I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
>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.
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...
> Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
Yeah, this seems likely. It's also quite possible that he not only "didn't come totally clean" but outright lied to the board i.e. "this was a one-time thing"
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.
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.
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)
The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here. Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. The Nvidia corp still has to answer for that even when Jensen is out.
> Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised
As a public company its job is to sell as much stuff as possible to as many people as possible, they had every incentive, arguably a duty to advocate for exports to China. The incentive is there regardless of outside meddling.
Skirting the sanctions intentionally would be bad.
Yeah but Dwarkesh is completely wrong and the fact he couldn't see this made me think differently about him.
Money is like oxygen. If you deny oxygen/money to the Chinese chip market, they can't grow as fast. By supplying China with chips, all the money will go back to the US and not enough money will go to Chinese chip manufacturers to help them advance the way Nvidia can.
This is what Jensen was saying and he is 100% correct here. The chip ban to China will really help them catch up because the money will recirculate since they have no choice but to buy Chinese chips, and in the end it will make them much stronger.
I'm doubtful of this hypothesis. Maybe for a few years, sure. But China has proven time and again that they do not need foreign supply constraints to incentivize the growth of their own competing domestic industry.
The fundamental contradiction of the AI maximalists like Huang is claiming that AI does not need regulated while simultaneously supporting chip exports to China. The supporting claim for the former is that we need to compete on AI with China and move as fast as possible and every day matters, while the latter implies that slowing down their compute is inconsequential.
IMO that ignores the decades of investment the Chinese government has made in its semiconductor industry. It’s literally been written into their five year plans at the highest level with tons of government pressure to buy domestic when possible across industries. With the biggest captive consumer market on the planet, there is no universe in which China doesn’t get its own cutting edge chip industry. They have been determined to do it since at least the 90s and have invested hundreds of billions in a concerted effort to pull it off.
One can have good argumenta against a specific law (personally I am very much pro free trade), but as long as the law exist, breaking it comes with consequences.
Yeah, Jensen sees the whole hw/sw ecosystem as a package. It isn't just chip n+1 on process n-1.
Keeping adversaries X-behind discourages adversaries from developing a new ecosystem since X-behind is better than building new. If an adversary with tremendous resources must recreate the ecosystem, it will be adopted by US+global companies since it will be lower margin.
The best way of hampering China technologically has always been about keeping them completely dependent on foreign chip supply chain, e.g. ASML, TSMC, NVDA, ARM, AVGO, INTC, etc.
If you simply ban them from getting any western chips or chip tech you simply light a viciously hot fire underneath them to develop their own TSMC equivalent and their own chip designers, and we are now seeing them catching up rapidly. In fact, they are pretty close to catching up now, basically within one or two years...
Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.
This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.
He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.
The US had put an export ban, and he clearly skirted it while at the same time banging a suspected Chinese spy. The company he ran like a fiefdom broke the rules set in place by the same country for which he's supposedly a loss.
I don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure.
Are we saying he was skirting the ban because he was having an affair with a Chinese spy? That seems like a stretch. Jensen was ideologically opposed to a ban, he didn't need any coaxing in that regard.
It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.
Sure, why not? Morality and law are not always aligned. I'm not sure I would go so far to consider these sorts of trade sanctions "immoral", but I wouldn't fault someone for believing so.
In this case, though, I think Huang just believed these sanctions were the wrong move, and would end up long-term helping China and hurting the US. Which is fair to believe, but believing a law is counterproductive doesn't give you immunity if you break it.
It would depend on the reason for the sanctions...
If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue.
Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue.
I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality.
It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it.
I think you can make a case that breaking a rule intended to prevent immoral activity is in and of itself immoral, even if breaking the rule didn't result in the immoral activity.
It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p
However the fact he was having an affair muddies the waters on the two. At best, the optics look bad to someone outside. Yes, he could have been opposed for money reasons, and that’s a position that needs no more explanation.
But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught.
Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes.
People at this level get intoxicated with their power. They think they are invincible and can do whatever they want. Often they can. Sometimes it all comes crashing down, here for example, or the case of Eric Swalwell. But they never think it will happen to them.
Sure but that's not the point here: he was getting frustrated in the interview because he was getting second guessed by someone who doesn't have as much insight has he does. Dude is the founder of Nvidia by the way.
You say that as if a lottery assigns companies what product they shall make. Or that they found their product designs in a kinder egg.
They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality.
People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck.
I am curious which questions you found poorly informed? Jensen Huang started with "China could have trained a Mythos level model" because the resources needed for that were "mundane". Maybe you believe him on that or you know that to be true but maybe mundane is not the right word. Also the rest of his answer did not age well. I think Dwarkesh genuinely wanted to have a deep conversation and not to be a troll.
The uninformed part was a rather dismissive attitude to Chinese capabilities and the assumption that access to NVidia chips was the only important success factor.
Jensen has two core points:
- stopping selling NVidia chips to China isn't going to stop China developing AI
- stopping NVidia selling to China will ultimately ceed US leadership in chips as Nvidia's commercial edge is as much about the dominant developer ecosystem as it is the chips per se.
ie the real risk is the default world tech stack shifts to open models on Chinese chips. End result Chinese lead in both.
He has spent his entire career competing and winning and he is being told he has to stop competing in order to achieve a goal that he knows won't actually be achieved by sacrificing NVidia.
In that scenario, where somebody is suggesting you throw away your life's work for nothing - I think anybody would be animated.
It's refreshing to see a podcaster push their guest to defend their positions, after having had the displeasure of listening to clips of Lex Fridman just accepting even obvious bullshit from his guests without any follow up. It sounds like Dwarkesh did the same with Dario, who argued the other side.
The questions weren't poorly informed just because you agree with what Jensen was saying. He seems pretty obviously to have made drastically poor judgement decisions that potentially affect national security of the US. I don't know if I would consider that to be a huge loss to the US.
The poorly informed part is the assumption that if Nvidia doesn't sell chips China AI dev will stop.
It clearly didn't - don't you remember the Deepseek launch where it came as a rude shock that the much vaunted concept of a compute capacity moat was blown away?
He kept repeating that while he made the best chips, computer science was more important.
Interim. They just need someone to crisis manage. I’m sure they have veteran capable executives other than Jensen. Maybe the AI focus wasn’t all Jensens idea even
All of the sudden people care about keeping Nvidia around? Theyve been jerking people around for decades, screwing customers, shitty drivers, exploding power connectors, anti competitive practices for miles.
those are mere gamer issues. perhaps more relevant ten year ago, but these days, the only question is the rack-scale products (and in that market, Nvidia's driver game has been pretty OK, though unfortunately closed-source).
We used their GPUs at scale before there was AI, and nvidia has always been a hostile vendor to deal with. I'm so ecstatic that at least huangs reputation is now in the trash, and I hope nvidia suffers severe consequences for all the decades of crap they've put us through
Yeah, you always want someone sacrificial to be the immediate next person in the hot seat. Too much emotional expectations will be attached to whoever is next. Let the next person take all of the crap long enough so that the person you actually want has a clear path. You see this in sports franchises as well.
Let's be clear, she is just the interim CEO (primarily because Huang neglected to ever even start a transition plan) while NVidia searches for a permanent CEO. The names I've seen floated are Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, and Ian Buck, the creator of CUDA.
I'm not sure what to make of the idol worshipping going on here. He was an average CEO and the train will continue right along. NVIDIA doesn't exist because of some inherent greatness of a single person.
He has poor judgement but I’ve yet to see any of the major consumer hardware companies that understand both hardware and software in the way he did. Or really the value of a fully vertically integrated stack.
Nvidia thrived because it paired great hardware with great software.
AMD and Intel think hardware is enough; it’s not. There’s a reason neither has ever been able to compete with Nvidia.
They have a giant ego, but I’d argue it’s probably well deserved.
Apple is/was similar. They also see that hardware without great software is useless. Spend as much; if not more on software to make your hardware shine.
Intel has some good compilers that take advantage of their hardware don't they? I think AMD now understands the software side of things, and is trying to fix it. Wonder how long it will take for them to get close to Nvidia's software side?
According to you, in comparison to the current competition, hardly Microsoft Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Linux world, they don’t add up not when it comes to hardware and software and the ability to create an ecosystem, you’re actually dead wrong.
Another thing is wrong was thinking that Apple should run in and build some type of AI model that’s proving to be well wrong the only thing in Apple’s way right now is memory. certainly isn’t money, and they certainly have the talent and house to fix the memory problem. The question is whether or not they have the will to do so.
No one equals Apple at this point in time when it comes to seamlessly integrating multiple devices in a useful way. Be it a desktop computer, laptop a smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, Apple Vision, AirPods with each iteration, once again in comparison to their competition, they seem to have the best hand at this time.
Memory cost is the biggest problem Apple has right now and it’s not like they don’t lack the money and with the Apple Silicon design group they certainly have the capability to fix it, or I should say design around it.
Yes, it might take 2 to 5 years to do it, but it’s not impossible, the main question is, do they have the will? And they’ve certainly shown it when it comes to processors, GPUs, modems, and other support chips that they can execute over time.
They may not execute on what you want or what I want, but in comparison to their competition, who is out there right now that can combine both the software and the hardware at a high level across the board?
Yes, we’re gonna find out how important he was. If he is on the level as some of the other great CEOs Nvidia gonna have trouble, this little flare could be the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. Because I don’t see Intel or AMD rising to the same level as Nvidia. Microsoft seems to be having bad luck with their team-ups.
Not true. The decisions always come out of the person at the top. See what happened to Intel recently when they had a succession of MBA bad CEOs…
Nvidia is a highly technical company we’re gonna find out how important Jensen really was to that company tech wise?
And if you look closely at their company, what have they really innovated on over the last five or six years? from a distance, like Intel, it seems like they just turn up the juice/Wattage in short, they are just cruising along.
I can't say it was solely his choice but Nvidia continually made fantastic market moves. CUDA, then their positioning to ride the crypto boom, and then the AI boom. all of that required deliberate planning with a strong long term vision.
Definitely not average, but Nvidia is the definition of one trick, and that one trick long-term will be their downfall, Intel is in the same position and so is AMD and Microsoft.
Due to sanctions there’s one Chinese company that seems to have become a multi-dimensional company we won’t know for sure for another two years.
Being a vertical computer company appears to be coming back in style bring on the 1980s. early 1990s.
NVIDIA doesn't exist because of some inherent greatness of a single person.
Yeah, it pretty much does. CUDA is why they are positioned where they are. Other players like AMD and Intel could have done that, but they didn't, and if they had, they wouldn't have persevered for 10+ years with essentially nothing to show for it.
Whether CUDA will continue to maintain dominance is less clear. It may become a literal victim of its own success, as CUDA-based models gain the ability to migrate themselves to new platforms.
It is because of his vision. And with him gone, we shall find out about Nvidia, when Apple computer went through a succession of mediocre CEOs, they were on the ropes if it wasn’t for the founder CEO coming back, Apple would’ve been history like Sun, SGI, Acorn, Commodore, Digital and a host of other computer companies from the 1980s and mid-1990s.
Western companies have had that problem. when the visionary CEO bites the dust. I think the Eastern companies are even more susceptible.
Note: Nvidia is the very definition of a one trick company I think they were in trouble long-term no operating system, Microsoft is in trouble in the other direction. No real in-house hardware ability. Long-term you have to have the ability of both in-house to adjust and iterate over the long haul with the changing conditions in tech.
He may not have 'invented' CUDA but he saw the potential and gave it resources to be created and continually developed.
How many "CUDA-like" ideas have be squashed at other companies by leaders that don't see the potential or are willing to take a multi-year loss?
IMO, it's like SpaceX vs other rocket companies - especially Blue Origin.
Bezos, at least at first, had just as much money if not more than Musk. So why did SpaceX do so much better than them and every other rocket company. I despise Musk personally, and he's generally not as smart as he makes himself out to be - but there is something there he does differently than others in his position, some with similar resources as he does as well.
Bezos is a genius and an another direction? a direction that is 180° different than Elon? and neither one probably will ever do well on the other person’s home field.
The temporarily embarrassed billionaires have swarmed your comment to remind you that success is based on a single person, which is why they should get to do whatever they want when they're running their own Nvidia-sized corp one day.
I'm not sure how long I should've kept watching but so far that looks like very good and knowledgeable answers, exactly what I'd expect from a competent tech CEO.
Unless it's like super far in, if this counts as heated then I just don't know what you expect.
I remember listening to that and thinking, this sounds like a guy who is primarily focused on selling chips and is brushing away legitimate concerns in a way that, I just did not find very compelling. A little bit too much protest you might say. Not to say there isn't or wasn't validity to his arguments, but in light of the current circumstances it seems to me that those arguments are quite a bit less valid than they were, and I've certainly swung my personal opinion from being on the fence to a hard no to selling these chips to Chinese buyers.
If the Chinese Communist Party are going through such great lengths to obtain these advanced Nvidia chips, it further invalidates a lot of what I've been reading here and elsewhere about China "catching up" or that being the leading models isn't what matters (commoditization). You don't do stuff like this unless you really need something.
Talking to friends who worked in diplomacy - honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely. It makes sense if you think about it. The failure rate on these is going to be fairly high and even if it’s a small success (ie a one night stand sort of thing) you can get a little compromat. The cost is probably fairly negligible, a lot of this will be fairly low risk as far as spying goes.
My favourite honey trap story comes from the cold war. A Russian diplomat in Denmark was the target of Danish intelligence. They tried to honey trap him at a party, but he didn't respond to their agent's advances. So, the Danes supposed that he might be gay, and sent a male honey trap to the next party, but again got no response from the Russian. They shrugged their shoulders and gave it up.
Unbeknownst to them, the Russian was actually at that time trying to make contact with western intelligence, as he was keen to defect! He was just a bit too awkward to respond to flirting.
He did eventually manage to defect to Britain, and died in 2025. His name was Oleg Gordievsky.
> honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely.
WSJ reports that U.S. intelligence says Chinese intelligence approached Alice to become an asset after she met Jensen in March 2024. So, she was an opportunistic info source, not targeted in advance.
also, men are redickulous. And they can go in any number of beneficial direction from turning informant, selling GPUs to the chinese, or just a pee tape, etc. Just like a lottery of fun ways to screw with an adversary.
I think it's worth remembering that China isn't a monolithic bloc, and CCP doesn't drive everything, that there are tons of private enterprises there that would benefit, even if the Chinese government strategically would prefer to push Huawei to grow the domestic capability. There being a ton of private demand internal to China doesn't invalidate Jensen's view that it's a strategic blunder to let Huawei get a foothold in the market. Within the CCP, there's also a lot of inter-regional competition to show growth in their own regions, because that's the primary qualification for advancement within the party.
That said, I don't have any special insight into the specifics of who was driving the demand backing Megaspeed.
there's a good analysis that says Alice was a fixer and/or white-glove. those are common-in-China roles that have to do with obfuscating big financial operations, not necessarily with any political (CCP) involvement. obviously, CCP approves, if tacitly, everything that happens in China.
Which part? You find it hard to believe that there are private enterprises there that don't always do exactly what CCP wants? Or that there're conflicting incentives inside the CCP, so that "what CCP wants" isn't simple?
China catching up does not mean they are not still behind.
Also, China is a big country with many companies. While some may be trying to catch up via local development, others may still prefer getting western hardware right now e.g. in order to get a competitive advantage over those catching up.
I'm a bit out of the loop, what part of what he said is wrong? He said they have more power and the more capability to produce chips, so they can essentially just brute force things vs the US if they wanted to: is that not the case?
That's like asking why China is building nuclear and coal power plants when solar is so much cheaper. They are doing all of the above.
Let's assume for a second that the compromat story on Huang is true, how much would that have cost? It could be everywhere from 10k to 10m $, depending on how difficult it was to get access, but it would still be a rounding error for AI invest.
Chips aren't what maketh SI anyway. The US is ahead because of a trifecta of having the best (most) hardware, best data, and best talent. You might also throw in business culture. But the same way Google is leading from behind in the US AI eco system, China is behind the frontier on LLMs, but laying foundational work in robotics, multi-modal models and integrated factories that might prove a big advantage down the line.
No it's not the case because if they could do it they would already have done it. Selling them Nvidia chips doesn't change that.
But here's a link to the podcast episode if you want to give it a listen. It will inform a lot to the discussion taking place here and help you understand a few of the things he said that are probably now wrong: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang
But what’s the point ultimately? Delaying their progress by a couple years?
Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
(and could leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future)
People are bending over backwards to come to try to find some deep reason, but I think the reason is simple - the people in charge are not particularly farsighted nor insightful. It's simply short-term thinking without consideration of long-term consequences - it's not limited to just businesses.
For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.
And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.
> Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?
This isn’t what China does though, the moment new tech crosses the border they reverse engineer and start producing it locally. IP protections are meaningless there. How many times does this have to happen to sink in?
What needs to happen is that the people who are getting wealthy from the offshoring of manufacturing and labor to China need to stop getting wealthy. Until then any and all excuses to pretend that China will operate in good faith will be levied to try and make people seem like it's in their best interest to hollow out the USA to hand over to China.
Keeping them dependent upon you guarantees that they never surpass you and that you can milk the relationship for all its worth economically and geopolitically. When they have their own fabs spun up it's possible that you are the one eventually stuck with inferior tech, and you lose all sort of revenue + leverage you'd otherwise have from the relationship.
It make sense. China had X amount of demand. If the demand is met they are satisfied, if the demand remains unmet they seek alternatives. That seeking of alternatives primarily means huge amounts of money, that would go to Nvidia, going to direct competitors of Nvidia to "chip" away at their competitive advantage.
The long term result is the same regardless of who makes the chips but the real strategy is delaying China's ability to surpass the US. It takes a lot of time and money to essentially copy the entire infrastructure required to build an Nvidia GPU. Nvidia has enough demand as is.
China is a trading partner but there is still a serious catalyst for war in the form of the South China Sea. If we went to war with China in 5 years time, why would we sell them the tech they need to match our ability now? Let them figure it out on their own.
It feels like Space Race thinking, honestly. If the US delays China and ends up with an AGI god a few years in advance, that can still be a significant advantage even if China can catch up. This especially would hold true if a theoretical AGI could maximally leverage RSI so the improvement curve becomes exponential.
If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before there is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has been misaligned to desire.
AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.
What stops another power from developing its own AGI a year or two later? Or from catching up once there are two competing RSI AGIs? The Soviets were a few years behind on getting nukes but they still got them.
AI has been identified as strategic national priority for both the Chinese and United States.
NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.
End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.
No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War. Subsequently they managed to starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then righted themselves.
They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use. They make almost everything in the average household.
Who says we won't just progress as well and they stay behind a couple of years?
Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.
If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.
> Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch
> up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese
> Exceptionalism to me.
Suppose you want to build something that requires technical knowledge (a GPU, a fighter jet, ...). You have engineers, but they don't yet know how to build it.
If no one on earth has ever built this thing, you need to consider the possibility that it can't be done at a cost you can pay. Perhaps it violates some law of physics, or it can't be manufactured without knowing some chemistry/physics that we are 100+ years from discovering.
If a company in some other country is already building this thing, you can be sure it is possible to build it. That is a critical piece of information! It means you don't need to discover (much) new physics. It means you can buy/steal a working copy and look at it to learn about it. It means there are engineers you can hire/spy on to understand their design process. It means you can more easily convince a bank/government to fund development, as they have proof your goals are achievable.
Inventing a thing is much harder than inventing a clone of a thing. The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
> The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
Which broadly leads to two conclusions:
They can't do it. If they could they would. If you could invest and create your own Nvidia, ASML, TSMC, &c. you would do that especially if you are China due to its stated goals and actions it takes that we can all see toward those goals.
They can do it and so selling them the chips doesn't matter other than helping to speed up their ability to do it, so we don't want to sell them the chips and thus speed up their capabilities.
But your viewpoint also holds true for the United States and Europe. Anything China can do we can also do, otherwise you're just supposing Chinese Exceptionalism.
Models aren’t everything. You need physical infrastructure at scale for inference, which is where the economic power comes from. Chinese hardware makes double the heat and needs at least double the energy input.
Exactly. And we better keep it this way. The fact that we can block them from copying us today means that they will try that much harder to come up with their own answers. Remember, they are miles ahead in manufacturing hardware and the software is not a problem anymore. Whatever moat cuda represented is gone now.
This is good evidence sanctions don't really work. Critical sectors will find ways around them and it only punishes the rank and file working class. If China or any sanctioned nation wanted those nvidia chips, it has ways to get them. So the military and intelligence get them, but the people don't. Same with sanctions on Russia now, which has not significantly slowed its military machine, but in fact its military machine is coming out with constant innovations (new Gerans, better EW, more spy sats, etc). I remember seeing a post mortem of some Russian drone. It had a Jetson chipset Russia was not supposed to be able to get. I imagine the smuggling market is far bigger than we might think and sanctions far less effective than we think.
Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
Sanctions should be a bigger conversation. They are almost never needed and especially trade tariffs and such are always used for the most corrupt cronyism.
> Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
There’s also the minor quibble that restricting food exports to starve another country are illegal under international law.
Nobody is starving in Russia (at least unavoidably).
That sanctions only harm the civilian economy is not an argument against them. Kinetic sanctions agains oil refining are also primarily impacting the general population and the military have enough oil. But they still impact the ability of the Russians to fund the war. Civilian infrastructure and economic assets are used by militaries too.
I watched the interview. I think the arguments made sense. People get heated talking about the colour of an object they can both see. I wouldn't want to project reasons for heated behaviour.
For the record I think that less than half of the people who thought the dress was black and gold were being influenced by the Chinese government to take that position.
Yeah call me crazy but I don't see the need to sell the cutting edge chips to China if you're already a trillion dollar company. Sure more money is nice, but not living under the thumb of a global dictatorship is nice too.
If the sale is not about money or share price then maybe it's ideological.
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here.
OK sure .. obviously sleeping with Chinese agent is a security issue .. very bad .. but Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense. In fact, it is counterproductive because it closes a huge market to Nvidia and makes China less reliant on US Tech - forcing them to accelerate development of homegrown GPU business.
> Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense
Jensen had the ear of the President. He could have lobbied this properly.
Doing so by obscuring Nvidia’s Singapore business, failing to apply for an export license to Megaspeed, corruptly quashing a Commerce investigation into Megaspeed, all while sleeping with its leader who turned out to be a Chinese spy, and then only coming clean when the Congress flipped…I don’t know how he could have flipped the bird stronger at the American people.
> corruptly quashing a Commerce investigation into Megaspeed
I'm squarely blaming the federal admin for this. Lutnick and Rubio both knew about this way ahead of time, and their negligence is what ended up screwing the American people over. Removing Jensen doesn't prevent this corruption, it just shuffles the blame around. Huang became the fall guy for corruption at a ludicrous scale, while Donald Trump ponders installing Tim Cook (?) as his replacement.
The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This is the Kardashian-ization of the American tech industry.
Are we calling her a "Chinese agent" because her business smuggled chips into China or because anyone believes she was a trained intelligence operative? Does being monetarily incentivized to do business with China make her an agent?
If Nvidia was skirting the law, then they should held accountable for that.
If Nvidia merely held a position that the particular law is, say, counter-productive and lobbied against it (but followed it) - what's illegal about that?
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china
As a business, why shouldn't they advocate for export to a relatively huge market? It is an expansion for them and from a business perspective completely expected.
Now legislators demonstrated how much that matters. I don't have the knowledge to evaluate the national security concerns. But from the outcome, it's a matter they'll firmly push as a long term strategy, even at the cost of one of the world's most visionary CEOs.
They should and there’s nothing wrong with only advocating. The problem is that it wasn’t just advocating but (possibly) knowingly subverting the export controls
US congresspersons and international media outlets condemned the use of AI warfare against Iran, including the Department of Defense's (DoD) Project Maven—a target tagging system integrating elements of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Anthropic's Claude large language model.
There was the kerfuffle with Dario Amodei and Pete Hegseth, who declared Anthropic a supply chain risk to the US. IMO, yes. Killer robots don't run on one 5090 :)
There is more spelunking to that situation, but that's a different thread.
Turns out there are laws and regulations that restrict one’s ability to lobby for foreign interests as both a public and private individual. Read about NJ Senator Bob Menendez which is a particularly egregious example.
The Chinese government working hard to ban NVIDIA GPUs from the country [1][2][3].
How does it make sense that Jensen is compromised while advocating for exporting GPUs to China, which is something that primarily benefits NVIDIA (and arguably the US) while being against the Chinese interests? If he were compromised he would be like "well actually maybe I shouldn't export chips to China after all and give their domestic semiconductor industry a chance".
They obviously need/needed as much NVIDIA as possible short term, and locally produced superior alternative ASAP long term. So one hand rushes to secure all stocks of NVIDIA prosumer and enterprise cards, while another rushes to ban it.
There's speculation that Trump knew about the Chinese spy and Nvidia donated $25M to the White House Ballroom in October 2025.
Even if this is just a coincidence, Jensen himself came out and said he donated to the ballroom, but kept the amount hidden. In internal documents, Jensen and Nvidia said to keep the amount hidden and it only came out due to disclosure documents from the government.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think that the risk is not nearly as real as it-- as they talk. And I think the risk can be managed. And it's managed, you know who? By who? The DOJ. We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said, "Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night."
ROSS DOUTHAT: Who was this person?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Or this company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you. But we said-- "Do you like the color orange because get rid --" said, "Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give 'em a kiss good night, and--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"that's the story because--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"because tomorrow morning--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"you're goin' to jail."
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the-- if they--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted to make a deal--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --to put that (UNINTEL)--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person totally changed everything. Totally. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: "Yes, sir"?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Was it a leader of a major AI company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. Yeah.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. And--
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --and-- and I don't think--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --said, "We wanna put th-- we wanna--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --"codify this into law--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't think it was--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --would you work with them--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --done maliciously. But it coulda been malicious, but--
---
This is what losing the Rule of Law looks like by the way. The sitting president is on TV saying that he found out someone rich and powerful is suspected of wrong doing serious enough to get a call from the president threatening him with prison, but that that's the punishment. Once that rich and powerful person bent the knee, said "Yes sir" with the right tone of voice, all was forgiven.
Equal Justice under Law means that we shouldn't punish people we don't like with harsher sentences it also means that wealth and power shouldn't be sufficient to skirt the law.
We often speak of a two-tiered justice system, but I've never seen the president go on TV and tell America in no uncertain terms, it exists, I'm a part of it, and it went very well, he said "Yes sir" just the right way and so you don't need to worry about it.
I’m aware, Apple and other companies donated too. What I found odd was the lengths Jensen and Nvidia went to hide the amount. Other companies came out and said how much they donated.
Oh! That explains why Trump was so sympathetic to Jensen : "He is suffering. Poor man. He is such a nice guy. And his family… but he is suffering greatly."
No, he doesn't. Congress has abdicated this power up to now during Trump 2 because the GOP are total lickspittle sycophants. The Democrats will be spineless cowards -- at least the older generation -- but they won't be total pushovers on this front.
The image is not a problem. That image has existed for months already. The problem is that Huang lost the tenuous protection that Trump and Lutnick agreed to give him so he could avoid jail. On that basis, investors are now scared the company might suddenly be under investigation for export violations.
Guessing Trump was talking about Jensen on 60 minutes this weekend when he said th DOJ called someone leading a major AI company and said "get ready to go to jail" 24:18 mark
This is dwarfed in scope of the compromise of NVIDIA by its shareholders, a shadowy group who some analysis believe have an interest in the sale of GPUs anywhere, a set of locations that is thought to include China.
And not that Nvidia is absolved of responsibility but it does make it a little easier if it's the new leadership in the hot seat for those things being like "yeah we did some naughty stuff but it was the last guy and we're working on hard on getting it all cleaned up."
I may sound arrogant, but I am not. Many people are a bit slow to catch on to these incidents or can't see beyond one layer, like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418215
Agreed. "Huang was right to advocate for them, China has no incentive to skirt the import ban, sad day for developers," are not takes I thought I would read today.
> Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised
I doubt it has anything to do with it really. China is a huge market and by not exporting to China they were missing out on tens to hundreds of billions in revenue. Any CEO would have advocated the same.
Considering the incredibly high demand for GPUs, they would have sold them regardless. All those sales do is increase demand and push prices up.
Particularly in the current political moment, saying essentially "we were using high demand in a market we can't legally sell in to increase prices for American customers" is not a good look.
(Yes,obviously, not all of this is Nvidia's doing, and demand at this volume through smuggling/front companies would still affect the legitimate market. But being an active participant in it is not a good look.)
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Honestly I doubt Huang seriously believed he could ride this out. He didn’t only jeopardise his own marriage, he jeopardised his company’s core IP, national security and possibly the entire global economy. That’s a tricky mistake to forgive.
Especially on the Trump admin having knowledge for an entire year, and not acting on that information in any significant way.
It's not just NVIDIA that's extremely weak on China, the entire Executive branch is both weak and incompetent on what they claim is a chief concern, and Congress has been completely absent on the oversight role that it should be performing according to the US Constitution.
The incompetence and/or corruption is inexcusable. Teapot Dumb Scandal.
> the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
The first can be objectively and quickly ruled as violating company policy. The second has to go through a process -- did Jensen knowingly violate national security policy, and if so how significant was it?
Not the _only_ reason, sure. However, it's quite common when executives have an affair they will get fired. I think that's just the reality. If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
I was on the leadership team of a startup that is now public, during that build something like that happened (almost exactly the same as this NVIDIA situation sans the spy stuff), there were effectively 5 of us involved in what the outcome should be and it basically came down to: me and another guy didn't want to sit on a leadership team with someone who exercised judgement that way, to the point that it was me and the other guy or affair person, so affair person was out, even tho it was very painful for the business. Also, I don't think what I just described is particularly uncommon.
I have worked at a larger company where the CEO did something similar and across the company all anyone could ask was "why would you do something that dumb", which is not a great way for people to feel about the person supposedly leading the company.
At the end of the day, it's also just too simplistic.
Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.
You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.
The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.
The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.
At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.
"you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance."
If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract with a person to whom you've promised utter faithfulness, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy with regard to some boring, impersonal business contracts?
It's perfectly possible to be trustworthy in one thing and not the other. If you can't trust a lion with your flock of sheep doesn't mean you can't trust it with a bunch of bananas.
yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.
This is more than an affair though. This is an affair with someone he has a business relationship with and thus it becomes the interest to the business. There are many many cases where someone give business favors to the person they are having an affair with.
My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.
If he’d had an affair with his physical therapist absolutely no one would care and he wouldn’t be out- it’s the totality of his actions and his extreme lack of judgement at issue.
Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.
Yep that's an even better point. Though I would say there's a distinction between socially-unacceptable and untrustworthy. Being forthcoming both limits surprise (per your point) and mitigates the trust component of deviance.
> Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Why?
I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?
Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.
> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?
This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.
Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.
And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.
Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.
Right, and because he was willing to break a commitment that serious it de-values other commitments he's made, including those more directly relevant to the business.
All this coming from a country that elected twice as President a guy that married three times, led a very sexually promiscuous life, including the notorious boasting, and was accused of sexual misbehaviours by almost 30 women. Hilarious.
The US system gives voters two options for president. Those options are chosen by parties, and parties make terrible choices.
In 2016, the choice was between Trump and Clinton. Clinton famously excused her husband's infidelity by calling the long list of women who claimed they were assaulted as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty".
In 2024, the choice was between Trump and Harris. Harris got into politics by being the mistress of a CA governor.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the US presidential election offered a choice between someone who was moral and someone who was as immoral as our existing political class. But that has not happened in my lifetime, and I don't expect that to change.
One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.
In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.
If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.
Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.
It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.
But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.
> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.
Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.
Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.
I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, they were well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, they agreed to them with their words, in fact. With us it was very simple, provided you're not a bigot, what you do on your own time is not our concern. However, what you do within our business is our concern. If you have intimate relations with anyone inside our company, even if consensual, you're no longer on our leadership team. Then, their actions did not match those words, when that is true, trust is gone. In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect their actions and words to match, and there are people who we know that isn't the case, and on some siding scale, we accept it (I didn't say acceptable). For example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). Groups typically have criteria/standards, if they change that, it may change the group to varying degrees, and that may be ok or not ok, depending on the group. I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?
Considering that extramarital escapades didn't prevent the current US president from being elected twice - and quite recently at that - I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with cultural acceptance.
You cannot tell from the NVDA stock crash if it's because the CEO had an affair, or because NVIDIA illegally sold GPUs to China and is in huge trouble.
One of the reasons this behavior is problematic in general is the potential for blackmail. It's not even really a statement about morality, just an acknowledgement that somebody who wants to keep things hidden is going to be beholden to the people who know the secrets.
Jensen went to many high profile parties with this woman. I don't see where he's trying to even hide it. Even the kiss was made out in public, not like a hotel room.
Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes. I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents, and he pretty much encouraged the agents to publish the photos.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes
No? All it requires is for Jensen to want to remain with his wife and for his wife to be willing to divorce him if she finds out he has an affair.
Or, even if we suppose he doesn’t care about his wife’s feelings at all, he might be very incentivised by losing half of his assets in a divorce. It’s worth many, many millions to him.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes.
You don’t have to be a prude to think cheating on a spouse is condemnable.
In general, it also doesn’t really matter what society thinks. You can just threaten to reveal the affair to the spouse. And even in the case the spouse doesn’t really care it’s fodder they can potentially use in a divorce to get a better deal.
One thing worth pointing out is that in this case in addition to the affair with the Chinese spy he was allegedly having an affair with a subordinate, which is always problematic.
Apparently the KGB tried to honeypot him - and they were flabbergasted when he asked for copies of the photos. Apparently photos of him with multiple Russian women would bolster his machismo image back home?
Although if you read his Wikipedia page, he had many, many wives, some concurrently, and the youngest was 19...so it's probably true, lol.
Then you read about a certain EV company CEO and his escapades and repopulating the planet, and you don't know what to think.
Or Charlie Sheen...
I guess politicians, celebrities and CEOs are another world from us mere mortals.....
It’s not just about humiliation. If your boss is sleeping with your coworker or someone on your team, how can you trust their decisions are grounded in fairness and logic. Sure, the world doesn’t work this way, and ceos are at a different realm than a mid level manager, but this is usually how HR defines things.
Reminds me of the Coldplay concert couple, which happened to be a CEO and head of HR. Head of HR! And what's more interesting is that they only got removed when the affair became public. At the same time the company was small potatoes so presumably less interesting to state actors.
Several publicly traded companies have (or had) majority-owner CEOs, which makes it more than a little awkward for the board to fire them. I can't really see the board outing Zuckerberg under similar circumstances
> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out
There is no "* only applies to publicly traded companies". Hence, it is incorrect.
The bigger point I am trying to make here being that not everything is investor-driven. People can run businesses without that. It annoys me greatly that HN regularly forgets that.
In publicly-traded companies, the board is not the ultimate boss, though. That would be the shareholders. And, at Meta and many companies copying Meta's playbook who have IPO'd since (notably including Anthropic, though notably not including Nvidia), founder shares have so much voting power that the founders are effectively in complete control.
In theory, Nvidia shareholders, if dissatisfied with today's decision, could vote to oust the current board and replace it with people more sympathetic to Huang, who would, as their first decision, re-hire him as CEO, as would be their prerogative. This is... unlikely to happen.
Public companies in the US are required to have a board of directors. If they’re not a “controlled company” - i.e. no single person controls more than 50% - then a majority of the board are required to be independent, i.e. not employees, executives, or consultants to the company.
If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
It's not entirely about humiliation.
Having an affair (or multiple, in this case) demonstrates poor decision making. You don't want someone who can't make wise choices running your company.
I suspect so many of us see examples of corporate crime or even of corporate greed (legally) causing an incredible amount of damage that an affair feels trivial in comparison. That is especially true when the private family life of a CEO is private. The damage of the affair could be anything from devastating to the family to they were all but legally separated.
That doesn't change that there is a conflict of interest here and any company should fire someone who has a conflict of interest that they are not carefully managing to ensure they don't become real.
Which is as it should be. First of all, marriage is a covenant. If someone cannot be trusted to keep his word on that, it's tough to trust him with power over thousands of employees and trillions of dollars. Second, I'm guessing the board asked Huang after the first affair's revelation whether there were more skeletons in his closet, and he said no. Lying to one's board is more than enough reason to be ousted.
That's a very narrow view that's a function of one's religion, culture, and values.
When I was in school, (US) my very Catholic French teacher explained that his uncle, in France, had a mistress. His uncle's wife knew and was okay with it. What my teacher was explaining is that the culture around marriage varies considerably through the world, and you can't take for granted that what we were taught (monogamy) is the standard that others live to, or even expect from you.
Yes, I can. The normalcy of a thing doesn't make it right. But this isn't really about whether absolute cultural relativism is appropriate or not. It's about a man who broke his word. Huang wed an American woman in America, not a French woman in France. Nothing about this situation indicates Huang's wife was remotely aware of nor alright with his philandery.
There's no major American subculture in which stepping out on your wife is "a good thing" or even "an okay thing". A vast majority of Americans poll consistently against adultery and it's often the most universally condemned action in surveys. Here's one example: https://news.gallup.com/poll/692801/adultery-cloning-seen-im...
My mother had gotten "two wrongs don't make a right" through my head by about age four. It's still true. I don't know nor care what they're doing in San Jose.
Seems like what they’re doing in North America kind of undercuts your assumptions.
Perhaps it’s you that is out of touch?
Both partners in this case know and/or participate, you don’t want drama at your games night after all. There is no wrong here, it turns out that many partners like seeing their partner have a great time.
From a religious perspective, sure. From an earthly perspective, you don't know what the other side was doing. Have you ever been married to a menopausal or a post menopausal woman? A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
> A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
That’s not quite true. A more accurate statement would be: A marriage may be annulled in some U.S. states if one spouse entered the marriage with a concealed, permanent intention not to consummate it, and that intention constitutes fraud going to the essence of the marriage.
If the couple was having sex after marriage, and then one partner decided to cease having it some time later, that is generally not grounds for annulment.
If it were permitted, this would make many, if not most, late-stage marriages subject to annulment. People get sick and injured or just incapable in old age.
Seems like some weird fundamentalist take. On its own it's purely a private matter between him and his wife (obviously the GPU smuggling stuff is a separate thing). Given that the affair has been semi public for years it's hard to imagine his wife didn't know about it anyway.
If it's fundamentalist to hold a man to his word, then I suppose you can count me a fundamentalist. If he'll shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world, just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
> shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world
Well we don't know that, you are not legally required to love someone you are married to and I have no clue what their relationship is like or whether they have any sort of "arrangements". I could hardly care less really since its their private matter.
> just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
I don't really see a correlation between those things. All sorts of immoral degenerates (e.g. Musk, (potentially) Gates and I assume plenty of other lesser known CEOs) have generated massive amounts of value for their shareholders.
This is the kind of story that makes me think most critical leadership should be held by women. Grossly generalizing here, but I think women are inherently less corruptible than men in this manner, especially older women.
It’s unambiguously a good thing that the next NVIDIA CEO (even if just an interim CEO) is a woman, and that the AMD CEO is a woman.
Famously, Mark Hurd made dubious expenses that were perceived negatively by the public (there were sexual harassment allegations) and was ousted as CEO from HP. Then Larry Ellison mocked HP and hired Mark as Oracle's President. So, some companies are worried about that, others aren't
It's entirely possible that the board just wasn't that warm on Jensen in the first place. Not cold, not looking to be the tall poppy that gets cut down... but at least willing to give Jensen the boot if given the right push.
This is how things change. Slowly and then all at once. If the board were more in love with him, they'd probably have been willing to turn a blind eye for just a little while longer. No such luck for Jensen, but we make our own luck in these things.
They can when they reveal poor decision making. If this guy is so stupid that he's willing to stick his dick in anyone, including a Chinese spy, what does that say about his ability to make rational decisions elsewhere in his life? He's clearly not making decisions that benefit him personally in the long term so can he even make good long term decisions at his job?
There's a reason why government background checks looks at financial records. Someone that has trouble paying their bills due to a gambling habit might be easy to turn by the enemy with some cash. Or someone that regularly cheats on their wife might be willing to do some favors for a pretty girl if she lets him sleep with her.
Maybe people are tired of that bullshit. The most powerful guy in business clearly felt empowered to let that facade go. I guess he just got a check for his experiment.
100%. While I do not condone his actions, publicly we do not know anything about his private life and the dynamics. Until there's a statement from his family, for all we know they may have been separated.
It's clearly the CN link and/or the cosying up with a customer that is the problem; the board would not care about his private life (and neither should the public, tbh).
And the open letter sounds more like it was written the way the public would expect a CEO to write.
If he was in an open relationship or had a girlfriend while separated from his wife, that's not really something to be embarrassed about. His letter talks is him apologizing to his family and asking for forgiveness. He got caught in a Chinese intelligence honeypot and knows he fucked up.
> His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?
He has also said so very many times in so very many ways that Nvidia was absolutely not involved in violation of export control laws regarding the export of its products to China. That -in fact- there was absolutely no smuggling going on and claims to the contrary were utterly baseless and without merit.
I agree with ohnnyApplePRNG's assertion that we know literally nothing about the private life and situation of Mr. Huang and his family.
> We know literally nothing about Jensen's private life or if he humiliated his family here.
Uh... but we do!
---
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.
Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
If he is actually a bi-furry with an understanding with his wife on 'affairs', do you think he'd say that? Or would he maintain the straight, family-friendly, investor-friendly front expected of him [by some people] in his position?
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much a promoter of monogamy.
I think it is naive to assume that such public statements are the whole truth of a matter.
People who fuck up a company (or have an affair, or get caught snorting drugs off a sex-worker) aren't really 'stepping back to spend more time with their families'. Historically the classic example of executive public statements.
Perhaps, but it's also more common than not for affairs to hurt families, and the statement confirms that applied here.
If you have stronger evidence that the statement was untruthful when it said he hurt his family, you may present it.
Until such time, the statement strengthens the bayesian prior, which is that his affairs hurt his family, and thus that is what we can conclude. We need not be 100% confident to conclude this absent further evidence. >50% confidence suffices.
Tell me you have no clue how corporations are run without telling me. Furthermore Jensen wasn't some random executive otherwise this wouldn't be now top news all over the world.
Let’s be real here. Everyone making money out of NVIDIA was more than happy enough to go around the restrictions and see the prices go up due to Chinese demand.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
In what world is the modern US Congress a good regulator of these kinds of things? Half the people in the Capitol have a literal vested interest in the very companies they claim to be trying to keep on a leash (and I recognize that some of these are inverse instruments, my point still stands).
Public service, especially at the highest levels, is both a realization of civic responsibility, as well as an immense material privilege.
If you've had a career in congress, parliament, whatever, you can live comfortably off of the various media appearances you're likely to have for much of the rest of your life.
Representatives in government should be able to keep it in their pants when it comes to investments at least while they're in government, and have a thick, thick wall between their jobs running a country (or state, or whatever) and the management of their investments. Blind trusts should be the bare minimum.
What I'd prefer to see is that while actively sitting in government, representatives must keep their savings invested in funds so diversified into low-risk instruments that almost no regulation can benefit them significantly more than it would an average passive investor.
My money is on the congress members - including the greatest stock trader of all times, Nancy Pelosi - having just sold their NVIDIA shares right before the spying was uncovered.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
It's also possible that after the first affair news broke, the board asked him questions and he didn't disclose that there's a second affair too (and maybe more??). The board only realized that he'd not been truthful/fully forthcoming when the second affair news broke yesterday. That's when they decided to boot him. Because if there's more and more affairs going to keep breaking, that would be a complete media spectacle distracting from the company.
Musk controls 19.9% of voting power at Tesla, and more than 80% at SpaceX. Huang has about a 3.5% ownership stake in of Nvidia and that’s jointly controlled with his wife.
Musk's companies have low quality boards, which is by design to make it almost impossible to fire him and the legacy of that should serve as a cautionary tale
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.
Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?
As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?
They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.
> They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
I know it's just speculation, but the fact that Nvidia hasn't tried to scapegoat some random compliance officer strongly suggests to me that Jensen did know, and that the board has seen the paper trail that proves it.
To me the fact that it was known for a year that the affair was happening, and nothing changed implies that this is more a publicity move rather than anything else. They had to make a change, improve their brand image. Probably nothing will change in how they sell their product, the rules they skirt.
Possibly, I am a bit tired of the national security argument with hand waving vagueness. It’s generally unfalsifiable because details would be a national security risk. Meanwhile we have seen National Security concerns that were pure lies once we get sufficiently far past it.
Yes you see there are various types of national security. For example, there is the national security when a country that touted capitalism and free trade for years suddenly finds itself beat at capitalism by someone else, that's a big national security issue. Then suddenly free trade is evil and a danger and a national security issue.
> There are some things more important than stock valuation.
Given that the economic growth of the USA during the last few years was entirely due to this man and his technologies, I'm going to say nah.
China having access to GPUs is not a national security threat. It's an economic threat. Not sure why people treat China as some enemy nation. It's just a competitor.
Or maybe he just simply wanted to make more money by increasing demand for Nvidia's GPUs by tacitly allowing for them to be exported to China though Singapore.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
Cheating on your wife may be despicable behavior, but it doesn’t warrant firing the founding CEO of one of the most important companies on earth, especially considering how much is at stake economically, including how reliant the U.S. economy has been on AI build out spending. On the other hand, cheating on your wife and endangering national security at the same time is a different story.
