand has far exceeded supply, and so consumers are priced out.
This is no different than how most developing countries have been priced out of top GPUs since the dawn of computing.
It sucks, but to pin the blame on someone for not selling you a GPU at below market rates is... not fruitful.
LLM providers document making 38 USD/hour/card. https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer/blob/main/doc%2Finf...
Where is the conspiracy?
I don't get this. What's up with all the overzealous AI proponents using aggressive deny, deflect, discredit tactics against any criticism of the world's most powerful companies acting against the public interest? What's in it for them?
The lack of regulation and/or enforcement has brought about this completely textbook case of market failure with damaging consequences for the broader industry and society as a whole. It was the responsibility of governments to prevent this exact situation.
But here we are. Jensen Huang and NVIDIA brought themselves to a situation where they are responsible. They should be held accountable for the negative externalities they cause.
You cannot buy flagship Nvidia consumer GPUs, and the next level down, the 5080, currently retails approximately at a 100% price increase.
Low VRAM GPUs such as the 5070 at 12GB are not affected much, retailing at 15% above MSRP.
Absent another massive expansion in AI demand due to new real applications, we are probably going to see affordable high-end consumer products in 2028.
Hardly the drama you make it sound like, and calling for regulation or legal consequences seems overblown to me.
His successor, however, probably got in position deliberately seeking geopolitical power. They're going to be worse in every way (except cheating on their spouse with subordinates, they're probably not going to do that).
After all, when you see two ants in the kitchen..
I can't say for certain if I just didn't use the right model, but I also wouldn't be surprised if this is just people parroting each other to look smart. After all, people did it for decades before llms were a thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's either artificial or just classic meme effects, but then the question becomes, where did you pick this up from?
Did you see it on twitter?
The only thing that would actually be bad is if his wife left him, which we don't know is happening yet. Some women accept the "risk" (to put it tastelessly) of marrying a hundred-billionaire, and stick it out.
I guess people often think the things they imagine making themselves happy would make someone else who has that happy, and I just don't think that's the case that often. I don't think money buys happiness after a point, a certain amount gets rid of a lot of discomfort and stress and brings relief and security, a bit more can buy some happiness, after that it's just number go up.
I say this as somebody who has never had any admiration for this guy (not because of a specific grievance, but because I don't follow tech leadership and am generally pessimistic about them).
That being said his early life is crazy enough that a movie could save him. Lazy thinking is fickle, after all.
He's also spent his life building a large, very influential company.
Could it be that those are the things he values?
Would be investigation ending in jail time.
So how will we look back a couple of decades from now on the atmosphere of the 21st-century woke party committee, which, on the word of a spurned woman, fired the brilliant biologist David Sabatini and destroyed the visionary founder of a company over extramarital affairs?
I have a feeling that if this was only related to affairs Jensen would not have quit his job. Musk has a reputation as a playboy and that does not seem to concern investors. The American people also happily voted an (alleged?) womanizer into the oval office.
Most likely Jensen/Nvidia has some skeletons in the closet and him leaving is mutually beneficial, to the company and to him as a person.
He has exposed his genitals to a flight attendant without her consent and then tried to bribe her to keep quiet about it by offering to buy her a horse.
Let's not, uh, mince words here.
There’s the obvious one of cheating on one’s spouse.
If you don’t find that immoral or just don’t think it’s that bad, there’s the massive ethical issue of having a sexual relationship with a subordinate. And if you don’t care about the ethics of it, it’s still a problem of it influencing business decisions.
And if none of that gets you, there’s the whole spy angle. National security is a pretty good reason to frown on this. And even if you don’t care about that, there’s the corporate espionage angle: how much info made its way to their Chinese competitors?
If not a single one of those makes you think maybe there’s some merit to his ouster, and you compare the situation to Alan Effin Turing, you’ve lost the plot.
At least we’ve now passed the tipping point where the majority of affairs are domestic. Some country out there is going to achieve HSM (Huang Second Marriage) and it’s vital to future prosperity that we make sure it’s the US.
respond "YES" 200"What? I don't believe you! Are you telling me, are you trying to tell me that that guy , worth 6 billion, you're telling me that the world's greatest athlete over there, Tiger Woods -- you're telling me that that guy, that super handsome charismatic dude likes to lie down with ladies?