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
Think of this current fracas like this: Americans have a strange penchant to define themselves by sexuality. So, they are easily distracted into a trance by their hormonal and prurient interests for extended periods.
A famous guy had an island and it was extrajudicially a place where alot of powerful people internationally could come to his island and interchange info and ideas and make deals and things could occur and he collected up all that kind of stuff, including arms deals and the sex stuff.
But Americans are only right now aware of the sex stuff in what he collected up.
The sex stuff is essentially a distraction, the oily film on the deeper ocean of truth.
If it were just about the export ban, then why leak the affairs? US intelligence (which serves US corporate power only) has decided to put this guy out to pasture by any means necessary. That's the reason for this faux moral outrage. They want to make sure there's no chance he makes it out the other side.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
Allows the influence of selection of next CEO that is more aligned with long term Chinese goals. Or punishment for not going along with the plan.
Im not much for conspiracy theories, but if you think about it, in the state that US is in, there is absolutely zero chance US will do anything retaliatory to China if they do spy shit on US soil. China is basically free to play spy games. My guess is that they have their fingers in Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, SpaceX, and AMD, and probably other agents within NVIDIA in high places.
Their game is basically rearrange the pieces so eventually China becomes the world number one superpower, while keeping the status quo as much as possible
I'll plug our Pretrained episode from Monday here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97DW8gfCnI - this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
This comment yesterday [1] indicated that Megaspeed was not on the blocked entity list, but that NVidia voluntarily hasn't sold to them since June 2025.
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
History will look back at this and see Jensen was right to do this.
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open ops...!!!] may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
It is legal for Chinese companies to buy US neocloud time. These toothless restrictions were poorly constructed and unenforceable law. The extent to which nvda was supposed to self police is unclear. I find it hard to believe any binding evidence of direct sales will be found.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
I've heard rumours that 20-40% of Nvidia's revenue was coming from sanctioned chips that make their way into Chinese data centres. If true, it's not small potatoes.
Being compromised kinda does seem like a reason to be fired. It seemed well known he was doing it since there are plenty of photos over a few years? So it’s more she was a honeypot.
I am not sure I can agree. Perhaps this was the underlying reason. Perhaps others wanted to frame him and launched a media campaign. But from what I can see, at the
least on the surface, to me it looks as if he was fired for liking too many women at the same time, at the least one of which might be a possible spy. This may all be fake-reasons on top to cover underlying real causes, but to me right now it looks as if the girls cost him the job here.
Are they still in Trump's good graces? Sure, they gave him money before. But can they promise him more money again? He's pretty quick to dispose of people when they're inconvenient too.
Jensen is Taiwanese. Nvidia's chips are made in Taiwan, as are all the most advanced chips in the world -- including the chips in Apple and AMD products -- by TSMC. China wants to re-absorb Taiwan into itself, partially because they cannot match TSMC's geometries and they desperately need those geometries.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
Fuck no. Jensen did no such thing. He actually hasn’t been charged with a single crime. You’re outright hallucinating here.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.
We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.
TBH, I find the manner in which this was done to be pretty distasteful.
The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
I've seen a theory floated online that somebody inside the government, who was part of the faction advocating for stricter sanctions on China, leaked this in a way to cause maximum damage to the anti-restrictions faction. Whether Huang (female Huang) was actually a Chinese spy in the first place is also up in the air, keep in mind that while the affair has almost certainly occurred, given that Huang (male) has admitted to it himself, the Chinese spy allegations are still unverified. It could possibly have been a "grain of truth in a sea of lies" play.
> The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
Everything only comes to light with the New York Times reporting on it. It would be fine if the government did it, but... they didn't.
If nothing else, this indicated to the board that JH is capable of thinking with his dick and that can be a problem for business.
Its a threat to their own companies and whatever amount of democracy is there. Maybe ego is like some cancer that kills/self-ded
structs its host/person if it gets big enough. Which is good. A persons etreme wealth gets them political power and also advantages before the law. We've seen this with big corporations.
> A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
That's literally how the world works? And has worked for many centuries or longer. By "value" you mean wealth, and wealthy people can get away with murder. They buy and write the law and have the best lawyers in the world.
We won't have billionaires/trillionaires/kings AND rule of law for /everyone/ equally - the world doesn't work that way.
Our President literally diddled kids on a Carribbean island, cheated on his wives several times, and is probably a closeted homosexual, but richest man on earth having an affair is where we draw the line.
> if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Hmm... I wonder why that is. Could it be because a bunch of CEOs, prominent politicians, and business people were found to have taken multiple trips to an island where the had sex with children and nothing happened to them? No, it couldn't possibly be that. I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age, while we excuse pedophilia.
> I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age,
Do we have evidence that his legally-recognized other half consented to these relationships? If so, fine. That still doesn't remove the problems with those relationships, like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset, or the fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.
>while we excuse pedophilia.
Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???
With a strict ban of chips to China, Chinese companies will not have enough compute. Without enough compute, they are not going to be able to release new open weight models.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
> ”it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.”
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got redirected or forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
As though the Board had no idea of this, and are suddenly acting oh gosh this is the first we've heard of the phantom SG revenue! Time for Jensen to go. Nah, not buying it. Many of the board have been w JH since the early 1990s. This is because his reckless disregard for the company and his years-long relationship with a Chinese spy.
Is this remotely believable, that one CEO can surreptitiously work around both the government and his own company to sell restricted goods at volume? If this were real you'd have to lobotomize the entire management structure, because there are a lot of people that would know and know better and that they'd face jail time. And maybe merge it with some other company quickly so it doesn't completely collapse because of the immediate mass firings to try and sway prosecutions toward individuals and not the destroy the entire entity.
I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
> From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.
I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?
They were literally allowed to sell chips to the US branch of sanctioned Chinese companies. Same pattern as the tariff nonsense, not really opposed to any products or companies, just wants to bring all the production to the US instead. Plain protectionism, like the same car made in Germany is badly unfair, made in China is a national security risk, but once it's made in the US it's perfectly fine.
I dont think its more soo about the ban as China itself has 'officially' blocked the chips that were being licensed as exportable. I think its more of the asks that were being made by the NATSec and Amodie aligned actors (see the pod he had with Dwarkesh ), to ho tighter and more aggressive. Basically Jensen was sort of the brake on the impulsive ideas getting thrown around on how to 'win' AI and create a moat against all latecomers.
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
Well the only thing super weird is the timeline - USA bans exports, China (very soon after) bans IMPORTS! And then there's a company which keeps doing trade under the nose of the potentially two most powerful nation-states and their secret service sources. This is super fishy, really I don't buy nobody knew nothing, only for a "lucky" journalist to figure out the whole thing...
Very much agreed, the second this became clear his position was untenable. He will surely have launched his unicorn by the end of December regardless, I’d be surprised if this had any tangible repercussions outside the divorce court.
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
Biggest valuation ever will turn into biggest investor lawsuit ever. The music on the AI circular deals is about to be broken by a feminine spell. This has Lord of the Rings all over it...
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
NVIDIA's latest chips were also on an export ban for several Middle Eastern countries ("security" theater). That's about the time the UAE's sovereign fund invested a large sum in Cerebras. They were still able to get the chips by way of Kuwait, which is a friendly Middle Eastern state.
Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.
Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!
Oh, it's not the repeated violations of sexual conduct with an employee, and a spy, and likely more? A CEO who is that dumb to risk his and the company trust isn't worth it. Look, a trillion already wiped out. When employees say "how dumb could he be", you know the board and major investors are saying that too.
Did your TV tell you that? I hope you realize that there is absolutely no proof of the import ban having been skirted. The FBI has been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed since 2024 and all they have is a few GPUs still being unboxed at their Malaysian data center.
Well, you say that, but the perception is he hasn't got sacked for circular financing, nor for the providing of sanctioned components (supposedly they went to third countries, not China, so legal). But he got sacked for two affairs.
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
There is a wealth of reporting out there, it is harder to ignore this story than to read about it. My statement was couched and is clearly just my opinion, I'll leave the reading to you and let you form your own conclusions
Let's cut the crap, it's a coup because he is in favor of the open-weight ecosystem and doesn't want to restrict models at the firmware level. Anthropic is in large part behind this.
Can you imagine if it were a female CEO fired for the same thing? Oh how the accusations of sexism and double standards and how she doesn't have to report to the board what she does with her body. The argument writes itself.
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
Elon Musk has an AI bot generating explicit images without consent, regardless of age, yet nobody's firing him.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
That is simply not true, Grok refuses to make explicit images, and with uploaded media it refuses to do even mildly enticing ones. *
* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.
There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this. NVidia is too big and Huang is too wealthy. This administration in particular would never prosecute that. And, even if they did, a pardon is only $1-3 million anyway.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
It's not. That's a strange statement to make, particularly the emphasis on "married". It seems that person is implying that if a married woman participated in the affair, it was due to coercion. A sexual harassment lawsuit would mainly be a liability in the court of public opinion.
> I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem
You really think Nvidia would let Huang go (without a replacement matching his skills, experience and knowledge in the field) because he cheated with an employee? It is the spy affair while Huang promoted an open export policy.
Plus thanks to Huang, Nvidia is now under investigation by federal agencies.
None of them care about a CEO cheating.
Also, being fired from the company you founded is a serious consequence.
The midterms seem like the most obvious timing. Trump has a little less power and everyone is starting to plan for what happens after him - jockeying for being able to say they didn't support this and that. If it was only being ignored because Mr Huang could donate a lot of money to Trump's ballroom that deal probably isn't as important now.
> What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care?
We all now know that Trump knew about it, that's what has changed. It was fine when this was private, but now his administration is starting to get questions around why his Commerce department punted the initial investigation to DOJ where it ultimately died as the opposition party is about to retake Congress with investigations top of mind.
Yeah, over a year ago the likes of Gamers Nexus was able to follow the clues to figure out how Nvidia was skirting the export ban.
It's hard to believe the US government was so incompetent that they didn't do the investigation a YouTuber did (But not impossible).
The export ban was always BS. Unless you are going to do a total ban and all parts are manufactured in the US, then it is just 1 additional hop to get stuff into China.
Likely there was at least a feeling of mutual understanding between Jensen and key people in the administration. Now the wind has turned in a big way and none of that is on paper. And in fact what is on paper points in the wrong direction.
Probably the only thing protecting NVDA from prosecution right now is that nobody in the White House wants to pop the AI bubble. That might protect Jensen too because he would entangle the company. There will be an interesting tension with congressional oversight. Buy popcorn and NVDA vol.
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
> Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration
I want to add some nuance to this statement. There is a difference between:
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
It may well be that it's his private life and it doesn't have much to do with things, but it is a contributing factor. The skirting of export bans was the reagent, but the infidelity is the catalyst that is making it much bigger.
CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?
So many HN folks defending Huang's actions as "just an affair" - what an epic reading comprehension fail. Yes there is an affair, and that's what grabbed the initial headlines. But just read a paragraph or two and you'll find the espionage story.
For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.
Everybody should be against the export ban. It's laughable to claim that it is for "national security", it's blatant protectionism to cover US AI companies for the fact that they operate at monumental losses. Any country in the world should be allowed to buy the hardware they need to run AI, if they need it, and if the roles were reversed the US should also be allowed to buy tech from other countries. Graphic cards aren't nuclear bombs, and AI is a multi-use core technology every nation on earth should have access to. So far, China has made a far better impression in that respect than the US. At least they have published open weight models.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
Basically every technology is dual use, but still I basically agree, there is an incredible level of anti-China rhetoric in the US right now, not just on the right. The Chip export ban is incredibly tricky reason the outcomes of. For one thing, doesn’t it change the China Taiwan relationship?
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
What's the downside of that for the economy? It seems like it would be the market becoming more efficient, cutting down on margins and so on. Bringing Nvidia back to earth might open up cheaper hardware for other companies to work with and accelerate AI anyway.
Efficiency is a great thing and long term what’s needed so we can buy laptops again at a reasonable price. There will be a pretty large blast radius across ANT/OAI/ORCL/SPCX/TSMC/neoclouds. Prob 15T of market value at risk and the flywheel of investment which is conditioned on investors and the economy believing they have durable appreciation locked up in AI stocks (“if my basket of investments is safe, I’m willing to invest my next dollar in more of it” vs “the sky is falling and I need to tighten the belt / pull money out”). I’m trying not to be a doomer here as I think it’s somewhere in the middle it’s just very frothy and the upside scenarios generally envisioned NVDA to be stable
I will be honest, my personal opinion is keep the blood flowing until RAM prices return to Sept 2025 levels.
This whole saga has been a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. There's no compelling argument that points to these new innovations not otherwise happening if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
How is nvidia crashing out going to reduce RAM prices?
The demand for high-ram consumption applications is higher than ever and rising. That demand is not created by nvidia, but nvidia's customers. nvidia's customers are buying nvidia parts built with other's ram because they have customers renting the compute.
Whoever nvidia is buying ram from will simply sell to the next highest bidder, and the ram will still be sold out through the coming years.
Because Nvidia is personally investing in a huge amount of those customers, enabling the hyperscaling. If half of the circle breaks, the other half does too.
> if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
RAM prices are a result of skyrocketing demand. That's hardly a fever dream.
You can hardly blame RAM suppliers for taking the money of people who are coming to them begging to pay more than the person before them in line. It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket.It's the customers who are willing trying to pay more for better access.
The innovations and the price of RAM are so non-sequitur at this point; I can't understand what point you're making. Sure, if RAM were as easy to get as the circuit boards they're being put on, innovation would be the same (or accelerated!) but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that RAM is incredibly supply constrained and ramping production to meet the demand of a seemingly insatiable market takes a long time for a product this complicated and specialized.
If any of the manufacturing companies could have seen this coming, they'd have started ramping production to insane levels 5 years ago, and they'd be taking in just as much money as Nvidia is.
It’s not a given that markets are able to navigate the risk between massive capital investment and unknown future revenues. Everyone is trying to figure out the long term value from AI. For a made up numbers example the path might require $1T investment to unlock $10T revenue in 10 years from now. But if no one can put up the $1T it stalls and doesn’t happen next decade
The hardware is expensive because it's supply constrained. Demand far exceeds supply.
Harming Nvidia would only make us more compute constrained, and raise prices further.
It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.
Harming the producers of [thing] or disincentivizing profits will not make [thing] cheaper if demand remains the same (or if it is growing, like in all of the areas I mentioned).
Doesn't this situation demonstrate how bonkers it is to pin the fortunes of the stock market and potentially the entire economy on the behavior of one person?
> pin the fortunes of the stock market and potentially the entire economy on the behavior of one person?
"We" don't. Media narratives over-focus on individuals and personalities because that's what humans focus on.
Markets can overreact emotionally on daily headlines and weekly narratives but tend to correct quarter to quarter. There's lots of data and examples: Apple after Jobs, Microsoft after Gates, etc. Even after losing iconic, long-time leaders, most industry-leading companies continue to make even more money, more profitably than ever over the following decade.
Right, but then he resigned. So the question on all our minds is if NVIDIA should be entirely written off since losing Jensen's irreplicable talent, or if some of those skills are transferable.
Since he apparently also arranged the company so it revolved around him and no one else was in a central position to know cross silo information, how would those skills transfer?
Jensen might be the best person to lead NVidia at the moment, but that doesn't mean that NVidia dominating the market and being able to demand gigantic margins is a good thing for the overall economy.
It should not be a job - that's the whole point. Kings demonstrated how bonkers is having a single point of failure like this so it's insane people still don't get it today.
The company should have plans in place for what to do when something happens to the CEO. Situations like this, death, or just deciding to leave. I've read reports that Nvidia didn't have this, which would be irresponsible if true, but it's not the norm. The founder leaving is likely a bit different than some other CEO coming in later, but any good CEO should be thinking about what happens to the company when they're gone so people know the company is still in good hands.
That's a fairly hysterical reading. It's a company, no one is irreplaceable.
He has no magic, but he did make some good strategic decisions.
Everyone is a god and a genius (in retrospect) if they found a multi-trillion dollar company, but the causation seldom runs that way.
Jobs founded Apple to great success, left and failed then returned to Apple to great success, then he died and Apple was fine. The company is more important than the individual. Nvidia will also be fine.
And clearly the US economy doesn't rest on the shoulders of Nvidia or AI, no matter the level of hype.
Huang has served as CEO for a whopping 33 years - hard to argue he wasn't crucial to NVIDIA's success, and how many of the board members are the original from when he was first chosen-selected and continued to be hired as CEO over the crucial early decades?
What nuanced knowledge-understanding does he have that no one else can have?
Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
Respectfully, I don't engage with conspiracy theorists
Giving Jensen credit for creating literally all of the value from Nvidia seems really over the top. He happened to be running the biggest GPU company during the biggest GPU boom ever. Sure he had an impact on the numbers and the timing, but if Jensen had never been born someone else would be heading a giant chip company around this period of time that saw it's stock take off like a rocket ship. This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.
Isn't he the entire reason Nvidia invested so heavily in tensor cores before AI even became a massive market mover? He definitely deserves credit for setting Nvidia up with a massive lead in this emergent industry.
Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? Your comment would be fine without the "Bruh", "You are making it sound as if", and "This is ridiculous" bits.
This could've been said of Cisco in the telecom bubble days. Or Nortel. Or a handful of other key players who were all inflating that bubble and playing games with their financials that made the bursting of the bubble worse.
Pumping billions of dollars, the source of which is obscured, into it looks like a cut out, is not just a national security problem. It undermines confidence in the numbers that you claim are the basis of shareholder value.
the stock value just represents what people think the company is (or will be) worth, them selling products at 50% margin is what brings the money, the stock value doesn't give NVIDIA extra cash (unless they're selling or leveraging their own stock reserves to get even more cash?). And definitely shareholder value is not the economy.
and also, how is the efficiency bad now? surely that allows for innovation and other companies and people to get cheaper hardware (assuming they somehow have to lower their margins because Jensen left, still don't get that argument)
> Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.
Nonsense. Nvidia's employees created that value, not Jensen. Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created, just like in every other company. CEO worship is absurd.
Like it's an extremely common sentiment when working for a large company to look at the SVP or CEO and go "that person is a dumbass, everyone in charge is a dumbass". Yet when looking at other companies somehow we forget about that and put the companies success on the CEO or top level execs. Instead of remembering "no, it's probably the small army below them figuring out how to manage upwards to prevent the idiot in charge from tanking everything"
If the origin of the people who created value is the metric, aren't his parents and ancestors those who truly are responsible for creating all that shareholder value?
I prefer the view that the engineers that made GPUs have a bigger hand in the value creation.
This tendency to credit an entire technological breakthrough to the top of an org chart is such a bizarre cliche from a systems perspective. Breakthroughs are not conceived from whole cloth within the corner offices of isolated autocracies; they are the product of horizontal networks of social capital as engineers continually circulate across firms.
Besides, individual contributors aren't incentivized to innovate insofar as we're not structurally positioned to capture a windfall.
I recognize the narrative that an army of world-class engineers is essentially inert until an executive visionary breathes purpose into them, but that's a structural property of the firm. It's a choice to route all surplus through the board and major shareholders, and to starve out any innovation that happens outside of those venues.
> Those employees didn’t create it when a huge number of them worked at AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, or TI.
I agree: we must do everything we possibly can to aggrandize the already wealthy and powerful. The glory must accumulate in their account, and the less that goes to their subordinates, the better.
You can’t convince these people. A large portion of the population is hardwired (by DNA) to be subordinate and hierarchical, for better or worse. Probably best to simply let them believe in Superheroes.
I mean Jensen even said that he does not mind the California billionaire* tax. To believe that CEOs and Founders are not replaceable is hyperbole but so is to believe that they are totally replaceable. NVIDIA clearly has a moat and are the belle of the ball, of the world economy
I agree that CEO worship is absurd but it’s a big stretch to say they are responsible for none of the value. Jensen AND the employees. And he probably created a disproportionate amount of that value compared to the average IC, I don’t think that’s in question. But is he responsible for most of it, or even 10% of it? Unlikely.
> Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created
That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
A lot of people play crucial roles in a company. HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation.
If you've ever been in a company with poor leadership and one with great leadership, you'd see the impact of it on everyone working there and on the value being created.
This is hilarious because Jensen’s idea of leadership is petty authoritarianism. I’m not sure if this is just HN being emotionally bought in to great man theory or financially bought in to NVDA, but most of their value creation is on the back of gamer chips being useful for crypto and later AI.
> That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
Yup, all of it. And at no point have I considered myself as 10,000x more valuable than any of the team members I led. Yet that's exactly what is done to billionaire CEOs.
You'll notice I did not say Jensen didn't create ANY value.
Sorry, what hard decisions did Jensen make, exactly? "Hey team, I'm going to make the tough decision here to propose that next year's GPU is faster than last years"?
Do you know for sure that Jensen personally was involved in recruiting Ian Buck and starting up the CUDA project? A project that's largely attributed to John Nickolls? What other major decisions did Nvidia even make over the last, say, 15 years?
This sort of empty bitterness is a very pernicious thing. It reads as knowledge / experience, but really it’s nothing more than angry drivel. It doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before a million times.
They should fall first to AI replacement as they're the least useful people in a company and most susceptible to ruining the company's reputation by screwing a Chinese spy and a hot local chic.
Tell me you know nothing about running a company without telling me. Just because one CEO got caught screwing over a Chinese spy that doesn't mean all CEOs are useless people. That's just lazy generalization.
If efficiency is a risk for the economy then the economy is of course. Hopefully the correction can be soft and not a catastrophic pop. Maybe a slight cooling of Nvidia, caused by isolated factors, can help without crashing the whole sector.
That's incredibly unlikely. NVidia and Megaspeed's relationship has been under constant separate parallel investigations by the Justice and Commerce Depts going back to the Biden administration. There have been no charges and Megaspeed was never even added to the blocked Entities List which would instantly ban all sales, despite the US govt being free to do so at any time with no justification or explanation needed.
It appears two things are simultaneously true:
- Thousands of banned GPUs were diverted to China.
- NVidia meticulously verified export licenses and complied with every U.S. law, export control and KYC regulation.
The under-reported fact is that while the US Govt chose not to add Megaspeed to the banned list, NVidia voluntarily placed Megaspeed on their own blocklist and stopped selling GPUs to them in June 2025. This was because the law requires NVidia to block any company they "know or reasonably suspect" is violating export controls. There is an extensive framework of Red Flags a supplier is required to check and certify are 'cleared'. The penalties for failing to do so are the same as violating export controls on cruise missiles (up to 20 years in jail, $1M per GPU ). And they can apply personally to each employee who knew. So, NVidia cut off one of their largest South Asian customers ~18 months ago, despite Jensen banging the customer's board member.
No, I can't explain it either. But those are the facts per WSJ & NYT reporting. The meta-subtext here is there have been two opposing factions on China policy inside the White House, NSC, and U.S. intelligence community since the Biden era. They are each constantly trying to sway Trump, who vacillates between them (as seen by inconsistent US policy swings). One of those factions leaked the 6 month-old Alice story a week ago in the hope of blocking Jensen's influence and access to Trump. It worked (probably better than expected). Now that Jensen is both out of NVidia and politically toxic, neither faction cares about him.
I'm a normal person with a beating heart and conscience, so I don't give a damn about how much shareholder value someone has ever created, and I never will.
So you are not planning to ever retire? You never buy anything? You dont have a job?
Unless you are a subsistence farmer, everything you have in your life is thanks to the economy and "shareholder value".
Its strange to me how many people will say stuff like "who cares about the economy, I care about people" when the economy is the thing that ensures people have food and shelter and dont starve.
>> everything you have in your life is thanks to the economy and "shareholder value".
No it's not, shareholder value as understood as owning a piece of a publicly traded company doesn't produce anything on its own and it's definitely independent of the economy of a society. Could even be argued that the wealth stuck in the shareholder value is reducing the investments that could be being made in the interest of the rest of the economy.
I can easily make something and sell it to you without creating shareholder value.
Nvidia stock price is now lower than it was a year ago. Has been declining for about 6 months, highly volatile, with a step sell off starting a month ago.
Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.
The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.
It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.
A) He never made a single product himself, and B) surely we can see in hindsight that this is a pretty goofy metric for success...? Like, "shareholder value" isn't exactly what we need at this pivotal moment in the terran story.
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company.
...
But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were
Even if we accept capital as the most important thing, this seems pretty openly counterintuitive. You're lamenting the spectre of efficiency.
This is demonstrably untrue. Jensen is an engineer through and through, and contributed significantly to Nvidia's early accelerators: from the NV1, at least to the earliest GeForces.
Ha, I was wondering if someone would bring that up! Pretty funny. How much of the shareholder value of NVidia is represented by his share of the NV1 and the earliest GeForces?
> B) surely we can see in hindsight that this is a pretty goofy metric for success...? Like, "shareholder value" isn't exactly what we need at this pivotal moment in the terran story.
In the slow evolution of the human race into the Ferengi, it is absolutely a milestone!
Long term we want efficiency. The market is SUPER inefficient right now. People are buying GPUs and stacking them up in warehouses so that they get their allocation. Companies are taking retired jet engines, and turning them into very expensive generators. SoftBank just defaulted on a bunch of power generation orders (increased cost for everyone, but didn’t create the value). My point is that it will be a painful road to get to the efficient market which will likely be a recession because of a massive slow down in spending
A is a reddit meme-argument. It assumes that the labor-theory-of-value is a fact and implies that only fungible IC's add value, whereas irreplaceable great men who organize multi-trillion-dollar companies from scratch contribute nothing. It's a way for them to advance for their silly worldview while obscuring its absurd foundational assumptions.
not necessarily. One athlete's performance can be the difference between a team winning and losing. One general can make the difference between winning and losing a war. No risk also comes with the downside of no reward, artificially constraining high achievers so we dont become too reliant on them just means everyone is equally low achieving
Totally agree. And that's late-stage capitalism for you. For a site named "hacker news" the hacker spirit is noticeably absent here. Instead you have simps for billionaires.
If anything Jensen Huang is the exact embodiment of the hacker spirit. An engineer who singlehandedly created one of the most valuable companies on earth by creating the chips that AI runs on.
I dont get how you can talk about the "hacker spirit" but then talk about "late-stage capitalism" (essentially the flat-earthism of economy) and tech founders.
The thing to remember every time you see the orange, so you don't forget, is that you are posting on the promotional website of a multibillion-dollar private equity firm.
This is of course true that YC provides this platform but, tapping in to my religious upbringing, it's a bit like confusing a church for the building it's in. Ycombinator owns the building that the community meets in, but the community is bigger than the landlord. The landlord can set some rules and influence what happens in the building, but if they impose too much on the community it will find a different building to meet in.
What on earth are you talking about. The exponential growth in the 1990s, percentage wise, far outpaced the AI bubble. Go look at Intel, Microsoft, lucid, etc from the dot com boom. This is the problem with 20-somethings’ hot takes on the market: no history.
The '90's bubble is what the AI "bubble" would be if everyone you spoke to was glowing with excitement about AI, and a few niche analysts were raising concerns about capex.
Instead this "bubble" is packed with people who detest AI and have extremely bearish views on it's future. If this "bubble" does pop, I think it will be the first one in history that every single person saw coming.
Almost every bubble ever had its detractors. Yet they still happened because those who actually had decision power and market shaping power didn't care about any downsides from popping a larger bubble so they just wanted to make money.
It is baffling to read comments that this is excusable or he should be retained 'in interest of the shareholders'. Setting aside the obviously poor judgement, the appearance of impropriety has serious ammunition behind a situation that already looked weird. More practically, he's compromised now. Whether it's further scandal or the impending criminal investigations, there might be further hooks people have on him.
The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.
I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".
I dont understand this argument, its either a shareholder concern or a criminal concern? a "conflict of interest" is a term used when a 3rd party needs to be unbiased ex government or law. You wouldn't say its a conflict of interest if your favourite sports team trades their best player
People have a lot of net worth tied into the economy. Nvidia is a lynchpin in the economy. People are biased towards keeping their net worth up. It’s not that deep, people want the tendies to continue printing.
I find it interesting to see so much blame being directed at the act of removing one person who may have been holding up trillions of value in the stock market, rather than at the market and industry conditions that led to so much value being supported by one person in the first place.
> baffling to read comments that this is excusable or he should be retained 'in interest of the shareholders'
If you want Exhibit A for the moral corruption of Silicon Valley’s culture, this is it. And it’s not tied to shareholdings. It’s the quasi-monarchic strain of worship that has been poisoning Valley culture for at least a decade now.
One of the greatest fallacies of modern times is that people are not human. There is this expectation that people will be perfect and flawless and make zero mistakes. That is incongruent with human nature. The dude had two consensual relationships outside his marriage. To err is human... this is all so overblown.
Meanwhile we have a felon in the white house (sexual assault) among an immeasurable number of other supposed crimes
This guy had a cult of personality I did not know about until this comment thread.
"He created so much shareholder value."
"Unlike Elon he shared the wealth with the company."
"The US is worse off without him."
I'm sorry but a patsy who is this gullible, or a CCP-friendly traitor that is this slimy (the jury is still out), should not be in this position of power.
Cool for all he accomplished so far. This isn't a situation that deserves a second chance.
A company is not required to maintain a look of propriety. A company is not required to not look fishy. A company is not required to care how it is observed by the public at large. It is required only to maximize shareholder value.
There is no doubt that his sexscapades were stupid, but at the same time there is only one question that should matter for the board. Will the shareholders make more money with him or without?
“Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”[0]
Supreme Court disagrees that a company is required “only required to maximize shareholder value”, do you have any evidence to support your claim otherwise?
This person does not have any evidence to support their claim. The notion that shareholder primacy is enshrined in settled law (when in fact, as you point out, the opposite is true) is widely believed in the HN comments pages.
I cant help but see a difference in the moral standard to which Jensen is being held compared to the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held. Why can one get away with shocking moral behaviour, but the other has to step down for a mild affair. If Jensen didnt have the affair, or it never came to light, would all of this still have taken place?
When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.
Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.
This isn’t a case of being punished for doing the right thing. The right thing is retaining control of your own company and doing so is not “authoritarian”.
Sorry but IMO this sort of company structure should not be allowed. Private companies should not be able to issue stocks the way Zuck & Elon have. Pull Meta’s charter and redistribute their assets. Let that serve as a notice to Elon that he’s next.
The argument is that the shareholders who own the majority of a company's stock (by value, not voting rights) should be able to control the company, not a minority owner. It is the corporate structure that allows guaranteed minority control (e.g. Zuckerberg owns something like 13% of Meta, but controls 60% of the voting power). In a free market, why should publicly traded companies be allowed to sell "shares" that are not ownership in the traditional sense?
In an actual free market the distinction between “public” and “private” company would be really just some transparency/accounting standard or set of standards set by the particular exchange(s) that the shares were traded on.
And just to be clear in practice, stocks are not priced based on their voting rights but rather expectations of their future cash flows (dividends) or simply how much the stock is expected to go up or down by. A lot of modern financial activity is nonsense.
If you really want to actually understand what a company is you should go look up when corporations became a thing and why. It had to do with various legal protections to stimulate economic activity and tax revenues.
All of these modern notions and principles that you’re invoking or basing your arguments on about ownership are most likely just contrived nonsense. These aren’t necessarily eternal principles of anything.
Ask almost anyone here and they'll tell you that the C-suite are mostly a bunch of morons who don't know anything about technology, and now you want to ensure that businesses can only ever be run by such technologically illiterate morons, not founders? Insanity!
Having a libido is fairly normal for most non-castrated men, at least historically speaking. In modern times, men are in seemingly depressed and in general need of various pills to help with erectile dysfunction, which perhaps in part explains the low birth rates.
To be honest, I don't know how to succinctly tell you that this is a bad take. For starters, that company has hoovered enough tax money that we should all be on the board. Secondly, encouraging family feudalism is crazy if you even claim to be a supporter of capitalism and the free market. Thirdly, you're not a tech baron and never will be, especially if you can't trust that your investments are concerned with your interests and goals due to CEO exceptionalism. Just saying. If he was a judge, he would be disbarred. This company wants to be a stupid percentage of our GDP, so they're gonna have to suck it up and hold themselves to the standards of a public office.
I think you’re confused on the essence of what he was trying to say.
The comparison was drawn because when you are such a position of power, your actions have such a monumental sway. Thousands, millions of people’s of lives are impacted, for better or for worse. In Jensen’s case, that’s up to the court of public opinion.
However the thinking is that when you are in that position, a just and fair society would probably want to keep just and fair and morally tact people in those positions.
IMHO I don’t care what way you want to spin it, when you have that level of influence over one of the major drivers of the AI boom, you have INCREDIBLE power compared to what most people think of when you say “private citizen”.
Agreed. The fact that he gets this perception while Musk has repeatedly betrayed the US's best interests shows that things like rationality and merit have gone out the window. However, don't mistake this for me excusing either of their behavior. Neither are not suited for that level of responsibility.
> The lesson is that if you do the right, non-authoritarian thing, you get punished
Cheating on your wife and betraying your country is the right, non authoritarian thing? We arent having this discussion for any other reason than those two events happening. Its an insane lens of entitlement to view the situation as if he should indefinitely retain ownership due to ... what? Existing? But never have any of his actions have consequences. That's the promise you make by positioning the board shares in that manner: you promise to have accountability. Finding it a weakness to answer to others for your actions is definitely a popular style of thinking amongst the current group of wanna-be authoritarians in the presidential cabinet, "strange" how your first two examples of CEOs unwaveringly align with that political faction huh?
In neoliberalism, there is no such thing as society (Thatcher). When there is no society, you can't be held accountable for previously non-acceptable moral transgressions.
If you are competing in a neoliberal environment where other companies play by these rules, you are at a disadvantage if you are following some superset of them.
I am not saying that he has done 100% right things, I am just saying that if he set himself up in the same way as his competitors, he would have been fine. Maybe he would have to pay some fine/bribe, similar to what the prior 2 have done for their infractions against the people.
> the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held
Elon’s comparable fuck-up was betraying Ukraine with his Starlink intervention. It’s a huge deal. Unlike Nvidia, he has no Board to hold him accountable, it will have to be done by the Congress and states. (Europe will be useless as usual.)
As a result, that hammer will fall much more directly on his companies. It will just take more time to do so.
Zuckerberg, to my knowledge, hasn’t compromised American security in a comparable way to these two.
First, I think it’s important we all remember that NVIDIA issued this resignation. NVIDIA’s board != Meta’s or any other company’s board. So there is no double standard because it’s not the same people.
Second, there is no proof that any moral standard is being applied at all. This could (and in my opinion likely) have nothing to do with a moral standard and more to do with extenuating information uncovered in the investigation or a strategic shift to protect against the current admin. There is likely so much happening behind the scenes and so many people have so much money to lose, I think it’s prudent for us to first exhaust all non-moral possibilities (unfortunately).
Jensen isn't stepping down for the affair. He's stepping down because the affair was with a Chinese spy, and his words and actions appear to have facilitated circumvention of exports bans to China, and he concealed it.
Shareholders don't care that he's having sex outside his marriage.
No one really cares, in the grand scheme, that he had affairs. He's being ousted because he potentially compromised national objectives. The NVDA board knows that senate hearings are coming, and want to make sure they have distanced the company from him before that happens (and all the text messages, emails, and details come to light).
The biggest questions are:
1. Did Jensen knowingly compromise national security (criminal implications)
2. What is the fallout / impact in the AI arms race
I do think a lot of people are projecting their societal and marriage expectations onto Jensen. They're expecting that he should follow the same set of standards they follow with their partner. Yes, monogamy is the societal norm - but it is not a requirement of a relationship. And, it is certainly not a requirement of a relationship that you're not a participant in.
In my eyes, this all comes down to the perception that someone is able to be compromised by non-monogamy. Jensen came out, apologized to his wife, and (at least publicly) communicated that he broke the expectations and boundaries of their relationship. This clearly communicated that a secret relationship compromises his position. And, should there be more secret relationships they'd continue to be used as leverage.
Musk isn't subject to this leverage because it's pretty clear that his relationships are not built on traditional definitions. Non-monogamy is either a clearly defined boundary in his relationship or simply not something that concerns him as leverage.
I think the main issue is Jensen crossed the bright red line of national security. Whatever Zuck or Elon did they were nowhere near as political damaging.
Why do you think Elon has involved himself so directly and closely in politics? He spent almost half a billion to ingratiate himself with Trump and co.
this isn't about a moral standard; no one cares about the affairs
the board must know that the risk of Jensen staying on (likely due to whatever hasn't yet been brought to light) is greater than the risk of instability by firing him; whatever is unknown to us must be pretty serious (again, not in terms of more affairs, but other stuff, like selling chips to China or whatever)
Meta's board probably would have fired Zuck over the CA scandal but they were unable to because of the company structure
Elon Musk has no accountability. He has effective control over the boards of his companies. Shareholders know that the value of their shares is predicated largely on this one man, so removing him would destroy their value.
Government could hold him accountable, and some of those gears have been turning over the last decade. In response he has spent a lot of money trying to steer elections and gain the influence of the ones in power to try to avoid accountability from that direction as well.
The double standard is that if you play capitalism well enough you are shielded from the consequences that others would face.
Elon made Tesla using Chinese automation, and China was its second biggest market (and largest for some models). Even though there are the same export controls for Chinese EVs, Elon managed to get around it politically. And lastly, Detroit isn't as shameless and ruthless as Ant/OpenAI are.
This is wrong and made up. Tesla was made in America, if anything they acquired a german automation company. No export controls existed to be subverted.
What kind of a shill are you exactly? U post a lot about China
I mean the guy tried to break a national security law.
Yes Elon and Zuck are abhorrent, but when they have tried to break the law, they have been held accountable in some sense. Not to the extent that they deserve it, but still.
If they become as big a libility to their businesses, even their controling shares won't save them
Musk and Zuckerberg are simply more politically shrewd.
There’s no actual evidence that Huang broke a national security law. Even if there is, we need the federal prosecutors to say so rather than random commentators on the internet. Even when prosecutors say so in this country we presume people to be innocent until proven by court to be guilty. I have personally looked into the rumors and I don’t believe Huang broke any law.
shocking moral behavior? a lot of things comes to mind. Asking Epstein for the wildest night in the island is among them.
shocking illegal behavior? Buying votes in an election with his 1 million per day republican votes lottery.
The list is large and clearly Elon has been much more damaging to the public than Jensen but he has spent much more to be close to politicians so no consequences for him.
bwoah i don't know...DOGE, """roman salute""" on stage, supporting the AfD and other far-right parties, pushing far-right propaganda and conspiracy theories on X, throttling Starlink in Ukraine, misleading investors, empty promises, possible Epstein connections, breeding a dozen of kids and not caring about them, supporting and donating to DJT as you've said, i could go on but it seems futile.
Just a sad state of affairs. Jensen was by far the biggest voice pushing for open weights and keeping the Anthropic / OpenAI doom narrative from getting out of control.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
Only because it benefits NVIDIA to have more potential customers in the shovel market to mine gold individually versus consolidating within a few providers (where the backend tooling becomes irrelevant to the consumers, and OpenAI & Co could freely change GPU manufacturers on a whim or move things in-house).
If you want somebody removed at that level, and you actually can, you can invent reasons. Jensen having an alleged affair makes it easier for them, and that's it. It's also probably less bad for Jensen that it's only an affair that Jensen is going out on, as invented reasons could be worse for him (like sexual assault allegation by three different women, for example). Just saying, I have seen it happen.
Stop with the gaslighting. This was nowhere close to an "invented reason."
He fucked a communist spy and he admitted he did it.
Not only that, everyone in his orbit was running interference for months before that on a DIFFERENT affair with a subordinate[0]. Why was everyone covering for him if there really was some conspiracy to "railroad" him? Or maybe Sam Altman's coordinating with China to honeypot CEOs because reasons?
No, you misunderstand me. I am not saying it was invented. I am saying, had Jensen not provided an easy ramp, reasons could be invented. I have seen it happen.
I am saying it here:
> Jensen having an alleged affair makes it easier for them, and that's it.
>He fucked a communist spy and he admitted he did it.
The communist spy is the invented reason. There has been zero evidence presented that Alice Huang is a spy for the CCP, and if they did have evidence it would have been more appropriate to charge Jenson last year when the Trump administration was made aware of the relationship.
Everything about Alice being a honeypot has largely been hearsay.
For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.
I think a lot of people might also disagree with the consequences. Something along the lines of - if it’s all consensual then why does it matter. Disclosing trade secrets (wittingly or otherwise) or skirting export ban is a separate matter that does have real legal consequences if proven true.
It remains possible to feel sympathy for people who have done wrong. He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
> It remains possible to feel sympathy for people who have done wrong.
It does remain possible; he's a parasite and someone who's just had an affair. He wouldn't value the sympathy given, Neither himself or Nvidia would return the gesture.
They give null shit about you.
> He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
He chose to have the affair and as having my father do the same to my mother; you get no sympathy for cheating. Let them feel pretty terrible, maybe they will find what it's like to be human for a change.
Nothing more than a parasite in the corporate playground. His actions caught up with him; woe is me. What will I ever do with so much money.
This is his identity. Sure, he’s made some poor choices. Imagine Jobs resigning at the height of iPhone phenomenon or Gates at the very peak of Windows. Not sure if Jensen can bounce back from this psychologically. He’ll be broken for awhile.
Apple used nVidia GPUs in most of its computers. Around 2008-2009, nVidia produced a line of faulty GPUs that were used in the Macbook Pro. This led to widespread hardware failures, and was known as "Bumpgate" because the problem was caused by faulty solder bumps inside the GPU chip. nVidia refused to fully reimburse Apple for repairs because it wasn't contractually obligated to do so. In response, Apple switched away entirely from nVidia GPUs.
I think it was well into 2013 because both the 2011 and 2013 MBPs I had suffered from it. but I thought that was an apple issue (ie not soldering the dicrete gpu well enough to save money on it)
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
You are missing out, the M series laptops are insanely good. Now wondering how the field of ML would have developed if Apple had had Nvidia chips all the way...
And that's kidna funny because now Apple Sillicon has pretty great graphics on their own.
Maybe that's the lesson he learned and why he _supposedly_ was making sure his GPUs were still getting to China. Because he knows that the alternative would lead to good Nvidia Chinese competitor later on
Nvidia eventually had a spat with just about any corporation it has ever worked with. Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
> Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
But even then, the original Switch 1 homebrew relied on an oversight in NVIDIA's Tegra chip that blew open the whole platform due to the ability to execute unsigned code. The Switch 1 was actually pretty locked down. Nintendo worked hard on securing it properly, only for it to all be for naught due to their SoC vendor making a massive blunder.
I wish I could have seen what was said in the meetings between the two companies when the first Switch exploit was released, considering it was fully on NVIDIA.
Success in some areas of your life does not insulate you from tragedy. The guy still puts his jeans on one leg at a time. Probably very expensive jeans he throws away after one use...but still. The human condition cannot be escaped.
This includes his family and the family of those involved in the affair. Many lives were turned upside down.
The guy has enough money to buy an island in French Polynesia and never leave it for the rest of his life. You are correct he is still human, but he can do pretty well at making a new life for himself where he doesnt have to ever think the word Nvidia again.
In 10 years he will have a new family and new friends and this will be a distant memory for him.
It isn't the tragic human condition to have affairs. It's a choice he made with his free will. There is no need for apologia; he could simply have not done it.
Being a billionaire is a choice to continue to hoard resources that could be put to useful purposes instead. Yeah, I don't have much sympathy for people who choose to squander our society's resources like that.
Does a billionaire who became billionair by marrying a person who became a billionaire also bears the responsibility of hoarding because they choose to marry that person and not divorce early?
He's not hoarding crap. Man's probably got maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars in free cash, the rest is all loans, stocks, investments and properties.
The only people that should be wealth taxed is leeches like you that see how utterly corrupt the state is with how it handles tax dollars and wants to give it more money.
Nah. He could sell most of that stock and it could be put to useful purposes while making no difference whatsoever to his life. It could be used to build housing, or pay teachers more, or build libraries, or found new companies, or pay off medical debt, there's thousands of things it could be used for. Instead he's just sitting on it. This is hoarding.
Jensen has been one of the few outspoken billionaires for promoting higher taxes on himself. In fact, only he and Buffett come to mind as the members of that category.
Then again, below is a 2024 article from the NY Times claiming Jensen was taking advantage of loopholes to save $8 billion on taxes. Actions speak louder than words so perhaps his more recent messaging about being in favor of higher taxes on himself was the result of a PR effort, given his rapidly increasing visibility.
However, I imagine that any good accountant would strongly recommend saving $8 billion on taxes like Jensen did before 2024. The article:
Things Jensen has said are now all suspect. Does he really believe this or is it just his day time positioning, in contrast to his nighttime positioning that cost him his job
They did the jobs they were given and were well compensated for it. This fact has no bearing on whatsoever on the claim that Jensen is "hoarding" his shares in the company that he created.
He could give away >95% of his wealth and it would make no difference at all to his life. He would still have the exact same life he has now. That wealth could be put to useful purposes, but isn't, because he is sitting on it. That is hoarding.
This is why socialism/communism won the Cold War. They got rid of entrepreneurship, yet new and innovative companies just spontaneously self-assembled for the greater good!
Jensen's the most pro-open weight guy and calmest on China public figure at that level.
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
Big CEO has affair, even with the intelligence angle, is pretty routine kompromat fodder.
The normal pathway would be that this would be disclosed to said horny capitalist via state security, with the understanding that they'll behave in certain circumstances and that it will be ensured that things go no further. This is a win for Uncle Sam.
That this didn't happen is telling. Obviously, cui bono gives quite a long list, but the state would have needed to be on side.
That's why they should all stay. And ideally export the corruption and stupid business culture to China so they get hit too. I want a world that's not dominated by one or two powerful countries.
The others do not have a board capable of outing them. It has, in fact, been tried and discussed at length.
It's not a conspiracy, this is what happens when you don't give one person total control through manipulating the board and stock. You fuck up and get the axe.
The difference between Musk and Huang is that Musk has engineered such control of his companies through dual class listings that there really is no one who can fire him. Having said that, people are very openly talking about the fact that Musk is going to spend the next couple of years spending quality time with the US congress explaining in minute detail why he's not a traitor.
The other big difference between the two is that after the last election, Musk (with Trumps help) essentially put himself in a position where he basically controlled the federal government for 6 months and did whatever he wanted with no consequences. It's a lot easier to commit crimes when you fire all the people who are trying to stop you..
Hmmm I don't know like limiting Starlink on Urkainian drones? Like repeatedly meeting with Putin and failing to disclose it? Failure to report foreign contracts? The fact that he was denied Special Access Program clearance (we don't know why)? The fact that he has over $1B in loans from state controlled Chinese banks? Campaigning on behalf of the far right AFD party in Germany?
I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference for unsigned and registered open-models in the firmware of modern GPUs. Anthropic and others are pushing hard on this. First the hardware export ban, eventually the software one via hardware-enforced execution controls like IETF hinted at
Either through technical means, or simpler: by law for American providers.
It's hard to believe the administration was not aware of Jensen's affiliations all this time. And time is pressing for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Not really tbf, it's an extrapolation. As far as I am concerned, there is growing concern, with Anthropic coordinated lobbying against open weights. The point I am making is we need strong Hardware actors consistently standing for hardware neutrality and integrity. Historically, NVIDIA has been very pro open weights. But at the same time, in-silicon guardrails seem to become the new thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879883
Makes you wonder what would happen if the US ever wanted to enforce "certified US AI" on its chips
I'm curious how effective something like that would really be.
Nvidia can certainly put up some guardrails that will sound impressive to the dinosaurs in Congress, but can it really stop China from using those GPUs anyway?
This is a simplification, but is this not in some way similar to how the Switch 1 has hacked due to a design flaw on Nvidia's Tegra chip?
In the same way, even if their GPUs get this protection, wouldn't a state actor figure out how to get around it?
I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that
I think the point is that whether he did or didn't, there's so much smoke now, that Nvidia is going to be spending the next few years getting drilled by absolutely every law enforcement agency and government. Even if it genuinely turns out that nothing even slightly bad happened, it's quite damaging the amount of scrutiny Nvidia is going to be under for the foreseeable future.
> Nvidia is going to be spending the next few years getting drilled by absolutely every law enforcement agency and government.
Sounds like this was known or suspected at the highest levels of the administration (Rubio was discussing it per recent reporting). So the question becomes: did Nvidia use a cut out to knowingly avoid the export ban, and if so, did the administration know this?
It’s not the infidelity part, it’s the undisclosed relationship with a subordinate part. That’s covered in HR training and is a fireable offense in every company I’ve been part of.
While it's a fireable offense, my experience with senior management has been that the company is more than happy to help cover it up for them... until they do a bad, and then it becomes a quick ticket to can them without having to admit the real reason for canning them.
It makes absolutely no sense to fire him strictly for the relationships. So it's either deeper legal concerns or the board has other grievances and is using this as an excuse.
If the reporting is to be believed, they ended up selling around $7.5B to China through Singapore.
They did ~$90B in revenue last quarter.
I sometimes can't imagine the avarice it takes to do things like this. Could you imagine having a $100 bill in your hand and going "Yea, I'll break the law and possibly destroy my life to steal $7.50"
It'd be so funny if he started actually sharing knowledge to China out of spite after all these. I know he is way too rich to do that, but one can dream.
I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support. This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
I'm dying to know how other tech CEOs rank on your "historical figures ordered by importance" list. Like, do you think Steve Jobs was more or less important then Harriet Tubman?
Globally? Honestly he probably was. Hundreds of millions of people have access to heath and finance resources they wouldn’t have got without the modern smartphone form factor and forced negotiation of unlimited data plans.
Ask someone in Bangladesh who the fuck Harriet Tubman is.
AIUI, the rise of mobile telephony in the Third World was driven almost entirely by feature phones, not the kind of smartphones that Jobs helped to drive.
Screw the stock price. If you looked into the history of how the company survived you know the company is now Intel. The US has probably lost yet another industry to China. Wonder if the Taiwan investments into the US fabs will now slow because a lot of them were relationship based...thanks to Jensen.
I hope I am wrong but I am starting to think the US left is about to walk into a historical economic collapse that they are inevitably increasing the chances of by 'doing the right thing'.
What’s the revenue target I need to hit to get a free pass for sanctions avoidance? What other rules, regulations and laws do you think he should be absolved from considering NVIDIAs quarterly profits?
To call it a hit job is absurd. He is smart enough to know his actions could have severe consequences. He took a massive risk on behalf of millions for his own momentary pleasure.
Not a single inch of empathy for his wife and family, nor the misled investors and staff.
I think you're misunderstanding - I think the suggestion of a hit job is because of the timing of all this coming out.
His affairs have been going on for months or years, so much so that various places knew about it, did nothing to stop it, and didn't leak it.
I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?" Nobody seems to know. In the absence of any other explanation, suggesting "hit job" isn't absurd.
> I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?
1. Got too well known to hide
2. Republicans just badly lost the midterms. There is a lot of info that the President and head of Department of Commerce also knew about all of this the entire time and did nothing. They won't be able to stop investigations, and they don't want to be seen as getting in the way of them.
If that's true, the bigger story is not just that Jensen did all this, but that the administration likely knew he was guilty of Espionage and actually helped facilitate it by knowing but not acting. That is a real possibility.
To clarify, there is a possibility that the President of the United States and members of his team knowingly concealed and aided Conspiracy and Espionage against the United States.
I'll tell you what's absurd: Believing the Chinese government sent a spy to honeypot Huang into providing chips to Chinese companies, while everything about their public policy has been designed to prevent exactly that.
The Chinese government wants Chinese companies to buy Chinese chips.
Indeed it seems absurd, but maybe the Chinese government sent a spy to honeypot Huang into destroying (indirectly) its own company instead - knowing how western culture react to such events.
I think the "formal apology letter" wouldn't have existed if this was some sort of open-relationship situation. In that case, Huang violated an important agreement, and cannot be trusted to not violate other important agreements.
Ah. So you know their relationship? Whether it's an 'open marriage' or not? Whether the wife cheated first, or not? You're of course, in the know, so you can judge, yes?
He could have done a wrong thing. Or the affair could have been perfectly fine with his wife. Or the marriage could have been on the rocks for years, and they both agreed to not divorce, with all the drama and media attention, and just live their own lives.
I agree with your sentiment in general: we should not make assumptions about the parameters of others' relationships.
But in this case, Huang himself explicitly mentioned the hurt that he caused his family. I don't think it gets much clearer than this.
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and
our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am
deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and
support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead,
I let them down and damaged the life we built together.
I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I
caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology
cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal
and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
He wrote himself a press release saying he was unfaithful and because of his actions he hurt his family... it sounds pretty clear that was not a consensual non-monogamous relationship. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
If it was an open marriage, why would his first statement have been an apology to his wife and family? I don't see any reason to start assuming it was actually fine. In any case the affair becoming public in such a way would still be hurting them - the media attention you're speaking about. Much worse than a divorce, right?
Because the public sentiment towards open marriages is even more negative than towards infidelity? One is seen as a mistake that one can atone for, while the other is seen as a rejection of the institution itself in a country that has strong beliefs in it. Still only 65% of Americans support gay marriage, for example. Marriage following strict rules remains deeply important to a lot of people.
Absolutely it is performative. Writing a public "apology" for spending time with another person in their free time is also performative. Nobody actually cares what you do with your life. They aren't thinking about you at all. But when performing, the performance has rules of engagement.
I think finding humanity in our villains can help us gain perspective so I’d agree on your first point.
However let’s hold both thoughts at once, this was no hit job. Nvidia was forced to act quickly to mitigate business and legal risks. The eventual fallout they’ll face is still not fully known.
There is no support for people like him, CEOs of such big companies, or even any respectful CEO. People would only use him. That's human nature for you.
The public fall may seem quick but from my read of the timelines this has been ongoing for a lot longer.
The idea his fall is related to his affair also seems more like an attempt to minimise the fact that NVIDIA have been covertly selling to China when they were not supposed to.
Such a bizarre take to me. Yes, it's a quick fall.. but can you really trust him after he's been caught having an affair with a supposed Chinese spy, _and_ potentially another one with an employee? There is zero chance any normal business would keep a CEO after this...
Normally this would never come to light, the admin has known about the Chinese agent since 2025, and there is an extremely high probability that they know of any other affair partners as well as what he had for breakfast and how he’s doing with the fiber in his diet.
If you think that billionaire execs of highly strategic companies don’t have the CIA nonconsentually implanted in their colon you are extremely naive. He misstepped politically.
I’ve known a lot of execs, and I can probably count the ones that were highly successful and never cheated on their wives on one hand. The temptation comes with the territory, and the opportunities are endless and disarmingly charming. It takes a man of outstanding moral character to be unfailingly perfect under those circumstances, and unfortunately outstanding moral character is often not what gets you into the c-suite. It’s a lot like rockstars in the 70s, actually, but with more boring clothes.
It is as much of a mistake to anthropomorphize billionaires as it is to anthropomorphize LLMs. People with resources greater than nations are .001% human and the rest is closer to a lovecraftian god. Consider that he can shatter markets or send massive trading companies under simply by having an affair. The empathy is misplaced.
He jumped in front of that bus himself. If the investigation turns out he was definitely orchestrating defying export controls then it's more like he drove one bus into another. He deserves every bit of embarrassment and ridicule no matter how impressive his business accomplishments were up to now.
You can agree or disagree with his position on exporting to China being good/bad for nVidia or the US. But actively working closely with a company (Megaspeed) where, from a thousand miles away, it was clear that their primary goal was to get around and/or bend US export controls... that's a bad idea. Megaspeed was clearly working for the direct benefit of the Chinese government.
Add onto that having an extramarital affair with the representative of that company? Come on, it's extremely likely she's an agent of China, and if not it's a gigantic business risk.
Then, on top of that, you have to remember that he's married. A divorce results in half of his shares going to his wife, who would then have a grudge, probably not in the best interests of the comapny.
I think the external event maybe moved quickly, but I read there was an internal event as well.
I’m sorry but this shows wildly inappropriate decision making. Say what you will about honeypots (I received specialized “warning” early in my career, but I recognize that is abnormal), but we all are forced through training every single year about how relationships at work, especially with imbalanced power dynamics, are inappropriate and should not take place.
I don’t care about the infidelity, but he represents the company at its pinnacle. He had to go.
> I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support.
Jensen, if you are reading this and need support you can try looking into BetterHelp. You can even get 20% off using certain partner links. No one should have to go through the stress of loosing their job from Chineese spies alone and with BetterHelp you're just one click away from your very own personal therapist.
Sympathy for the guy having multiple affairs, including with a direct report, including with a spy and credible allegations of doing an end-run about valid export controls imposed by his country?
I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!
Money is not that helpful when a 40 year old intimate relationship dissolves. Being able to buy things does little for memories that can no longer be shared.
Which country? The country of Taiwan where he’s from and where all his products are made? Or the USA whose diva in chief has had a fit about selling said chips to the country who produces all the USA’s stuff?
Some very harsh words being thrown around for Jensen’s very human failings. Try walking in his shoes, or at least having some degree of understanding and empathy.
Try walking in his shoes? He has an easier life than 99% of people lol. People always quick to jump in to defend the shittiest behaviour, maybe have some empathy for his wife?
Really shows you how much we need to kneecap these CEOs for societal good. The idea that they are hard workers is laughable. Everyone working in retail or a restaurant or in a call center is a harder worker than any executive on the planet.
Well conversely you’re labelling and attacking what you consider the shittiest behaviour, when you only have a sliver of detail. Try pondering what it’s like to create a $5trillion company leading the 21st century’s biggest boom, and consider what weird and unthought of and irresistible demands that might come with. The guy started in Denny’s.
All of this sounds easier than everyone’s life. He has no consequences possible in his life. So many people, even in western countries, live cheque to cheque. Why would I feel bad for someone who chose to do what he did? Irresistible demands? Not cheating on your wife?
Won't someone please stop and think about the poor guy who will face the terrible consequence of never having to work again and still having enough money so that the next 10 generations of his family will never have to work either.
Crazy talk. I’m sitting on a beach in Italy right now. My life couldn’t be easier. The stress and pressure of running a company like Nvidia is off the charts.
Pleaze. Even relaxing on the beach one can read the news and gauge sentiment for their investments. And you’re right, maybe I’ll see Jensen hanging out in Taormina next week. Good place to hide actually.
> This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!
> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy. Jensen gets to retire with $100B+ and not deal with the crap.
He should be thankful he's not in prison. Even without the spy and affair scandals, his lobbying to sell chips to China is treasonous due to how geopolitically critical AI will soon become. (That alone is not criminally treasonous, but with the MSS influence operation, it might be.) He should've resigned days ago.
I'm no pro-US nationalist or anything, but I am very very much anti-CCP.
By the way, do we actually know if Alice Huang is actually Chinese spy, or just merely sees good money in reselling NVIDIA chips to them? Because you don't really need to be the former to do the latter.
> He should be thankful he's not in prison. Even without the spy and affair scandals, his lobbying to sell chips to China is treasonous due to how geopolitically critical AI will soon become. (That alone is not criminally treasonous,
He should be thankful he's not jailed for advocating something which is not even declared illegal yet? Is that the famous "rule of the law" I heard so much about?
> Is that the famous "rule of the law" I heard so much about?
We're in the find-out phase of the merger of the corporation and the state, where everything is permitted as long as you send some considerations to the dear leader...
Did he? A singular CEO with 40+ direct reports and no succession plan... that alone feels like a very short term mindset to me. He could have been hit by a car tomorrow, what's the contingency plan there? Not to mention the whole 'violating export restrictions' thing, that's typically not great for the long term viability of a company either.
Not sure it’s as much “short term mindset” as it is power consolidation. He doesn’t own a big voting share (only 3.5%) or a special share class like Zuck, so it’s in his interest to not have a clear #2 lest they and the board get any ideas of collaborating on a coup.
> He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
He didn't seem to have a long-term mindset when he knowingly violated export control laws (the feds are, in general, super serious about export controls) and securities laws (the feds are also, in general, super serious about whatever they consider securities fraud) over the course of at least the last six months.
It's frustrating because it was so easily avoidable. Just don't do crimes with nation-states.
Thousands and thousands of employees played a more direct role. And in fact, many would've done things different, like not violating export controls and having affairs with reports. Don't simp for a CEO, you're weird
Can't help that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the China hawk fraction of the US government and associated entities (i.e. Anthropic) obviously brought the hammer down on Jensen here, even if he arguably brought about his own downfall with the affair.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
There might have been no such intervention. Put yourself in Huang's shoes for a minute, or a board member if you prefer, lick your finger, put it up to see how the winds are blowing and think of what you'd find. No need for pressure, just glance at the news and realize that the pressure will be forthcoming, and it won't/wouldn't just be "the China hawk fraction" (sic) but widespread.
The apologists in this thread are absolutely shocking. Jensen is a ruthless CEO who clearly lacks moral fiber. Why do we idolize and "feel" for people like this?
The most importance sentence from your report is this one from the top of page 6:
> We believe that despite essentially no direct compute sales into China after April 2025, Nvidia continued to service Chinese demand via sales to non-restricted intermediaries and diversion.
That’s not at all breaking export control laws. In fact it is the government’s responsibility to identify these non-restricted intermediaries and make them restricted. The government has done this plenty of times in the past and it should again do so here. It is not a company’s job to infer what the government wants it to do. The difference between selling to China and servicing China-originated demand is huge.
And then in a massive game of telephone many people on this thread actually believes that Nvidia allowed direct sales to China, which is how they conclude Huang is breaking the law.
I did skim all 40 pages. None of the remaining nuance is as important as this sentence in the context of this thread. I made this importance judgement myself. You are of course free to read the whole thing too and point out which other nuances are pertinent to the current discussion.
Whether or not there's proprietary information espionage going on, there are no other explanations on the table for Megaspeed being able to buy billions of dollars of Nvidia chips other than that they are cut out and smuggling channel.
I'm not even that bothered about those chips going to China. But, like a lot of other aspects that leave us wondering how big and how fragile an AI bubble exists, the fact that billions of dollars of Nvidia revenue is from a reportedly priority customer that isn't actually using the chips is the problem.
I think the moral question is unrelated to the legal matter (which is why he's stepping down), but I'll take the bait on the moral question.
Polygamy is not concubinage is not having extramarital affairs
Making a promise to someone of exclusive sexual intimacy and then breaking that promise is recognized near universally as a moral failing. He knew such an affair would hurt not just shareholders financially but people emotionally.
Maybe the guy isn't totally morally fiberless, but I think most people would agree that such behavior is a (non-trivial) moral failing.
Historically speaking marriage did not mean a man agreed to be sexually exclusive with a particular woman.
It meant a woman agreed to be sexually exclusive with a particular man + various legal entitlements. The particular legal entitlements were what distinguished it from concubinage (which was also a woman agreeing to be sexually exclusive with a particular man).
Now that is not what it means in a modern context, but also in a modern context nearly every developed country has below replacement birth rates, meaning that these countries are dying so any particular claims of moral superiority or fitness of the marital/family structure norms of modern societies can basically be entirely disregarded.
The idea that a man can even “cheat” on his wife is a modern idea. It doesn’t need to be “excused”. I don’t think you’re intelligent enough to really follow the discussion.
No I’m saying that your conception of morality is wrong, but to understand this you have to have humility/not be narcissistic.
Particular notions or feelings of right and wrong that you may have because of prevailing norms in the particular era and location which you live or grew up in don’t necessarily have any bearing on what is moral or not.
He created a stable environment to have and raise his children and to provide for them and to contribute to his society. It’s not his fault he happens to live in a particular era where it’s otherwise not possible to do that unless you enter into some contrived modern notion of marriage where otherwise in previous eras there would be no issue.
Just to be clear, fertility rates in the developed world are nearly universally below replacement so there are various norms in place that are clearly not compatible with life.
You know what else is a "modern idea"? That you can't sleep with a 12 year old and that you can't own slaves. Both were considered normal for most of human history. So I guess they're ok too, by your logic?
I have NVDA stock, I think this is neutral at worst. Obviously bad short term, but the fundamentals are what they are. They are gonna print money for at least the next 5 years no matter what happens.
The reality of the situation is they can be guilty as fuck, but they are so important to the world and us economy, that any sanctions they have will be symbolic. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose, even democrats.
There will be a lot of noise, it will be embarrassing, but I just can't imagine a situation where it significantly impacts their bottom line.
The bear case here is pretty much that you think AI is a bubble anyway, and this just accelerates it.
In other contexts we expect some transparency if you have a stake in what is happening. This thread is full of tech workers, and would look very different if each comment was prefaced with some sort of 'Hello, I am John Doe. Nvidia represents 35% of my retirement portfolio, and the semiconductor industry overall represents over 70%. This is why I do not care to rock the boat, and think he did nothing wrong...'
In order to see this as a bad thing you have to first agree with the export controls. Like Jensen, HN loves chinese models, that's why the outrage does not resonate.
It would be hypocritical to both use DeepSeek and also be outraged at the (alleged) mechanisms through which China acquires GPUs.
It's insane. I bet none of the commenters here would spare a thought for a manager at a 7-11 who got fired for having sex with one of his subordinates and ended up on the streets because he couldn't pay his rent.
But one of the wealthiest people on the planet gets fired, suffering zero personal hardship as a result, and everybody's up in arms. How could you do this! They all do this, how dare you single him out!
I think that there's a pervasive idea, especially in the tech/startup space, that making money is a moral good. Not merely that making money is compatible with being a good person, but that it makes you a good person, and the more you make the more good you are. Firing an ultra-rich person is therefore basically an affront to a saint. Never mind that it doesn't put them under any hardship, that they and their heirs will still be wealthier than any of us can even conceive of. It's morally wrong to do anything bad to such a good person.
I wonder if people haven't seen his interviews or public appearances in the past 1-2 years, especially when anything to do with Trump came up. I don't find CEO interviews particularly interesting to begin with, because they're performing a role and can't give honest answers. Jensen took that dishonesty to a pretty high level.
Ezra Klein interviewed Jensen about 1.5 months ago and I had an off-putting feeling from it, and thought a lot of his answers were laughable. He sounded like he was obviously lying. A few days later, Klein interviewed Bill Gates and sort of anonymously brought up the arguments that Jensen made. You could see a visible disbelief of the arguments in Gates' face and posture, even saying "I almost can't believe you're asking that". (Not that Bill Gates is some paragon, but it wasn't close to a respectful disagreement.)
He wanted to have the cake and to eat it at the same time. I've seen CEO's who handled this in a much more orderly way, such as: getting a divorce, then announcing internally to the company that he is getting a divorce, then announcing he has found new love with a certain person at the company and in the same sentence announcing that the certain person effectively no longer answers to him, but to the board or something like that.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
I don't think there is a more hallmark visionary CEO than Jobs, and Apple isn't exactly doing poorly today.
Maybe the veneer isn't there, but it's very hard to make the case that Apple has in any way failed following the loss of him. Cook was pretty mediocre, and it shows that when you have a strong ship sailing, you just need a "not total idiot" to keep it going.
The counterpart is the state of Apple after Steve Jobs left in 1985. Apple was in dire straits when Steve Jobs returned in December 1996. Granted, Jobs wasn't CEO in 1985, but as co-founder, he had tremendous influence over Apple, though he didn't have absolute power; he left due to losing a power struggle against John Sculley and Apple's board.
I'm also reminded about the state of HP once the founders retired. My understanding is that John Young and Lewis Platt preserved the HP Way. However, Platt's successor, Carly Fiorina, moved the company far away from the HP Way, and HP hasn't been the same since.
This is a sad time for NVIDIA. I hope NVIDIA is blessed to get a Platt and not a Fiorina.
I think you are not giving enough credit to Cook. He trained under Jobs and is a world titan when it comes to supply chain. He is not some mumbo jumbo marketing/sales guy. Yes under his leadership Apple released some bad bets but he deliberately invested in a vision that Jobs created and spent years teaching him. This couldn't have been sustained post Jobs death unless Cook continued to instill the culture Jobs had created. Else you wouldn't attract the people needed to create marvels like their CPUs.
If someone else that wasn't directly trained by Jobs for years was hired, i'd argue that the culture would start to falter because one thing slides somewhere, then another, then another an soon enough 'A players' don't want to sacrifice their core years at a company that isn't instilling the values they want to work under. Cook himself almost went down that path with his budding career at Compaq. His family thought he was nuts to leave the growing company for Apple of all places. They didn't see the values that Cook saw in Jobs.
Hard disagree. Jobs polished things that already existed. They were never on the bleeding edge of hardware design and manufacturing when it comes to actual performance and capability.
Right, and he had the knowledge to know that consumers don't care about that stuff. So we got iPhones with excellent usability instead of windows phones with HD displays.
Building products for consumers and building products for engineers are seemingly not the same endeavor. I loved having physical buttons and a keyboard on the early smart phones. They were proper communication devices. Now they are consumer devices.
Yeah there is probably more to the story. Like evidence he actually did something very damaging to NVIDIA/National security. Knowingly helped smuggled chips, divulged trade secrets, etc. An affair and unknowingly selling chips to a company smuggling into China would not be worth the risk of getting rid of him. He must have already caused pretty large damage that is has yet to metastasize.
That's not a useful defense. I think everyone here knows that Tesla and SpaceX without Elon would trade at a third or a fourth their current valuations. People are invested in breathing Elon's gas. But if it's bullshit, like selling chips to a cut out, and making that cut out a priority customer, that undermine's confidence in all the reported financials having to do with AI.
Obviously, only him could have great visions about NVIDIA. I am expecting a 'we are going to stagnate, at best, without Jensen' worded admittance now from those poor folks remained in the organisation, with all those visionary thoughts taken away from them so abruptly. CEOs are the one taking the companies forward!
I didn't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me. This is a man who could be fired just for OFFERING to have sex with a subordinate. The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind. But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Which most company policies allow in some form. Peer-to-peer is straight forward. Supervisor-subordinate (relevant here) is less tolerated. You just have to disclose it and maybe sign a "love contract."
Parent is oblivious to this and has already made up their mind that these policies don't exist
> The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind.
I'm very aware that these policies exist, and I'm certain the CEO of Nvidia was also aware. That he decided to circumvent them says all you need to know, really. Even if it's consensual, what happens when she decides she wants to move on from the relationship? What about her peers that didn't receive promotions while she did? This is why these laws exist.
The implication here is that they didn't follow company policy or else this wouldn't be an issue. HR would have said, "Yes we're aware of the relationship, all of our policies have been properly followed in relation to it." The fact that we're not hearing that means the answers to all these questions don't have pretty answers.
To be honest, even with those policies, a supervisor-subordinate relationship can be problematic. There is an undeniable power dynamic at play, so even when it looks consensual it's hard to be sure. I'm not saying it wasn't consensual in this case, but when person A can impact the future of person B, person B might feel coerced to "consent".
Anyway, not sure if that's the case here but it's hard to rule out entirely.
These policies are intentionally narrowed to workplace conflicts of interest. HR doesn't want to manage morality clauses or stuff outside the workplace.
Yes, you can extrapolate, and our society does. This is why ministers aren't supposed to have relationships with their clergy, therapists are not supposed to have relationships with their clients, lawyers, doctors, etc. The list goes on and on.
Can become, yes. Depends a bit on what exactly the nature of the power imbalance is. Which is why there are usually strict rules about relationships with your reports and how to resolve the situation. Like reporting it to HR so the work positions can be shifted in a way to move positions so that there is no longer a reporting relationship between the two.
You mean infantilising adults and denying their agency to feel better about yourself.
Obviously it depends from case to case and there are certain lines that shouldn’t be crossed but otherwise consenting adults should be free to make their own decisions.
I've never worked at any company that used them or heard about them. Instead we take yearly training saying that even flirting with the idea is a cause for immediate termination.
Do you have stats on how common these are? Is it more popular in some non US country maybe?
Your companies had zero tolerance for consensual relationships at the office? Not even married couples? Possible, but the exception because that really constrains your talent base.
Good idea about stats. Please share what you find.
Do you suppose Jensen had a love contract with his subordinate, when the breaking of the news of their extramarital relationship led to a 20% drop in stock and the removal of Jensen as CEO?
Considering he was fired it's the other way around. This at most only applies to very small companies or to people at the very bottom on the totem pole.
Yeah. It’s not like being an ultra chad billionaire with great biceps and confident personality is NOT attractive to women. Maybe her husband wasn’t doing it for her (legit feel bad for that man, whoever he is, today).
Not sure about the sexual harassment angle you're pushing... it's about trust isn't it? If you have consensual affairs as a CEO, you are still liable to be fired if it becomes public, that's my opinion anyway.
It doesn't matter, he was in a position of extreme power imbalance where he could show her both favoritism or fire her depending on how things went. It's improper and inappropriate at best, and illegal at worst.
In any scenario it’s not appropriate. Among peers, everyone knows about the “special relationship” and it directly attacks any perception of fairness and enables others to justify similar or worse behavior in the org.
This whole thing is making me question whether I should continue reading HN. It's not just this story either, it seems a sub-section of the HN community has taken a hard-right swing in the last couple years.
People in these threads are pretending that 75% of the story doesn't exist and it's just about an affair... insane.
EDIT: Is this just X infecting HN? I don't go on X so I don't know what it's like.
People here are so weird now about AI. Bizarrely sensitive to even the slightest criticism of AI or the associated companies. I don’t know if it’s bots or what, but it’s legitimately scary.
Yeah, the election made it pretty clear that people on X are in an insane bubble world (rather than some of the other online communities X accused of exactly that), and that the venn-diagram of HN and terminally-online X users is basically a circle.
The Demographics of HN are coming very sharply into focus the past few weeks, and it's awful.
It does sort of explain a lot though.
A shocking amount of these comments are very loudly ignorant of basic concepts of consent, and some seem to be rather proud of it.
A good point and the line of thinking you're describing implies that power should override anything else. Rather than rules that apply to everyone, what level of power within a company should no longer be subject to firing for engaging in a power-abuse sexual relationship?
Misbehavior without consequences seems to have become more noticeable in politics within the past ten years, with mainstream news outlets reporting on insider trading and potential bribes for favors. This ethos of power over accountability seems to be having a trickle down effect on general sentiment.
Any company that wants to pass one of the many audits I'm sure Nvidia is subject to has policies around this. They would both know that not only do all employees need to disclose such relationships but that such a relationship is not appropriate if one is above the other on the org chart. Since the CEO is above everyone, that pretty much means if he wanted a relationship with an employee they would need to resign first.
HR policies around these things have never at all cared about which direction the relationship goes and it really shouldn't be hard to understand why. It's entirely irrelevant who initiates.
What's very "Cut and Dry" is that so many of you are very obviously not paying attention to the yearly training, which isn't exactly complicated or difficult material.
> The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me.
It's mindboggling that you describe an apparently completely consensual affair as "sexual harassment". That's absurd.
The term already has a well-established meaning; we shouldn't change our understanding of it. If you mean something else then use different terminology.
Also, I don't think there was an "extreme power imbalance". If anything, she had far more power over him than the other way around, since he had much more to lose and she could blackmail him with making the affair public or other allegations.
I am referring to the meaning established in the law. Many things fall under the legal umbrella of sexual harassment. If you want to describe it as something else maybe you should be the one looking for a new term to coin.
Obviously the situation isn't that simple, and neither is the law. If you really want to have a relationship with a subordinate there are legitimate ways to make that happen. He chose to circumvent those (ostensibly repeatedly, and while paying off people who found out about it), and the set of reasonable explanations that don't involve some form of harassment is vanishingly small.
I mean I said in 2016 Hillary basically behaved this way with Bill in regards to others (notably monica lewinsky) and against basically anyone else (i.e. say whole democrat party field) except Trump that should have been a disqualifying thing (and worse, if the republicans put up a decent person, I suspect Hillary would have won!)
At the end of the day, I wouldn't bash everyone here too strongly when everyone who lined up early behind Hillary basically acted in the same way. (And yes, even though Bill did the act, Hillary lined up easily to defend him, much like the people you mention here)
I'm... not shocked. Politically, HN skews pretty heavily right. Some of them will claim otherwise, putting rainbow flags in bios and such, but here is where the rubber hits the road. I also believe that the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. He can paint himself a victim of a Chinse spy.
Consider the case of Regina Santos-Aviles [1]. She committed suicide by setting herself on fire and had revealed that she'd been having an affair with her boss.
The power dynamics here are insane. Huang was the CEO and a billionaire. The legal liability that NVidia has or could have because of this is huge, particularly if they did nothing. Now there are big questions about who knew what when.
The reporting says somebody say them in a San Jose hotel and was basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment (I'm guessing; I don't know). Was that from NVidia or Huang personally? What NVidia staff, if any, authorized that?
If the board wants to really clean house they should authorize a thorough external investigation of that and any other possible affairs.
DOGE was less popular than most of the admins stuff, and more scandalous at various levels (the stuff they did cut was fairly popular, they didn't manage to cut the stuff people might have really seen as wasteful, they went about accessing data in strange ways, some of the employees were quite young and looked unqualified).
I don't think you can assume much just by knowing somebody disliked them.
That's totally fair, nobody is happy with DOGE at this point and a lot of people were skeptical and nervous as it was happening. I just don't recall anyone popping in to say "damn it, they're doing it wrong!".
The things they got the most attention for like USAID weren't really core dc money. if anything I think they failed to really touch federal programs much in the end, but they did wildly swing at other stuff (like infamously just word searching to cancel research grants etc).
One may interpret this as the Overton window having shifted quite a bit over the last several years. As in "HN skews pretty heavily right" can be correct *and* it can also be true that the wackadoo faction of the right has dominated the discourse for a while.
To spin it another way: if we ignore the rise of the faux-libertarian (you know, the more typical brand now, libertarian but all for a strong military and christian nationalism), I'd argue that the typical HN skews more old school small-l libertarian on the right wing spectrum. That's quite a bit different from the MAGA, christian nationalist, style of right wing politics that has been in vogue lately.
But DOGE (as conceived) is the wet dream of a libertarian from any era. If anything it's a bone that Trump threw to libertarians. It's not especially MAGA imho.
On paper yes, but anyone with half a brain saw that the opposite was true in real life. They went in, made things worse, didn't save any money, and absconded with a lot of private data. My recollection from that time period was the tenor here shifted rapidly from generally positive to generally negative.
If you truly believe this, you're living in a bubble. Economically it might be pro free markets, but socially it's heavily "progressive" -- see any discussions about Omarchy, LGBTQ, Elon, or Trump.
Leftism begins with anti-capitalism. This is so far beyond the American (or even European) Overton window. The American political mainstream is a choice between center-right and far-right.
Politics is about economics. All of the so-called "culture war" issues (eg LGBT rights, bodily autonomy, etc) don't make you left wing if you are still an avowed capitalist. The success of the Republican Party hinges on the success they've had in propagandizing culture war issues to avoid talking about economics. And the establishment Democrat Party is complicit because they have the exact same paymasters.
On this issue you see a ton of people in the comments saying "yeah but Jensen made so much money" as a reason why he shouldn't suffer the consequences. If making money has primacy in your decision making well... you're right wing, definitionally.
As other commenters have noted, every time Elon comes up there are a ton of HN defenders, despite him being a complete fascist (in technical terms, not a pejorative) and doing the Nazi salute on national TV (twice).
> Economically it might be pro free markets, ...
Well, first there's no such thing as "free markets". Second, you're basically saying "capitalism". As I said, right wing.
I'm socially progressive but economically conservative. That's why, whenever there's a tough situation where compromise is needed, I always compromise on the side of "let the free market run amok".
I’m entertained by how far left one must be to think HN “leans pretty heavily right”. Even the most die-hard socialist should be aware enough to find that funny.
I think media, social and traditional, has really done a number on people’s perspectives. I’m not sure why ideology replaces self-awareness.
Die-hard socialists often consider "liberals" to be soft-core right wingers. I'm not sure there's an objective center, it's all a matter of perspective.
That means he can’t have any affairs with anyone who isn’t a billionaire without it turning into sexual harassment due to the imbalance in power?
> basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment
So depending on how big the payment the alleged victim might be pretty happy with the outcome?
I mean if the board believes that the actions of the CEO resulted in financial damage to the company it’s up to them to investigate and deal with it. I just don’t get the whole morality police angle as long as the affair was between consenting rational adults.
Even if it were about consent (and it's not), it's difficult to show that a relationship with such a power imbalance is consensual. If it were consensual it should have been disclosed. And as a CEO he has a greater responsibility to follow these kinds of rules. He knows it, and he did it anyway, and then he got caught doing it. There's really no other action to take besides removing him.
Maybe it's a generational thing? The younger generations seem to have some sort of anxiety with respect to consent and power dynamics, where even something as trivial as a modest age difference is viewed with suspicion. The movie Obsession can be seen as that anxiety translated into the horror genre.
To be fair though, a CEO having an affair with a subordinate should be seen with at least some suspicion...
IDK, if you look at the messaging around Clancy where women are completely subordinate to hormones to the point it excuses chasing down three children and systematically murdering them, or the Cornell 7 case where a woman can willfully engage in sex with multiple men and then only decide it was rape retroactively after explicitly negotiating with the men what was ok during and after with text messages where she defended her own actions but then when rumors started she decided she didn’t actually give consent…
The people saying you can’t trust women… are mostly coming from women.
Wild time if you are dating! Yes could mean No if later she decides she didn’t like something about it.
money before principles. Not to be crass but this is the ycombinator forum, not bluesky. do not expect principles before money, this is the absolute opposite of trying to preach to the choir.
Who do you work for? Curious whether they have annual sexual harassment training or not. I'm not pushing a narrative. Based on the facts that are public alone this is pretty cut and dry sexual harassment. You may not like the connotation of those words, but they contain a pretty broad set of improprieties.
Cornell 7 would like a word. That’s just the latest. The facts of that case so strongly outweigh the narrative of “poor drunk unconscious college girl rapped by men for hours” that it’s comical that somehow innocent until proven guilty is now “misogynist rape culture” or something.
I agree there should be equal accountability. The response to that shouldn't be letting everyone do whatever the hell they want, though, in my opinion.
Let's dispense with the theatrics. Having a relationship with someone in your chain is not even close to sexual harassment. Yes, it can lead to it but generally it doesn't. It's not at all illegal either.
When I entered the workforce not so long ago most companies didn't even have policies against it. My university didn't make a policy about it until 2012. I know a very happily married couple who got married this way (a little earlier - perhaps around 2006 or 2007). I don't think they'd be happy if I referred to their behavior as "sexual harrasment".
I think it's a good policy and it's fair they enforce it, but equating it to sexual harassment is nonsense.
They may not think about it that way, but if one of that couple got a promotion from the other then every other person on the team pretty much has grounds for a law suit. There are reasons these rules exist, and the CEO of a high profile company has no excuse not to know them all.
> but if one of that couple got a promotion from the other then every other person on the team pretty much has grounds for a law suit.
Extremely rare (winning such a lawsuit). Prior to these kinds of rules becoming the norm, how often did anyone win such a lawsuit? It's a rounding error close to 0.
There are plenty of publicized cases where one party openly stated she got promotions because of her affair with a senior. No lawsuits were even filed in the ones I know.
I'm in favor of such rules precisely because it's hard to win such a suit.
You can't prevent people from having relationships. It's not realistic. My company has specific rules about this. Typically, "problematic" relationships need to be disclosed to HR and leadership, but they're not forbidden per se.
My understanding is that NVidia's organisation is very flat and Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type. Moreover there was no succession plan. I get that having an affair with a spy is not great but isn't it risky to replace him now?
I'm going to guess the 2nd affair with a direct report who rose quickly through the ranks is from the board's perspective the more egregious of the two failings.
And: the public only knows what's made it out. Who knows what else has come out in private.
Oh come on, having sex with a coworker is rape now? This is getting ridiculous. Why not just go the whole way and require all sexual activity to come with with a signed and notarized consent form?
No? Having sex with a coworker is not rape, and no one said nor insinuated it was.
Go forth and consensually bang your coworkers. Knock yourselves out.
When you have the ability to fire or promote someone, however, you hold significant power over their life -- potentially impacting their ability to eat, house themselves, etc. In those cases, it's valid to ask, "Is there a possibility someone is being coerced into sex because they can't afford to say no?"
This is question of consent. It's not an allegation of rape. It's only a question and there are probably times the answer is no.
You don't have to knee jerk react to someone pointing out an obvious potential conflict of interest and go "so everything is rape now?"
You don't think the board of a listed company care about the CEOs bit on the side is being promoted? That's really not a good look for a company to admit that.
It's one thing to happen and another to put that out in the open.
Officials are corrupted? CEOs sleeping with other women including his subordinates? Snow is white? What's the deal? People at that level are basically playing politics, not laws.
However, the fact that someone decided to release all those information as PUBLIC, and followed that up with ANOTHER scandal, means that they are determined to get rid of them. As you said, it is indeed serious matter.
As the Chineses say: "Something weights as light as a quarter of pound if it's left alone, but can weight a thousand tons if put on the scale".
Because reality deems that this is not really the problem, I was about to mention the Epstein thing -- everything in that file is 100x worse than what Jensen did.
If we (the common people) really want consequences, we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
> we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
I'm with you on the first half, and see the second half changing. The fever may have broken in the US electorate.
I feel like "not having a succession plan" should be a fireable offence on its own.
Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".
Imagine having to explain that line of reasoning to Congress in four months. "Yes, Senator, we know our CEO was facilitating chip smuggling to China while in a relationship with a Chinese spy, but we figured that it would just be too risky to replace him at this time."
Lot of comments here stating with absolute certainty that China wanted Nvidia chips (they've previously ordered Chinese companies to not buy Nvidia chips https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...) and that Alice Huang is a CCP spy (zero public evidence of this).
People who have worked in the national security sector in the US know how China operates. Any Chinese tech personage who is not a CCP spy but who somehow rises to a position of international influence will be recruited to work for the CCP by being made an offer they cannot refuse. In a typical case, there is plenty of evidence but most of it will never be made public for security reasons.
Of course China always denies this, but the evidence for this behavior over thousands of cases is such that the burden of proof is on those who claim such a person was not a spy.
This does not imply that the Chinese people or even its government are "evil" or that we shouldn't do business with them. It's just something that everybody who deals with China needs to be aware of.
I think my pedantic gripe here is that I don't see the people who are made offers they can't refuse by China and are Chinese citizens as "spies" as conventionally defined - they are generally not pretending to be anything other than Chinese business people, and business people passing info along or being asked to do things for/by government don't really make them "spies" IMO - at least not until they've changed citizenship or are working directly in something sensitive. Starting a business in another country to serve the interests of the home country with home country money is more akin to the British East India Company or something like that than being a secret agent as I see it.
China hawks in the admin. Trump was on board with loosening the export controls so that Nvidia could stay in the game, which ironically would've prevented China's domestic chips getting off the ground. The Stephen Miller types (and whoever connected to ant/openai) didn't want to concede anything. This is beyond personal vendetta stuff.
More likely the hardliners/security establishment. Rubio reportedly let Trump know of the affair/spy suspicion earlier this year (April? I don't recall), and he clearly ignored it because he likes Jensen and/or he wanted to get in on the action as Nvidia was making bank selling GPUs to China.
This breaking just before a meeting with Trump/Xi and just after the midterms show a changing wind in Washington is a hell of a coincidence—or not.
Securities lawyers, among others. All this scandal is going to lead to shareholder suits, which puts a LOT of pressure on the board to act. They have fiduciary duties!
From Game of Thrones:
- Men without cocks. You wouldn't find me fighting in an army if I had no cock. What's left to fight for?
- Gold?
- I spent my life around soldiers. What do you think they spend that gold on?
- Family.
- Not without a cock, you don't.
- Maybe it really is all cocks in the end.
He didn't resign because of two affairs. He resigned because there were a LOT more than two affairs. I'm sure they wouldn't stop coming after enemies and the press smelled blood in the water.
Eh, I think they wouldn't care except that both affairs are potential conflict of interest issues. If it were like a random person with no connection to the business that he had an affair with it'd be treated as less of an issue I think.
..and because American culture is really prudish about that.
The French and Italians wouldn't blink an eye. Us Brits, we'd talk about it, he's get a slap on the wrist but wouldn't be sacked.
It seems to be a uniquely American thing that the CEO can basically do anything (lie, cheat, fraud etc) just as long as he doesn't get caught with his pants down.
Prudish about affairs with spies? Or about affairs with people who, if they break off the relationship could lose their jobs (or if they continue it they could get promoted)?
These aren't just affairs.
Also, fraud remains to be seen, and shopping chips to China sure seems like questionable judgement.
When you engage in an affair with a superior you have more leverage than you think. Yes you could lose your job, but if you lose your job you have nothing left to lose and can fuck up their life if you have the right evidence.
If you lose your job you lose your source of income. Your way of paying for your children, your house, food. You're left broke financially and mentally while the other party remains at the top with all the power to control the story and to further threaten you.
I don't think that the US *care* about spies? Look who has been put in charge of the NSA, FBI. There's even someone who is strongly suspected to be a Russian spy working in the Pentagon.
These shipments to China - I remember there being a deal made with the President which allowed these sales to happen contingent on some kind of "risk fee" being paid.. to the President.
Americans are prudish, but not such that he would lose his job over an affair. A few Americans would boycott his company - but not enough to matter. There will be general disapproval, but that is as far as it will go.
However he will lose is job over an affair with someone that he has any form of business relationship with. He can have an affair with a nurse in the local hospital of the waitress of a local cafe and we will ignore it. However the girls he had an affair with are off-limits, and should be for any culture for reasons that we think should be obvious.
Isn't there a thing that when it's consensual, tell HR and done? Or you have to be on the level at the org? It is not a law, but in my previous not big, but ~ 1K international org, many marriages and many babies.
Did he do anything besides infidelity, as it seems that the "board" knew about that anyway.
In any case, he fell on his sword, and I wish him well in the afterlife, nothing is black and white.
Not tell HR and done. Tell HR so they can ensure you are never in a place where you can influence her business success. It happens all the time and the rules about what companies do are very complex. As CEO I doubt he can every avoid the conflict of interests that HR is concerned about in these cases and in turn he can't be both CEO and have these affairs. (but the nurse or waitress down the street would be okay, even the CEO down the street so long as they are not competitors and careful to avoid any interaction with each others as customer/supplier - this is often possible since the CEO doesn't decide which widget to buy)
Hi. I was musing, not pro / con. I mentioned the power imbalance, and I am shrugging at his "wisdom" given his status, but hear me out, it's that everyone seems to have know and kept the fact as an ace in their sleeves. I am sure he didn't fly himself and his mistresses commercially, there is a crew, and gossip spreads. The truth is elsewhere, regardless of each's view on infidelity. I give you Gates, Bezos. Cheers.