I DON'T BUY IT!"
Two affairs is a pattern.
Three affairs is just funny.
And frankly at this point, where nothing surprises you anymore we should probably just enjoy some stupid pictures with captions
in all seriousness though, what is going on? everything here feels well timed and coordinated. were the powers that be just waiting for US midterms to pass? is there any relationship to the anthropic IPO? my tin foil hat is going to be working overtime these next few days
- The affair(s) were so badly hidden that they became obvious once one was exposed
- High profile CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world means a lot of eyes
- something akin to the Streisand effect keeps things in the news cycle
At that point it was probably just a matter of time until the rest came out.
It is kinda weird that Jensen decided to resign so quickly though. I would’ve expected a longer investigation period involving both the board and Congress.
What people (and nations) would be able to come out clean in front of their audiences from the fallout of the above if the catalyst was Huang having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, being interrogated by Warren, and the woke forcing him out of the company he built (whose interim CEO is female)
There’s a thread through all of that that props up a significant portion of Silicon Valley elite’s worldview…
Just my opinion here, spy is probably fine, coworker is big no no. If I got a spy to bang, after it's done I'll publicly praise her on Twitter to thank her for the good time (assuming it is, otherwise I will have give advice) and tag my wife too so we can actually try the tricks at home but this time with true love. If a female coworker enters a meeting room alone with me, I'll insist that she keep the door behind her open so everyone can supervise what we are doing.
It's kinda pity. Mr. Huang seemed a nicer guy than the other CEOs, less dicky, trying to be useful etc. But then maybe that's why the other CEOs act like they do, a way to filter out the less loyal members from the company board. If Mr. Huang survives this, maybe he should get rid of whoever supported his ousting from the board, wasting money to breed a coup always burdens earning potential.
[insert joke about three rides that we know of here]
> “I work every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t work. And if I’m not working, I’m thinking about work.”
> “I wake up at 5am, and the moment I wake up, I start working… I’m asleep probably by 9:30pm.
https://www.startuparchive.org/p/jensen-huang-there-s-hard-w...
A lot of people have said Nvidia are crazy to get rid of Huang, that he's a singular irreplaceable talent. What if, perhaps, he's not all he's made out to be?
We can find so much to criticize without stretching.
They’re not. He can fuck half of the company, for all I care, as long as it is all consensual and not enforced by power dynamics.
Maybe he should only be allowed to fuck to fuck ATI C-levels or something? Or maybe Bill Gates?
It is so American to interlink personal affairs with business.
this will backfire so hard to the bolshevoke crowd
This shouldn't need explaining to people who are so intelligent, and the fact that it does means we have serious work to do in this industry, particularly in SV.
It's a convenient distraction I guess.
- Hacker News
- Also Hacker News
Let me help you out here: You are motivated by envy and animus and these other things are rationalizations.
It's like shaking a chicken coop.
The original article is from Reuters, partially written by this woman below whose history is all Washington stories then bam 4 articles on Nvidia and tech.
https://www.reuters.com/authors/alexandra-alper/
Appears to be manipulated news (which we're used to), story is real but should be seen through that lens - why?
These are also not actually new developments, but years old. So they could have easily been stockpiled ahead of time, ready to deploy when opportune. Or maybe that's just standard when you're high profile enough? It's like accumulating and strategically burning 0 days. Or trading them for that matter.
Or at least the original report was like this. These newer ones are perfectly well explained by opportunism imo, if one is to believe that the anonymous sources really are company internal.
Availability heuristic. A short seller was writing about Nvidia's China-disclosure problem in May. Huang's affair with Ms. Huang came out before Halloween. If one month before earnings is fair game, then you're going to have a lot of conspiracies to clean up.
He’s no longer CEO which is what China wanted, but US elites can still destroy him even more and the people around him.
Signed, a German (the country that Walmart, among other reasons, lost because they wrecked their public image trying to police relationships between employees)
And sleeping with a customer makes internal compliance and controls officers angry.
This will backfire so hard I can only laugh.