He wasn't getting sacked yesterday. It only changed when the second affair leaked.
Narrow-minded? I don't know, given the levels of insanity and in-your-face corruption we've seen pretty much every day coming from the US and particularly from the entire tech ecosystem it's really hard to understand the "norms".
I've read about how the US President raped a young girl (13) and multiple other victim accounts. I've watched how we've shown consequences to Prince Andrew, Mandelson and many others. I also see on Twitter the owners of this very site standing behind the disgusting people on the US.
I can't square that with the Jensen situation.
I should add that I'm personally in the camp of leaders who cheat on their wives or who make or accept bribes should be removed from their position. I don't agree with the British (or French/Italian) takes at all.
Just because tabloid news are full of usgov garbage doesn't mean every single human in the world accepted such behavior as new norm. There are still decent folks out there, dare I say a majority.
But yeah how can US folks stomach child rapists at the top of their power is beyond me, I've met plenty of folks with flexible spines while working in banking but this is on completely another level and that level is whole nation.
I agree - and I still believe that the vast majority are decent people. The issue is being ill informed.
The problem is that a whole layer of society have been completely and utterly corrupted to an extent which makes say a country like India seem to be a paradise.
Probably because of the power dynamic makes it really hard to see how free that "choice" really is.
And also puts doubt on any decisions by the boss that affect the employee - companies don't want people "sleeping their way to the top" as that's not putting the business' needs first.
This is a very successful woman, career wise. She’s clearly not incapable of navigating high stakes power dynamics and you shouldn’t just absolve her of responsibility in this.
We don't really have the ability to judge the power dynamic without intimate knowledge of the people and their personal lives, we don't even know when things started and what place their lives were in then.
It's why we generally frown upon relationships if there's any direct business link.
Because a boss has the power to reward the otherwise lesser competent women he is sleeping with over someone else who is otherwise better at the job but not sleeping with the job. If I'm a shareholder of the company I care about that, and the person wronged also cares.
As an aside, the above applies to any one of any gender sleeping with their boss (again of any gender)
Because it’s actually misogynistic to cast women as passive and subservient victims of power abusing men, when for millennia women have been doing all they can to get as close as they can to men with the most power, money and status. This is the most recent example.
Obviously over your head. Please don’t flame and cast peoples takes as “culture war garbage”. I was responding to the OP’s framing as the women as passive participants in this saga. Hard to believe that’s the case.
You think the women that have caused Jensen to come undone this week are passive and powerless victims of him abusing his power? Except for his wife, it seems like it’s the opposite.
I am not talking about the spy, but the women who reported to him. Being powerless or weak is irrelevant. He had power over her and that was what "me too" was calling out.
The French would not blink with an eye about a spy spying on the top tech company of the country? The French intelligence would probably got her killed.
The second one was a direct report to him, and I wouldnt be surprised if he granted her favors in exchange for the sex (whether it was "promised" or not) typically no executive 'survives' having an affair with a direct report and stays in the company.
Who you have an affair with matters more, in this case a Chinese spy wasn't enough, which almost makes you think, he was not the only one at Nvidia who knew.
The "nVidia are selling chips to China" thing wasn't exactly a secret though. It was all over Twitter and the tech/investment communities I was in. And in the gamer communities (as we're pissed at how nVidia and the rest of tech have screwed us).
What you know and what you can prove are not the same.
What we can prove in the near future likely changed a bit when Congress went to the Dems a few days ago. Republicans weren't gonna make a scene about their $25M donation to the ballroom project.
I need to find the links but the reporting in Europe was that this was part of a deal where Trump got given a 20% fee for it (I believe those were his own words!).
It was reported together with the victim statements of the children Trump allegedly raped. I understand that the US media aren't allowed to publish any of these stories though so I can understand why few people would know about them.
It's not just that they were selling through China, but that they bribed their way through the Trump admin's efforts to investigate it. But even that was partly known, it's just everything is now coming up all at once, making it so obvious he had to take a fall.
Frankly, you're being naive. When it comes to a massive $4 trillion market-cap US corporation and one of the most important companies on planet Earth, money is everything.
If the company struggles without him and it's obvious they need his leadership, he'll be back. Morals be damned.
Interesting that 18% of Nvidia's revenue comes from their 2020 Mellanox buyout. Might rank among YouTube as one of the most profitable corporate buyouts ever.
About their new interim CEO Colette Kress:
>'She starts her day talking with Israeli execs because Nvidia's major Israel operations (post-Mellanox acquisition, ~6k staff, ~18% of revenue via networking chips) are business-critical'
Jensen bought Mellanox for $7B in 2020. In Q2 2026 it generated $17.5B in revenue or ~18% of Nvidia's total revenue.
This is going to be very unpopular here, but this domino triggered by the China hawks in the current admin (and the handful of dem lobbyists in the pocket of openai/ant) is going to go down in history as a massive geopolitical and technological blunder.
Huawei just announced a fully domestic computer, Deepseek is rumored to be training v5 right now on entirely domestic Ascend chips.
I know eventually there will come out all the justifications for how this was to protect AGI, etc. But this move has also now tipped the scale beyond just the hardware bifurcation, but also the open vs. closed and commons vs. sovereign models. This isn't just chopping off your nose, this is America purposely gouging out it's eyes and removing it's ability to see down the road. Jensen Huang was the world's best shot and trying to keep a global AI world together, but one side has made their voice on that extremely loud and clear.
I wish there was more commentary on your point of view. HN has really disappointed me today. I come here for the deeper insight and instead I got Reddit lite. I read the NVIDIA way when it came out and was gobsmacked that all these years the company was operating the way that it did. It really made me admire the perseverance the employees went through and made me realize Jensen was a hidden gem. Seeing China announce their own GPUs made me think NVIDIA was in for some sweat but now? Its as if they are torpedoing NVIDIA for a short term gain only to not realize they have just tossed the long term win to China. The conspiracy theorist in me think they are hoping to pin the blame on the left or they think they can remain in the shadows and break companies that dont play ball no matter how important they are and walk away unscathed. This is a serious fundamental problem in modern American governance that might scare talented people away from the country.
Astroturfed talking points is prevalent since like maybe 10 years I believe. There was this huge shift when 'influencers' became a thing and people realized there was power in that for real.
I feel this is a hasty and suicidal move for the company, and for the American AI chip industry as a whole, esp. when they haven't figured out a transition plan.
None of them are able to put two and two together that this was a deliberate coup
And it seems like nobody is paying attention to what Jensen Huang was fighting for. He was against regulation of open source local models. He was against regulation shifting liability of local model developers as well as frontier models.
All in all without Jensen, it isn't just about NVIDIA, there's no one to champion for open source models and running them locally is going to get a lot harder and expensive. It's actually going to accelerate the monopolization of closed models and they will have to pass on the costs to consumers.
It's an L across the board and I'm noting the degraded quality of discourse on HN and that nobody is seeing through the veil here.
eh, there is a rumour that it was one of those 'open' marriages, given that his daughter was seen with him and Alice Huang in a video, implying they were ok with it. (dunno about the second one though, but given the first, the second seems excused as well)
Nah, this is about the indirect Chinese access to chips, and this whole cheating thing is a cover. He's confessing to a 'lesser' crime to save himself for the real threat of jail.
Any guesses if that correlates with earnings? Are they bad, so they can they, look we already have new CEO, now everything is going to be better. Or are they that good, that they can say, look we will manage without Jensen.
You're getting mixed signals because it's both a yes and a no. Very likely not a "spy" per se - she's a proper business woman with a long career. Very likely in touch with China's information services - because she's a business woman with a long career.
But yeah, the "model" memes are completely offtopic. She's nearly 50.
The big question for NVIDIA investors is how much of their sales came from skirting export sanctions because you can bet there is an investigation coming.
I only wish he got ousted for being a liar about where the money was coming from during the crypto boom, or the super anti consumer policies like prohibiting OEMs from having a top of the line series with anything other than nvidia, refusing for years to support standard vrr and pushing for g-sync, artificially nerfing silicon capabilities in consumer grade dies and helping this bubble get bigger and bigger with bad accounting practices.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
The problem i see is that I dont see anyone who is suitable to be a ceo of Nvidia. It’s a special blend of hardware and software chops that no other CEO has imo.
Very very few HW CEOs have even the slightest ability to appreciate the key strength of Nvidia which is ability to build hardware and then drive it with outstanding software.
Look at AMD. Great hardware but hamstrung by their software for 20 years.
Funny how that perspective completely changed because CUDA ended up being a better idea than initially anticipated, while the need for well-designed and -maintained linux graphics drivers.. somehow subsided? (my nvidia drivers still deadlock way too often)
There is a lot of discussions on Export Ban. Does selling to a Singapore Company with Chinese Stakeholders considered illegal under those ban? Does Nvidia have to track every single GPU sold or even resold?
I was under the impression he sold it to a Singapore company, or even any other companies. What those companies do with those GPU is not his fault.
'Singaporean' company whose former managing director (Chinese national Alice Huang / Huang Le) and owner (through a self-titled company) is the same person he's had an extramarital affair with.
The same company they've audited the datacentres of, and saw dummy non-running servers within which had been stripped of their GPUs, and were 'fooled' that they were simply yet to be commissioned.
The point is that there is clearly knowledge of the company having heavy ties to China - his affair partner owned it. Therefore, heavy caution should be taken with regard to export controls. Instead it acted like a gold stamp.
Yes US hyperscalers have plenty of hardware but are running out of 'warm shells' to put them into. It's not much of a problem in Southeast Asia.
He's the hero we needed but didn't deserve. If this thing didn't happen my guess is open models wouldn't exist and we would be deeper and darker into the whole AI boom
The board is considering both internal and external candidates. Who has experience in hardware, has led a trillion-dollar company, has deep connections in Asia, and might be available?
It's possible Tim Cook's phone is ringing right now.
It would be interesting if the story unfolded with Jensen going to TSMC [1] and Tim Cook taking over NVIDIA.
It's hard for me to imagine Cook taking over Nvidia unless it was strictly temporary. I get the impression Cook retired because he wanted to relax and enjoy his golden years. But I agree he'd be a good choice to manage the chaos at Nvidia.
I don’t think Tim Cook would even give the time of the day to the Nvidia board or recruiters. He can bear and hold a grudge for a long time, similar to Steve Jobs. His firing of Scott Forstall and Apple’s dissociation with Nvidia after its GPUs failed in Macs are just two examples.
There’s a rumor that Apple’s Johny Srouji may be tapped to be Nvidia’s CEO. But I’m guessing Apple will do whatever it takes to retain him.
This is insane. Firing someone for their personal life choices instead of their professional life choices is absurd. The reporter that went after the second affair story was a proper misandrist too (as per reels) who had a history misandry in the past.
I don't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
Despite his personal affairs, he brought significant growth and stability to NVIDIA thanks to which we all have access to excellent products so his dismissal does not seem like a wise decision. I wonder if his successor will be able to measure up to him. And what would be the cost for nvidia?
It all seems political and every politician has an affair to hide...
“Hey Lisa! How’s it going? So ya we just fired your cousin who created our company. We were wondering if we could get on a call with you about replacing him and leaving your rival company? If you could call us back on 1-800-NVDA that would be great.”
This might be due to violations or breach of his duties as the CEO, especially given the nature of who the other party has loyalties too, but nonetheless, its a lesson for us all. Because even if he didn't directly provide any IP, would that party have reasonable access to any IP during the events. Guess only time will tell
>Huang, Nvidia's fourth-largest shareholder with a stake of about 3.61%
This was the founder? Damn!
I get that hardware requires much more capital and investment than a pure software company, but he had crossed the board-being-able-to-fire-you rubicon looong ago
For intents and purposes, consider NVIDIA compromised for some foreseeable future. For operations and future purchases/CAPEX, more than a passing due dilligence is warranted if considering NVIDIA.
The specific truths about anything hardly matter when a story becomes this big. The hubbub is too much of a distraction and Jensen was going to get hauled in front of Congress by reps trying to score points with anti-AI constituents.
Personally I am not a fan of companies being moral arbiters, or company's reputation and such be the organizing axis around which we decide whether a person has the right to a livelihood, companies after all are not people. Though Jensen is insulated from economic security concerns, for any other "normal" person, the coercive power of a corporate with it's army of lawyers can effectively ruin a person's life.
Whether one deserves such ruination is a moral matter, and everyone is entitled to their own judgement, but it seems wrong to concentrate such power in a private for-profit entity. The entire basis of anti-fascist doctrine is infringement of individual liberties and modern societies, while mostly conditioned to be against government coercion are remarkably comfortable with corporate coercion, dressed up in the pretty language of compliance and organizational reputation. A company is an economic entity, not a moral entity. It is fine with being a moral entity when it comes to matters of its own reputation and operations, but conveniently becomes an economic entity when it is time for layoffs. Ultimately, it comes down to who has a bigger stick
The thing is an organization is not just a place where you work; it is a provider of economic security, livelihood, and dignity. This concentrates extraordinary power in your place of employment; you are to clock in 5 days a week for at least 8 hours a week; and then work in a highly locked down corporate machine, which you are not allowed to customize even though this is where you will spend the majority of your week in, and one has to ask the question to what extent a company owns your life.
I think that we must also identify the cultural contradiction here; where Hollywood and the like in a sense glorify promiscuity and depict wealth as flaunted with assets and women, as a cultural ideal, and then turn around and hound creatures who are products of such a culture.
Of course, in this case it is far more likely that Jensen was involved with some national security incident.
Huang has shown catastrophically bad judgement and lied publicly [0]. Many commenters here harbor lots of sympathy for him, I assume out of respect for the technology and company he's built, but that doesn't exonerate him.
He was sleeping with one of his customers—a huge conflict of interest. That alone is good grounds to get a CEO fired, but it only gets worse! Alice Huang, a Chinese national, was previously working for a CCP propaganda channel network with an impeccable acronym: CCTV. Her company was accused publicly and investigated by the government for suspected smuggling of sanctioned NVIDIA hardware into China. Now we learned he also had an affair with one of his direct reports — another diabolical conflict of interest, which alone could be good reason to oust the CEO and possibly the VP as well.
It's yet to be determined whether he disclosed secrets to the Chinese spy, or whether he at least privately admitted to the second affair (if not, that's even worse!)
It's not a single, horrendous mistake anymore but a pattern of disastrously poor judgement. Building an extraordinary company and technology shouldn't mean lack of accountability, and thankfully we found out today that even at the highest level it doesn't.
This is insane. This is the best case scenario for China, much better than just getting the chips. They just crippled their biggest competitor. The stock might not crater immediately because of ongoing AI demand, but it will at some point.
I've seen some people speculate whether or not he'll be a prosecuted/arrested. It's difficult to believe, but surely would be the biggest imprisonment that I can remember from recent memory.
Am I the only one who feels this is a smear piece to oust Jenson to retain optics?
Outside of the continued selling to China/skirting the export ban I’m of the belief that he was offered a better deal in China, took it, then signaled he was departing, the timing on this seems…suspect.
Recalling the May POTUS and CEO field trip to china, the lot returned together with Jenson extending his stay nearly two weeks afterwards.
IMO this ongoing theatre provides cover to oust Jenson and vilify him before he appears somewhere in China —- imagine how the share price would fair if it came to light that he was leaving as CEO to take a position in Huawei…
Regardless of the implications, even just as a change for NVIDIA this will be one of the moments we look back on. Keep hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times!
Now I'm in danger of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I think there are several layers to this current drama. Most of the reporting is very "surface level". I also don't pretend to have the full picture myself, but there are many players and many agendas at play, and those agendas can change over time.
[edited for typo]
He resigns so he would forfeit much of contractual severance in most cases. A negotiated settlement is likely as part of the resignation and if he’s rehired elsewhere (eg at terafab or tsmc) it will generally terminate ongoing payments, healthcare, access to private aircraft and security.
I can think of one company that rose from $347 billion to $4.6 trillion market cap after their finance person successfully filled the shoes of an innovator
The board, made of 10 members, only has 3.94% of Nvidia share in total, out of which 3.58% is owned by Huang.
Meaning that the 9 people pushing him out add up to own 0.36% of Nvidia share, only 0.36%
This is betray of shareholder interest. The board doesn't own Nvidia, this is not their business, yet only they can vote. they just want to finish as soon as possible, and you get a mad result.
Huh, between the Anthropic IPO, the big shift in political environment, and the change in outlook for tech stocks, this comes at a pretty pivotal moment to see if AI train keeps accelerating at the same pace or if we start to see the end of the bubble.
I don't want to sound like a Jensen apologist, obviously huge missteps on his part, but he was quite a figure in shaping the last few years broad economic narrative. Good or bad, he was a force in shaping one of the largest investments ever. Does that shift without him? Does it shift really quick?
I would have preferred a slow fade into the sunset as a opposed to a dramatic exit. Yes, there would have always been a correction, but the bubble bursting explosively vs a more measured, slower correction will have different broader impacts and I just hope this doesn't push more towards the outcome that hurts a lot more.
My conspiracy theory is that its American spies who let this go public to pressure him out because Jensen was fighting their agenda of stopping China getting advanced chips. The flow will probably slow for a while, domestic Chinese companies will be forced to adapt, and as a bonus the USA wont even be competitive because they took their best horse out behind the woodshed and shot it to stop someone else from getting a ride. 12 months from now Jensen is gonna be VP of AI hardware at Huaweii or similar, calling it now. Another A+ geopolitical move from an administration that has been in a class of its own right from the beginning. Im a nobody who knows nothing but if I had to bet it would be on this.
"We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said get ready to go to jail."
Wish the interviewer would have let him talk more instead of changing the subject.
There's huge risk in firing a very successful CEO without anyone ready to replace him.
No one really cares about the affairs, so I think the only thing that could push the board do this would be the threat of more damaging stuff coming out, like nVidia skirting the China ban, or a legal threat to Jensen that envelops the company. Or back-channel pressure from the US Gov.
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy.
Someone with an actual long term mindset wouldn't have slept with a suspected PRC spy, while simultaneously flouting the intent of export control laws, and setting his company up for federal smuggling probes, and congressional investigations.
Someone with an actual long term mindset and who had the interests of the company would have groomed one or more successors, and, if, for some reason, they felt they were indispensable, would have probably avoided jeopardizing the company by allegedly having an affair with a subordinate.
There are plenty of people in the world to sleep with besides subordinates and spies. Failing the most basic of marshmallow tests is not a indication of a consistent long-term mindset.
Jensen is a colorful, important figure in the history of technology. He did make many solid long term bets. But if the company falls apart because of his reckless actions, that that's on him too.
And if it doesn't fall apart, then the credit goes to him for resigning.
Where do you think that someone who is surrounded by bodyguards, always traveling, and working 7 days a week is going to meet someone normal?
I’m not even a billionaire, but the only people I interact with are people who I work with or who insert themselves into my life because they want something.
To go full devils avocado: Surely a CEO selling more chips isn't a bad thing for his company?
All I've seen is his personal relationships drama and advocating for softening of useless export laws that didn't stop a single CPU or GPU get into China in the first place, selling to Megaspeed is hardly anything unlike what AMD or other suppliers does right now.
It's a hitjob and he probably could have fought it but chose not to.
Much like the broken unenforced rules that lets OpenAI/ycombinator sell trillions upon trillions of tokens into China each week despite all the export restriction laws against them doing it.
You really think the Chinese can't pay and access ChatGPT/Anthropic/Google premium models today?
does that imply OP is right that Huang is the best person to lead the company and efforts to pressure him to step down are just people trying to cancel him over his sexual escapades? Otherwise what is "spoken like a true shareholder" supposed to mean?
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA.
Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
And now nothing is stopping him from defecting over to China and Deepseek. Lost his family, lost his job, and China has plenty of money mountains and a very dedicated workforce. The idea must have crossed his mind.
is today the best day in over a year to buy NVDA? From a long-term perspective, how much was he the one driving innovation, and can they be something like an Apple who overcame founder's reliance?
I was hoping we wouldn't return to woke witch hunts
If this was about national security or evading the law, it would have happened when it was discovered.
The board didn't have the determination either to fire him or to protect him, and he realized they wouldn't be able to make a decision, so he did it for them.
Now we'll see yet another jewel taken over by bean counters because the board was so dependent.
Let's hope other founders have boards who can actially handle their responsibilities.
What I think is hard to argue: Jensen did a remarkable job leading his company, especially during the development of CUDA, which required an enormous investment in the 2000s but eventually created an ecosystem that outside developers and companies now help sustain and expand. CUDA is a major reason Nvidia has such a dominant market position and should continue to achieve far into the future, regardless of who is CEO. Nvidia's massive risk and its extraordinary payoff will likely be studied for a long time.
AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.
The irony isn't lost on me that Jensen Huang suffered consequences for his involvement with mature, consenting adults and a whole bunch of other tech billionaires didn't for their island antics.
I think the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. That opens up NVidia to a lot of legal exposure.
The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Skirting export bans is an unknown. I honestly don't believe this administration would let anything bad happen there. Jensen Huang is simply too rich and NVidia too big.
> The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Yeah, this is the most interesting part to me.
It points to the US government knowing about this, and holding onto it as compromat until the time was right to kick him out. But I don't even have a guess as to why this was viewed as the right time...
He had two back to back scandals that would normally oust any other CEO. Don't fall for the story this is some targeted thing, he screwed up at least twice publicly and they came out very close together ensuring his ouster but both of these individually are likely tenure enders.
Lots of HNers chiming in that consent is all that matters, so the affair with a subordinate is totally fine.
Perhaps this may help explain why it's unethical to date a direct report to those HNers:
- It's unfair to the coworkers of the subordinate, because the affair can give the impression of influencing promotion, personnel and monetary decisions you make in favour of the subordinate.
- It places your direct report in a compromising position. Such a relationship is potentially coercive, because the direct report may fear reprisal, rendering any consent invalid. Many have commented that imputing coercion to any power imbalance leads to the absurd conclusion a rich person shouldn't date at all - however, this use of "slippery slope" doesn't offset your ethical duty as a leader. As the boss, you have to protect your employees, and placing them in this situation in the first place violates that commitment.
tl;dr you violate your duty of care, plain and simple, to everyone underneath you by doing this.
A pragmatic, ethical workplace policy is to instead date people not in your reporting chain. If that means you shouldn't date your employees as CEO, then that's responsible behaviour, not a chafing limitation.
---
Others have commented that Jensen's affair is plausibly fine because "we don't know his private affairs". Jensen has made an unambiguous statement about hurting his wife and family - if they were non-monogamous, Jensen has had the opportunity to disclose it. Absent that, you have to assume this was an illicit affair. Moreover, none of this changes the fact that having an affair with a direct report was entirely unethical.
Still others have attempted a whataboutism by asking why "other CEOs" haven't had this level of blowback for having an affair with a subordinate. Unfortunately, not every tragedy gets the same level of public reaction, for no other reason than timing, luck, or lack if engagement. We should be equally upset about all the other cases as a general rule, rather than relying on normalized apathy to lull us into complacence.
There are lots of reasons to do this. Many of the work in the favor of the the person ratting. There are strong whistleblower protections for some of the reasons that work against that person.
Jack Clark Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic / head of the Anthropic Institute is the nyt and @AnaSwanson "source" he is the one coordinating a coup against Jensen.
But they are going to be hit by this as well - this is a strike against the whole AI ecosystem and honestly, the US economy as a whole considering how propped up it is by the hype.
interesting. the timing would favor their IPO in terms of flexing their ability to move policy through extra-judicial means. but it would also benefit them to coattail the narrative even if they weren't players so I wouldn't assume it without evidence.
And is it going to get cheaper to build data centers?
Nvidia was/is such a fundamental cog in the american ai economy/ machine, what spies, what cheating are people obsessed about? Nvidia created the capital for its own success; read about it, think about it, be against it, be for it. The capital did not exist, they created it by neoclouds buying hardware which they wouldnt need for two years ahead by lender and vendor-backed financing; hardware, which would be replaced in another 2-4 years.
Will nVidia continue to provide the same backing to neo-clouds? Without nVidia backing are lenders willing to give more or less?
Forget about chinese openweight models, antropic or oai, I see this development as a huge spanner in the us ai economy, maybe the biggest blunder of the year, the biggest own goal if it came from within the us administration under or without guidance.
And finally: Jensen selling to the chinese iron. Okay, was he the only one, god amongst mortals, in the fricking room. Who the heck comes up with these shallow plots...
> Jensen Huang was fighting hard to hang onto his role with the company he founded, according to several people briefed on the discussions. But an interim plan for the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, to take over Nvidia was well underway yesterday.
From the NYT live updates.
Ah well, I'm somewhat seeing parallels to the 2023 OpenAI drama, not sure if this is gonna be how things end quite yet.
I was telling yall I knew something was off with nvidia when they had those remote controlled “lets pretend they are ai” Disney robots on stage - I was like that’s not cricket.
I remember Jensen saying he doesn’t have a contract with TSMC. The whole supply is based on a trusted relationship and handshake deals between the two CEOs. I wonder if that relationship is transferable to his successor.
Would anyone bat an eye for “one admitted affair”? It is the “spy, Chinese, export ban, a blonde” caught on. No evidence whatsoever on these. It is the imagination of if you have “two ANT in the kitchen…”
Banging Chinese Spies presents a conflict of interest the Board cannot overlook.
Banging 1000 women while married is Chinese "Boss" behavior.
The cause and effect is that any and all future CEOs caught in a honeypot will be easier to compromise. Xi loves the news. Nerds with one billion dollars hoping to attain unlimited groupies will need proper Hollywood Handlers. HR for whore intake if you will. Until the sex robots arrive.
Since this company has abandoned gamers for AI. Plus allegedly giving away a few million plus chips (gamers get fucked) to China. I am fully on his wife's side. She was there at the beginning.
Luckily we know that American courts are one sided. Making the upcoming divorce more costly then the Bill Gate's Foundation implosion. What's the over/under divorce cost trending on Polymarket right now? Seems undervalued.
This is the reason no other ceo projects an image of being good guy. One affair and everything you build just collapses. And on the other side rich people can be doing anything and nothing moves markets for their deeds lol
The affairs are horrible behavior. Going around export restrictions.
But talk about ruining a legacy before it really took off. I don't really have sympathy. But this guy should have carried around a piece of paper with some short aphorisms to look at everyday to anchor him back to reality.
"The state of the world economy and the future of open models would be in turmoil due to the affairs of a person who's not even a politician" was not on my 2026 bingo card.
Financially, this is probably the best thing that could’ve happened to him…even with the almost assured impending divorce. Wonder if he’s gonna start a new chip company.
I guess everyone looks at infidelity and goes oh the horror. Thing is these are puritanical views and has no bearing on the companys wider performance. Not to mention the fact we dont really know what was going on with these people's personal lives. Now going around sanctions otoh is a whole different problem. Although tbf, given the clown that is the US president right now, I am not sure the US has the moral high ground to suggest selling to China is a problem or anything. I dont see the point of these sanctions, so I understand if Nvidia found a way of going around the sanctioned pathways.
we'll see whether it was about the affairs if Nvidia keeps promoting open weight models or just becomes a supplier for openai and anthropic's closed ecosystems for 'national security' reasons.
Jensen Huang getting caught with his pants down was not on my bingo card for how AI ponzi schemes will crash. This is the same guy and the same board that has been loaning peter to rent compute from paul who buys from them. ie circular financing juicing forward revenue.
Huang/Nvidia = House Atreides
Lisa Su/AMD = House Harkonnen
GPUs = Sandworms
US Govt = The Emperor/House Corrino
Smugging GPUs to China = Smuggling Sandworms off planet to try and break the spice monopoly
This event = some stuff that happens in book 2/ movie part 3
Stuff
Eh, i think he's acting as a heatshield for Nvidia, his affairs are irrelevant, but the Chinese sales could put both Nvidia as a company and him as CEO in jail... this allows them both to pretends it's a 'personal issue' and get away with it.
That bit with Dwarkesh was very prophetic in hindsight.
Let this be a learning experience for everyone here: if you ever get the CEO if a US tech giant, then never f** a Chinese spy! (and never circumvent export bans while you are at it)
Both of these scandals individually are usually pretty rough to weather, together they were essentially guaranteed to have him forced out by the board. He's choosing to resign the same way a cop under investigation resigns to avoid more public consequences and to hope to sneak away to a new job.
He is at retirement age and a zillionaire. So he is going to start cashing as he is no longer required to report the sale of the stock. He is going to liquidate.
Gates did it too and they still think he is a guru which he never was by the way; all of them are into this stuff when the hit their 50s feeling left out of the game while accumulating zillions.
Someone of incredible wealth and influence suffering negative outcomes for something wrong that they did?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
The real question we must ask is if a current $30k consumer GPU that initially sold for $2.7k is just as inflated as the 'AI' holdings revenue predictions.
The smart money will wait till the legal mess starts, as the dead cat bounce in the panic sell off is probable as people try to buy the dip. ymmv =3
> NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
It's kinda crazy to me to point at open weights here when we got proof of foreign interference of this kind. The case for considering China a fair or respectable actor in this regard is now absolutely dynamited.
This proves that not selling to China was a good idea, and throws into question every narrative pointing otherwise. It also should make it evident that yes, China is most certainly spreading propaganda regarding these points, there's just no way it's not happening.
He was at the top of the world just last week and now his career is over.
Slept with a direct subordinate - who btw rose quickly through the ranks - also slept with a Chinese spy and allegedly sold one of the most precious commodities in modern times illegally to an economic adversary. Hit job or not, he really fucked up.
The spy affair was probably going to sink him eventually because she was also tied to a company that was redirecting chips to China where NVidia is banned from selling chips above a certain capability. Another affair came out this time with a subordinate inside the company which is also something that CEOs normally don't survive, the combo of them helped hammer in the nearly inevitable conclusion of each of them.
Not sure about the people thinking he didn't do much wrong.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
I think he clearly did something wrong. It just doesn't seem that bad in comparison to the current shit our leaders do weekly. We're in an age of morally corrupt leadership across the board in the United States.
And the way to fix that is to start holding leaders accountable. So the insistence that it's wrong to somehow hold Jensen accountable here is a pretty absurd angle for the exact "But but but we don't hold leaders accountable here" people to take.
You want leaders to be held accountable? Look, a leader who clearly made bad and dumb and wrong choices, and a simple opportunity to celebrate them facing accountability. Can you support that?
I never mentioned cheating? Not sure why are you bringing it up.
I said that the missteps was having sex with subordinates and chinese spies.
Now start connecting the dots with Nvidia being one of the major advocates for relaxing exports to China and selling billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies that the chinese spy represented and you understand why the board finds him a liability.
Even the "chinese spies" is just unsubstantiated 'she's chinese so she should be a spy". She's not even chinese iirc, isn't she singaporean? so it's like suspect by ethnicity.
Suspect by payment from ... TenCent? AFAIK. Her company got money from Tencent and after every longer meeting with Jensen, someone from Tencent flew in and had a meeting with her. At least that is what I remember hearing.
In Wikipedia no mention of TenCent at all. In another writeup it's mentioned, but nothing clear.
Was Alice's company supposed to be the only company getting Nvidia chips (which they deny doing anyway). Or one of many and Chinese companies did it with many different others?
If many, why is her relationship specifically important or special from that aspect?
Again, I can understand snooping for confidential early information from him. But "she got with him so that this single company gets chips"?
But yes, the fact that Nvidia advocated for relaxing exports to China and that he sold billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies is now obviously under major scrutiny.
If it was some middle manager who got fired for screwing a subordinate you'd see the typical "don't shit where you eat" comments.
My guess is people are upset because their stock is down 20% over the last month because of this drama.
I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.
I agree. And to the conspiracy theorists: what is more likely? That an impossibly rich guy who thinks he is the center of the universe does something as entitled as this? Or that there is some shadowy coup going on that just checkmated him? Human nature doesn’t need that much encouragement.
i hate this moral outrage. what's wrong if he was sleeping around? let him just print gpu. his ability to print gpus has nothing to do what he does in his bedroom. i can sympathaize with the wife and infidelity is a sin. but he was supplying everybody with gpu. so that makes him a great guy too.
Because there is potentially more to the story that would impact the actual business than just affairs. The board is to protect the business and if they make a move like this, they do so in the best interest of shareholders. We will see if anything comes out but I suspect it’s not just sleeping around.
There is also fears of a federal investigation and the ability to scapegoat Jensen may be the best move, business wise
I really hope the NVIDIA GeForce Now service sticks around and doesn't get enshittified.
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
One Blue Tsunami, and now all the oligarchs are suddenly turning progressive and transitioning! Trump was right all along. This is exactly what he was trying to warn us about.
Think of all the mistresses who will now have to accept and adapt to their oligarch lover's new gender -- Jensen has at least two that we know of, but when you see two ants in the kitchen, you know there are a lot more. I can't wait to see the wig Bezos picks out.
What is, however had, more interesting is that many of
his statements did not age well. Now, mind you - I still
think it is his private life at the end of the day; one
can reason about foreign spies, but then the same question
can be asked about Trump and his strange addiction to
Putin. As well as how Jen-Hsun was so obedient to a
mainland-China female, when the other Taiwanese are
scared of being possibly invaded and subsequently killed
by dictator Xi, just as dictator Putin commits to his
own personal genocide against Ukrainians right now.
But, with regards to statements, I distinctly remember
Jen-Hsun berating the british as incompetent economists.
I watched that on a shorts on youtube; can not find it
right now (google search AND youtube search sucks to
no ends now). Well - he may be right that the UK suffers
huge economic problems, but boy, this has not aged well.
People will poke fun at his love of women potentially
being spies while berating the british as being too
incompetent in economics. Perhaps he was too incompetent
in his own love life?
The reason this is all going so quickly now is because they realised how deep the shit is Jensen put the company in.
There will be an endless walk of shame for Jensen that would constantly drag the price of the company down, because this is the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to fly out of the gate in January and put the fear of god into the other billionaire oligarchs again. Punish one with extreme measures the others will fall in line, because at the end of the day they are all pussys.
Remember Elon wanted to do cagefighting with Zuckerberg. Those two losers had every excuse ready not to fight in the end. They didn’t even touch gloves for a single sparring. Manly men. All they can do is tough talk.
Plus the voters will see at least one party is doing something against blatant billionaire corruption, with corruption being the third most important topic in the elections.
There needs to be made an example of what happens to you if you start selling weapons-grade technology to the enemies of the United States for personal profit, and then think you are above the law.
This is not over for Jensen. And also not over for Nvidia, so the only sane thing to do is get as much distance between the "rogue" CEO and the company. Same for the White House, let’s see how often we see Jensen and Trump still together.
They are going to throw him under the bus and say he had the opportunity and the access and the power to do this without anyone else noticing, especially as he was sexually manipulating managers that directly report to him on important corporate issues.
They will make it look as though it’s all Jensen’s fault because otherwise they stop being a trillion-dollar company.
It’s a fitting end for Jensen Huang.
He gets taken down by the holy trifecta of power, money and politics he valued above his own marriage or what this whole mess would do to his kids.
He even lied in his public apology because he still was confident the other affair with his married manager would never surface because he truly believes he is smarter than anyone else.
What a loser. 140B deep pockets and still a loser.
Money is only paper. All that counts is family.
Threw away his life’s work, his marriage and every last drop of respect for him as a man, father and husband his kids could ever have for pocket change and some ass.
Stuff like this is why AI automation is going to come faster than people think.
Invariably it will be recognized that the weakest link in any part of any organizations are the humans. Humans once had a monopoly on long-term strategic thinking so capital had to confer them authority and compensation, but once AI supersedes humans in these respects, then the human element will be aggressively excised from any company where human flaws put the strength and compettive advantage of that company at risk.
A robot employee never has affairs, never sleeps, never needs worker's compensation for injury, never sues the company. When trillions of dollars are on the line, eliminating risks like this is a trivial decision.
If your whole world is controlled by your greed, yes. But human beings are relational. Half the reason I go to work is to talk and relate to my coworkers.
I know some people have AI girlfriends, but most people are not willing to (nor do I think they should) make that jump to trying to relate to their robot coworker.
I hope it's the same for people making a company. If not, we are heading towards a very lonely world.
If shareholders want to save the company fu-g board of directors should be replaced completely and Jensen back.
Colette Kress has brain of Marisa Mayer who destroyed Yahoo. A woke clown to lead technology company? No vision, no skills, no understanding of technology.
Because he cheated on his wife?? Or what am I missing? If that's the official reason, I don't buy it. I don't think those who can influence this decision give two shits about this type of morality. It's silly on its face. Obviously it's cover for some other agenda. I'm just surprised people buy this silly excuse instead of getting to the bottom of what is really happening.
That he conspired to smuggle NVIDIA GPUs into China to bypass a US embargo working with the Chinese government via a spy (either willingly or via blackmail). Impropriety adds insult to injury - the board have rightly seen that the market will view it more negatively if he stays than if he leaves.
It's only been like a year since the last CEO resigned for viral infidelity.
And that was only with a subordinate, not a subordinate AND with a foreign spy (alleged). Reports say China got billions in chips imported thanks to this operation.
Politicians also drop like flies. The only person impervious to consequences has been Trump. None of his supporters care that he's the devil.
No, it's because he repeatedly lied. 20% of the company's profits were/are coming from selling sanctioned chips to China and he said 0% 0% 0% (in official filings)
The news made it sound like she was a sophisticated person using him as a simpleton, but if anything he was using her to move his products against sanctions.
I have to say, this seems like a ridiculous over-reaction on the part of the board.
I think if you could know the truth, 75% of CEOs in the US probably cheat on their wives. They are not hired to be faithful to their wives, they are hired to increase the stock prices of their companies.
Like sure, if you're a good Christian, it's not good behavior, but ultimately, it's just having sex with someone. I want the guy to make me money and build a great company, I don't care who he has sex with.
It's not about the sex. It's about the judgement shown in cheating with a Chinese spy and a direct report, specifically. It's the lack of trustworthiness shown by someone who is willing to cheat in their marriage (presumably they are then fine lying to their company). And finally it's about exporting gpus to China illegally.
The only reason Jensen is out is because he doesn't pretend AI is an existential threat like Anthropic and OpenAI do to boost their own valuation/moats and to boost the anti-China sentiment for the administration.
Apologies, but I don't really get why these issues are being exposed all over so awfully about the person life of the poor person who is getting ashamed, reputation getting damaged, and what's more important, his wonderful personal, private life is getting exposed and preserved in the history...
These lovely cases must still be approached with pure respect for private life of everyone, and understanding, because we all are human who have feelings, and this is absolutely normal to make mistakes in love sometimes trying...
Relationships, affairs, love... this is personal and must be respected. These are some of the most complex subjects, if not the most... and infinitely magnificent feelings... where sometimes the heart and hope wins over rational actions...
Yet, this is true for every single human, isn't it? This is true about me, I believe, too. This is true about people I know in overly serious and responsible positions at critical decisions for business and lives of other people... and they know that, and stay careful.
And these cases, vulnerabilities, or operational risks... are also covered on military classes, as leadership and security awareness courses, to stay responsible for actions and consider the future - to remind that you must always evaluate the long term consequences, to the point to decide quickly in full action.
This is matter of the heart... human emotions... infinitely powerful aspects of human nature... the dear love...
There's nothing to be ashamed of.
Yes, you must stay truthful to your half... the ring bound promise, which is a miracle if from love...
But it is fundamentally... absolutely normal, awesome to try searching for your soulmate if you don't have peace at heart, making mistakes, trying hard...
// ---
Such public cases are either designed for public (e.g., to derail attention from something more important), or those that get out of control, which is relatively rare, I believe.
It is rare to get exposed on public since these relationships are known to limited number of people, aren't they? So samizdat is rarely responsible for it, and mass publishers are normally supervised by governments, which is expected for them to stay responsible for control of events.
Even if circumstances and consequences may be monumentally tragic or overly serious, this is love which is no less serious, and miraculously lovely awesome...
// ---
> I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry...
>
> To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust...
>
> My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
>
> ~ Jensen
>
> Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
// ---
And I just heartfelt sorry for the person to receive so much shame, hatred, mockering, hostility, ridiculing from public... for just his attempts to find love, his peace at heart...
There is no shame in that, I believe, absolutely. This is his business to be not exposed so disgracefully on public.
This is a miracle to proud of, to understand, and respect always.
Sincere heartwarming hug, dear Jensen... I am... sorry... for the people to ridicule on it you nor anyone deserves...
How do you know he did it "for love and peace at heart?"
People coming at this are coming from the opposite assumption: that he's a billionaire and uses that power to fuel an appetite for lust.
I mean, if you look at the evidence, that's what the narrative supports. Both those affairs - one with Alice and one with Kimberley - overlapped in time. It's not that he fell head over heels for someone and pined for them - it's that he didn't resist the temptation to prioritize getting laid over getting love.
Further, matters of the heart are less important than doing the right thing. You don't date a direct report, period. It's unethical for everyone involved, and affects everyone of that woman's coworkers.
I am not saying there's no complexities in matters of the heart. I'm just saying this case is simple, and black and white, and not an excuse for us to turn off our eyes and ears.
Everyone wants to think they’re morally superior, that they wouldn’t do the same. Newsflash people, having sexual desires is a very natural human thing, it’s wired into us all. You don’t know what his marriage was like. Could’ve been the most draining thing imaginable but maybe he wanted to keep it together for his kids.
He made a very human mistake and now his personal life is on display for the world to read about. I feel sorry for him.
Jensen Huang called Israel a "second home" while it was committing genocide against Palestinians. This is just a continuation of a pattern of corruption. I think he resented his own success because these are not honest mistakes. Jensen Huang is the AI Great Gatsby.
fwiw, this was seen at the time as a gesture to the large number of NVIDIA (Mellanox) employees in Israel. Both due to it being a major center for the company and because he had personally been spending a lot of time there meeting with the networking org.
I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
>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:
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.
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...
> Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
Yeah, this seems likely. It's also quite possible that he not only "didn't come totally clean" but outright lied to the board i.e. "this was a one-time thing"
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.
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.
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)
The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here. Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. The Nvidia corp still has to answer for that even when Jensen is out.
> Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised
As a public company its job is to sell as much stuff as possible to as many people as possible, they had every incentive, arguably a duty to advocate for exports to China. The incentive is there regardless of outside meddling.
Skirting the sanctions intentionally would be bad.
+1. Jensen getting really heated when pressed by Dwarkesh over China during his interview can be seen in new light now.
Yeah but Dwarkesh is completely wrong and the fact he couldn't see this made me think differently about him.
Money is like oxygen. If you deny oxygen/money to the Chinese chip market, they can't grow as fast. By supplying China with chips, all the money will go back to the US and not enough money will go to Chinese chip manufacturers to help them advance the way Nvidia can.
This is what Jensen was saying and he is 100% correct here. The chip ban to China will really help them catch up because the money will recirculate since they have no choice but to buy Chinese chips, and in the end it will make them much stronger.
I'm doubtful of this hypothesis. Maybe for a few years, sure. But China has proven time and again that they do not need foreign supply constraints to incentivize the growth of their own competing domestic industry.
The fundamental contradiction of the AI maximalists like Huang is claiming that AI does not need regulated while simultaneously supporting chip exports to China. The supporting claim for the former is that we need to compete on AI with China and move as fast as possible and every day matters, while the latter implies that slowing down their compute is inconsequential.
IMO that ignores the decades of investment the Chinese government has made in its semiconductor industry. It’s literally been written into their five year plans at the highest level with tons of government pressure to buy domestic when possible across industries. With the biggest captive consumer market on the planet, there is no universe in which China doesn’t get its own cutting edge chip industry. They have been determined to do it since at least the 90s and have invested hundreds of billions in a concerted effort to pull it off.
One can have good argumenta against a specific law (personally I am very much pro free trade), but as long as the law exist, breaking it comes with consequences.
Yeah, Jensen sees the whole hw/sw ecosystem as a package. It isn't just chip n+1 on process n-1.
Keeping adversaries X-behind discourages adversaries from developing a new ecosystem since X-behind is better than building new. If an adversary with tremendous resources must recreate the ecosystem, it will be adopted by US+global companies since it will be lower margin.
Bingo! This guy gets it.
The best way of hampering China technologically has always been about keeping them completely dependent on foreign chip supply chain, e.g. ASML, TSMC, NVDA, ARM, AVGO, INTC, etc.
If you simply ban them from getting any western chips or chip tech you simply light a viciously hot fire underneath them to develop their own TSMC equivalent and their own chip designers, and we are now seeing them catching up rapidly. In fact, they are pretty close to catching up now, basically within one or two years...
Link to the interview https://youtu.be/Hrbq66XqtCo?t=3457
Thanks for the link.
Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.
This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.
He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.
The US had put an export ban, and he clearly skirted it while at the same time banging a suspected Chinese spy. The company he ran like a fiefdom broke the rules set in place by the same country for which he's supposedly a loss.
I don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure.
Are we saying he was skirting the ban because he was having an affair with a Chinese spy? That seems like a stretch. Jensen was ideologically opposed to a ban, he didn't need any coaxing in that regard.
It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.
Cheating on your wife of 40 years OTOH...
He was playing both sides and got caught. Nothing more.
"It's not immoral to violate trade sanctions if you don't think they should exist".
Sure, why not? Morality and law are not always aligned. I'm not sure I would go so far to consider these sorts of trade sanctions "immoral", but I wouldn't fault someone for believing so.
In this case, though, I think Huang just believed these sanctions were the wrong move, and would end up long-term helping China and hurting the US. Which is fair to believe, but believing a law is counterproductive doesn't give you immunity if you break it.
Can you make the case for trade sanctions being a moral issue?
It would depend on the reason for the sanctions...
If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue.
Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue.
I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality.
It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it.
> It would depend on the reason for the sanctions...
But then it would be the thing that is sanctioned that is the immoral activity, not the breaking of a sanction, right?
It's like you said, unlawful != immoral.
I think you can make a case that breaking a rule intended to prevent immoral activity is in and of itself immoral, even if breaking the rule didn't result in the immoral activity.
It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p
Absolutely. Immoral and illegal/unlawful are separate things alogether.
However the fact he was having an affair muddies the waters on the two. At best, the optics look bad to someone outside. Yes, he could have been opposed for money reasons, and that’s a position that needs no more explanation.
But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught.
Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes.
People at this level get intoxicated with their power. They think they are invincible and can do whatever they want. Often they can. Sometimes it all comes crashing down, here for example, or the case of Eric Swalwell. But they never think it will happen to them.
Sure but that's not the point here: he was getting frustrated in the interview because he was getting second guessed by someone who doesn't have as much insight has he does. Dude is the founder of Nvidia by the way.
The board should be fired next for allowing a CEO to have 60 direct reports and no succession plan.
It turned them into one of the most valuable companies in history. The board can figure out succession now.
Is that the reason? Or is it that they happened to make a product that became very in demand?
You say that as if a lottery assigns companies what product they shall make. Or that they found their product designs in a kinder egg.
They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality.
People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck.
"happened"?
Ok, but the goalposts are shifting. This started as "look how flustered he got when asked about China. That means he did it".
Um it's absolutely possible to break the rules set in place by a country and help it in doing so. No clue whether that's the case here
I am curious which questions you found poorly informed? Jensen Huang started with "China could have trained a Mythos level model" because the resources needed for that were "mundane". Maybe you believe him on that or you know that to be true but maybe mundane is not the right word. Also the rest of his answer did not age well. I think Dwarkesh genuinely wanted to have a deep conversation and not to be a troll.
The uninformed part was a rather dismissive attitude to Chinese capabilities and the assumption that access to NVidia chips was the only important success factor.
Jensen has two core points:
- stopping selling NVidia chips to China isn't going to stop China developing AI
- stopping NVidia selling to China will ultimately ceed US leadership in chips as Nvidia's commercial edge is as much about the dominant developer ecosystem as it is the chips per se.
ie the real risk is the default world tech stack shifts to open models on Chinese chips. End result Chinese lead in both.
He has spent his entire career competing and winning and he is being told he has to stop competing in order to achieve a goal that he knows won't actually be achieved by sacrificing NVidia.
In that scenario, where somebody is suggesting you throw away your life's work for nothing - I think anybody would be animated.
It's refreshing to see a podcaster push their guest to defend their positions, after having had the displeasure of listening to clips of Lex Fridman just accepting even obvious bullshit from his guests without any follow up. It sounds like Dwarkesh did the same with Dario, who argued the other side.
The questions weren't poorly informed just because you agree with what Jensen was saying. He seems pretty obviously to have made drastically poor judgement decisions that potentially affect national security of the US. I don't know if I would consider that to be a huge loss to the US.
The poorly informed part is the assumption that if Nvidia doesn't sell chips China AI dev will stop.
It clearly didn't - don't you remember the Deepseek launch where it came as a rude shock that the much vaunted concept of a compute capacity moat was blown away?
He kept repeating that while he made the best chips, computer science was more important.
Replaced by a CFO… this is what they always do. And that sign the slow death of the any company.
A CFO as interim CEO is fine. Their job is to keep the house in order and Wall Street at bay while the search for a new CEO is underway.
Yeah, this is the standard/textbook move. Keep things moving forward and the financials in order during the search.
Interim. They just need someone to crisis manage. I’m sure they have veteran capable executives other than Jensen. Maybe the AI focus wasn’t all Jensens idea even
All of the sudden people care about keeping Nvidia around? Theyve been jerking people around for decades, screwing customers, shitty drivers, exploding power connectors, anti competitive practices for miles.
those are mere gamer issues. perhaps more relevant ten year ago, but these days, the only question is the rack-scale products (and in that market, Nvidia's driver game has been pretty OK, though unfortunately closed-source).
We used their GPUs at scale before there was AI, and nvidia has always been a hostile vendor to deal with. I'm so ecstatic that at least huangs reputation is now in the trash, and I hope nvidia suffers severe consequences for all the decades of crap they've put us through
"let's ignore how shitty the consumer facing company has been for thirty years, they're too big to fail."
Ma Bell without the anti-trust (yet!).
Opinions on Nvidia depend heavily on one's shares:gpus ratio.
Yeah, its just their karma finally paying dividends.
And yet their products are superior to the competition. Yes, it's a sad day.
Sad? How? Self dealing CEO who cheats on his family after decades of being a shit to their customers as well, seems... deserved
Quite surprised they did not replace him with AI CEO-Class Agent. This would be sweet irony...
Replaced for like 10 minutes until the new CEO comes in. This isn't the time to announce the permanent next-20-years CEO.
Yeah, you always want someone sacrificial to be the immediate next person in the hot seat. Too much emotional expectations will be attached to whoever is next. Let the next person take all of the crap long enough so that the person you actually want has a clear path. You see this in sports franchises as well.
He clearly made some very bad decisions or we wouldn't be having this discussion
> replaced by a ex-CFO.
Let's be clear, she is just the interim CEO (primarily because Huang neglected to ever even start a transition plan) while NVidia searches for a permanent CEO. The names I've seen floated are Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, and Ian Buck, the creator of CUDA.
There are so many people who could fill his position. Not such a big loss
I'm not sure what to make of the idol worshipping going on here. He was an average CEO and the train will continue right along. NVIDIA doesn't exist because of some inherent greatness of a single person.
He saw the promise in GPGPU 10 years ahead of time and kept funding it out of a stubborness despite a lack of returns until it 1000xd the business.
You can say it was luck but it was definitely not "average".
He has poor judgement but I’ve yet to see any of the major consumer hardware companies that understand both hardware and software in the way he did. Or really the value of a fully vertically integrated stack.
Nvidia thrived because it paired great hardware with great software.
AMD and Intel think hardware is enough; it’s not. There’s a reason neither has ever been able to compete with Nvidia.
They have a giant ego, but I’d argue it’s probably well deserved.
Apple is/was similar. They also see that hardware without great software is useless. Spend as much; if not more on software to make your hardware shine.
Intel has some good compilers that take advantage of their hardware don't they? I think AMD now understands the software side of things, and is trying to fix it. Wonder how long it will take for them to get close to Nvidia's software side?
Apple's software quality has jumped off a cliff in the last few years, unfortunately.
According to you, in comparison to the current competition, hardly Microsoft Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Linux world, they don’t add up not when it comes to hardware and software and the ability to create an ecosystem, you’re actually dead wrong.
Another thing is wrong was thinking that Apple should run in and build some type of AI model that’s proving to be well wrong the only thing in Apple’s way right now is memory. certainly isn’t money, and they certainly have the talent and house to fix the memory problem. The question is whether or not they have the will to do so.
No one equals Apple at this point in time when it comes to seamlessly integrating multiple devices in a useful way. Be it a desktop computer, laptop a smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, Apple Vision, AirPods with each iteration, once again in comparison to their competition, they seem to have the best hand at this time.
Memory cost is the biggest problem Apple has right now and it’s not like they don’t lack the money and with the Apple Silicon design group they certainly have the capability to fix it, or I should say design around it.
Yes, it might take 2 to 5 years to do it, but it’s not impossible, the main question is, do they have the will? And they’ve certainly shown it when it comes to processors, GPUs, modems, and other support chips that they can execute over time.
They may not execute on what you want or what I want, but in comparison to their competition, who is out there right now that can combine both the software and the hardware at a high level across the board?
Yes, we’re gonna find out how important he was. If he is on the level as some of the other great CEOs Nvidia gonna have trouble, this little flare could be the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. Because I don’t see Intel or AMD rising to the same level as Nvidia. Microsoft seems to be having bad luck with their team-ups.
Not true. The decisions always come out of the person at the top. See what happened to Intel recently when they had a succession of MBA bad CEOs…
Nvidia is a highly technical company we’re gonna find out how important Jensen really was to that company tech wise?
And if you look closely at their company, what have they really innovated on over the last five or six years? from a distance, like Intel, it seems like they just turn up the juice/Wattage in short, they are just cruising along.
I can't say it was solely his choice but Nvidia continually made fantastic market moves. CUDA, then their positioning to ride the crypto boom, and then the AI boom. all of that required deliberate planning with a strong long term vision.
Self founds one of the most valuable companies of all time - average CEO, sure
You can criticize his recent question actions all you want, but you can’t believe he is “average”.
Definitely not average, but Nvidia is the definition of one trick, and that one trick long-term will be their downfall, Intel is in the same position and so is AMD and Microsoft.
Due to sanctions there’s one Chinese company that seems to have become a multi-dimensional company we won’t know for sure for another two years.
Being a vertical computer company appears to be coming back in style bring on the 1980s. early 1990s.
NVIDIA doesn't exist because of some inherent greatness of a single person.
Yeah, it pretty much does. CUDA is why they are positioned where they are. Other players like AMD and Intel could have done that, but they didn't, and if they had, they wouldn't have persevered for 10+ years with essentially nothing to show for it.
Whether CUDA will continue to maintain dominance is less clear. It may become a literal victim of its own success, as CUDA-based models gain the ability to migrate themselves to new platforms.
It is because of his vision. And with him gone, we shall find out about Nvidia, when Apple computer went through a succession of mediocre CEOs, they were on the ropes if it wasn’t for the founder CEO coming back, Apple would’ve been history like Sun, SGI, Acorn, Commodore, Digital and a host of other computer companies from the 1980s and mid-1990s.
Western companies have had that problem. when the visionary CEO bites the dust. I think the Eastern companies are even more susceptible.
Note: Nvidia is the very definition of a one trick company I think they were in trouble long-term no operating system, Microsoft is in trouble in the other direction. No real in-house hardware ability. Long-term you have to have the ability of both in-house to adjust and iterate over the long haul with the changing conditions in tech.
Exactly.
He may not have 'invented' CUDA but he saw the potential and gave it resources to be created and continually developed.
How many "CUDA-like" ideas have be squashed at other companies by leaders that don't see the potential or are willing to take a multi-year loss?
IMO, it's like SpaceX vs other rocket companies - especially Blue Origin.
Bezos, at least at first, had just as much money if not more than Musk. So why did SpaceX do so much better than them and every other rocket company. I despise Musk personally, and he's generally not as smart as he makes himself out to be - but there is something there he does differently than others in his position, some with similar resources as he does as well.
Bezos is a genius and an another direction? a direction that is 180° different than Elon? and neither one probably will ever do well on the other person’s home field.
The temporarily embarrassed billionaires have swarmed your comment to remind you that success is based on a single person, which is why they should get to do whatever they want when they're running their own Nvidia-sized corp one day.
> He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US
Let's expect better of leadership than to be criminal.
I'm not sure how long I should've kept watching but so far that looks like very good and knowledgeable answers, exactly what I'd expect from a competent tech CEO.
Unless it's like super far in, if this counts as heated then I just don't know what you expect.
Also got a similar vibe from him during Ezra Klein interview but Ezra was better at keeping it on rails.
https://youtu.be/HjurAWAr_nY
https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U?t=1058
Wrong interview
Its about his push for China. No intention of posting the other interview.
I remember listening to that and thinking, this sounds like a guy who is primarily focused on selling chips and is brushing away legitimate concerns in a way that, I just did not find very compelling. A little bit too much protest you might say. Not to say there isn't or wasn't validity to his arguments, but in light of the current circumstances it seems to me that those arguments are quite a bit less valid than they were, and I've certainly swung my personal opinion from being on the fence to a hard no to selling these chips to Chinese buyers.
If the Chinese Communist Party are going through such great lengths to obtain these advanced Nvidia chips, it further invalidates a lot of what I've been reading here and elsewhere about China "catching up" or that being the leading models isn't what matters (commoditization). You don't do stuff like this unless you really need something.
Talking to friends who worked in diplomacy - honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely. It makes sense if you think about it. The failure rate on these is going to be fairly high and even if it’s a small success (ie a one night stand sort of thing) you can get a little compromat. The cost is probably fairly negligible, a lot of this will be fairly low risk as far as spying goes.
My favourite honey trap story comes from the cold war. A Russian diplomat in Denmark was the target of Danish intelligence. They tried to honey trap him at a party, but he didn't respond to their agent's advances. So, the Danes supposed that he might be gay, and sent a male honey trap to the next party, but again got no response from the Russian. They shrugged their shoulders and gave it up.
Unbeknownst to them, the Russian was actually at that time trying to make contact with western intelligence, as he was keen to defect! He was just a bit too awkward to respond to flirting.
He did eventually manage to defect to Britain, and died in 2025. His name was Oleg Gordievsky.
> honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely.
WSJ reports that U.S. intelligence says Chinese intelligence approached Alice to become an asset after she met Jensen in March 2024. So, she was an opportunistic info source, not targeted in advance.
also, men are redickulous. And they can go in any number of beneficial direction from turning informant, selling GPUs to the chinese, or just a pee tape, etc. Just like a lottery of fun ways to screw with an adversary.
I think it's worth remembering that China isn't a monolithic bloc, and CCP doesn't drive everything, that there are tons of private enterprises there that would benefit, even if the Chinese government strategically would prefer to push Huawei to grow the domestic capability. There being a ton of private demand internal to China doesn't invalidate Jensen's view that it's a strategic blunder to let Huawei get a foothold in the market. Within the CCP, there's also a lot of inter-regional competition to show growth in their own regions, because that's the primary qualification for advancement within the party.
That said, I don't have any special insight into the specifics of who was driving the demand backing Megaspeed.
there's a good analysis that says Alice was a fixer and/or white-glove. those are common-in-China roles that have to do with obfuscating big financial operations, not necessarily with any political (CCP) involvement. obviously, CCP approves, if tacitly, everything that happens in China.
I find this hard to believe. Covid made it clear the CCP is very much in charge and in control.
Which part? You find it hard to believe that there are private enterprises there that don't always do exactly what CCP wants? Or that there're conflicting incentives inside the CCP, so that "what CCP wants" isn't simple?
Political officers are assigned to most Chinese tech companies.
You can't just take away someone's boogeyman like that.
> invalidates . . . . China "catching up"
China catching up does not mean they are not still behind.
Also, China is a big country with many companies. While some may be trying to catch up via local development, others may still prefer getting western hardware right now e.g. in order to get a competitive advantage over those catching up.
I'm a bit out of the loop, what part of what he said is wrong? He said they have more power and the more capability to produce chips, so they can essentially just brute force things vs the US if they wanted to: is that not the case?
If they don't need NVIDIA then why are they attempting so hard to bypass export controls.
If they don't need NVIDIA then why is the now former CEO of NVIDIA trying so hard to allow exprt controls to be relaxed.
And it's because brute forcing only allows you to not fall behind, but you can't catch up to frontier models or surpass.
That's like asking why China is building nuclear and coal power plants when solar is so much cheaper. They are doing all of the above.
Let's assume for a second that the compromat story on Huang is true, how much would that have cost? It could be everywhere from 10k to 10m $, depending on how difficult it was to get access, but it would still be a rounding error for AI invest.
Chips aren't what maketh SI anyway. The US is ahead because of a trifecta of having the best (most) hardware, best data, and best talent. You might also throw in business culture. But the same way Google is leading from behind in the US AI eco system, China is behind the frontier on LLMs, but laying foundational work in robotics, multi-modal models and integrated factories that might prove a big advantage down the line.
Could it not be true that they could brute force it if need be, but it would be much easier to use the better chips if they can get them?
No it's not the case because if they could do it they would already have done it. Selling them Nvidia chips doesn't change that.
But here's a link to the podcast episode if you want to give it a listen. It will inform a lot to the discussion taking place here and help you understand a few of the things he said that are probably now wrong: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang
They are catching up. Don’t delude yourself. This minor innocent little faux pas is the start of the AI bubble, it is in some ways poetic…
One other little crack in the dike. Was Sam Altman saying regular computer users shouldn’t have memory all memory should be allocated to data centers.
What will be the third crack in the dike?
I am trying to separate the current situation from his comments. Perhaps that is a mistake. He's trying to sell chips but that doesn't make him wrong.
But what’s the point ultimately? Delaying their progress by a couple years?
Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
(and could leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future)
People are bending over backwards to come to try to find some deep reason, but I think the reason is simple - the people in charge are not particularly farsighted nor insightful. It's simply short-term thinking without consideration of long-term consequences - it's not limited to just businesses.
For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.
And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.
It's just myopia.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
> Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?
Friends close and enemies closer.
An economy kept dependent on American tech is unlikely to drop bombs on America and vice versa. Co dependency prevents war.
This isn’t what China does though, the moment new tech crosses the border they reverse engineer and start producing it locally. IP protections are meaningless there. How many times does this have to happen to sink in?
What needs to happen is that the people who are getting wealthy from the offshoring of manufacturing and labor to China need to stop getting wealthy. Until then any and all excuses to pretend that China will operate in good faith will be levied to try and make people seem like it's in their best interest to hollow out the USA to hand over to China.
Keeping them dependent upon you guarantees that they never surpass you and that you can milk the relationship for all its worth economically and geopolitically. When they have their own fabs spun up it's possible that you are the one eventually stuck with inferior tech, and you lose all sort of revenue + leverage you'd otherwise have from the relationship.
It make sense. China had X amount of demand. If the demand is met they are satisfied, if the demand remains unmet they seek alternatives. That seeking of alternatives primarily means huge amounts of money, that would go to Nvidia, going to direct competitors of Nvidia to "chip" away at their competitive advantage.
The long term result is the same regardless of who makes the chips but the real strategy is delaying China's ability to surpass the US. It takes a lot of time and money to essentially copy the entire infrastructure required to build an Nvidia GPU. Nvidia has enough demand as is.
China is a trading partner but there is still a serious catalyst for war in the form of the South China Sea. If we went to war with China in 5 years time, why would we sell them the tech they need to match our ability now? Let them figure it out on their own.
Davidson Window...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidson_window
It feels like Space Race thinking, honestly. If the US delays China and ends up with an AGI god a few years in advance, that can still be a significant advantage even if China can catch up. This especially would hold true if a theoretical AGI could maximally leverage RSI so the improvement curve becomes exponential.
It's much closer to nuclear arms-race thinking.
If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before there is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has been misaligned to desire.
AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.
What stops another power from developing its own AGI a year or two later? Or from catching up once there are two competing RSI AGIs? The Soviets were a few years behind on getting nukes but they still got them.
The first AGI protecting its turf and sabotaging or corrupting the second AI to be its agent.
I think the verdict is still out on whether having an AGI God fly out of your butt would serve as a strategic advantage in the great power struggle.
This. And this happened before, see the China Sovjet split
AI has been identified as strategic national priority for both the Chinese and United States.
NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.
End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.
Why wouldn’t they have done that by now then? Where is their ASML or TSMC? They’ve had decades to catch up already.
> They’ve had decades to catch up already
No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War. Subsequently they managed to starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then righted themselves.
They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use. They make almost everything in the average household.
Their ASML and TSMC are...ASML and TSMC.
Who says we won't just progress as well and they stay behind a couple of years?
Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.
If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.
> Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch > up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese > Exceptionalism to me.
Suppose you want to build something that requires technical knowledge (a GPU, a fighter jet, ...). You have engineers, but they don't yet know how to build it.
If no one on earth has ever built this thing, you need to consider the possibility that it can't be done at a cost you can pay. Perhaps it violates some law of physics, or it can't be manufactured without knowing some chemistry/physics that we are 100+ years from discovering.
If a company in some other country is already building this thing, you can be sure it is possible to build it. That is a critical piece of information! It means you don't need to discover (much) new physics. It means you can buy/steal a working copy and look at it to learn about it. It means there are engineers you can hire/spy on to understand their design process. It means you can more easily convince a bank/government to fund development, as they have proof your goals are achievable.
Inventing a thing is much harder than inventing a clone of a thing. The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
> The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
Which broadly leads to two conclusions:
They can't do it. If they could they would. If you could invest and create your own Nvidia, ASML, TSMC, &c. you would do that especially if you are China due to its stated goals and actions it takes that we can all see toward those goals.
They can do it and so selling them the chips doesn't matter other than helping to speed up their ability to do it, so we don't want to sell them the chips and thus speed up their capabilities.
But your viewpoint also holds true for the United States and Europe. Anything China can do we can also do, otherwise you're just supposing Chinese Exceptionalism.
> fiat d accompli
The phrase is “fait accompli”, without a D, and is French for “accomplished feat”.
> Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
The ever closing gap between the capabilities of frontier models vs chinese open weight models.
Models aren’t everything. You need physical infrastructure at scale for inference, which is where the economic power comes from. Chinese hardware makes double the heat and needs at least double the energy input.
And 3 years ago they were producing no heat and required no energy because they did not exist. Clearly they are catching up
even if true, luckily for them, double the heat and double the energy input aren't an issue, and they have more physical infrastructure at scale too
It's like the ever closing gap between the smartest kid in class and the kid who sits behind him copying his work.
That's not a strategy that leads to actually being the best.
Exactly. And we better keep it this way. The fact that we can block them from copying us today means that they will try that much harder to come up with their own answers. Remember, they are miles ahead in manufacturing hardware and the software is not a problem anymore. Whatever moat cuda represented is gone now.
This is good evidence sanctions don't really work. Critical sectors will find ways around them and it only punishes the rank and file working class. If China or any sanctioned nation wanted those nvidia chips, it has ways to get them. So the military and intelligence get them, but the people don't. Same with sanctions on Russia now, which has not significantly slowed its military machine, but in fact its military machine is coming out with constant innovations (new Gerans, better EW, more spy sats, etc). I remember seeing a post mortem of some Russian drone. It had a Jetson chipset Russia was not supposed to be able to get. I imagine the smuggling market is far bigger than we might think and sanctions far less effective than we think.
Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
Sanctions should be a bigger conversation. They are almost never needed and especially trade tariffs and such are always used for the most corrupt cronyism.
> Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
There’s also the minor quibble that restricting food exports to starve another country are illegal under international law.
Nobody is starving in Russia (at least unavoidably).
That sanctions only harm the civilian economy is not an argument against them. Kinetic sanctions agains oil refining are also primarily impacting the general population and the military have enough oil. But they still impact the ability of the Russians to fund the war. Civilian infrastructure and economic assets are used by militaries too.
I watched the interview. I think the arguments made sense. People get heated talking about the colour of an object they can both see. I wouldn't want to project reasons for heated behaviour.
For the record I think that less than half of the people who thought the dress was black and gold were being influenced by the Chinese government to take that position.
He doesn’t seem too heated to me. Maybe it was just the way this awful interviewer took 3 minutes to finish asking the question.
Yeah call me crazy but I don't see the need to sell the cutting edge chips to China if you're already a trillion dollar company. Sure more money is nice, but not living under the thumb of a global dictatorship is nice too.
If the sale is not about money or share price then maybe it's ideological.
20% more revenue is a lot of money and makes Huang wealthier since he owns a large piece of the company.
He was so unhinged and angry. Ppl just ignored it at the leather jacket glazing time s
LMAO Dwarkesh is stupid ass
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here.
OK sure .. obviously sleeping with Chinese agent is a security issue .. very bad .. but Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense. In fact, it is counterproductive because it closes a huge market to Nvidia and makes China less reliant on US Tech - forcing them to accelerate development of homegrown GPU business.
> Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense
Jensen had the ear of the President. He could have lobbied this properly.
Doing so by obscuring Nvidia’s Singapore business, failing to apply for an export license to Megaspeed, corruptly quashing a Commerce investigation into Megaspeed, all while sleeping with its leader who turned out to be a Chinese spy, and then only coming clean when the Congress flipped…I don’t know how he could have flipped the bird stronger at the American people.
> corruptly quashing a Commerce investigation into Megaspeed
I'm squarely blaming the federal admin for this. Lutnick and Rubio both knew about this way ahead of time, and their negligence is what ended up screwing the American people over. Removing Jensen doesn't prevent this corruption, it just shuffles the blame around. Huang became the fall guy for corruption at a ludicrous scale, while Donald Trump ponders installing Tim Cook (?) as his replacement.
The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This is the Kardashian-ization of the American tech industry.
Are we calling her a "Chinese agent" because her business smuggled chips into China or because anyone believes she was a trained intelligence operative? Does being monetarily incentivized to do business with China make her an agent?
there are many sound positions that are illegal, so it's kind of irrelevant
Hold on here ..
If Nvidia was skirting the law, then they should held accountable for that.
If Nvidia merely held a position that the particular law is, say, counter-productive and lobbied against it (but followed it) - what's illegal about that?
Has anybody argued against your second point? Feels like a straw man.
> If Nvidia was skirting the law, then they should held accountable for that.
in corporate america haha
But had he paid his Trump tax? Perhaps he’s not one of the elect!
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china
As a business, why shouldn't they advocate for export to a relatively huge market? It is an expansion for them and from a business perspective completely expected.
The advocacy is not the problem. The problem is that, once the ban was in place, they skirted the ban.
Didn't everyone already know that China was buying Nvidia GPUs?
Is the problem that Nvidia was not making it as hard as it should have?
Realistically, how much does that even matter?
Now legislators demonstrated how much that matters. I don't have the knowledge to evaluate the national security concerns. But from the outcome, it's a matter they'll firmly push as a long term strategy, even at the cost of one of the world's most visionary CEOs.
They and their shareholders are about to find out how much it matters.
Which is not what the comment being replied to said at all.
They should and there’s nothing wrong with only advocating. The problem is that it wasn’t just advocating but (possibly) knowingly subverting the export controls
You intentionally cut off the why here.
Well its suspicious. If they were onoy advocating then thats free speech, but if they also skirted the ban, then its then kinda admitting to it
Let's export rockets, F-35s, Typhoons, Rafales', Gripens, jet turbines.
China should have infiltrated ASML, not much they can do without them until they get the blueprints. Unlikely they aren't doing it already.
> rockets, F-35s, Typhoons, Rafales', Gripens, jet turbines
these are actual weapons, does anyone use GPUs to kill humans?
Yep.[0]
US congresspersons and international media outlets condemned the use of AI warfare against Iran, including the Department of Defense's (DoD) Project Maven—a target tagging system integrating elements of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Anthropic's Claude large language model.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
They can be part of the "kill chain", yes.
There was the kerfuffle with Dario Amodei and Pete Hegseth, who declared Anthropic a supply chain risk to the US. IMO, yes. Killer robots don't run on one 5090 :)
There is more spelunking to that situation, but that's a different thread.
Turns out there are laws and regulations that restrict one’s ability to lobby for foreign interests as both a public and private individual. Read about NJ Senator Bob Menendez which is a particularly egregious example.
That feels like it should be unconstitutional.
The Chinese government working hard to ban NVIDIA GPUs from the country [1][2][3].
How does it make sense that Jensen is compromised while advocating for exporting GPUs to China, which is something that primarily benefits NVIDIA (and arguably the US) while being against the Chinese interests? If he were compromised he would be like "well actually maybe I shouldn't export chips to China after all and give their domestic semiconductor industry a chance".
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-chips-pile-up-hon...
[2] https://ng.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/nvidia-ai-ch...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...
They obviously need/needed as much NVIDIA as possible short term, and locally produced superior alternative ASAP long term. So one hand rushes to secure all stocks of NVIDIA prosumer and enterprise cards, while another rushes to ban it.
China doesn’t want regular businesses to have them illegally.
That’s not the same as China not wanting them legitimately.
Long-term plans vs. short-term plans?
Also that its intertwined with asking the corrupt administration to relax export regulations
There's speculation that Trump knew about the Chinese spy and Nvidia donated $25M to the White House Ballroom in October 2025.
Even if this is just a coincidence, Jensen himself came out and said he donated to the ballroom, but kept the amount hidden. In internal documents, Jensen and Nvidia said to keep the amount hidden and it only came out due to disclosure documents from the government.
Trump went on 60 Minutes and said as much
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think that the risk is not nearly as real as it-- as they talk. And I think the risk can be managed. And it's managed, you know who? By who? The DOJ. We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said, "Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night."
ROSS DOUTHAT: Who was this person?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Or this company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you. But we said-- "Do you like the color orange because get rid --" said, "Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give 'em a kiss good night, and--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"that's the story because--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"because tomorrow morning--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"you're goin' to jail."
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the-- if they--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted to make a deal--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --to put that (UNINTEL)--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person totally changed everything. Totally. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: "Yes, sir"?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Was it a leader of a major AI company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. Yeah.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. And--
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --and-- and I don't think--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --said, "We wanna put th-- we wanna--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --"codify this into law--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't think it was--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --would you work with them--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --done maliciously. But it coulda been malicious, but--
---
This is what losing the Rule of Law looks like by the way. The sitting president is on TV saying that he found out someone rich and powerful is suspected of wrong doing serious enough to get a call from the president threatening him with prison, but that that's the punishment. Once that rich and powerful person bent the knee, said "Yes sir" with the right tone of voice, all was forgiven.
Equal Justice under Law means that we shouldn't punish people we don't like with harsher sentences it also means that wealth and power shouldn't be sufficient to skirt the law.
We often speak of a two-tiered justice system, but I've never seen the president go on TV and tell America in no uncertain terms, it exists, I'm a part of it, and it went very well, he said "Yes sir" just the right way and so you don't need to worry about it.
This conversation is completely unhinged and unintelligible.
$25M to sell billions of GPUs to China
cost of doing business. kiss the ring, get the blessing, make fat stacks -- illegally.
These "donations" are just par for the course (to use an expression from the current president's favorite sport)...
I’m aware, Apple and other companies donated too. What I found odd was the lengths Jensen and Nvidia went to hide the amount. Other companies came out and said how much they donated.
Ok Mr. Both Sides, show me the donations to Biden's gilded ballroom.
I should have made it clearer that I was only both-sidesing it when it comes to the donors, not to the recipient...
Oh! That explains why Trump was so sympathetic to Jensen : "He is suffering. Poor man. He is such a nice guy. And his family… but he is suffering greatly."
Corrupt from top to bottom.
he's also probably empathetic towards men who have publicly been caught cheating on their wives, for obvious reasons
birds of a feather, and all that
So directly colluding with Russia hasn't taken Trump down, but maybe allowing prohibited exports to China in exchange for money will?
The audit on the main contractor for that "ballroom" must be wild. I guess that auditor is going to make a pretty penny.
Trump has several protections- #1 is that as chief executive he gets to decide who our friends and enemies are to begin with…
No, he doesn't. Congress has abdicated this power up to now during Trump 2 because the GOP are total lickspittle sycophants. The Democrats will be spineless cowards -- at least the older generation -- but they won't be total pushovers on this front.
Where did I say this will bring Trump down? Maybe Trump gave the go ahead as long as he gets his cut?
You didn't say that, I was speculating in response to your comment.
The image is not a problem. That image has existed for months already. The problem is that Huang lost the tenuous protection that Trump and Lutnick agreed to give him so he could avoid jail. On that basis, investors are now scared the company might suddenly be under investigation for export violations.
https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/trump-lutnick-nvidia-china-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...
Guessing Trump was talking about Jensen on 60 minutes this weekend when he said th DOJ called someone leading a major AI company and said "get ready to go to jail" 24:18 mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2aC8lAOQbg&t=1458s
This is dwarfed in scope of the compromise of NVIDIA by its shareholders, a shadowy group who some analysis believe have an interest in the sale of GPUs anywhere, a set of locations that is thought to include China.
And not that Nvidia is absolved of responsibility but it does make it a little easier if it's the new leadership in the hot seat for those things being like "yeah we did some naughty stuff but it was the last guy and we're working on hard on getting it all cleaned up."
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here.
I said the same thing a few days ago and got heavily downvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50417959
> Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. Ha! Who's going to wait until Jan? There's already a congressional hearing on Nov/18 https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/chairme...
I may sound arrogant, but I am not. Many people are a bit slow to catch on to these incidents or can't see beyond one layer, like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418215
The cult of the Genius Tech CEO is strong on HN.
Agreed. "Huang was right to advocate for them, China has no incentive to skirt the import ban, sad day for developers," are not takes I thought I would read today.
Bots are cheap and easy to spin up. Looking forward to a real government that doesn’t just lick billionaire taint.
> Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised
I doubt it has anything to do with it really. China is a huge market and by not exporting to China they were missing out on tens to hundreds of billions in revenue. Any CEO would have advocated the same.
Considering the incredibly high demand for GPUs, they would have sold them regardless. All those sales do is increase demand and push prices up.
Particularly in the current political moment, saying essentially "we were using high demand in a market we can't legally sell in to increase prices for American customers" is not a good look.
(Yes,obviously, not all of this is Nvidia's doing, and demand at this volume through smuggling/front companies would still affect the legitimate market. But being an active participant in it is not a good look.)
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up. So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Sad day for developers.
as always, any slither of facts skewing from the narrative gets downvotes before a single comment pointing out where it's wrong never change hn
Honestly I doubt Huang seriously believed he could ride this out. He didn’t only jeopardise his own marriage, he jeopardised his company’s core IP, national security and possibly the entire global economy. That’s a tricky mistake to forgive.
Especially on the Trump admin having knowledge for an entire year, and not acting on that information in any significant way.
It's not just NVIDIA that's extremely weak on China, the entire Executive branch is both weak and incompetent on what they claim is a chief concern, and Congress has been completely absent on the oversight role that it should be performing according to the US Constitution.
The incompetence and/or corruption is inexcusable. Teapot Dumb Scandal.
Maybe GPU's will get cheaper then, that would be nice.
I can think of several more urgent topics for congressional hearings than that honestly...
> the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
> directly violates HR rules
> ban for national security reasons
These don't sound like they are on the same order of magnitude in terms of severity?
The first can be objectively and quickly ruled as violating company policy. The second has to go through a process -- did Jensen knowingly violate national security policy, and if so how significant was it?
Externally no, but internally to the company they probably can be.
Not the _only_ reason, sure. However, it's quite common when executives have an affair they will get fired. I think that's just the reality. If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
I was on the leadership team of a startup that is now public, during that build something like that happened (almost exactly the same as this NVIDIA situation sans the spy stuff), there were effectively 5 of us involved in what the outcome should be and it basically came down to: me and another guy didn't want to sit on a leadership team with someone who exercised judgement that way, to the point that it was me and the other guy or affair person, so affair person was out, even tho it was very painful for the business. Also, I don't think what I just described is particularly uncommon.
I have worked at a larger company where the CEO did something similar and across the company all anyone could ask was "why would you do something that dumb", which is not a great way for people to feel about the person supposedly leading the company.
this is something i am probably too european to understand...
At the end of the day, it's also just too simplistic.
Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.
You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.
The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.
The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.
At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.
That is the unforgivable lapse in judgement.
"you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance."
If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract with a person to whom you've promised utter faithfulness, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy with regard to some boring, impersonal business contracts?
It's perfectly possible to be trustworthy in one thing and not the other. If you can't trust a lion with your flock of sheep doesn't mean you can't trust it with a bunch of bananas.
yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.
This is more than an affair though. This is an affair with someone he has a business relationship with and thus it becomes the interest to the business. There are many many cases where someone give business favors to the person they are having an affair with.
My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.
If he’d had an affair with his physical therapist absolutely no one would care and he wouldn’t be out- it’s the totality of his actions and his extreme lack of judgement at issue.
You should be fired if you're having an affair with a spy, or with someone who reports to you.
How do you know you aren’t?
By not having an affair with anyone?
You're too European to understand infidelity? Must be French!
- Signed, another European
i understand infidelity, i don't understand who would care on the job. also, not french :)
...must be those long vacations
If he was French, this would be “oui, et?”
Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
(Agreeing, with an asterisk.)
Markets care about predictability.
To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.
Yep that's an even better point. Though I would say there's a distinction between socially-unacceptable and untrustworthy. Being forthcoming both limits surprise (per your point) and mitigates the trust component of deviance.
> Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Why? I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?
Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.
Maybe I don't understand enough the US culture.
> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?
This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.
Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.
And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.
Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.
Right, and because he was willing to break a commitment that serious it de-values other commitments he's made, including those more directly relevant to the business.
gosh we need another 68
What does that mean?
1968
All this coming from a country that elected twice as President a guy that married three times, led a very sexually promiscuous life, including the notorious boasting, and was accused of sexual misbehaviours by almost 30 women. Hilarious.
The US system gives voters two options for president. Those options are chosen by parties, and parties make terrible choices.
In 2016, the choice was between Trump and Clinton. Clinton famously excused her husband's infidelity by calling the long list of women who claimed they were assaulted as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty".
In 2024, the choice was between Trump and Harris. Harris got into politics by being the mistress of a CA governor.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the US presidential election offered a choice between someone who was moral and someone who was as immoral as our existing political class. But that has not happened in my lifetime, and I don't expect that to change.
Willie Brown and Jerry Brown are not the same person
Trump's key innovation was shamelessness. It's good that Jensen feels shame here.
One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.
In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.
If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.
Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.
It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.
But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.
> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
> Why?
It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.
Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.
Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.
I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, they were well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, they agreed to them with their words, in fact. With us it was very simple, provided you're not a bigot, what you do on your own time is not our concern. However, what you do within our business is our concern. If you have intimate relations with anyone inside our company, even if consensual, you're no longer on our leadership team. Then, their actions did not match those words, when that is true, trust is gone. In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect their actions and words to match, and there are people who we know that isn't the case, and on some siding scale, we accept it (I didn't say acceptable). For example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). Groups typically have criteria/standards, if they change that, it may change the group to varying degrees, and that may be ok or not ok, depending on the group. I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?
*Everything on a spectrum.
Somehow, that wasn't an issue for Eric Schmidt, who was shagging some publicist while he was Google's CEO (and while happily married). Wonder why.
Was she working at Google at that time and reporting directly to Eric Schmidt?
That’s how it was for Sergei brin.
For one, Schmidt left Google in 2011. Cultural acceptance of fucking subordinates has changed a lot since then.
Considering that extramarital escapades didn't prevent the current US president from being elected twice - and quite recently at that - I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with cultural acceptance.
You're "pretty sure" that you can isolate causality in multicausal and overdetermined systems by pointing to a few extreme examples?
I'm jealous!
I can dumb it down even further for you.
Yes, please do!
Seems like a real analytical breakthrough that I'd legitimately love to learn more about.
You cannot tell from the NVDA stock crash if it's because the CEO had an affair, or because NVIDIA illegally sold GPUs to China and is in huge trouble.
Or because the current stock value is highly inflated and the bubble is starting to pop.
Feels like the pop would start with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
One of the reasons this behavior is problematic in general is the potential for blackmail. It's not even really a statement about morality, just an acknowledgement that somebody who wants to keep things hidden is going to be beholden to the people who know the secrets.
"It's not the crime, it's the coverup."
Jensen went to many high profile parties with this woman. I don't see where he's trying to even hide it. Even the kiss was made out in public, not like a hotel room.
Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes. I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents, and he pretty much encouraged the agents to publish the photos.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes
No? All it requires is for Jensen to want to remain with his wife and for his wife to be willing to divorce him if she finds out he has an affair.
Or, even if we suppose he doesn’t care about his wife’s feelings at all, he might be very incentivised by losing half of his assets in a divorce. It’s worth many, many millions to him.
Very little involvement from society in that one.
186 thousand million.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes.
You don’t have to be a prude to think cheating on a spouse is condemnable.
In general, it also doesn’t really matter what society thinks. You can just threaten to reveal the affair to the spouse. And even in the case the spouse doesn’t really care it’s fodder they can potentially use in a divorce to get a better deal.
One thing worth pointing out is that in this case in addition to the affair with the Chinese spy he was allegedly having an affair with a subordinate, which is always problematic.
> affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes
For better or worse, this is the world we live in.
For worse.
That's pretty wild. A society that doesn't value faithfulness to a spouse or looks the other way at sleeping with a subordinate is pretty sick imo.
> I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents
Sukarno. "Project Happy Days", lol.
He (Sukarno) thought it was hilarious and sent copies to his friends.
CIA was pissed w/ him because he killed a lot of Communists but then started leaning to China and beefing with Malaysia, which irritated the British
Apparently the KGB tried to honeypot him - and they were flabbergasted when he asked for copies of the photos. Apparently photos of him with multiple Russian women would bolster his machismo image back home?
Although if you read his Wikipedia page, he had many, many wives, some concurrently, and the youngest was 19...so it's probably true, lol.
Then you read about a certain EV company CEO and his escapades and repopulating the planet, and you don't know what to think.
Or Charlie Sheen...
I guess politicians, celebrities and CEOs are another world from us mere mortals.....
It’s not just about humiliation. If your boss is sleeping with your coworker or someone on your team, how can you trust their decisions are grounded in fairness and logic. Sure, the world doesn’t work this way, and ceos are at a different realm than a mid level manager, but this is usually how HR defines things.
Yeah there’s a reason it’s strictly against companies policies and it’s not a moral reason.
It seems more common they get fired for either "with a subordinate" or "a relationship with a conflict of interest for the company".
There are many examples where the outed affair resulted in nothing material when neither of the above was true.
This case, seems to touch both.
Reminds me of the Coldplay concert couple, which happened to be a CEO and head of HR. Head of HR! And what's more interesting is that they only got removed when the affair became public. At the same time the company was small potatoes so presumably less interesting to state actors.
That is assuming there is a layer above the executive, which is not necessarily the case.
It is true for anything with a board, of course. But there is no rule mandating boards.
Pretty sure all publicly traded companies in the US are required to have a board
Several publicly traded companies have (or had) majority-owner CEOs, which makes it more than a little awkward for the board to fire them. I can't really see the board outing Zuckerberg under similar circumstances
Zuckerberg protected himself from this scenario by starting off with an Asian wife.
Most certainly, but the statement was
> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out
There is no "* only applies to publicly traded companies". Hence, it is incorrect.
The bigger point I am trying to make here being that not everything is investor-driven. People can run businesses without that. It annoys me greatly that HN regularly forgets that.
In publicly-traded companies, the board is not the ultimate boss, though. That would be the shareholders. And, at Meta and many companies copying Meta's playbook who have IPO'd since (notably including Anthropic, though notably not including Nvidia), founder shares have so much voting power that the founders are effectively in complete control.
In theory, Nvidia shareholders, if dissatisfied with today's decision, could vote to oust the current board and replace it with people more sympathetic to Huang, who would, as their first decision, re-hire him as CEO, as would be their prerogative. This is... unlikely to happen.
None of the above is investment advice.
It worked for Sam.
Public companies in the US are required to have a board of directors. If they’re not a “controlled company” - i.e. no single person controls more than 50% - then a majority of the board are required to be independent, i.e. not employees, executives, or consultants to the company.
If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
It's not entirely about humiliation.
Having an affair (or multiple, in this case) demonstrates poor decision making. You don't want someone who can't make wise choices running your company.
> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business
I can hardly imagine anything more stupid than judging the aptitude of the CEO of a 5T$ business based on his private love life.
I suspect so many of us see examples of corporate crime or even of corporate greed (legally) causing an incredible amount of damage that an affair feels trivial in comparison. That is especially true when the private family life of a CEO is private. The damage of the affair could be anything from devastating to the family to they were all but legally separated.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
You should be concerned about corporate crime.
That doesn't change that there is a conflict of interest here and any company should fire someone who has a conflict of interest that they are not carefully managing to ensure they don't become real.
This is not about his private love life. This is about a conflict of interest that happens to also involve his private love life.
Which is as it should be. First of all, marriage is a covenant. If someone cannot be trusted to keep his word on that, it's tough to trust him with power over thousands of employees and trillions of dollars. Second, I'm guessing the board asked Huang after the first affair's revelation whether there were more skeletons in his closet, and he said no. Lying to one's board is more than enough reason to be ousted.
> marriage is a covenant
That's a very narrow view that's a function of one's religion, culture, and values.
When I was in school, (US) my very Catholic French teacher explained that his uncle, in France, had a mistress. His uncle's wife knew and was okay with it. What my teacher was explaining is that the culture around marriage varies considerably through the world, and you can't take for granted that what we were taught (monogamy) is the standard that others live to, or even expect from you.
Yes, I can. The normalcy of a thing doesn't make it right. But this isn't really about whether absolute cultural relativism is appropriate or not. It's about a man who broke his word. Huang wed an American woman in America, not a French woman in France. Nothing about this situation indicates Huang's wife was remotely aware of nor alright with his philandery.
> Huang wed an American woman in America
Please don't make the mistake of assuming that American culture is homogeneous: It's not.
There's no major American subculture in which stepping out on your wife is "a good thing" or even "an okay thing". A vast majority of Americans poll consistently against adultery and it's often the most universally condemned action in surveys. Here's one example: https://news.gallup.com/poll/692801/adultery-cloning-seen-im...
Wait till you hear about what wives get up to at “board game night” in San Jose.
My mother had gotten "two wrongs don't make a right" through my head by about age four. It's still true. I don't know nor care what they're doing in San Jose.
Seems like what they’re doing in North America kind of undercuts your assumptions.
Perhaps it’s you that is out of touch?
Both partners in this case know and/or participate, you don’t want drama at your games night after all. There is no wrong here, it turns out that many partners like seeing their partner have a great time.
From a religious perspective, sure. From an earthly perspective, you don't know what the other side was doing. Have you ever been married to a menopausal or a post menopausal woman? A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
> A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
That’s not quite true. A more accurate statement would be: A marriage may be annulled in some U.S. states if one spouse entered the marriage with a concealed, permanent intention not to consummate it, and that intention constitutes fraud going to the essence of the marriage.
If the couple was having sex after marriage, and then one partner decided to cease having it some time later, that is generally not grounds for annulment.
If it were permitted, this would make many, if not most, late-stage marriages subject to annulment. People get sick and injured or just incapable in old age.
Seems like some weird fundamentalist take. On its own it's purely a private matter between him and his wife (obviously the GPU smuggling stuff is a separate thing). Given that the affair has been semi public for years it's hard to imagine his wife didn't know about it anyway.
If it's fundamentalist to hold a man to his word, then I suppose you can count me a fundamentalist. If he'll shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world, just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
> shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world
Well we don't know that, you are not legally required to love someone you are married to and I have no clue what their relationship is like or whether they have any sort of "arrangements". I could hardly care less really since its their private matter.
> just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
I don't really see a correlation between those things. All sorts of immoral degenerates (e.g. Musk, (potentially) Gates and I assume plenty of other lesser known CEOs) have generated massive amounts of value for their shareholders.
It may even be the case that immoral degenerates are the MOST suitable people to invest your money with.
no one cares who you put your dick into if the returns are good and there are no threats to the business. but he only fucked threats to the business.
he was fucking a spy
he was fucking one of his direct reports
what are two things you shouldn't ever do as a CEO of the biggest company in the world?
this wasn't Cindy the random waitress from the Palo Alto Ruth Chris', these were literally two people he should never be fucking
he put the company at risk of national security issues and HR lawsuits for what is otherwise painfully mid-tier pussy. he's gotta go.
> for what is otherwise painfully mid-tier pussy.
This is an extremely unnecessary misogynistic comment.
This is the kind of story that makes me think most critical leadership should be held by women. Grossly generalizing here, but I think women are inherently less corruptible than men in this manner, especially older women.
It’s unambiguously a good thing that the next NVIDIA CEO (even if just an interim CEO) is a woman, and that the AMD CEO is a woman.
was it confirmed she was a spy? or is that just twitter rumors?
It is the official allegation of the United States and other major governments. So that doesn't guarantee it but it is more than a rumor.
Can you link me to the press release or anything where this is said? I want to share it with my friends!
https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/20261111_warren...
https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/china-dismisses-spy...
Exactly. Jensen could have had ten high-priced escorts attending to him at home at every hour and there would be no issue.
I dunno that executive looks rather top tier to me. Maybe you have different standards for late-40s extremely accomplished women.
Famously, Mark Hurd made dubious expenses that were perceived negatively by the public (there were sexual harassment allegations) and was ousted as CEO from HP. Then Larry Ellison mocked HP and hired Mark as Oracle's President. So, some companies are worried about that, others aren't
It's entirely possible that the board just wasn't that warm on Jensen in the first place. Not cold, not looking to be the tall poppy that gets cut down... but at least willing to give Jensen the boot if given the right push.
This is how things change. Slowly and then all at once. If the board were more in love with him, they'd probably have been willing to turn a blind eye for just a little while longer. No such luck for Jensen, but we make our own luck in these things.
Not looking warm on a guy that synthesized five trillion dollars from nothing in the 90s is some high standards.
Not sure how personal affairs humiliate your business
They can when they reveal poor decision making. If this guy is so stupid that he's willing to stick his dick in anyone, including a Chinese spy, what does that say about his ability to make rational decisions elsewhere in his life? He's clearly not making decisions that benefit him personally in the long term so can he even make good long term decisions at his job?
There's a reason why government background checks looks at financial records. Someone that has trouble paying their bills due to a gambling habit might be easy to turn by the enemy with some cash. Or someone that regularly cheats on their wife might be willing to do some favors for a pretty girl if she lets him sleep with her.
They do when they're with a subordinate or a vendor, both of which he did. Add on "foreign agent" and you're done.
They do in our puritanical culture.
In a Goffman Front Stage/Back Stage sense, you are supposed to keep the front stage presentation on the level of a pious monk or nun.
The irony to me is this just another asymmetrical advantage for Chinese culture.
Trump was elected twice. I think there are other factors here.
Maybe people are tired of that bullshit. The most powerful guy in business clearly felt empowered to let that facade go. I guess he just got a check for his experiment.
"Oh hey, I'm going to be buying 1,000,0000,000 widgets from that widget maker Nvidia"
"Haha you mean the Chinese spy guy? Hey ask if you can get a discount if your secretary sleeps with their CEO haha"
Good executives go to Epstein island and do not get fired.
I wonder where they are going now.
We know nothing about Jensen's private life or if he humiliated his family here.
Marriages of 41+ years can get into any kind of dynamic.
100%. While I do not condone his actions, publicly we do not know anything about his private life and the dynamics. Until there's a statement from his family, for all we know they may have been separated.
It's clearly the CN link and/or the cosying up with a customer that is the problem; the board would not care about his private life (and neither should the public, tbh).
And the open letter sounds more like it was written the way the public would expect a CEO to write.
If he was in an open relationship or had a girlfriend while separated from his wife, that's not really something to be embarrassed about. His letter talks is him apologizing to his family and asking for forgiveness. He got caught in a Chinese intelligence honeypot and knows he fucked up.
Then obviously his letter could've said as much. It didn't, ergo an interpretation of available evidence clearly indicates you are wrong.
> or if he humiliated his family here.
His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?
> His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?
He has also said so very many times in so very many ways that Nvidia was absolutely not involved in violation of export control laws regarding the export of its products to China. That -in fact- there was absolutely no smuggling going on and claims to the contrary were utterly baseless and without merit.
I agree with ohnnyApplePRNG's assertion that we know literally nothing about the private life and situation of Mr. Huang and his family.
So because he lied when he denied certain allegations, you don't believe his admissions of guilt? That seems like an odd logical jump.
> we know literally nothing
He "literally" wrote about how his actions hurt his family, I'm not sure why there's a second account parroting the exact same phrase.
This is incorrect. Even if they had a totally open relationship, it being public news across the world can be humiliating.
We do actually know enough to know that the edge cases do not sufficiently apply here to arrive at the conclusion you're implying.
We don't know, but it is overwhelmingly likely that he and his wife do not have an open marriage. Most people do not.
> We know literally nothing about Jensen's private life or if he humiliated his family here.
Uh... but we do!
---
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.
Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
Jensen
---
Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
If he is actually a bi-furry with an understanding with his wife on 'affairs', do you think he'd say that? Or would he maintain the straight, family-friendly, investor-friendly front expected of him [by some people] in his position?
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much a promoter of monogamy.
I think it is naive to assume that such public statements are the whole truth of a matter.
People who fuck up a company (or have an affair, or get caught snorting drugs off a sex-worker) aren't really 'stepping back to spend more time with their families'. Historically the classic example of executive public statements.
> If he is actually a bi-furry with an understanding with his wife on 'affairs', do you think he'd say that?
Yes, and it would have helped. CEOs have "exciting" relationships all the time, and folks seem entirely willing to accept this.
These are entirely different stories:
"My wife and I have a non-traditional relationship and would prefer to keep the specifics private, but no harm was caused by my actions."
"I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."
I think the thriving bi-furry community on HN might have a word or two to say about that
People don’t realise that execs don’t actually write these messages usually.
Perhaps, but it's also more common than not for affairs to hurt families, and the statement confirms that applied here.
If you have stronger evidence that the statement was untruthful when it said he hurt his family, you may present it.
Until such time, the statement strengthens the bayesian prior, which is that his affairs hurt his family, and thus that is what we can conclude. We need not be 100% confident to conclude this absent further evidence. >50% confidence suffices.
Tell me you have no clue how corporations are run without telling me. Furthermore Jensen wasn't some random executive otherwise this wouldn't be now top news all over the world.
Let’s be real here. Everyone making money out of NVIDIA was more than happy enough to go around the restrictions and see the prices go up due to Chinese demand.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
Unless you are a competitor.
Or Anthropic
It's a good thing Congress doesn't just care about their opinions then.
In what world is the modern US Congress a good regulator of these kinds of things? Half the people in the Capitol have a literal vested interest in the very companies they claim to be trying to keep on a leash (and I recognize that some of these are inverse instruments, my point still stands).
what's the alternative?
no regulation?
regulation without representation?
Public service, especially at the highest levels, is both a realization of civic responsibility, as well as an immense material privilege.
If you've had a career in congress, parliament, whatever, you can live comfortably off of the various media appearances you're likely to have for much of the rest of your life.
Representatives in government should be able to keep it in their pants when it comes to investments at least while they're in government, and have a thick, thick wall between their jobs running a country (or state, or whatever) and the management of their investments. Blind trusts should be the bare minimum.
What I'd prefer to see is that while actively sitting in government, representatives must keep their savings invested in funds so diversified into low-risk instruments that almost no regulation can benefit them significantly more than it would an average passive investor.
My money is on the congress members - including the greatest stock trader of all times, Nancy Pelosi - having just sold their NVIDIA shares right before the spying was uncovered.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
It's also possible that after the first affair news broke, the board asked him questions and he didn't disclose that there's a second affair too (and maybe more??). The board only realized that he'd not been truthful/fully forthcoming when the second affair news broke yesterday. That's when they decided to boot him. Because if there's more and more affairs going to keep breaking, that would be a complete media spectacle distracting from the company.
Musk has survived and brushed off much worse.
And Jensen isn't just any CEO, he is the founder and has run the company for thirty years.
He would have survived the affairs if it wasn't for the export control violation aspects.
Musk controls 19.9% of voting power at Tesla, and more than 80% at SpaceX. Huang has about a 3.5% ownership stake in of Nvidia and that’s jointly controlled with his wife.
But there is a great belief that Huang is the reason for nVidia’s success and like Steve Jobs take 2, removing him will imperil the company’s future.
Musk's companies have low quality boards, which is by design to make it almost impossible to fire him and the legacy of that should serve as a cautionary tale
Cautionary tale for who?
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc. And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.
Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?
As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?
They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.
> They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
I know it's just speculation, but the fact that Nvidia hasn't tried to scapegoat some random compliance officer strongly suggests to me that Jensen did know, and that the board has seen the paper trail that proves it.
To me the fact that it was known for a year that the affair was happening, and nothing changed implies that this is more a publicity move rather than anything else. They had to make a change, improve their brand image. Probably nothing will change in how they sell their product, the rules they skirt.
I agree that this is a more likely explanation, given the AI arms race between the US and China.
I think NVIDIA lose more things by firing Jensen.
Screw him.
He put US national security at risk just because between his wife and his other mistress, he couldn't keep it in his pants.
There are some things more important than stock valuation.
Possibly, I am a bit tired of the national security argument with hand waving vagueness. It’s generally unfalsifiable because details would be a national security risk. Meanwhile we have seen National Security concerns that were pure lies once we get sufficiently far past it.
Or, he was right by advocating for letting China buy Nvidia chips to keep China dependent on US.
> He put US national security at risk
My god, the god complex
How exactly does selling a few billion dollars of GPUs to China threaten "US national security"?
You actually fell for the propaganda?
Yes you see there are various types of national security. For example, there is the national security when a country that touted capitalism and free trade for years suddenly finds itself beat at capitalism by someone else, that's a big national security issue. Then suddenly free trade is evil and a danger and a national security issue.
This is the funniest thing to see it happen so blatantly. “National security”, what a joke.
> There are some things more important than stock valuation.
Given that the economic growth of the USA during the last few years was entirely due to this man and his technologies, I'm going to say nah.
China having access to GPUs is not a national security threat. It's an economic threat. Not sure why people treat China as some enemy nation. It's just a competitor.
Frontier AI may help China in a military conquest of Taiwan: their stated ambition.
> He put US national security at risk
It is far far worse than that - he lied to shareholders.
> he couldn't keep it in his pants.
Or maybe he just simply wanted to make more money by increasing demand for Nvidia's GPUs by tacitly allowing for them to be exported to China though Singapore.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Only by the shallow thinking - there can be more than one reason to espouse a position and they can all be valid.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
Cheating on your wife may be despicable behavior, but it doesn’t warrant firing the founding CEO of one of the most important companies on earth, especially considering how much is at stake economically, including how reliant the U.S. economy has been on AI build out spending. On the other hand, cheating on your wife and endangering national security at the same time is a different story.
> He slept with someone who worked directly under him
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Exactly. Remember the Supermicro scandal? NVIDIA has been bypassing the ban at massive scale. Everybody knew.
Links to the reporting?
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
They were allowed to sell to china, just not their top models. It was widely known that china acquired those indirectly.
What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.
Or the publicity about the affair put a brighter light on the thing that was already "widely known" and increased the need for a response.
It's widely known that luxury cars stolen in the west end up shipped to the UAE, where they're resold, frequently to Russian customers.
So for example, a stolen Porsche could end up being driven by a Russian oligarch.
Porsche is not on the hook for this. The car was stolen by a third party.
If a Porsche exec instead had sex with the thief and tossed them the keys to a brand new 911, then they might be on the hook for violating sanctions.
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
or....they figured out that the chips were ...um... untrustworthy
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
Think of this current fracas like this: Americans have a strange penchant to define themselves by sexuality. So, they are easily distracted into a trance by their hormonal and prurient interests for extended periods.
A famous guy had an island and it was extrajudicially a place where alot of powerful people internationally could come to his island and interchange info and ideas and make deals and things could occur and he collected up all that kind of stuff, including arms deals and the sex stuff.
But Americans are only right now aware of the sex stuff in what he collected up.
The sex stuff is essentially a distraction, the oily film on the deeper ocean of truth.
The green username is always very telling
Probably A/B testing. People click the salacious stuff, so that's what gets emphasized.
If it were just about the export ban, then why leak the affairs? US intelligence (which serves US corporate power only) has decided to put this guy out to pasture by any means necessary. That's the reason for this faux moral outrage. They want to make sure there's no chance he makes it out the other side.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
>then why leak the affairs
Allows the influence of selection of next CEO that is more aligned with long term Chinese goals. Or punishment for not going along with the plan.
Im not much for conspiracy theories, but if you think about it, in the state that US is in, there is absolutely zero chance US will do anything retaliatory to China if they do spy shit on US soil. China is basically free to play spy games. My guess is that they have their fingers in Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, SpaceX, and AMD, and probably other agents within NVIDIA in high places.
Their game is basically rearrange the pieces so eventually China becomes the world number one superpower, while keeping the status quo as much as possible
I'll plug our Pretrained episode from Monday here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97DW8gfCnI - this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
This comment yesterday [1] indicated that Megaspeed was not on the blocked entity list, but that NVidia voluntarily hasn't sold to them since June 2025.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121
Nvidia has always sold to China through the back door, that ain’t gonna change even with a new CEO…
What happens if all the money in the system circulating through AI companies turns out to be ill-gotten gains?
just another day in paradise [sips daiquiri]
> I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
It is currently not possible to commit treason because the United States is not at war.
Yes we are. He just needs to lay off the super hot Iranian spies. Which, good luck.
History will look back at this and see Jensen was right to do this.
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
We've had insatiable demand for Nvidia excluding China, I doubt they would have run that kind of legal risk.
there are many reasons for that kind of risk to have been taken. many reasons for a patriot to have been compelled or coerced to take it
Where the hell is your source for this?
They did not even need to sell them physically to China. Many of them ended up in Malaysian datacenters that rented them to China.
Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
well...and I am not generally a theorist but
dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open ops...!!!] may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Sad day for developers.
It will be interesting to see if there are criminal proceedings. If you or I violated ITAR or CMMC/NIST 800 there would be.
It is legal for Chinese companies to buy US neocloud time. These toothless restrictions were poorly constructed and unenforceable law. The extent to which nvda was supposed to self police is unclear. I find it hard to believe any binding evidence of direct sales will be found.
Do we know yet what the potential consequences may be? Legally or from a market/business standpoint?
The affair is what led to this, demonstrating why it actually should matter if your CEO is having one. Ethics and trust should matter.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
They didn’t sold the chips directly to China, they sold them to Megaspeed and they sold the compute to China.
It looks like there's quite a bit of them that made their way directly to China, and that they knew that was where they would eventually end up.
I've heard rumours that 20-40% of Nvidia's revenue was coming from sanctioned chips that make their way into Chinese data centres. If true, it's not small potatoes.
Wilful blindness is not a valid defense
Export ban is the wrong call
The previous and current administration.
This is obviously something that has been postponed for after the midterms.
I think they were selling to Malaysian shell companies to China.
Being compromised kinda does seem like a reason to be fired. It seemed well known he was doing it since there are plenty of photos over a few years? So it’s more she was a honeypot.
How do you know?
Does it mean we will have mass produced cheaper graphics cards? Akin to flagship killer mobile phones and other hardware? Sounds good.
I mean having an affair with someone who works below in the company hierachy, is also a huge problem (if the thing about second affair is correct)
The affairs are absolutely part of it, they show a dishonest pattern of behavior.
I am not sure I can agree. Perhaps this was the underlying reason. Perhaps others wanted to frame him and launched a media campaign. But from what I can see, at the least on the surface, to me it looks as if he was fired for liking too many women at the same time, at the least one of which might be a possible spy. This may all be fake-reasons on top to cover underlying real causes, but to me right now it looks as if the girls cost him the job here.
> Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light
Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?
Are they still in Trump's good graces? Sure, they gave him money before. But can they promise him more money again? He's pretty quick to dispose of people when they're inconvenient too.
Um hard negative to what you are saying. It is absolutely fundamental to the issue -- its compounds the issues around assessing Jensen's judgement.
This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.
Jensen is Taiwanese. Nvidia's chips are made in Taiwan, as are all the most advanced chips in the world -- including the chips in Apple and AMD products -- by TSMC. China wants to re-absorb Taiwan into itself, partially because they cannot match TSMC's geometries and they desperately need those geometries.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
Highly unlikely that China would direct a military threat at a tech CEO.
The more sane explanation is that Jensen Huang just wanted to capture more revenue.
Fuck no. Jensen did no such thing. He actually hasn’t been charged with a single crime. You’re outright hallucinating here.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
Do you think he might get the death sentence for treason?
A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.
We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.
TBH, I find the manner in which this was done to be pretty distasteful.
The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
I've seen a theory floated online that somebody inside the government, who was part of the faction advocating for stricter sanctions on China, leaked this in a way to cause maximum damage to the anti-restrictions faction. Whether Huang (female Huang) was actually a Chinese spy in the first place is also up in the air, keep in mind that while the affair has almost certainly occurred, given that Huang (male) has admitted to it himself, the Chinese spy allegations are still unverified. It could possibly have been a "grain of truth in a sea of lies" play.
> The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
Everything only comes to light with the New York Times reporting on it. It would be fine if the government did it, but... they didn't.
If nothing else, this indicated to the board that JH is capable of thinking with his dick and that can be a problem for business.
Its a threat to their own companies and whatever amount of democracy is there. Maybe ego is like some cancer that kills/self-ded structs its host/person if it gets big enough. Which is good. A persons etreme wealth gets them political power and also advantages before the law. We've seen this with big corporations.
> A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
That's literally how the world works? And has worked for many centuries or longer. By "value" you mean wealth, and wealthy people can get away with murder. They buy and write the law and have the best lawyers in the world.
We won't have billionaires/trillionaires/kings AND rule of law for /everyone/ equally - the world doesn't work that way.
Our President literally diddled kids on a Carribbean island, cheated on his wives several times, and is probably a closeted homosexual, but richest man on earth having an affair is where we draw the line.
Affairs are wrong, but they are not illegal.
> if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Hmm... I wonder why that is. Could it be because a bunch of CEOs, prominent politicians, and business people were found to have taken multiple trips to an island where the had sex with children and nothing happened to them? No, it couldn't possibly be that. I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age, while we excuse pedophilia.
> I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age,
Do we have evidence that his legally-recognized other half consented to these relationships? If so, fine. That still doesn't remove the problems with those relationships, like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset, or the fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.
>while we excuse pedophilia.
Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???
Alternate perspective:
bipartisan bill[1] needed to decapitate[2] opposition[3] to expanded controls/moratoria and install “neutral” caretakers[4] until passage
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/09/10/2026/bipartisan-ai-saf...
[2] https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2120745928722087948
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035303
[4] current CFO Kress or former Apple CEO Tim Cook (suggested by president in social media post)
Yep, this is exactly what is going on here. TLDR: Anthropic lobbying funded this coup because Jensen was pro-open weight models.
With a strict ban of chips to China, Chinese companies will not have enough compute. Without enough compute, they are not going to be able to release new open weight models.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
Interesting times
> ”it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.”
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got redirected or forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
As though the Board had no idea of this, and are suddenly acting oh gosh this is the first we've heard of the phantom SG revenue! Time for Jensen to go. Nah, not buying it. Many of the board have been w JH since the early 1990s. This is because his reckless disregard for the company and his years-long relationship with a Chinese spy.
Is this remotely believable, that one CEO can surreptitiously work around both the government and his own company to sell restricted goods at volume? If this were real you'd have to lobotomize the entire management structure, because there are a lot of people that would know and know better and that they'd face jail time. And maybe merge it with some other company quickly so it doesn't completely collapse because of the immediate mass firings to try and sway prosecutions toward individuals and not the destroy the entire entity.
I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
Why was it bad?
His argument was “we must not make it more convenient to develop a fully domestic stack”
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is a fairly reasonable adage
Nationalism is a mental disease.
Tell that to Ukraine.
> From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.
I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?
They were literally allowed to sell chips to the US branch of sanctioned Chinese companies. Same pattern as the tariff nonsense, not really opposed to any products or companies, just wants to bring all the production to the US instead. Plain protectionism, like the same car made in Germany is badly unfair, made in China is a national security risk, but once it's made in the US it's perfectly fine.
I dont think its more soo about the ban as China itself has 'officially' blocked the chips that were being licensed as exportable. I think its more of the asks that were being made by the NATSec and Amodie aligned actors (see the pod he had with Dwarkesh ), to ho tighter and more aggressive. Basically Jensen was sort of the brake on the impulsive ideas getting thrown around on how to 'win' AI and create a moat against all latecomers.
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
I think this episode proves one thing:
It would have been simpler and more profitable to sell China the GPUs.
One woman from the CCP just burned a couple of trillion out of your 401Ks. Have you said thank you even once? Are you sick of winning yet?
Well the only thing super weird is the timeline - USA bans exports, China (very soon after) bans IMPORTS! And then there's a company which keeps doing trade under the nose of the potentially two most powerful nation-states and their secret service sources. This is super fishy, really I don't buy nobody knew nothing, only for a "lucky" journalist to figure out the whole thing...
Sold to china and gave trump, whitcoff and kushner I think, 15% of sales. Almost like a bribe.
Lots of this has been known since may, and it sounds like the president was informed she was a spy a year ago.
One wonders if this happened now since the Dems took control of the investigation bodies.
If they had not, would they have kept right on as is?
Very much agreed, the second this became clear his position was untenable. He will surely have launched his unicorn by the end of December regardless, I’d be surprised if this had any tangible repercussions outside the divorce court.
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
That’s the excuse, it isn’t the reason.
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
Biggest valuation ever will turn into biggest investor lawsuit ever. The music on the AI circular deals is about to be broken by a feminine spell. This has Lord of the Rings all over it...
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
NVIDIA's latest chips were also on an export ban for several Middle Eastern countries ("security" theater). That's about the time the UAE's sovereign fund invested a large sum in Cerebras. They were still able to get the chips by way of Kuwait, which is a friendly Middle Eastern state.
Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.
Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!
Oh, it's not the repeated violations of sexual conduct with an employee, and a spy, and likely more? A CEO who is that dumb to risk his and the company trust isn't worth it. Look, a trillion already wiped out. When employees say "how dumb could he be", you know the board and major investors are saying that too.
Like the film ‘War Dogs’ but with GPUs and affairs instead of weapons and drugs. :D
Did your TV tell you that? I hope you realize that there is absolutely no proof of the import ban having been skirted. The FBI has been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed since 2024 and all they have is a few GPUs still being unboxed at their Malaysian data center.
I just find it weird that trump loses the midterms and suddenly this happens. Might be a coincident but feels very sus.
Yeah Jensen Huang is secretly Chinese.
It’s not the side chicks, it’s the side chips.
Well, you say that, but the perception is he hasn't got sacked for circular financing, nor for the providing of sanctioned components (supposedly they went to third countries, not China, so legal). But he got sacked for two affairs.
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
> national security reasons
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
I mean, an undisclosed affair with the CEO of a large customer is also a pretty big conflict of interest, regardless of natsec concerns…
>I'd love to be wrong
wong?
Pretty sure he was fucking a Chinese spy though... so...
They could not have done any of the export ban skirting without the complicity or outright cooperation of the administration.
Remind me: when did Huang direct NVDA funds to the Trump ballroom fund?
Trump greenlit H200s for China just this year.
> supposedly
According to who?
There is a wealth of reporting out there, it is harder to ignore this story than to read about it. My statement was couched and is clearly just my opinion, I'll leave the reading to you and let you form your own conclusions
He ALSO slept with a direct report, which would get most of us fired too.
Allegedly. There were no proofs of that, not confessions.
>From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
This was blatantly obvious. Do we really think Malaysia was using Billions in GPUs on some secret AI project?
Trump is on record saying Jensen should not be fired.
That suggests no treason.
yup, my NVDA puts are printing hard rn.
Let's cut the crap, it's a coup because he is in favor of the open-weight ecosystem and doesn't want to restrict models at the firmware level. Anthropic is in large part behind this.
Can you imagine if it were a female CEO fired for the same thing? Oh how the accusations of sexism and double standards and how she doesn't have to report to the board what she does with her body. The argument writes itself.
How naive do you have to be to believe that Congress actually cares about that? They don’t care and happily watch their shares rise in price.
If the second affair didn’t come out, this wouldn’t be a discussion.
The rumor is
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
I don't think so.
I think it was the affair with the direct report that did him in.
That's a bigger no-no than selling to spies, especially when the administration knew about it and did nothing.
Elon Musk has an AI bot generating explicit images without consent, regardless of age, yet nobody's firing him.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
Musk has 82% of the voting shares of SpaceX, which owns Twitter. He can't be fired, no matter how much he might deserve it.
That is simply not true, Grok refuses to make explicit images, and with uploaded media it refuses to do even mildly enticing ones. *
* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.
So all of [1] is made up?
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal
I don't know what was in back 2025. We tested it late October, 2026. Couldn't generate anything explicit at all.
There was no action taken against him when it was most definitely happening was the point, which stands.
There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this. NVidia is too big and Huang is too wealthy. This administration in particular would never prosecute that. And, even if they did, a pardon is only $1-3 million anyway.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
> I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that
For someone not familiar with American law: How the fuck is that a bigger problem than the Chinese spy ?
Is there any explicit rules at NVidia forbidding that in a code of conduct somewhere ?
It's not. That's a strange statement to make, particularly the emphasis on "married". It seems that person is implying that if a married woman participated in the affair, it was due to coercion. A sexual harassment lawsuit would mainly be a liability in the court of public opinion.
Being fired seems like a serious consequence.
> I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem
You really think Nvidia would let Huang go (without a replacement matching his skills, experience and knowledge in the field) because he cheated with an employee? It is the spy affair while Huang promoted an open export policy.
Plus thanks to Huang, Nvidia is now under investigation by federal agencies.
None of them care about a CEO cheating.
Also, being fired from the company you founded is a serious consequence.
"There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this."
Hah. He doesn't have a prenup. That's going to lead to serious enough consequences for him in divorce court.
The ban was lifted and fees were applied so there were plenty of legitimate ways to sell. I hate how inaccurate hn has become.
Except the administration has known about them skirting it since day 1.
So it’s no longer about national security. What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care? Did Jenson reduce SpaceX’s allocation?
The midterms seem like the most obvious timing. Trump has a little less power and everyone is starting to plan for what happens after him - jockeying for being able to say they didn't support this and that. If it was only being ignored because Mr Huang could donate a lot of money to Trump's ballroom that deal probably isn't as important now.
> What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care?
We all now know that Trump knew about it, that's what has changed. It was fine when this was private, but now his administration is starting to get questions around why his Commerce department punted the initial investigation to DOJ where it ultimately died as the opposition party is about to retake Congress with investigations top of mind.
Yeah, over a year ago the likes of Gamers Nexus was able to follow the clues to figure out how Nvidia was skirting the export ban.
It's hard to believe the US government was so incompetent that they didn't do the investigation a YouTuber did (But not impossible).
The export ban was always BS. Unless you are going to do a total ban and all parts are manufactured in the US, then it is just 1 additional hop to get stuff into China.
You have put your finger on it.
Likely there was at least a feeling of mutual understanding between Jensen and key people in the administration. Now the wind has turned in a big way and none of that is on paper. And in fact what is on paper points in the wrong direction.
Probably the only thing protecting NVDA from prosecution right now is that nobody in the White House wants to pop the AI bubble. That might protect Jensen too because he would entangle the company. There will be an interesting tension with congressional oversight. Buy popcorn and NVDA vol.
Oh please, nothing at all will happen to them ...
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
...maybe. Or maybe not. Consistency in application of the law is not exactly at an all-time high right now.
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
It may well be that it's his private life and it doesn't have much to do with things, but it is a contributing factor. The skirting of export bans was the reagent, but the infidelity is the catalyst that is making it much bigger.
CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?
And, there is no spy business. They just want a more compliant CEO. What a *hit show.
So many HN folks defending Huang's actions as "just an affair" - what an epic reading comprehension fail. Yes there is an affair, and that's what grabbed the initial headlines. But just read a paragraph or two and you'll find the espionage story.
For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.
Mostly the apologism is for the affair part, not the espionage part. So it kind of lines up with your points about what the important issue is.
What else did the US do in 1953 since you are so keen on it? Can think of a few things.
Everybody should be against the export ban. It's laughable to claim that it is for "national security", it's blatant protectionism to cover US AI companies for the fact that they operate at monumental losses. Any country in the world should be allowed to buy the hardware they need to run AI, if they need it, and if the roles were reversed the US should also be allowed to buy tech from other countries. Graphic cards aren't nuclear bombs, and AI is a multi-use core technology every nation on earth should have access to. So far, China has made a far better impression in that respect than the US. At least they have published open weight models.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
If the roles were reversed you’d see American battleships off the country’s Ports
Basically every technology is dual use, but still I basically agree, there is an incredible level of anti-China rhetoric in the US right now, not just on the right. The Chip export ban is incredibly tricky reason the outcomes of. For one thing, doesn’t it change the China Taiwan relationship?
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We've banned this account.
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
What's the downside of that for the economy? It seems like it would be the market becoming more efficient, cutting down on margins and so on. Bringing Nvidia back to earth might open up cheaper hardware for other companies to work with and accelerate AI anyway.
Efficiency is a great thing and long term what’s needed so we can buy laptops again at a reasonable price. There will be a pretty large blast radius across ANT/OAI/ORCL/SPCX/TSMC/neoclouds. Prob 15T of market value at risk and the flywheel of investment which is conditioned on investors and the economy believing they have durable appreciation locked up in AI stocks (“if my basket of investments is safe, I’m willing to invest my next dollar in more of it” vs “the sky is falling and I need to tighten the belt / pull money out”). I’m trying not to be a doomer here as I think it’s somewhere in the middle it’s just very frothy and the upside scenarios generally envisioned NVDA to be stable
I will be honest, my personal opinion is keep the blood flowing until RAM prices return to Sept 2025 levels.
This whole saga has been a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. There's no compelling argument that points to these new innovations not otherwise happening if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
How is nvidia crashing out going to reduce RAM prices?
The demand for high-ram consumption applications is higher than ever and rising. That demand is not created by nvidia, but nvidia's customers. nvidia's customers are buying nvidia parts built with other's ram because they have customers renting the compute.
Whoever nvidia is buying ram from will simply sell to the next highest bidder, and the ram will still be sold out through the coming years.
Because Nvidia is personally investing in a huge amount of those customers, enabling the hyperscaling. If half of the circle breaks, the other half does too.
> If half of the circle breaks, the other half does too.
If the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise.
Agreed. We all want a soft landing.
> if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
RAM prices are a result of skyrocketing demand. That's hardly a fever dream.
You can hardly blame RAM suppliers for taking the money of people who are coming to them begging to pay more than the person before them in line. It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket.It's the customers who are willing trying to pay more for better access. The innovations and the price of RAM are so non-sequitur at this point; I can't understand what point you're making. Sure, if RAM were as easy to get as the circuit boards they're being put on, innovation would be the same (or accelerated!) but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that RAM is incredibly supply constrained and ramping production to meet the demand of a seemingly insatiable market takes a long time for a product this complicated and specialized.
If any of the manufacturing companies could have seen this coming, they'd have started ramping production to insane levels 5 years ago, and they'd be taking in just as much money as Nvidia is.
It’s not a given that markets are able to navigate the risk between massive capital investment and unknown future revenues. Everyone is trying to figure out the long term value from AI. For a made up numbers example the path might require $1T investment to unlock $10T revenue in 10 years from now. But if no one can put up the $1T it stalls and doesn’t happen next decade
Spot on
It’s the wrong way by having a neutered market leader instead of strengthened competitors.
Guys going to start his own company. Surely?
He may not feel like putting out the effort. Hired by AMD could be interesting.
The hardware is expensive because it's supply constrained. Demand far exceeds supply.
Harming Nvidia would only make us more compute constrained, and raise prices further.
It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.
Harming the producers of [thing] or disincentivizing profits will not make [thing] cheaper if demand remains the same (or if it is growing, like in all of the areas I mentioned).
> It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.
What type of person are you referring to?
Have you ever considered that an efficient economy is you paying everything you have for food and living in absolute poverty
Doesn't this situation demonstrate how bonkers it is to pin the fortunes of the stock market and potentially the entire economy on the behavior of one person?
> pin the fortunes of the stock market and potentially the entire economy on the behavior of one person?
"We" don't. Media narratives over-focus on individuals and personalities because that's what humans focus on.
Markets can overreact emotionally on daily headlines and weekly narratives but tend to correct quarter to quarter. There's lots of data and examples: Apple after Jobs, Microsoft after Gates, etc. Even after losing iconic, long-time leaders, most industry-leading companies continue to make even more money, more profitably than ever over the following decade.
Can you produce me a list of people who will be better for the job than him? You are asking the wrong questions.
This doesn't seem like the right question either. Can you provide a list of unique qualifications that make Jensen irreplicable?
He started the biggest GPU company and ran it successfully for three decades?
Right, but then he resigned. So the question on all our minds is if NVIDIA should be entirely written off since losing Jensen's irreplicable talent, or if some of those skills are transferable.
Since he apparently also arranged the company so it revolved around him and no one else was in a central position to know cross silo information, how would those skills transfer?
Jensen might be the best person to lead NVidia at the moment, but that doesn't mean that NVidia dominating the market and being able to demand gigantic margins is a good thing for the overall economy.
It should not be a job - that's the whole point. Kings demonstrated how bonkers is having a single point of failure like this so it's insane people still don't get it today.
A single point of failure is also a single point of success. There’s real reasons run by committee is considered a joke.
The company should have plans in place for what to do when something happens to the CEO. Situations like this, death, or just deciding to leave. I've read reports that Nvidia didn't have this, which would be irresponsible if true, but it's not the norm. The founder leaving is likely a bit different than some other CEO coming in later, but any good CEO should be thinking about what happens to the company when they're gone so people know the company is still in good hands.
But by not having one, the CEO has a lot more leverage over the company.
good leaver vs bad
That's a fairly hysterical reading. It's a company, no one is irreplaceable.
He has no magic, but he did make some good strategic decisions.
Everyone is a god and a genius (in retrospect) if they found a multi-trillion dollar company, but the causation seldom runs that way.
Jobs founded Apple to great success, left and failed then returned to Apple to great success, then he died and Apple was fine. The company is more important than the individual. Nvidia will also be fine.
And clearly the US economy doesn't rest on the shoulders of Nvidia or AI, no matter the level of hype.
So what mechanism do you propose?
Huang has served as CEO for a whopping 33 years - hard to argue he wasn't crucial to NVIDIA's success, and how many of the board members are the original from when he was first chosen-selected and continued to be hired as CEO over the crucial early decades?
What nuanced knowledge-understanding does he have that no one else can have?
Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
Huang is known to literally respond to low-level e-mails between ICs. The idea that a CFO can take his place is ridiculous. People need to be real.
What's happening now with this situation is why communism and similar has historically been able to take hold.
> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
This is, frankly, an outlandish statement.
> Highly successful businessman.
> Behaves like a fool, risks national security to get his dick wet, has unethical affair with subordinate.
> The problem is that people like this get held accountable for their misdeeds instead of being left to do what they want!
but think of the shareholders! think of the executives who have layoffs in the hopper but can't pull the trigger yet!
> Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
Respectfully, I don't engage with conspiracy theorists
Giving Jensen credit for creating literally all of the value from Nvidia seems really over the top. He happened to be running the biggest GPU company during the biggest GPU boom ever. Sure he had an impact on the numbers and the timing, but if Jensen had never been born someone else would be heading a giant chip company around this period of time that saw it's stock take off like a rocket ship. This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.
Isn't he the entire reason Nvidia invested so heavily in tensor cores before AI even became a massive market mover? He definitely deserves credit for setting Nvidia up with a massive lead in this emergent industry.
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Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? Your comment would be fine without the "Bruh", "You are making it sound as if", and "This is ridiculous" bits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's easy to dismiss someone's life's work when you aren't the one in their shoes.
> This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.
Tell that to Intel's ex-CEO.
This could've been said of Cisco in the telecom bubble days. Or Nortel. Or a handful of other key players who were all inflating that bubble and playing games with their financials that made the bursting of the bubble worse.
Pumping billions of dollars, the source of which is obscured, into it looks like a cut out, is not just a national security problem. It undermines confidence in the numbers that you claim are the basis of shareholder value.
NVDA losing 90% would bankrupt the entire AI sector and plunge US into a deep recession.
It's not just a chip company. Those trillions of value represent bets across the their company. When the casino goes bankrupt, all bets are off.
what kind of argument is this?
the stock value just represents what people think the company is (or will be) worth, them selling products at 50% margin is what brings the money, the stock value doesn't give NVIDIA extra cash (unless they're selling or leveraging their own stock reserves to get even more cash?). And definitely shareholder value is not the economy.
and also, how is the efficiency bad now? surely that allows for innovation and other companies and people to get cheaper hardware (assuming they somehow have to lower their margins because Jensen left, still don't get that argument)
> Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.
Nonsense. Nvidia's employees created that value, not Jensen. Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created, just like in every other company. CEO worship is absurd.
Like it's an extremely common sentiment when working for a large company to look at the SVP or CEO and go "that person is a dumbass, everyone in charge is a dumbass". Yet when looking at other companies somehow we forget about that and put the companies success on the CEO or top level execs. Instead of remembering "no, it's probably the small army below them figuring out how to manage upwards to prevent the idiot in charge from tanking everything"
Those employees didn’t create it when a huge number of them worked at AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, or TI.
It took the corporate structure and top-down direction decision ATTRIBUTABLE TO JENSEN to allow them to work so productively together.
Leadership matters. Labor Talent is only able to operate at 10% effectiveness with shitty leaders in place.
You think he hired everyone personally?
CEOs in large companies do not play a role like that.
He founded the company. Everyone there is either hired by him or hired by someone he hired.
If the origin of the people who created value is the metric, aren't his parents and ancestors those who truly are responsible for creating all that shareholder value?
I prefer the view that the engineers that made GPUs have a bigger hand in the value creation.
> Everyone there is either hired by him or hired by someone he hired
If you think about that for 2 seconds you'll see that this is just wrong?
Req hoc ergo propter hoc, eh?
This tendency to credit an entire technological breakthrough to the top of an org chart is such a bizarre cliche from a systems perspective. Breakthroughs are not conceived from whole cloth within the corner offices of isolated autocracies; they are the product of horizontal networks of social capital as engineers continually circulate across firms.
Besides, individual contributors aren't incentivized to innovate insofar as we're not structurally positioned to capture a windfall.
I recognize the narrative that an army of world-class engineers is essentially inert until an executive visionary breathes purpose into them, but that's a structural property of the firm. It's a choice to route all surplus through the board and major shareholders, and to starve out any innovation that happens outside of those venues.
> Those employees didn’t create it when a huge number of them worked at AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, or TI.
I agree: we must do everything we possibly can to aggrandize the already wealthy and powerful. The glory must accumulate in their account, and the less that goes to their subordinates, the better.
You can’t convince these people. A large portion of the population is hardwired (by DNA) to be subordinate and hierarchical, for better or worse. Probably best to simply let them believe in Superheroes.
I mean Jensen even said that he does not mind the California billionaire* tax. To believe that CEOs and Founders are not replaceable is hyperbole but so is to believe that they are totally replaceable. NVIDIA clearly has a moat and are the belle of the ball, of the world economy
I agree that CEO worship is absurd but it’s a big stretch to say they are responsible for none of the value. Jensen AND the employees. And he probably created a disproportionate amount of that value compared to the average IC, I don’t think that’s in question. But is he responsible for most of it, or even 10% of it? Unlikely.
> Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created
That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
A lot of people play crucial roles in a company. HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation.
If you've ever been in a company with poor leadership and one with great leadership, you'd see the impact of it on everyone working there and on the value being created.
> HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation
Not sure about HR TBH
This is hilarious because Jensen’s idea of leadership is petty authoritarianism. I’m not sure if this is just HN being emotionally bought in to great man theory or financially bought in to NVDA, but most of their value creation is on the back of gamer chips being useful for crypto and later AI.
The children yearn for a tyrant I guess.
> That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
Yup, all of it. And at no point have I considered myself as 10,000x more valuable than any of the team members I led. Yet that's exactly what is done to billionaire CEOs.
You'll notice I did not say Jensen didn't create ANY value.
Companies rise and fall based on leadership decisions. You inability to see that highlights your lack of thought needed for true leadership.
Critical / hard decisions are worth more than just a manager telling / trusting his team to execute on x,y,z task.
Sorry, what hard decisions did Jensen make, exactly? "Hey team, I'm going to make the tough decision here to propose that next year's GPU is faster than last years"?
Do you know for sure that Jensen personally was involved in recruiting Ian Buck and starting up the CUDA project? A project that's largely attributed to John Nickolls? What other major decisions did Nvidia even make over the last, say, 15 years?
Okay, but why doesn't AMD have a CUDA equivalent in quality? Luck?
This sort of empty bitterness is a very pernicious thing. It reads as knowledge / experience, but really it’s nothing more than angry drivel. It doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before a million times.
So fire all CEOs, let employees run the company then. Blind CEO hatred is equally stupid.
They should fall first to AI replacement as they're the least useful people in a company and most susceptible to ruining the company's reputation by screwing a Chinese spy and a hot local chic.
If you think CEOs are useless, why dont you create a company without a CEO and simply outcompete Google and Amazon?
> as they're the least useful people in a company
Tell me you know nothing about running a company without telling me. Just because one CEO got caught screwing over a Chinese spy that doesn't mean all CEOs are useless people. That's just lazy generalization.
Edit: Guess I am arguing with a bot lol
Yes, this cult of personality I find completely insane. Mostly the egotists get in the way of the technical people making progress.
If efficiency is a risk for the economy then the economy is of course. Hopefully the correction can be soft and not a catastrophic pop. Maybe a slight cooling of Nvidia, caused by isolated factors, can help without crashing the whole sector.
surely the telegraph was the biggest value creator ever?
Or the steam engine, or writing, or... Shareholder value is such an obtuse way to look at the world.
The Roof was an invention the allowed us to delay the rotting of all our harvests. Pretty good.
That's a good one, I haven't thought about needing to invent a "roof".
I don't care about shareholder value. There is Schaudenfreude in seeing an AI/tech billionaire go down.
He's still one of the richest people on earth. I wouldn't exactly call that "going down."
Well, he might very well end up in jail.
> he might very well end up in jail
That's incredibly unlikely. NVidia and Megaspeed's relationship has been under constant separate parallel investigations by the Justice and Commerce Depts going back to the Biden administration. There have been no charges and Megaspeed was never even added to the blocked Entities List which would instantly ban all sales, despite the US govt being free to do so at any time with no justification or explanation needed.
It appears two things are simultaneously true:
- Thousands of banned GPUs were diverted to China.
- NVidia meticulously verified export licenses and complied with every U.S. law, export control and KYC regulation.
The under-reported fact is that while the US Govt chose not to add Megaspeed to the banned list, NVidia voluntarily placed Megaspeed on their own blocklist and stopped selling GPUs to them in June 2025. This was because the law requires NVidia to block any company they "know or reasonably suspect" is violating export controls. There is an extensive framework of Red Flags a supplier is required to check and certify are 'cleared'. The penalties for failing to do so are the same as violating export controls on cruise missiles (up to 20 years in jail, $1M per GPU ). And they can apply personally to each employee who knew. So, NVidia cut off one of their largest South Asian customers ~18 months ago, despite Jensen banging the customer's board member.
No, I can't explain it either. But those are the facts per WSJ & NYT reporting. The meta-subtext here is there have been two opposing factions on China policy inside the White House, NSC, and U.S. intelligence community since the Biden era. They are each constantly trying to sway Trump, who vacillates between them (as seen by inconsistent US policy swings). One of those factions leaked the 6 month-old Alice story a week ago in the hope of blocking Jensen's influence and access to Trump. It worked (probably better than expected). Now that Jensen is both out of NVidia and politically toxic, neither faction cares about him.
Yeah, show me people are not buying Nvidia GPUs because of this and maybe I'll sell.
I'm a normal person with a beating heart and conscience, so I don't give a damn about how much shareholder value someone has ever created, and I never will.
So you are not planning to ever retire? You never buy anything? You dont have a job?
Unless you are a subsistence farmer, everything you have in your life is thanks to the economy and "shareholder value".
Its strange to me how many people will say stuff like "who cares about the economy, I care about people" when the economy is the thing that ensures people have food and shelter and dont starve.
>> everything you have in your life is thanks to the economy and "shareholder value".
No it's not, shareholder value as understood as owning a piece of a publicly traded company doesn't produce anything on its own and it's definitely independent of the economy of a society. Could even be argued that the wealth stuck in the shareholder value is reducing the investments that could be being made in the interest of the rest of the economy.
I can easily make something and sell it to you without creating shareholder value.
And poof just like that the myth of the founder led company being untouchable has imploded. All other founder led CEOs will be watching this closely.
Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.
And we get to buy GPUs again in normalized prices. How's that bad for the economy exactly?
I’m stoked about my next computer. It does kind of suck to see one’s retirement account get cut by 30% even when in mutual funds…
How is it going to get cut by 30%? NVDA is only 6% of SP500.
Everyone else depends on them.
What exactly have any of us regular people gotten from more Nvidia shareholder value? More expensive chips and AI slop?
Nvidia stock price is now lower than it was a year ago. Has been declining for about 6 months, highly volatile, with a step sell off starting a month ago.
Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.
The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.
It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.
Nvidia makes a lot of CPUs, my dude. And network switches. They’re full stack.
> A) He never made a single product himself
This is demonstrably untrue. Jensen is an engineer through and through, and contributed significantly to Nvidia's early accelerators: from the NV1, at least to the earliest GeForces.
Ha, I was wondering if someone would bring that up! Pretty funny. How much of the shareholder value of NVidia is represented by his share of the NV1 and the earliest GeForces?
Don't even engage with these types of people. They think CEOs provide no value and anyone can do the job
> B) surely we can see in hindsight that this is a pretty goofy metric for success...? Like, "shareholder value" isn't exactly what we need at this pivotal moment in the terran story.
In the slow evolution of the human race into the Ferengi, it is absolutely a milestone!
Neither did Elon. What’s the point of A?
Long term we want efficiency. The market is SUPER inefficient right now. People are buying GPUs and stacking them up in warehouses so that they get their allocation. Companies are taking retired jet engines, and turning them into very expensive generators. SoftBank just defaulted on a bunch of power generation orders (increased cost for everyone, but didn’t create the value). My point is that it will be a painful road to get to the efficient market which will likely be a recession because of a massive slow down in spending
A is a reddit meme-argument. It assumes that the labor-theory-of-value is a fact and implies that only fungible IC's add value, whereas irreplaceable great men who organize multi-trillion-dollar companies from scratch contribute nothing. It's a way for them to advance for their silly worldview while obscuring its absurd foundational assumptions.
This slavish devotion to shareholder value above all else is pretty gross.
He cheated, multiple times, he is scum for that.
He seems to have consorted with a spy and evaded export bans. He is a criminal for that.
Oh, but he made people a lot of money? All good! /s
Throwing all morals and ethics out the window because of the eCoNoMy is insane.
The cult of personality around CEOs is unhealthy.
Both can be true. What if Jensen is a guy who did bad things and Nvidia triggers a recession because it loses its central status on AI?
If a single person was keeping the market from a recession, then that itself is the issue, not the removal of that person.
not necessarily. One athlete's performance can be the difference between a team winning and losing. One general can make the difference between winning and losing a war. No risk also comes with the downside of no reward, artificially constraining high achievers so we dont become too reliant on them just means everyone is equally low achieving
I never said there wouldn't be consequences to the economy. I said it's crazy to put up with such bad behavior to spare the economy.
The economy is everything. Ask Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
We need better markets and recessions are the cost of cleaning markets up, unfortunately.
The comments in these threads are somewhat sickening. That so many commenters here see no problem with his behavior is troubling.
Welcome to HackerNews!
Hero worshippers.
Totally agree. And that's late-stage capitalism for you. For a site named "hacker news" the hacker spirit is noticeably absent here. Instead you have simps for billionaires.
If anything Jensen Huang is the exact embodiment of the hacker spirit. An engineer who singlehandedly created one of the most valuable companies on earth by creating the chips that AI runs on.
I dont get how you can talk about the "hacker spirit" but then talk about "late-stage capitalism" (essentially the flat-earthism of economy) and tech founders.
The thing to remember every time you see the orange, so you don't forget, is that you are posting on the promotional website of a multibillion-dollar private equity firm.
This is of course true that YC provides this platform but, tapping in to my religious upbringing, it's a bit like confusing a church for the building it's in. Ycombinator owns the building that the community meets in, but the community is bigger than the landlord. The landlord can set some rules and influence what happens in the building, but if they impose too much on the community it will find a different building to meet in.
> This slavish devotion to shareholder value above all else is pretty gross.
Anti-capitalists appealing to bourgeoisie values in their zeal to destroy a capitalist icon is pretty freakin' rich.
What on earth are you talking about. The exponential growth in the 1990s, percentage wise, far outpaced the AI bubble. Go look at Intel, Microsoft, lucid, etc from the dot com boom. This is the problem with 20-somethings’ hot takes on the market: no history.
The '90's bubble is what the AI "bubble" would be if everyone you spoke to was glowing with excitement about AI, and a few niche analysts were raising concerns about capex.
Instead this "bubble" is packed with people who detest AI and have extremely bearish views on it's future. If this "bubble" does pop, I think it will be the first one in history that every single person saw coming.
Almost every bubble ever had its detractors. Yet they still happened because those who actually had decision power and market shaping power didn't care about any downsides from popping a larger bubble so they just wanted to make money.
>Almost every bubble ever had its detractors.
Absolutely correct. That's why I mentioned the niche in my comment.
But no bubble ever has been predominately detractors.
Bubbles are driven and crashed by people who put their money where their mouth is.
So online discourse doesn't matter much.
It is baffling to read comments that this is excusable or he should be retained 'in interest of the shareholders'. Setting aside the obviously poor judgement, the appearance of impropriety has serious ammunition behind a situation that already looked weird. More practically, he's compromised now. Whether it's further scandal or the impending criminal investigations, there might be further hooks people have on him.
The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.
I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".
A lot of people here hold NVDA shares, so there is a lot of conflict of interest in the comments.
I dont understand this argument, its either a shareholder concern or a criminal concern? a "conflict of interest" is a term used when a 3rd party needs to be unbiased ex government or law. You wouldn't say its a conflict of interest if your favourite sports team trades their best player
Do you make money when your favorite sports team does well?
Being a Manchester United fan, apparently not
I mean, doesn't basically everyone with a 401k?
People have a lot of net worth tied into the economy. Nvidia is a lynchpin in the economy. People are biased towards keeping their net worth up. It’s not that deep, people want the tendies to continue printing.
I find it interesting to see so much blame being directed at the act of removing one person who may have been holding up trillions of value in the stock market, rather than at the market and industry conditions that led to so much value being supported by one person in the first place.
> baffling to read comments that this is excusable or he should be retained 'in interest of the shareholders'
If you want Exhibit A for the moral corruption of Silicon Valley’s culture, this is it. And it’s not tied to shareholdings. It’s the quasi-monarchic strain of worship that has been poisoning Valley culture for at least a decade now.
One of the greatest fallacies of modern times is that people are not human. There is this expectation that people will be perfect and flawless and make zero mistakes. That is incongruent with human nature. The dude had two consensual relationships outside his marriage. To err is human... this is all so overblown.
Meanwhile we have a felon in the white house (sexual assault) among an immeasurable number of other supposed crimes
This guy had a cult of personality I did not know about until this comment thread.
"He created so much shareholder value."
"Unlike Elon he shared the wealth with the company."
"The US is worse off without him."
I'm sorry but a patsy who is this gullible, or a CCP-friendly traitor that is this slimy (the jury is still out), should not be in this position of power.
Cool for all he accomplished so far. This isn't a situation that deserves a second chance.
A company is not required to maintain a look of propriety. A company is not required to not look fishy. A company is not required to care how it is observed by the public at large. It is required only to maximize shareholder value.
There is no doubt that his sexscapades were stupid, but at the same time there is only one question that should matter for the board. Will the shareholders make more money with him or without?
“Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”[0]
Supreme Court disagrees that a company is required “only required to maximize shareholder value”, do you have any evidence to support your claim otherwise?
[0]https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/13-354.ht...
Within the constraints of the law is my understanding.
This person does not have any evidence to support their claim. The notion that shareholder primacy is enshrined in settled law (when in fact, as you point out, the opposite is true) is widely believed in the HN comments pages.
It's a simple concept to understand so pick stick to it as being the truth.
> There is no doubt that his sexscapades were stupid
Sure, but his selling into China might be criminal. Or would you also excuse criminal behavior that's profitable?
> there is only one question that should matter for the board. Will the shareholders make more money with him or without?
I think "can we trust this person to act in the best interests of this company?" is a more accurate question
I don't think these scandals are in NVidias best interest, and the hits the share value have taken seem to support that
What's really inexcusable about it? It might be part of the standard US corporate culture, but still idiotic.
He'd get more of a free pass if he had gone to JE island
I cant help but see a difference in the moral standard to which Jensen is being held compared to the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held. Why can one get away with shocking moral behaviour, but the other has to step down for a mild affair. If Jensen didnt have the affair, or it never came to light, would all of this still have taken place?
When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.
Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.
Elon and Zuck set themselves in a position where they are 51% and cannot be ousted by the board by construction.
Jensen messed up by splitting the power between all board members equally, and not getting a bunch of his family on a board.
The lesson is that if you do the right, non-authoritarian thing, you get punished
This isn’t a case of being punished for doing the right thing. The right thing is retaining control of your own company and doing so is not “authoritarian”.
Sorry but IMO this sort of company structure should not be allowed. Private companies should not be able to issue stocks the way Zuck & Elon have. Pull Meta’s charter and redistribute their assets. Let that serve as a notice to Elon that he’s next.
This is a terrible idea.
ah, well, I'll just have to take your word for it, since you've articulated no form of case whatsoever
Under that standard why not just strip you of all your wealth and property and redistribute it? You’re not deserving of anything at all.
The argument is that the shareholders who own the majority of a company's stock (by value, not voting rights) should be able to control the company, not a minority owner. It is the corporate structure that allows guaranteed minority control (e.g. Zuckerberg owns something like 13% of Meta, but controls 60% of the voting power). In a free market, why should publicly traded companies be allowed to sell "shares" that are not ownership in the traditional sense?
In an actual free market the distinction between “public” and “private” company would be really just some transparency/accounting standard or set of standards set by the particular exchange(s) that the shares were traded on.
And just to be clear in practice, stocks are not priced based on their voting rights but rather expectations of their future cash flows (dividends) or simply how much the stock is expected to go up or down by. A lot of modern financial activity is nonsense.
If you really want to actually understand what a company is you should go look up when corporations became a thing and why. It had to do with various legal protections to stimulate economic activity and tax revenues.
All of these modern notions and principles that you’re invoking or basing your arguments on about ownership are most likely just contrived nonsense. These aren’t necessarily eternal principles of anything.
Sorry but making laws retroactive is authoritarian. We should make it illegal to propose such things and put you in prison.
Ask almost anyone here and they'll tell you that the C-suite are mostly a bunch of morons who don't know anything about technology, and now you want to ensure that businesses can only ever be run by such technologically illiterate morons, not founders? Insanity!
So if you don't want to to happen just don't issue shares on the stock market ?
No, it's a case of consequences for making incredibly poor personal decisions while being in a very visible position in a very visible company.
The man is smart enough to know he was playing with fire, and he got burned. The literal definition of FAFO.
Having a libido is fairly normal for most non-castrated men, at least historically speaking. In modern times, men are in seemingly depressed and in general need of various pills to help with erectile dysfunction, which perhaps in part explains the low birth rates.
What is it that you’re actually trying to say here.
To be honest, I don't know how to succinctly tell you that this is a bad take. For starters, that company has hoovered enough tax money that we should all be on the board. Secondly, encouraging family feudalism is crazy if you even claim to be a supporter of capitalism and the free market. Thirdly, you're not a tech baron and never will be, especially if you can't trust that your investments are concerned with your interests and goals due to CEO exceptionalism. Just saying. If he was a judge, he would be disbarred. This company wants to be a stupid percentage of our GDP, so they're gonna have to suck it up and hold themselves to the standards of a public office.
He’s not a judge, he’s a private citizen, he holds no office. Your thinking is very confused.
I think you’re confused on the essence of what he was trying to say.
The comparison was drawn because when you are such a position of power, your actions have such a monumental sway. Thousands, millions of people’s of lives are impacted, for better or for worse. In Jensen’s case, that’s up to the court of public opinion.
However the thinking is that when you are in that position, a just and fair society would probably want to keep just and fair and morally tact people in those positions.
IMHO I don’t care what way you want to spin it, when you have that level of influence over one of the major drivers of the AI boom, you have INCREDIBLE power compared to what most people think of when you say “private citizen”.
The court of public opinion is steered by the media, which is entirely orchestrated. You can't pander to the mindless masses, that's a suckers game.
Agreed. The fact that he gets this perception while Musk has repeatedly betrayed the US's best interests shows that things like rationality and merit have gone out the window. However, don't mistake this for me excusing either of their behavior. Neither are not suited for that level of responsibility.
Yep. I learnt that lesson early on in my company. Never lose control of the board.
A lesson for future entrepreneurs. Follow the rules and lose.
Right. Maybe there's also some lesson about not cheating on your wife and skirting around export bans.
He followed the rules?
Are the rules "you must not control your own company"?
Putting his wife on the board would definitely not have helped lol
> The lesson is that if you do the right, non-authoritarian thing, you get punished
Cheating on your wife and betraying your country is the right, non authoritarian thing? We arent having this discussion for any other reason than those two events happening. Its an insane lens of entitlement to view the situation as if he should indefinitely retain ownership due to ... what? Existing? But never have any of his actions have consequences. That's the promise you make by positioning the board shares in that manner: you promise to have accountability. Finding it a weakness to answer to others for your actions is definitely a popular style of thinking amongst the current group of wanna-be authoritarians in the presidential cabinet, "strange" how your first two examples of CEOs unwaveringly align with that political faction huh?
In neoliberalism, there is no such thing as society (Thatcher). When there is no society, you can't be held accountable for previously non-acceptable moral transgressions.
If you are competing in a neoliberal environment where other companies play by these rules, you are at a disadvantage if you are following some superset of them.
I am not saying that he has done 100% right things, I am just saying that if he set himself up in the same way as his competitors, he would have been fine. Maybe he would have to pay some fine/bribe, similar to what the prior 2 have done for their infractions against the people.
> the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held
Elon’s comparable fuck-up was betraying Ukraine with his Starlink intervention. It’s a huge deal. Unlike Nvidia, he has no Board to hold him accountable, it will have to be done by the Congress and states. (Europe will be useless as usual.)
As a result, that hammer will fall much more directly on his companies. It will just take more time to do so.
Zuckerberg, to my knowledge, hasn’t compromised American security in a comparable way to these two.
You may think its a huge deal, but I guarantee nothing will come off this at all.
> I guarantee nothing will come off this at all
I had this exact conversation about Jensen with a Silicon Valley executive checks notes on Monday night.
There is a bubble that doesn’t seem to see the wave of contempt across the American political spectrum for these executives.
First, I think it’s important we all remember that NVIDIA issued this resignation. NVIDIA’s board != Meta’s or any other company’s board. So there is no double standard because it’s not the same people.
Second, there is no proof that any moral standard is being applied at all. This could (and in my opinion likely) have nothing to do with a moral standard and more to do with extenuating information uncovered in the investigation or a strategic shift to protect against the current admin. There is likely so much happening behind the scenes and so many people have so much money to lose, I think it’s prudent for us to first exhaust all non-moral possibilities (unfortunately).
Jensen isn't stepping down for the affair. He's stepping down because the affair was with a Chinese spy, and his words and actions appear to have facilitated circumvention of exports bans to China, and he concealed it.
Shareholders don't care that he's having sex outside his marriage.
No one really cares, in the grand scheme, that he had affairs. He's being ousted because he potentially compromised national objectives. The NVDA board knows that senate hearings are coming, and want to make sure they have distanced the company from him before that happens (and all the text messages, emails, and details come to light).
The biggest questions are:
1. Did Jensen knowingly compromise national security (criminal implications) 2. What is the fallout / impact in the AI arms race
I do think a lot of people are projecting their societal and marriage expectations onto Jensen. They're expecting that he should follow the same set of standards they follow with their partner. Yes, monogamy is the societal norm - but it is not a requirement of a relationship. And, it is certainly not a requirement of a relationship that you're not a participant in.
In my eyes, this all comes down to the perception that someone is able to be compromised by non-monogamy. Jensen came out, apologized to his wife, and (at least publicly) communicated that he broke the expectations and boundaries of their relationship. This clearly communicated that a secret relationship compromises his position. And, should there be more secret relationships they'd continue to be used as leverage.
Musk isn't subject to this leverage because it's pretty clear that his relationships are not built on traditional definitions. Non-monogamy is either a clearly defined boundary in his relationship or simply not something that concerns him as leverage.
Who was Jensen having an affair with?
You’re glossing over (or rather, not even mentioning) the fact that one of the women is a Chinese spy and the other is an exec.
I think the main issue is Jensen crossed the bright red line of national security. Whatever Zuck or Elon did they were nowhere near as political damaging.
I think they're both turds, and so are Gates and Bezos for cheating on their wives.
I feel like it might be a cover up for something deeper? I honestly have no clue, it just seems off
Why do you think Elon has involved himself so directly and closely in politics? He spent almost half a billion to ingratiate himself with Trump and co.
Skin color. Can you imagine if Jensen were even remotely associated with Epstein file?
Slippery slope ?
this isn't about a moral standard; no one cares about the affairs
the board must know that the risk of Jensen staying on (likely due to whatever hasn't yet been brought to light) is greater than the risk of instability by firing him; whatever is unknown to us must be pretty serious (again, not in terms of more affairs, but other stuff, like selling chips to China or whatever)
Meta's board probably would have fired Zuck over the CA scandal but they were unable to because of the company structure
Elon Musk has no accountability. He has effective control over the boards of his companies. Shareholders know that the value of their shares is predicated largely on this one man, so removing him would destroy their value.
Government could hold him accountable, and some of those gears have been turning over the last decade. In response he has spent a lot of money trying to steer elections and gain the influence of the ones in power to try to avoid accountability from that direction as well.
The double standard is that if you play capitalism well enough you are shielded from the consequences that others would face.
Musk and Zuck should both be in jail.
Elon made Tesla using Chinese automation, and China was its second biggest market (and largest for some models). Even though there are the same export controls for Chinese EVs, Elon managed to get around it politically. And lastly, Detroit isn't as shameless and ruthless as Ant/OpenAI are.
This is wrong and made up. Tesla was made in America, if anything they acquired a german automation company. No export controls existed to be subverted.
What kind of a shill are you exactly? U post a lot about China
I mean the guy tried to break a national security law.
Yes Elon and Zuck are abhorrent, but when they have tried to break the law, they have been held accountable in some sense. Not to the extent that they deserve it, but still.
If they become as big a libility to their businesses, even their controling shares won't save them
Musk and Zuckerberg are simply more politically shrewd.
There’s no actual evidence that Huang broke a national security law. Even if there is, we need the federal prosecutors to say so rather than random commentators on the internet. Even when prosecutors say so in this country we presume people to be innocent until proven by court to be guilty. I have personally looked into the rumors and I don’t believe Huang broke any law.
What shocking moral behavior has Elon shown? Supporting Trump? Removing far left censorship from Twitter?
shocking moral behavior? a lot of things comes to mind. Asking Epstein for the wildest night in the island is among them.
shocking illegal behavior? Buying votes in an election with his 1 million per day republican votes lottery.
The list is large and clearly Elon has been much more damaging to the public than Jensen but he has spent much more to be close to politicians so no consequences for him.
bwoah i don't know...DOGE, """roman salute""" on stage, supporting the AfD and other far-right parties, pushing far-right propaganda and conspiracy theories on X, throttling Starlink in Ukraine, misleading investors, empty promises, possible Epstein connections, breeding a dozen of kids and not caring about them, supporting and donating to DJT as you've said, i could go on but it seems futile.
Just a sad state of affairs. Jensen was by far the biggest voice pushing for open weights and keeping the Anthropic / OpenAI doom narrative from getting out of control.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
Only because it benefits NVIDIA to have more potential customers in the shovel market to mine gold individually versus consolidating within a few providers (where the backend tooling becomes irrelevant to the consumers, and OpenAI & Co could freely change GPU manufacturers on a whim or move things in-house).
Which is why he got railroaded.
Entirely preventable on his part. If he had kept his dick in his pants, he wouldn't be in this mess.
If you want somebody removed at that level, and you actually can, you can invent reasons. Jensen having an alleged affair makes it easier for them, and that's it. It's also probably less bad for Jensen that it's only an affair that Jensen is going out on, as invented reasons could be worse for him (like sexual assault allegation by three different women, for example). Just saying, I have seen it happen.
Stop with the gaslighting. This was nowhere close to an "invented reason."
He fucked a communist spy and he admitted he did it.
Not only that, everyone in his orbit was running interference for months before that on a DIFFERENT affair with a subordinate[0]. Why was everyone covering for him if there really was some conspiracy to "railroad" him? Or maybe Sam Altman's coordinating with China to honeypot CEOs because reasons?
0. https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/nvidia-jensen-huang-affair-...
No, you misunderstand me. I am not saying it was invented. I am saying, had Jensen not provided an easy ramp, reasons could be invented. I have seen it happen.
I am saying it here:
> Jensen having an alleged affair makes it easier for them, and that's it.
>He fucked a communist spy and he admitted he did it.
The communist spy is the invented reason. There has been zero evidence presented that Alice Huang is a spy for the CCP, and if they did have evidence it would have been more appropriate to charge Jenson last year when the Trump administration was made aware of the relationship.
Everything about Alice being a honeypot has largely been hearsay.
So you think there is no there-there with Megaspeed?
And you think he was stupid enough that he thought that these would never be caught?
They'd find another way to nail him.
you random people have no idea have billionaries live btw. you eat media BS instead
Enlighten those random people.
I can't cause I met few, several times + signed NDA. Too serious to share via comments here? I don't wan to be sued but I believe what my eyes saw
Wow, you're very wise and mysterious.
your nick should be kingvagueposter instead
Only if he was fired for the affairs. He could have funneled chips to China fully clothed.
For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.
> I do feel for Jensen
Why? He caused this. He chose to have affairs with a spy and a subordinate. Now he has to deal with the consequences.
I think a lot of people might also disagree with the consequences. Something along the lines of - if it’s all consensual then why does it matter. Disclosing trade secrets (wittingly or otherwise) or skirting export ban is a separate matter that does have real legal consequences if proven true.
It remains possible to feel sympathy for people who have done wrong. He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
Why would I have sympathy for him? Sounds like he got what he deserved
Because its the human thing to do.
probably feeling pretty terrible that he finally got caught?
based on the reporting about the second affair, it's possible his security has had to shut down similar witnesses in the past.
> It remains possible to feel sympathy for people who have done wrong.
It does remain possible; he's a parasite and someone who's just had an affair. He wouldn't value the sympathy given, Neither himself or Nvidia would return the gesture.
They give null shit about you.
> He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
He chose to have the affair and as having my father do the same to my mother; you get no sympathy for cheating. Let them feel pretty terrible, maybe they will find what it's like to be human for a change.
Nothing more than a parasite in the corporate playground. His actions caught up with him; woe is me. What will I ever do with so much money.
Sympathy isn't absolution. Do you not have mistakes you live with? I hope he's okay in the same way I hope everyone is okay.
This is his identity. Sure, he’s made some poor choices. Imagine Jobs resigning at the height of iPhone phenomenon or Gates at the very peak of Windows. Not sure if Jensen can bounce back from this psychologically. He’ll be broken for awhile.
It’s possible to have empathy for sinners. We’re all human.
I agree. I think the biggest issue is to not have empathy for sinners and you think you are a saint…
It's like if, after a shooting, you were worried about the shooter having to go to jail instead of wondering about the people shot.
spending your empathy on billionaires rather than people being screwed over by billionaires is a choice.
Let's not forget him most likely knowingly breaking US export laws. Some might even call that treason.
You mean he knew she was a spy?
Exactly. I don't feel bad for a billionaire who operates in an extremely unethical fashion.
> "And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago."
Apparently I am able to, what was that?
Apple used nVidia GPUs in most of its computers. Around 2008-2009, nVidia produced a line of faulty GPUs that were used in the Macbook Pro. This led to widespread hardware failures, and was known as "Bumpgate" because the problem was caused by faulty solder bumps inside the GPU chip. nVidia refused to fully reimburse Apple for repairs because it wasn't contractually obligated to do so. In response, Apple switched away entirely from nVidia GPUs.
I think it was well into 2013 because both the 2011 and 2013 MBPs I had suffered from it. but I thought that was an apple issue (ie not soldering the dicrete gpu well enough to save money on it)
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
The infamous early 2011 MBPs had AMD GPUs that basically crapped out the entire logic board. That was what got me to switch back to Windows.
You are missing out, the M series laptops are insanely good. Now wondering how the field of ML would have developed if Apple had had Nvidia chips all the way...
No, it was Nvidia because of the way the BGA solder was done. The problem was across manufacturers.
And that's kidna funny because now Apple Sillicon has pretty great graphics on their own.
Maybe that's the lesson he learned and why he _supposedly_ was making sure his GPUs were still getting to China. Because he knows that the alternative would lead to good Nvidia Chinese competitor later on
I don't remember either, but I do remember Linus Torwalds not being entirely satisfied with NVIDIA. That is actually something very hard to forget.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
Every time I have to reinstall CUDA, I fondly remember this video.
Nvidia eventually had a spat with just about any corporation it has ever worked with. Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
TSMC?
from what i remember, morris chang is a close friend to hueng.
i wonder what will happen to nvidia's relationship with TMSC now.
Morris is almost 100 years old. His role at TSMC was instrumental, but now is more of an ornamental figurehead.
> Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
But even then, the original Switch 1 homebrew relied on an oversight in NVIDIA's Tegra chip that blew open the whole platform due to the ability to execute unsigned code. The Switch 1 was actually pretty locked down. Nintendo worked hard on securing it properly, only for it to all be for naught due to their SoC vendor making a massive blunder.
I wish I could have seen what was said in the meetings between the two companies when the first Switch exploit was released, considering it was fully on NVIDIA.
Yeah but that was only 1st gen and Nintendo can be just as much to blame for exposing it so easily. They fixed the second rev.
Megaspeed? :-P
This is undoubtedly the most painful professional moment in his career which has been almost entirely Nvidia.
and entirely preventable. FAFO
7th richest person in the world. Has multiple side pieces. The horror, the horror.
Success in some areas of your life does not insulate you from tragedy. The guy still puts his jeans on one leg at a time. Probably very expensive jeans he throws away after one use...but still. The human condition cannot be escaped.
This includes his family and the family of those involved in the affair. Many lives were turned upside down.
The guy has enough money to buy an island in French Polynesia and never leave it for the rest of his life. You are correct he is still human, but he can do pretty well at making a new life for himself where he doesnt have to ever think the word Nvidia again.
In 10 years he will have a new family and new friends and this will be a distant memory for him.
Yeah, it's just potentially a little light treason, what could go wrong
Yeah, pretty small potatoes compared to the current US president.
But the President is an untouchable. Huang isn't.
Trump will get away with everything he's done. Rubio, Vance, Kennedy and Hegseth won't.
The current chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee proudly wears a foreign military's uniform on Capitol Hill, so probably nothing.
It isn't the tragic human condition to have affairs. It's a choice he made with his free will. There is no need for apologia; he could simply have not done it.
Humans being fallible and not being able to resist our urges is indeed part of the human condition.
He worked at Dennys in Portland for a while, so... He can always lean on that experience if needed.
I think he will be ok with $50B+
In this economy, that might just cover his rent until next month.
He is hoarding dozens of billions of dollars. He does not need your feelings, he needs a wealth tax.
That’s a strange argument. His wife owns half of these dollars, so no one should feel for her as well?
(I personally don’t care about Jensen. I just don’t think that “people don’t deserve sympathy because they are billionaires” makes any sense.)
Being a billionaire is a choice to continue to hoard resources that could be put to useful purposes instead. Yeah, I don't have much sympathy for people who choose to squander our society's resources like that.
Does a billionaire who became billionair by marrying a person who became a billionaire also bears the responsibility of hoarding because they choose to marry that person and not divorce early?
He's not hoarding crap. Man's probably got maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars in free cash, the rest is all loans, stocks, investments and properties.
The only people that should be wealth taxed is leeches like you that see how utterly corrupt the state is with how it handles tax dollars and wants to give it more money.
Nah. He could sell most of that stock and it could be put to useful purposes while making no difference whatsoever to his life. It could be used to build housing, or pay teachers more, or build libraries, or found new companies, or pay off medical debt, there's thousands of things it could be used for. Instead he's just sitting on it. This is hoarding.
Wrong tree?
> Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Backs California Billionaire Tax Despite Potential $8B Bill
> "I don't mind paying taxes. The more you make, the more taxes you pay. I'm okay with that," Huang said
Jensen has been one of the few outspoken billionaires for promoting higher taxes on himself. In fact, only he and Buffett come to mind as the members of that category.
Then again, below is a 2024 article from the NY Times claiming Jensen was taking advantage of loopholes to save $8 billion on taxes. Actions speak louder than words so perhaps his more recent messaging about being in favor of higher taxes on himself was the result of a PR effort, given his rapidly increasing visibility.
However, I imagine that any good accountant would strongly recommend saving $8 billion on taxes like Jensen did before 2024. The article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/business/nvidia-jensen-hu...
It's not necessarily inconsistent. You can support improvements to the tax code while also optimizing for the current version.
Things Jensen has said are now all suspect. Does he really believe this or is it just his day time positioning, in contrast to his nighttime positioning that cost him his job
Owning part of the company he built isn't hoarding, kiddo.
Tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people built that company, kiddo.
They did the jobs they were given and were well compensated for it. This fact has no bearing on whatsoever on the claim that Jensen is "hoarding" his shares in the company that he created.
He could give away >95% of his wealth and it would make no difference at all to his life. He would still have the exact same life he has now. That wealth could be put to useful purposes, but isn't, because he is sitting on it. That is hoarding.
You could also fall in a well and would probably make no difference to the world.
Wonder if he'll enjoy his retirement or end up like Marlo Stanfield at the end of The Wire.
I feel for his wife, personally
> He built this thing from an absolute scratch.
Pretty sure all those nVidia employees over the years had a bigger hand in building it.
I mean they obviously didn't because they never would have been working together without the founders.
Right. I'm sure if you got all of those employees in a room together with no vision and no Jensen, Nvidia as we know it today just pops out, right?
“The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.” -Elbert Hubbard
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/
Aha. So now we know why the world is in such a sorry state.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of AI chip startups right now. So yes is a very reasonable stance to your question
It's CUDA, indeed, only Jensen can do it
Allegedly Ai does it better now, and there is more than CUDA these days
The idea that only one person matters is a plague on society
This is why socialism/communism won the Cold War. They got rid of entrepreneurship, yet new and innovative companies just spontaneously self-assembled for the greater good!
I, too, feel for the billionaire adulterer.
Jensen's the most pro-open weight guy and calmest on China public figure at that level.
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
Tin foil hat take: I think Jensen's been sniped.
> We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments.
Huh, hadn’t heard of any actually, examples?
>Tin foil hat take: I think Jensen's been sniped.
By whom?
Big CEO has affair, even with the intelligence angle, is pretty routine kompromat fodder.
The normal pathway would be that this would be disclosed to said horny capitalist via state security, with the understanding that they'll behave in certain circumstances and that it will be ensured that things go no further. This is a win for Uncle Sam.
That this didn't happen is telling. Obviously, cui bono gives quite a long list, but the state would have needed to be on side.
You know, _them_
Jensen AND Elon AND Sam should all go. They have all proven to do enormous damage to the US and its allies
That's why they should all stay. And ideally export the corruption and stupid business culture to China so they get hit too. I want a world that's not dominated by one or two powerful countries.
Jensen is being outed by his board.
The others do not have a board capable of outing them. It has, in fact, been tried and discussed at length.
It's not a conspiracy, this is what happens when you don't give one person total control through manipulating the board and stock. You fuck up and get the axe.
The difference between Musk and Huang is that Musk has engineered such control of his companies through dual class listings that there really is no one who can fire him. Having said that, people are very openly talking about the fact that Musk is going to spend the next couple of years spending quality time with the US congress explaining in minute detail why he's not a traitor.
The other big difference between the two is that after the last election, Musk (with Trumps help) essentially put himself in a position where he basically controlled the federal government for 6 months and did whatever he wanted with no consequences. It's a lot easier to commit crimes when you fire all the people who are trying to stop you..
> Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective.
Like what
Oh brother, have you been living under a rock?
Hmmm I don't know like limiting Starlink on Urkainian drones? Like repeatedly meeting with Putin and failing to disclose it? Failure to report foreign contracts? The fact that he was denied Special Access Program clearance (we don't know why)? The fact that he has over $1B in loans from state controlled Chinese banks? Campaigning on behalf of the far right AFD party in Germany?
I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference for unsigned and registered open-models in the firmware of modern GPUs. Anthropic and others are pushing hard on this. First the hardware export ban, eventually the software one via hardware-enforced execution controls like IETF hinted at
It's obviously the biggest concern.
Either through technical means, or simpler: by law for American providers. It's hard to believe the administration was not aware of Jensen's affiliations all this time. And time is pressing for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Only conjectures for now, time will tell
Yeah, this is the biggest concern that I have regarding this whole story.
Is there a source for this? I googled it and this was claimed to be satire
Not really tbf, it's an extrapolation. As far as I am concerned, there is growing concern, with Anthropic coordinated lobbying against open weights. The point I am making is we need strong Hardware actors consistently standing for hardware neutrality and integrity. Historically, NVIDIA has been very pro open weights. But at the same time, in-silicon guardrails seem to become the new thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879883
Makes you wonder what would happen if the US ever wanted to enforce "certified US AI" on its chips
I'm curious how effective something like that would really be.
Nvidia can certainly put up some guardrails that will sound impressive to the dinosaurs in Congress, but can it really stop China from using those GPUs anyway?
This is a simplification, but is this not in some way similar to how the Switch 1 has hacked due to a design flaw on Nvidia's Tegra chip?
In the same way, even if their GPUs get this protection, wouldn't a state actor figure out how to get around it?
Of course it will. That's the entire point of this. It has nothing to do with an affair.
> I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference..
lol had to read this several times due to all the negatives
finally got it - "I hope NVIDIA continue to allow inference..."
Wow. Finally found a human in the comments
Definitely, expect future GPUs to run only signed LLM models with mandatory online attestation and reporting.
I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that
I think the point is that whether he did or didn't, there's so much smoke now, that Nvidia is going to be spending the next few years getting drilled by absolutely every law enforcement agency and government. Even if it genuinely turns out that nothing even slightly bad happened, it's quite damaging the amount of scrutiny Nvidia is going to be under for the foreseeable future.
> Nvidia is going to be spending the next few years getting drilled by absolutely every law enforcement agency and government.
Sounds like this was known or suspected at the highest levels of the administration (Rubio was discussing it per recent reporting). So the question becomes: did Nvidia use a cut out to knowingly avoid the export ban, and if so, did the administration know this?
Especially after Democrats now control both House and Senate, that too by a wide margin.
It’s not the infidelity part, it’s the undisclosed relationship with a subordinate part. That’s covered in HR training and is a fireable offense in every company I’ve been part of.
While it's a fireable offense, my experience with senior management has been that the company is more than happy to help cover it up for them... until they do a bad, and then it becomes a quick ticket to can them without having to admit the real reason for canning them.
Three things: Selling GPUs and knowingly avoiding legal restrictions
A relationship with a foreign agent
An inappropriate relationship with a subordinate
Two of these potentially have serious legal consequences.
>That’s covered in HR training
Oh sorry Jensen you broke one of the rules in the HR handbook we have to fire you now nothing we can do.
It's in the handbook so that people who ignore the law don't have the excuse of ignorance.
It isn't an arbitrary policy.
Was he the only one who knew?
This.
It makes absolutely no sense to fire him strictly for the relationships. So it's either deeper legal concerns or the board has other grievances and is using this as an excuse.
Everyone on that board will have had knowledge of GPUs going to China. Everyone on on THIS board has knowledge about GPUs going to China. Jeez.
I'm going to suggest that everyone or a lot of people on the board likely knew about the affairs as well. Jensen wasn't exactly hiding it.
This is a CYA move by the board as all this is becoming public.
They had some amount of plausible deniability until the "spy" story made the news then they didn't.
If the reporting is to be believed, they ended up selling around $7.5B to China through Singapore.
They did ~$90B in revenue last quarter.
I sometimes can't imagine the avarice it takes to do things like this. Could you imagine having a $100 bill in your hand and going "Yea, I'll break the law and possibly destroy my life to steal $7.50"
The difference between 100 billion and 107.5 billion is a 7.5 BILLION dollars.
Another way to put it is the difference between 75 MILLION and 7.5 BILLION is rounded to 7.4 BILLION.
The scale of numbers is huge and it is not just another 7.5 billion dollars.
So, you think that crime is good? What's your point here?
Yeah it’s great.
It'd be so funny if he started actually sharing knowledge to China out of spite after all these. I know he is way too rich to do that, but one can dream.
sounds like the administration knew it too.
I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support. This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
He's the chief architect of this. I hope the ones he's hurt along the way have support.
He’s also the chief architect of one of the most influential companies in the world. How many people has he positively affected?
He makes overpriced computer chips... he isn't gandhi.
He is changing the course of history, maybe even more impactful on a global scale than colonial conflict
I'm dying to know how other tech CEOs rank on your "historical figures ordered by importance" list. Like, do you think Steve Jobs was more or less important then Harriet Tubman?
Globally? Honestly he probably was. Hundreds of millions of people have access to heath and finance resources they wouldn’t have got without the modern smartphone form factor and forced negotiation of unlimited data plans.
Ask someone in Bangladesh who the fuck Harriet Tubman is.
AIUI, the rise of mobile telephony in the Third World was driven almost entirely by feature phones, not the kind of smartphones that Jobs helped to drive.
Telephony, yes. The services that are making massive impact now are dependent on smartphones.
Bro... get a grip. He's one dude whose jobs is to boost stock prices, the company will be fine.
Screw the stock price. If you looked into the history of how the company survived you know the company is now Intel. The US has probably lost yet another industry to China. Wonder if the Taiwan investments into the US fabs will now slow because a lot of them were relationship based...thanks to Jensen.
I hope I am wrong but I am starting to think the US left is about to walk into a historical economic collapse that they are inevitably increasing the chances of by 'doing the right thing'.
You don't seem to understand how the economy and competitive forces work, nor how hierarchies of competency function and work.
I suspect you hypocritically have and will continue to benefit from his work that he started as their CEO 33 years ago.
I just shed a tear thinking of how much shareholder value he created over the course of his career.
I'll be sure to tell that to my kids while I put them to bed today.
Or maybe they understand better than you.
I hope this kicks the legs out from under the "circular financing"[0] that has enabled slop to permeate seemingly everything good about computing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting
Really shows you how out of touch the tech world is with humanity and what average people care about.
And how many has his influential company affected negatively?
That isn't the way the world - or most morality systems - work.
A surgeon who saves a thousand lives doesn't get a pass for the one murder they commit.
If the person who eventually cures cancer also happens to be a rapist, do you remember their name with awe or pity?
The sort of Felicific Calculus practiced by the "Effective" Altruists is a tawdry trick designed to excuse despicable behaviour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect
And yet you've a convicted felon who vacationed on Epstein island sitting at the highest office in the land, or even in the world.
> How many people has he positively affected?
I honestly don't care. It's not a balance sheet to me.
> How many people has he positively affected?
What's your definition? People he sold a GPU to at extortionate markups?
What’s the revenue target I need to hit to get a free pass for sanctions avoidance? What other rules, regulations and laws do you think he should be absolved from considering NVIDIAs quarterly profits?
To call it a hit job is absurd. He is smart enough to know his actions could have severe consequences. He took a massive risk on behalf of millions for his own momentary pleasure.
Not a single inch of empathy for his wife and family, nor the misled investors and staff.
I think you're misunderstanding - I think the suggestion of a hit job is because of the timing of all this coming out.
His affairs have been going on for months or years, so much so that various places knew about it, did nothing to stop it, and didn't leak it.
I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?" Nobody seems to know. In the absence of any other explanation, suggesting "hit job" isn't absurd.
> I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?
1. Got too well known to hide
2. Republicans just badly lost the midterms. There is a lot of info that the President and head of Department of Commerce also knew about all of this the entire time and did nothing. They won't be able to stop investigations, and they don't want to be seen as getting in the way of them.
If that's true, the bigger story is not just that Jensen did all this, but that the administration likely knew he was guilty of Espionage and actually helped facilitate it by knowing but not acting. That is a real possibility.
To clarify, there is a possibility that the President of the United States and members of his team knowingly concealed and aided Conspiracy and Espionage against the United States.
My guess would be it having to do with Jensen's friend in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue recently losing a ton of power.
I'll tell you what's absurd: Believing the Chinese government sent a spy to honeypot Huang into providing chips to Chinese companies, while everything about their public policy has been designed to prevent exactly that.
The Chinese government wants Chinese companies to buy Chinese chips.
Indeed it seems absurd, but maybe the Chinese government sent a spy to honeypot Huang into destroying (indirectly) its own company instead - knowing how western culture react to such events.
Mission accomplished
Do you find it implausible that there is any reason the Chinese government would want to spy on NVidia?
He cheated on his wife. More than once. Fuck him, let him be stressed.
Who says she's didn't know or even if she cares?
> 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.
I don't understand what compels people to make up scenarios to defend people who have come out and said the opposite.
Not defending, but it's also clear that the statement is meaningless.
Probably more meaningful then something you a third-party/bot just made up and shared on a message board though...
I think the "formal apology letter" wouldn't have existed if this was some sort of open-relationship situation. In that case, Huang violated an important agreement, and cannot be trusted to not violate other important agreements.
He’s forced to even if she were a full poly lesbian, because they both live in The United States.
Well you could read the letter he wrote but why when you can just ask empty edgy questions to farm karma.
Framing a pretty basic question as "edgy" is pretty silly.
The world as a whole is pretty conservative, people like to project the happily married couple image regardless of reality of the relationship.
it's the empty part that makes it edgy.
Ah. So you know their relationship? Whether it's an 'open marriage' or not? Whether the wife cheated first, or not? You're of course, in the know, so you can judge, yes?
He could have done a wrong thing. Or the affair could have been perfectly fine with his wife. Or the marriage could have been on the rocks for years, and they both agreed to not divorce, with all the drama and media attention, and just live their own lives.
But you know all this is true, or not true.
Yes?
I agree with your sentiment in general: we should not make assumptions about the parameters of others' relationships.
But in this case, Huang himself explicitly mentioned the hurt that he caused his family. I don't think it gets much clearer than this.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/08/nvidia-jensen-huang-email-bo...We don't know how much of that is "what public expects" in such situation vs what is actually true.
Even if his wife doesn't care it would be wise to keep this apology style, rather than try to go with cliche "its not as bad as it looks".
This is just some basic PR letter, no one from his family actually cares about corporate theatrics
He wrote himself a press release saying he was unfaithful and because of his actions he hurt his family... it sounds pretty clear that was not a consensual non-monogamous relationship. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
If it was an open marriage, why would his first statement have been an apology to his wife and family? I don't see any reason to start assuming it was actually fine. In any case the affair becoming public in such a way would still be hurting them - the media attention you're speaking about. Much worse than a divorce, right?
Because the public sentiment towards open marriages is even more negative than towards infidelity? One is seen as a mistake that one can atone for, while the other is seen as a rejection of the institution itself in a country that has strong beliefs in it. Still only 65% of Americans support gay marriage, for example. Marriage following strict rules remains deeply important to a lot of people.
> the institution itself in a country that has strong beliefs in it.
It could be argued much of that is performative. The most vocal group for this in America voted for someone who is well known to break oaths.
Absolutely it is performative. Writing a public "apology" for spending time with another person in their free time is also performative. Nobody actually cares what you do with your life. They aren't thinking about you at all. But when performing, the performance has rules of engagement.
he wouldn't have publicly apologized if all of that was "perfectly fine" with his wife
Might wanna google the term “affair”
He publicly stated he broke his wife’s trust, buddy.
People don't need facts when they just want an excuse to attack someone from the outgroup.
Yes, I'm completely sure his wife never ever cheated on him, lol
That wouldn't justify anything.
LMAO this guy feeling bad about a billionaire who cheated on his wife. Is he projecting muc
No, I just think honesty is cool.
Actions do have consequences and unlike his family, he made those decisions. They also are affect by them despite never having a choice.
I think finding humanity in our villains can help us gain perspective so I’d agree on your first point.
However let’s hold both thoughts at once, this was no hit job. Nvidia was forced to act quickly to mitigate business and legal risks. The eventual fallout they’ll face is still not fully known.
There is no support for people like him, CEOs of such big companies, or even any respectful CEO. People would only use him. That's human nature for you.
The public fall may seem quick but from my read of the timelines this has been ongoing for a lot longer.
The idea his fall is related to his affair also seems more like an attempt to minimise the fact that NVIDIA have been covertly selling to China when they were not supposed to.
Such a bizarre take to me. Yes, it's a quick fall.. but can you really trust him after he's been caught having an affair with a supposed Chinese spy, _and_ potentially another one with an employee? There is zero chance any normal business would keep a CEO after this...
If there were a dozen more affairs I would not be surprised.
Yet the choose to publish this one throwing Powell under the bus. Did she deserve that as well?
Normally this would never come to light, the admin has known about the Chinese agent since 2025, and there is an extremely high probability that they know of any other affair partners as well as what he had for breakfast and how he’s doing with the fiber in his diet.
If you think that billionaire execs of highly strategic companies don’t have the CIA nonconsentually implanted in their colon you are extremely naive. He misstepped politically.
I’ve known a lot of execs, and I can probably count the ones that were highly successful and never cheated on their wives on one hand. The temptation comes with the territory, and the opportunities are endless and disarmingly charming. It takes a man of outstanding moral character to be unfailingly perfect under those circumstances, and unfortunately outstanding moral character is often not what gets you into the c-suite. It’s a lot like rockstars in the 70s, actually, but with more boring clothes.
It's only the beginning of his problems. Congress hearings and an investor class action lawsuit are being prepared.
now the entitled vultures will come to pick him to bits
It is as much of a mistake to anthropomorphize billionaires as it is to anthropomorphize LLMs. People with resources greater than nations are .001% human and the rest is closer to a lovecraftian god. Consider that he can shatter markets or send massive trading companies under simply by having an affair. The empathy is misplaced.
The mistake is to direct your empathy only one way
He actually built something amazing. That is why he should be thanked and left alone, not thrown under the bus.
So much hate for him, it is sad.
He jumped in front of that bus himself. If the investigation turns out he was definitely orchestrating defying export controls then it's more like he drove one bus into another. He deserves every bit of embarrassment and ridicule no matter how impressive his business accomplishments were up to now.
He quickly threw a small but original market under the bus without hesitation. I'm sure every man, woman, and child without a 5090 is chuckling
Are you saying Jensen had godlike sex with that Chinese spy?
I'm sorry, but a hit job he conducted on himself?
You can agree or disagree with his position on exporting to China being good/bad for nVidia or the US. But actively working closely with a company (Megaspeed) where, from a thousand miles away, it was clear that their primary goal was to get around and/or bend US export controls... that's a bad idea. Megaspeed was clearly working for the direct benefit of the Chinese government.
Add onto that having an extramarital affair with the representative of that company? Come on, it's extremely likely she's an agent of China, and if not it's a gigantic business risk.
Then, on top of that, you have to remember that he's married. A divorce results in half of his shares going to his wife, who would then have a grudge, probably not in the best interests of the comapny.
I think the external event maybe moved quickly, but I read there was an internal event as well.
I’m sorry but this shows wildly inappropriate decision making. Say what you will about honeypots (I received specialized “warning” early in my career, but I recognize that is abnormal), but we all are forced through training every single year about how relationships at work, especially with imbalanced power dynamics, are inappropriate and should not take place.
I don’t care about the infidelity, but he represents the company at its pinnacle. He had to go.
You’re that sympathetic for a billionare having multiple affairs?
Are you serious?
Hopefully his wife has support. Jensen gets to reap what he sowed.
> I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support.
Jensen, if you are reading this and need support you can try looking into BetterHelp. You can even get 20% off using certain partner links. No one should have to go through the stress of loosing their job from Chineese spies alone and with BetterHelp you're just one click away from your very own personal therapist.
> I hope whatever he's going through he's got support.
He's worth like $140 billion. $70 billion if he gets divorced. He'll be fine.
Sympathy for the guy having multiple affairs, including with a direct report, including with a spy and credible allegations of doing an end-run about valid export controls imposed by his country?
I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!
For real, are these bot comments?
I think with personal wealth in the billions he'll be just fine.
Money is not that helpful when a 40 year old intimate relationship dissolves. Being able to buy things does little for memories that can no longer be shared.
womp womp. Shoulda thought of that before he went and got himself some strange
Just like Jensen built nvidia from scratch, he did build this situation from scratch too.
maybe he shouldn't have been putting his dick in people other than where it was supposed to be?
I mean yes, he shouldn't be hounded, but if he'd kept it in his pants, he could have avoided all this nastiness.
> I hope whatever he's going through he's got support.
You don't get to cheat on your wife, company and country and get support lmao, what a strange things to say.
Which country? The country of Taiwan where he’s from and where all his products are made? Or the USA whose diva in chief has had a fit about selling said chips to the country who produces all the USA’s stuff?
Some very harsh words being thrown around for Jensen’s very human failings. Try walking in his shoes, or at least having some degree of understanding and empathy.
> Try walking in his shoes…
Chances are I could just sell them and live for a year or ten off it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/17/leather-jacket-worn-by-nvidi...
Which illustrates the gap between his life's challenges and everyone else's nicely, IMO.
Try walking in his shoes? He has an easier life than 99% of people lol. People always quick to jump in to defend the shittiest behaviour, maybe have some empathy for his wife?
Really shows you how much we need to kneecap these CEOs for societal good. The idea that they are hard workers is laughable. Everyone working in retail or a restaurant or in a call center is a harder worker than any executive on the planet.
Well conversely you’re labelling and attacking what you consider the shittiest behaviour, when you only have a sliver of detail. Try pondering what it’s like to create a $5trillion company leading the 21st century’s biggest boom, and consider what weird and unthought of and irresistible demands that might come with. The guy started in Denny’s.
All of this sounds easier than everyone’s life. He has no consequences possible in his life. So many people, even in western countries, live cheque to cheque. Why would I feel bad for someone who chose to do what he did? Irresistible demands? Not cheating on your wife?
Won't someone please stop and think about the poor guy who will face the terrible consequence of never having to work again and still having enough money so that the next 10 generations of his family will never have to work either.
99% is too low. He has an easier life than anyone. There's maybe tens of people who have an even easier life.
Crazy talk. I’m sitting on a beach in Italy right now. My life couldn’t be easier. The stress and pressure of running a company like Nvidia is off the charts.
And you’re a bot so as if you’d know.
> I’m sitting on a beach in Italy right now. My life couldn’t be easier.
You're choosing to argue with strangers on the Internet while on said beach. Your life could be easier.
Huang is choosing to make his life easier by resigning, and has the resources to do the beach thing - at essentially infinite luxury - indefinitely.
Pleaze. Even relaxing on the beach one can read the news and gauge sentiment for their investments. And you’re right, maybe I’ll see Jensen hanging out in Taormina next week. Good place to hide actually.
He put out the hit on himself when he stepped out.
If only there was something he could have done to not do it
Imagine not having a full picture and defending someone going around sanctions for profit. Wild stuff.
Won’t someone please think of the poor tech CEO
> This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!
> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY
"I sure hope the billionaires are doing okay"
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy. Jensen gets to retire with $100B+ and not deal with the crap.
He should be thankful he's not in prison. Even without the spy and affair scandals, his lobbying to sell chips to China is treasonous due to how geopolitically critical AI will soon become. (That alone is not criminally treasonous, but with the MSS influence operation, it might be.) He should've resigned days ago.
I'm no pro-US nationalist or anything, but I am very very much anti-CCP.
There is a competition in the market share for AI chips and R&D money. Including with China.
By the way, do we actually know if Alice Huang is actually Chinese spy, or just merely sees good money in reselling NVIDIA chips to them? Because you don't really need to be the former to do the latter.
> He should be thankful he's not in prison. Even without the spy and affair scandals, his lobbying to sell chips to China is treasonous due to how geopolitically critical AI will soon become. (That alone is not criminally treasonous,
He should be thankful he's not jailed for advocating something which is not even declared illegal yet? Is that the famous "rule of the law" I heard so much about?
> Is that the famous "rule of the law" I heard so much about?
Yes, the famous "rule for thee, not for me".
> Is that the famous "rule of the law" I heard so much about?
We're in the find-out phase of the merger of the corporation and the state, where everything is permitted as long as you send some considerations to the dear leader...
Until it's not. :)
> He had a long-term mindset
Did he? A singular CEO with 40+ direct reports and no succession plan... that alone feels like a very short term mindset to me. He could have been hit by a car tomorrow, what's the contingency plan there? Not to mention the whole 'violating export restrictions' thing, that's typically not great for the long term viability of a company either.
Not sure it’s as much “short term mindset” as it is power consolidation. He doesn’t own a big voting share (only 3.5%) or a special share class like Zuck, so it’s in his interest to not have a clear #2 lest they and the board get any ideas of collaborating on a coup.
Sounds more and more like he had a "me" mindset, not a long-term one. Not exactly mind blowing that the board wouldn't love that.
Yeah the whole “long term mindset” idea is definitely just hagiography done with the benefit of hindsight. Indistinguishable from luck empirically!
> He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
He didn't seem to have a long-term mindset when he knowingly violated export control laws (the feds are, in general, super serious about export controls) and securities laws (the feds are also, in general, super serious about whatever they consider securities fraud) over the course of at least the last six months.
It's frustrating because it was so easily avoidable. Just don't do crimes with nation-states.
Thousands and thousands of employees played a more direct role. And in fact, many would've done things different, like not violating export controls and having affairs with reports. Don't simp for a CEO, you're weird
Good leadership 101: Take the blame, leave the credit
Can't help that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the China hawk fraction of the US government and associated entities (i.e. Anthropic) obviously brought the hammer down on Jensen here, even if he arguably brought about his own downfall with the affair.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
There might have been no such intervention. Put yourself in Huang's shoes for a minute, or a board member if you prefer, lick your finger, put it up to see how the winds are blowing and think of what you'd find. No need for pressure, just glance at the news and realize that the pressure will be forthcoming, and it won't/wouldn't just be "the China hawk fraction" (sic) but widespread.
It is also tanking the Nvidia stock price causing many to sell, freeing up a lot of capital ... just before the Anthropic IPO...
Surely an AI market falling from this is not a good environment for Anthropic's IPO?
The apologists in this thread are absolutely shocking. Jensen is a ruthless CEO who clearly lacks moral fiber. Why do we idolize and "feel" for people like this?
Can't speak for everyone else but for me it's because:
1. The whole spy / compromising national security thing are as far as I know unproven.
2. Affairs by themselves, while not ethical, are fairly tame compare to other prominent tech figures like Musk.
If it comes out that he did indeed compromise national security knowingly, then that's a different matter of course.
unproven?! https://culperresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Culper...
The most importance sentence from your report is this one from the top of page 6:
> We believe that despite essentially no direct compute sales into China after April 2025, Nvidia continued to service Chinese demand via sales to non-restricted intermediaries and diversion.
That’s not at all breaking export control laws. In fact it is the government’s responsibility to identify these non-restricted intermediaries and make them restricted. The government has done this plenty of times in the past and it should again do so here. It is not a company’s job to infer what the government wants it to do. The difference between selling to China and servicing China-originated demand is huge.
And then in a massive game of telephone many people on this thread actually believes that Nvidia allowed direct sales to China, which is how they conclude Huang is breaking the law.
Its a 40 page report. There is no 'most important sentence' that justifies hand waving nuance in evaluating the veracity of claims.
I did skim all 40 pages. None of the remaining nuance is as important as this sentence in the context of this thread. I made this importance judgement myself. You are of course free to read the whole thing too and point out which other nuances are pertinent to the current discussion.
Yes unproven, hence the word “alleged” in all the articles. Your link provided no evidence evidence she’s a spy for China.
Whether or not there's proprietary information espionage going on, there are no other explanations on the table for Megaspeed being able to buy billions of dollars of Nvidia chips other than that they are cut out and smuggling channel.
I'm not even that bothered about those chips going to China. But, like a lot of other aspects that leave us wondering how big and how fragile an AI bubble exists, the fact that billions of dollars of Nvidia revenue is from a reportedly priority customer that isn't actually using the chips is the problem.
To quote a fictional president: "That's the problem with the american dream, it makes everyone concerned for the day they're going to be rich..."
What did he do that lacks “moral fiber”? Men have had multiple wives and concubines for as long as marriage has been an institution.
It’s important to not confuse your own feelings, usually born from jealousy and various ego related failings, with morality.
I think the moral question is unrelated to the legal matter (which is why he's stepping down), but I'll take the bait on the moral question.
Polygamy is not concubinage is not having extramarital affairs
Making a promise to someone of exclusive sexual intimacy and then breaking that promise is recognized near universally as a moral failing. He knew such an affair would hurt not just shareholders financially but people emotionally.
Maybe the guy isn't totally morally fiberless, but I think most people would agree that such behavior is a (non-trivial) moral failing.
Historically speaking marriage did not mean a man agreed to be sexually exclusive with a particular woman.
It meant a woman agreed to be sexually exclusive with a particular man + various legal entitlements. The particular legal entitlements were what distinguished it from concubinage (which was also a woman agreeing to be sexually exclusive with a particular man).
Now that is not what it means in a modern context, but also in a modern context nearly every developed country has below replacement birth rates, meaning that these countries are dying so any particular claims of moral superiority or fitness of the marital/family structure norms of modern societies can basically be entirely disregarded.
So your excuse for cheating in marriage is declining birth rates? Absolutely hilarious.
The idea that a man can even “cheat” on his wife is a modern idea. It doesn’t need to be “excused”. I don’t think you’re intelligent enough to really follow the discussion.
What you’re saying is that (some) men have lacked morals for a long, long time.
No, you're saying they lacked your morals.
No I’m saying that your conception of morality is wrong, but to understand this you have to have humility/not be narcissistic.
Particular notions or feelings of right and wrong that you may have because of prevailing norms in the particular era and location which you live or grew up in don’t necessarily have any bearing on what is moral or not.
Someone please frame this comment for the HN hall of fame
Is your claim that cheating on your wife is a moral thing to do?
The concept that a man can even “cheat” on his wife is a modern idea.
It violates the agreement he had with his wife. Modern expectations are that you do not commit infidelity.
He created a stable environment to have and raise his children and to provide for them and to contribute to his society. It’s not his fault he happens to live in a particular era where it’s otherwise not possible to do that unless you enter into some contrived modern notion of marriage where otherwise in previous eras there would be no issue.
Just to be clear, fertility rates in the developed world are nearly universally below replacement so there are various norms in place that are clearly not compatible with life.
You know what else is a "modern idea"? That you can't sleep with a 12 year old and that you can't own slaves. Both were considered normal for most of human history. So I guess they're ok too, by your logic?
`monideas` is a bot. You're wasting your time and mental energy even paying attention to this.
The apologists probably hold NVDA stock. Same thing happens with other popular companies and their voices are very loud online.
I bought more this morning, it's just on sale.
I have NVDA stock, I think this is neutral at worst. Obviously bad short term, but the fundamentals are what they are. They are gonna print money for at least the next 5 years no matter what happens.
I would invest but my concern is nvidia getting dragged through investigations, who knows how deep this goes.
The reality of the situation is they can be guilty as fuck, but they are so important to the world and us economy, that any sanctions they have will be symbolic. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose, even democrats.
There will be a lot of noise, it will be embarrassing, but I just can't imagine a situation where it significantly impacts their bottom line.
The bear case here is pretty much that you think AI is a bubble anyway, and this just accelerates it.
> ruthless
Really now. Let's get some examples of his being ruthless.
In other contexts we expect some transparency if you have a stake in what is happening. This thread is full of tech workers, and would look very different if each comment was prefaced with some sort of 'Hello, I am John Doe. Nvidia represents 35% of my retirement portfolio, and the semiconductor industry overall represents over 70%. This is why I do not care to rock the boat, and think he did nothing wrong...'
What kind of investment strategy would have 70% in semiconductors? We all need to diversify more again, huh.
To which kind of morality are you referring to? The extramarital affair, the puritan angle, or something else?
The sleeping with a spy and selling chips to china part.
In order to see this as a bad thing you have to first agree with the export controls. Like Jensen, HN loves chinese models, that's why the outrage does not resonate.
It would be hypocritical to both use DeepSeek and also be outraged at the (alleged) mechanisms through which China acquires GPUs.
No, you only need to agree that the rule of law is important to uphold, whether you agree with all the laws or not.
I personally could care less if he sells chips to china, morally, but they do have to follow the law.
And having an affair with a subordinate. That alone should be grounds for being instantly fired.
It's insane. I bet none of the commenters here would spare a thought for a manager at a 7-11 who got fired for having sex with one of his subordinates and ended up on the streets because he couldn't pay his rent.
But one of the wealthiest people on the planet gets fired, suffering zero personal hardship as a result, and everybody's up in arms. How could you do this! They all do this, how dare you single him out!
I think that there's a pervasive idea, especially in the tech/startup space, that making money is a moral good. Not merely that making money is compatible with being a good person, but that it makes you a good person, and the more you make the more good you are. Firing an ultra-rich person is therefore basically an affront to a saint. Never mind that it doesn't put them under any hardship, that they and their heirs will still be wealthier than any of us can even conceive of. It's morally wrong to do anything bad to such a good person.
I wonder if people haven't seen his interviews or public appearances in the past 1-2 years, especially when anything to do with Trump came up. I don't find CEO interviews particularly interesting to begin with, because they're performing a role and can't give honest answers. Jensen took that dishonesty to a pretty high level.
Ezra Klein interviewed Jensen about 1.5 months ago and I had an off-putting feeling from it, and thought a lot of his answers were laughable. He sounded like he was obviously lying. A few days later, Klein interviewed Bill Gates and sort of anonymously brought up the arguments that Jensen made. You could see a visible disbelief of the arguments in Gates' face and posture, even saying "I almost can't believe you're asking that". (Not that Bill Gates is some paragon, but it wasn't close to a respectful disagreement.)
He wanted to have the cake and to eat it at the same time. I've seen CEO's who handled this in a much more orderly way, such as: getting a divorce, then announcing internally to the company that he is getting a divorce, then announcing he has found new love with a certain person at the company and in the same sentence announcing that the certain person effectively no longer answers to him, but to the board or something like that.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
NVIDIA without Jensen? That’s a huge risk. The company may be bigger than ever but replacing its visionary won't be easy.
I don't think there is a more hallmark visionary CEO than Jobs, and Apple isn't exactly doing poorly today.
Maybe the veneer isn't there, but it's very hard to make the case that Apple has in any way failed following the loss of him. Cook was pretty mediocre, and it shows that when you have a strong ship sailing, you just need a "not total idiot" to keep it going.
The counterpart is the state of Apple after Steve Jobs left in 1985. Apple was in dire straits when Steve Jobs returned in December 1996. Granted, Jobs wasn't CEO in 1985, but as co-founder, he had tremendous influence over Apple, though he didn't have absolute power; he left due to losing a power struggle against John Sculley and Apple's board.
I'm also reminded about the state of HP once the founders retired. My understanding is that John Young and Lewis Platt preserved the HP Way. However, Platt's successor, Carly Fiorina, moved the company far away from the HP Way, and HP hasn't been the same since.
This is a sad time for NVIDIA. I hope NVIDIA is blessed to get a Platt and not a Fiorina.
I think you are not giving enough credit to Cook. He trained under Jobs and is a world titan when it comes to supply chain. He is not some mumbo jumbo marketing/sales guy. Yes under his leadership Apple released some bad bets but he deliberately invested in a vision that Jobs created and spent years teaching him. This couldn't have been sustained post Jobs death unless Cook continued to instill the culture Jobs had created. Else you wouldn't attract the people needed to create marvels like their CPUs.
If someone else that wasn't directly trained by Jobs for years was hired, i'd argue that the culture would start to falter because one thing slides somewhere, then another, then another an soon enough 'A players' don't want to sacrifice their core years at a company that isn't instilling the values they want to work under. Cook himself almost went down that path with his budding career at Compaq. His family thought he was nuts to leave the growing company for Apple of all places. They didn't see the values that Cook saw in Jobs.
Hard disagree. Jobs polished things that already existed. They were never on the bleeding edge of hardware design and manufacturing when it comes to actual performance and capability.
Hard disagree with your disagree.
Apple was saved because it abandoned all its pre-1997 software and adopted NEXTSTEP, which Jobs created.
Right, and he had the knowledge to know that consumers don't care about that stuff. So we got iPhones with excellent usability instead of windows phones with HD displays.
Building products for consumers and building products for engineers are seemingly not the same endeavor. I loved having physical buttons and a keyboard on the early smart phones. They were proper communication devices. Now they are consumer devices.
Tim Cook was a lot more than just “not a total idiot”
Yeah there is probably more to the story. Like evidence he actually did something very damaging to NVIDIA/National security. Knowingly helped smuggled chips, divulged trade secrets, etc. An affair and unknowingly selling chips to a company smuggling into China would not be worth the risk of getting rid of him. He must have already caused pretty large damage that is has yet to metastasize.
NVIDIA would be without Jensen some day anyway, and he still owns a lot of stock.
Temporary setback maybe, but I guess I don't see how an organization this large can depend so much on 1 person
That's not a useful defense. I think everyone here knows that Tesla and SpaceX without Elon would trade at a third or a fourth their current valuations. People are invested in breathing Elon's gas. But if it's bullshit, like selling chips to a cut out, and making that cut out a priority customer, that undermine's confidence in all the reported financials having to do with AI.
Obviously, only him could have great visions about NVIDIA. I am expecting a 'we are going to stagnate, at best, without Jensen' worded admittance now from those poor folks remained in the organisation, with all those visionary thoughts taken away from them so abruptly. CEOs are the one taking the companies forward!
Tweet by Jared Friedman [1] "The people on the Nvidia Board:
1. Jensen Huang - Co-founder, President & CEO
2. Tench Coxe - Former Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures
3. John O. Dabiri - Professor of Aeronautics & Mechanical Engineering, Caltech
4. Dawn Hudson - Former CMO of the NFL, former CEO Pepsi-Cola North America
5. Harvey C. Jones - Managing Partner, Square Wave Ventures
6. Melissa B. Lora - Former President, Taco Bell International
7. Stephen C. Neal - Lead Independent Director; Chairman Emeritus, Cooley LLP
8. Suzanne Nora Johnson - former Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs
9. A. Brooke Seawell - Venture Partner, New Enterprise Associates
10. Aarti Shah - Former SVP & Chief Information/Digital Officer, Eli Lilly
11. Mark A. Stevens - former Managing Partner at Sequoia Capital"
1 - https://x.com/snowmaker/status/2120902014389694684
I didn't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me. This is a man who could be fired just for OFFERING to have sex with a subordinate. The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind. But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
> sexual harassment in the workplace
I had only heard about a consensual relationship.
Which most company policies allow in some form. Peer-to-peer is straight forward. Supervisor-subordinate (relevant here) is less tolerated. You just have to disclose it and maybe sign a "love contract."
Parent is oblivious to this and has already made up their mind that these policies don't exist
> The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind.
I'm very aware that these policies exist, and I'm certain the CEO of Nvidia was also aware. That he decided to circumvent them says all you need to know, really. Even if it's consensual, what happens when she decides she wants to move on from the relationship? What about her peers that didn't receive promotions while she did? This is why these laws exist.
Your hypothetical makes zero sense as your questions have simple yes/no answers.
> Even if it's consensual, what happens when she decides she wants to move on from the relationship?
Then they're no longer in a relationship and still have to follow HR/company policies.
>What about her peers that didn't receive promotions while she did?
Did they follow the company policy (e.g., hiring committee recusal) or not for the promotions?
>This is why these laws exist.
Did the company policies follow employment regulations when setting and enforcing their policy?
The implication here is that they didn't follow company policy or else this wouldn't be an issue. HR would have said, "Yes we're aware of the relationship, all of our policies have been properly followed in relation to it." The fact that we're not hearing that means the answers to all these questions don't have pretty answers.
Well, I guess they should fire her, then.
To be honest, even with those policies, a supervisor-subordinate relationship can be problematic. There is an undeniable power dynamic at play, so even when it looks consensual it's hard to be sure. I'm not saying it wasn't consensual in this case, but when person A can impact the future of person B, person B might feel coerced to "consent".
Anyway, not sure if that's the case here but it's hard to rule out entirely.
I think we can all read between the lines that no such thing existed in this case because he was married.
Interestingly, no!
These policies are intentionally narrowed to workplace conflicts of interest. HR doesn't want to manage morality clauses or stuff outside the workplace.
If you want to have a consensual relationship with someone you need to guarantee they don't work for you somehow first, really.
I think the real world is not that black and white, really... There is nuance in those interactions as well.
No such thing as consensual when saying no to the boss could result in getting fired.
If you go that route you can extrapolate to some absurd degree. Basically any relationship with a power imbalance becomes sexual harassment.
Yes, you can extrapolate, and our society does. This is why ministers aren't supposed to have relationships with their clergy, therapists are not supposed to have relationships with their clients, lawyers, doctors, etc. The list goes on and on.
Can become, yes. Depends a bit on what exactly the nature of the power imbalance is. Which is why there are usually strict rules about relationships with your reports and how to resolve the situation. Like reporting it to HR so the work positions can be shifted in a way to move positions so that there is no longer a reporting relationship between the two.
Congrats you just figured out divorce laws and alimony from first principles.
Wow you are mere inches from understanding the concept of sexual harassment. Keep going!
You mean infantilising adults and denying their agency to feel better about yourself.
Obviously it depends from case to case and there are certain lines that shouldn’t be crossed but otherwise consenting adults should be free to make their own decisions.
So is Huang only allowed to have sex with Lisa Su or something? But even then Nvidia dwarfs AMD in power.
There is always Elon I guess…
100% of his relationships have been with nvidia subordinates and business partners. You realize there are more women on the planet right?
> 100% of his relationships
*that we know of
Got it, that's why I only date girls who meet the following criteria:
* My age, +/- 2 years.
* Comparable emotional and intellectual development.
* Same level of education.
* Earn within 10% of what I earn.
* Total net worth within 10% of mine.
* Muscular, so we're of comparable strength.
* Exact same cultural and ethnic background.
* No chronic diseases or disabilities, since I don't have any and that would be an unfair advantage.
* Read Hacker News just as pathologically frequently, so we both know when to short NVIDIA at approximately the same time.
How do you reconcile "love contracts" [0]?
[0] https://www.woodsrogers.com/insights/publications/this-valen...
I've never worked at any company that used them or heard about them. Instead we take yearly training saying that even flirting with the idea is a cause for immediate termination.
Do you have stats on how common these are? Is it more popular in some non US country maybe?
Your companies had zero tolerance for consensual relationships at the office? Not even married couples? Possible, but the exception because that really constrains your talent base.
Good idea about stats. Please share what you find.
Do you suppose Jensen had a love contract with his subordinate, when the breaking of the news of their extramarital relationship led to a 20% drop in stock and the removal of Jensen as CEO?
You're asking a leading question with flawed premises and assumptions.
1. The subordinate story broke yesterday. The stock dropped 12% (not 20) and recovered half.
2. But for the spy/export control subversion, do you think a CEO would be stepping down for banging a co-worker? LOL...
Considering he was fired it's the other way around. This at most only applies to very small companies or to people at the very bottom on the totem pole.
How do you know the boss initiated?
Yeah. It’s not like being an ultra chad billionaire with great biceps and confident personality is NOT attractive to women. Maybe her husband wasn’t doing it for her (legit feel bad for that man, whoever he is, today).
Everyone loves to jump to this conclusion when I think that should require some heavy evidence.
You could just as easily say she did sexual favors to get a leg-up over more qualified peers and get/maintain her position.
If anything, the fact he got fired seems to imply she has all the power in their relationship being outed. I haven't seen anyone calling for her head.
> could result in getting fired
When did they discover the quid-pro-quo aspect of this particular relationship? The news is moving so fast that I must have missed that part.
If there is an asymmetry in power, hardly consensual.
Not sure about the sexual harassment angle you're pushing... it's about trust isn't it? If you have consensual affairs as a CEO, you are still liable to be fired if it becomes public, that's my opinion anyway.
When the CEO starts hitting on you the word "consensual" doesn't really fit anymore.
Maybe she hit on him. He was not hiding being open to affairs so she may have shot her shot. We just don’t know.
It doesn't matter, he was in a position of extreme power imbalance where he could show her both favoritism or fire her depending on how things went. It's improper and inappropriate at best, and illegal at worst.
Yeah you don’t want to be hit by your CEO. But that doesn’t immediately mean the specific case with Huang and his subordinate was a harassment.
What is known now is described a conflict of interest (which is bad already for a CEO). Whether it was a harassment - investigation should show.
In any scenario it’s not appropriate. Among peers, everyone knows about the “special relationship” and it directly attacks any perception of fairness and enables others to justify similar or worse behavior in the org.
This whole thing is making me question whether I should continue reading HN. It's not just this story either, it seems a sub-section of the HN community has taken a hard-right swing in the last couple years.
People in these threads are pretending that 75% of the story doesn't exist and it's just about an affair... insane.
EDIT: Is this just X infecting HN? I don't go on X so I don't know what it's like.
People here are so weird now about AI. Bizarrely sensitive to even the slightest criticism of AI or the associated companies. I don’t know if it’s bots or what, but it’s legitimately scary.
Both, but you don't need to worry. Nvidia will release a new LLM model in a few days time and everyone will all be happy again.
This one tip gets you off the hook of any company slander; just release a LLM model.
This is a VC message board after all so money is king above law and morality, those things often get in the way of profit. Marx had some good points.
Yeah, the election made it pretty clear that people on X are in an insane bubble world (rather than some of the other online communities X accused of exactly that), and that the venn-diagram of HN and terminally-online X users is basically a circle.
The Demographics of HN are coming very sharply into focus the past few weeks, and it's awful.
It does sort of explain a lot though.
A shocking amount of these comments are very loudly ignorant of basic concepts of consent, and some seem to be rather proud of it.
A good point and the line of thinking you're describing implies that power should override anything else. Rather than rules that apply to everyone, what level of power within a company should no longer be subject to firing for engaging in a power-abuse sexual relationship?
Misbehavior without consequences seems to have become more noticeable in politics within the past ten years, with mainstream news outlets reporting on insider trading and potential bribes for favors. This ethos of power over accountability seems to be having a trickle down effect on general sentiment.
Do we know that he offered? It is possible that she went after him. These things aren't always so cut and dry.
Any company that wants to pass one of the many audits I'm sure Nvidia is subject to has policies around this. They would both know that not only do all employees need to disclose such relationships but that such a relationship is not appropriate if one is above the other on the org chart. Since the CEO is above everyone, that pretty much means if he wanted a relationship with an employee they would need to resign first.
HR policies around these things have never at all cared about which direction the relationship goes and it really shouldn't be hard to understand why. It's entirely irrelevant who initiates.
What's very "Cut and Dry" is that so many of you are very obviously not paying attention to the yearly training, which isn't exactly complicated or difficult material.
> The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me.
It's mindboggling that you describe an apparently completely consensual affair as "sexual harassment". That's absurd.
Maybe you should expand your understanding of the term, then. It's a well-known thing, especially when it comes to extreme power imbalances.
The term already has a well-established meaning; we shouldn't change our understanding of it. If you mean something else then use different terminology.
Also, I don't think there was an "extreme power imbalance". If anything, she had far more power over him than the other way around, since he had much more to lose and she could blackmail him with making the affair public or other allegations.
I am referring to the meaning established in the law. Many things fall under the legal umbrella of sexual harassment. If you want to describe it as something else maybe you should be the one looking for a new term to coin.
No. The law does not describe a consensual relationship with a subordinate as "sexual harassment".
Obviously the situation isn't that simple, and neither is the law. If you really want to have a relationship with a subordinate there are legitimate ways to make that happen. He chose to circumvent those (ostensibly repeatedly, and while paying off people who found out about it), and the set of reasonable explanations that don't involve some form of harassment is vanishingly small.
It's not just not "vanishingly small", there is zero indication that any sexual harassment was involved.
What are you on about? She wasnt an employee of nvidia, but a client of sorts. No, this is not what you want it to be about.
I mean I said in 2016 Hillary basically behaved this way with Bill in regards to others (notably monica lewinsky) and against basically anyone else (i.e. say whole democrat party field) except Trump that should have been a disqualifying thing (and worse, if the republicans put up a decent person, I suspect Hillary would have won!)
At the end of the day, I wouldn't bash everyone here too strongly when everyone who lined up early behind Hillary basically acted in the same way. (And yes, even though Bill did the act, Hillary lined up easily to defend him, much like the people you mention here)
I'm... not shocked. Politically, HN skews pretty heavily right. Some of them will claim otherwise, putting rainbow flags in bios and such, but here is where the rubber hits the road. I also believe that the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. He can paint himself a victim of a Chinse spy.
Consider the case of Regina Santos-Aviles [1]. She committed suicide by setting herself on fire and had revealed that she'd been having an affair with her boss.
The power dynamics here are insane. Huang was the CEO and a billionaire. The legal liability that NVidia has or could have because of this is huge, particularly if they did nothing. Now there are big questions about who knew what when.
The reporting says somebody say them in a San Jose hotel and was basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment (I'm guessing; I don't know). Was that from NVidia or Huang personally? What NVidia staff, if any, authorized that?
If the board wants to really clean house they should authorize a thorough external investigation of that and any other possible affairs.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-gonzales-aide-affair-texts...
> Politically, HN skews pretty heavily right.
I've found HN to be pretty hostile to DOGE (whereas conversation is usually respectful even for fringe viewpoints; something special happened here).
DOGE was less popular than most of the admins stuff, and more scandalous at various levels (the stuff they did cut was fairly popular, they didn't manage to cut the stuff people might have really seen as wasteful, they went about accessing data in strange ways, some of the employees were quite young and looked unqualified).
I don't think you can assume much just by knowing somebody disliked them.
That's totally fair, nobody is happy with DOGE at this point and a lot of people were skeptical and nervous as it was happening. I just don't recall anyone popping in to say "damn it, they're doing it wrong!".
lol, do you think it is a coincidence that going after DC’s money was met with more media attention than other things? I don’t.
The things they got the most attention for like USAID weren't really core dc money. if anything I think they failed to really touch federal programs much in the end, but they did wildly swing at other stuff (like infamously just word searching to cancel research grants etc).
One may interpret this as the Overton window having shifted quite a bit over the last several years. As in "HN skews pretty heavily right" can be correct *and* it can also be true that the wackadoo faction of the right has dominated the discourse for a while.
To spin it another way: if we ignore the rise of the faux-libertarian (you know, the more typical brand now, libertarian but all for a strong military and christian nationalism), I'd argue that the typical HN skews more old school small-l libertarian on the right wing spectrum. That's quite a bit different from the MAGA, christian nationalist, style of right wing politics that has been in vogue lately.
But DOGE (as conceived) is the wet dream of a libertarian from any era. If anything it's a bone that Trump threw to libertarians. It's not especially MAGA imho.
On paper yes, but anyone with half a brain saw that the opposite was true in real life. They went in, made things worse, didn't save any money, and absconded with a lot of private data. My recollection from that time period was the tenor here shifted rapidly from generally positive to generally negative.
Yeah but on HN in particular I never recall anything positive or hopeful at the beginning. I may have missed or forgotten about it though.
> Politically, HN skews pretty heavily right
If you truly believe this, you're living in a bubble. Economically it might be pro free markets, but socially it's heavily "progressive" -- see any discussions about Omarchy, LGBTQ, Elon, or Trump.
Every time Musk comes up there are a bunch of people excusing his behavior just like what is happening with Huang.
Leftism begins with anti-capitalism. This is so far beyond the American (or even European) Overton window. The American political mainstream is a choice between center-right and far-right.
Politics is about economics. All of the so-called "culture war" issues (eg LGBT rights, bodily autonomy, etc) don't make you left wing if you are still an avowed capitalist. The success of the Republican Party hinges on the success they've had in propagandizing culture war issues to avoid talking about economics. And the establishment Democrat Party is complicit because they have the exact same paymasters.
On this issue you see a ton of people in the comments saying "yeah but Jensen made so much money" as a reason why he shouldn't suffer the consequences. If making money has primacy in your decision making well... you're right wing, definitionally.
As other commenters have noted, every time Elon comes up there are a ton of HN defenders, despite him being a complete fascist (in technical terms, not a pejorative) and doing the Nazi salute on national TV (twice).
> Economically it might be pro free markets, ...
Well, first there's no such thing as "free markets". Second, you're basically saying "capitalism". As I said, right wing.
I'm socially progressive but economically conservative. That's why, whenever there's a tough situation where compromise is needed, I always compromise on the side of "let the free market run amok".
I’m entertained by how far left one must be to think HN “leans pretty heavily right”. Even the most die-hard socialist should be aware enough to find that funny.
I think media, social and traditional, has really done a number on people’s perspectives. I’m not sure why ideology replaces self-awareness.
Die-hard socialists often consider "liberals" to be soft-core right wingers. I'm not sure there's an objective center, it's all a matter of perspective.
Yes, this is basically correct. I drew a diagram [1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50164265
lol, DSA as center huh? Interesting take. How fascinating that there is no far left according to you.
> and a billionaire
That means he can’t have any affairs with anyone who isn’t a billionaire without it turning into sexual harassment due to the imbalance in power?
> basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment
So depending on how big the payment the alleged victim might be pretty happy with the outcome?
I mean if the board believes that the actions of the CEO resulted in financial damage to the company it’s up to them to investigate and deal with it. I just don’t get the whole morality police angle as long as the affair was between consenting rational adults.
The number of people here who don't think women can consent to sexual relationships is thankfully not quite as high.
Even if it were about consent (and it's not), it's difficult to show that a relationship with such a power imbalance is consensual. If it were consensual it should have been disclosed. And as a CEO he has a greater responsibility to follow these kinds of rules. He knows it, and he did it anyway, and then he got caught doing it. There's really no other action to take besides removing him.
Maybe it's a generational thing? The younger generations seem to have some sort of anxiety with respect to consent and power dynamics, where even something as trivial as a modest age difference is viewed with suspicion. The movie Obsession can be seen as that anxiety translated into the horror genre.
To be fair though, a CEO having an affair with a subordinate should be seen with at least some suspicion...
IDK, if you look at the messaging around Clancy where women are completely subordinate to hormones to the point it excuses chasing down three children and systematically murdering them, or the Cornell 7 case where a woman can willfully engage in sex with multiple men and then only decide it was rape retroactively after explicitly negotiating with the men what was ok during and after with text messages where she defended her own actions but then when rumors started she decided she didn’t actually give consent…
The people saying you can’t trust women… are mostly coming from women.
Wild time if you are dating! Yes could mean No if later she decides she didn’t like something about it.
> But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way
The irony is so sweet here.
money before principles. Not to be crass but this is the ycombinator forum, not bluesky. do not expect principles before money, this is the absolute opposite of trying to preach to the choir.
Who do you work for? Curious why you're pushing an unproven narrative? In America, we are innocent until proven guilty. Let's not forget that :)
Who do you work for? Curious whether they have annual sexual harassment training or not. I'm not pushing a narrative. Based on the facts that are public alone this is pretty cut and dry sexual harassment. You may not like the connotation of those words, but they contain a pretty broad set of improprieties.
Cornell 7 would like a word. That’s just the latest. The facts of that case so strongly outweigh the narrative of “poor drunk unconscious college girl rapped by men for hours” that it’s comical that somehow innocent until proven guilty is now “misogynist rape culture” or something.
wait who said hn supported social justice and women's rights generally? that's not really been my impression wherever it comes up
The sex is a nothing burger. He would have been fine if they were for instance, latin American and not Chinese.
This is blatant racism. It has nothing to do with race.
Of course it has nothing to do with race but it has everything to do with geopolitics. Latin America doesn’t have chip foundries.
If a billionaire can't have consensual sex with women what is the point of it all?
"Subordinate", get a grip!
I think the angle is more so on lack of equal accountability.
Musk has done worse, yet nothing has really happened to him.
I agree there should be equal accountability. The response to that shouldn't be letting everyone do whatever the hell they want, though, in my opinion.
That chick could very well be an American spy who did everything she could to get him into bed, you have no idea what the truth is.
Let's dispense with the theatrics. Having a relationship with someone in your chain is not even close to sexual harassment. Yes, it can lead to it but generally it doesn't. It's not at all illegal either.
When I entered the workforce not so long ago most companies didn't even have policies against it. My university didn't make a policy about it until 2012. I know a very happily married couple who got married this way (a little earlier - perhaps around 2006 or 2007). I don't think they'd be happy if I referred to their behavior as "sexual harrasment".
I think it's a good policy and it's fair they enforce it, but equating it to sexual harassment is nonsense.
They may not think about it that way, but if one of that couple got a promotion from the other then every other person on the team pretty much has grounds for a law suit. There are reasons these rules exist, and the CEO of a high profile company has no excuse not to know them all.
She was a direct report of the CEO. There are no promotions possible. She was max level already.
But was she a direct report when the affair started?
> but if one of that couple got a promotion from the other then every other person on the team pretty much has grounds for a law suit.
Extremely rare (winning such a lawsuit). Prior to these kinds of rules becoming the norm, how often did anyone win such a lawsuit? It's a rounding error close to 0.
There are plenty of publicized cases where one party openly stated she got promotions because of her affair with a senior. No lawsuits were even filed in the ones I know.
I'm in favor of such rules precisely because it's hard to win such a suit.
You can't prevent people from having relationships. It's not realistic. My company has specific rules about this. Typically, "problematic" relationships need to be disclosed to HR and leadership, but they're not forbidden per se.
My understanding is that NVidia's organisation is very flat and Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type. Moreover there was no succession plan. I get that having an affair with a spy is not great but isn't it risky to replace him now?
I'm going to guess the 2nd affair with a direct report who rose quickly through the ranks is from the board's perspective the more egregious of the two failings.
And: the public only knows what's made it out. Who knows what else has come out in private.
I think that's a nothing-burger but it's enough to force him out. They probably have more cards in the play. Unfortunately we will never know of them.
Having sex with a report is a very serious no no. There are very valid questions of one's ability to consent when your boss is also your partner.
Oh come on, having sex with a coworker is rape now? This is getting ridiculous. Why not just go the whole way and require all sexual activity to come with with a signed and notarized consent form?
No? Having sex with a coworker is not rape, and no one said nor insinuated it was.
Go forth and consensually bang your coworkers. Knock yourselves out.
When you have the ability to fire or promote someone, however, you hold significant power over their life -- potentially impacting their ability to eat, house themselves, etc. In those cases, it's valid to ask, "Is there a possibility someone is being coerced into sex because they can't afford to say no?"
This is question of consent. It's not an allegation of rape. It's only a question and there are probably times the answer is no.
You don't have to knee jerk react to someone pointing out an obvious potential conflict of interest and go "so everything is rape now?"
Quid pro quo sexual harassment is not a “nothing-burger”.
No sexual harrasment has been suggested, except by you, from your imagination
You don't think the board of a listed company care about the CEOs bit on the side is being promoted? That's really not a good look for a company to admit that.
It's one thing to happen and another to put that out in the open.
Officials are corrupted? CEOs sleeping with other women including his subordinates? Snow is white? What's the deal? People at that level are basically playing politics, not laws.
However, the fact that someone decided to release all those information as PUBLIC, and followed that up with ANOTHER scandal, means that they are determined to get rid of them. As you said, it is indeed serious matter.
As the Chineses say: "Something weights as light as a quarter of pound if it's left alone, but can weight a thousand tons if put on the scale".
> CEOs sleeping with other women including his subordinates? Snow is white? What's the deal?
The problem is that you don't think it is a problem. It goes on because there are no consequences.
Maybe in '29 the Epstein perps will actually be prosecuted
Because reality deems that this is not really the problem, I was about to mention the Epstein thing -- everything in that file is 100x worse than what Jensen did.
If we (the common people) really want consequences, we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
> we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
I'm with you on the first half, and see the second half changing. The fever may have broken in the US electorate.
But the original news was not what sealed the deal, it was the follow up.
Nvidia will be just fine
I feel like "not having a succession plan" should be a fireable offence on its own.
Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".
Imagine having to explain that line of reasoning to Congress in four months. "Yes, Senator, we know our CEO was facilitating chip smuggling to China while in a relationship with a Chinese spy, but we figured that it would just be too risky to replace him at this time."
> Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type
well, yeah.
"an affair with a spy is not great" rather undersells the situation - there could be criminal liability.
Lot of comments here stating with absolute certainty that China wanted Nvidia chips (they've previously ordered Chinese companies to not buy Nvidia chips https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...) and that Alice Huang is a CCP spy (zero public evidence of this).
> zero public evidence of this
is a bit of a stretch, given the reporting, intel briefings, comments from members of congress after the briefings, etc...
People who have worked in the national security sector in the US know how China operates. Any Chinese tech personage who is not a CCP spy but who somehow rises to a position of international influence will be recruited to work for the CCP by being made an offer they cannot refuse. In a typical case, there is plenty of evidence but most of it will never be made public for security reasons.
Of course China always denies this, but the evidence for this behavior over thousands of cases is such that the burden of proof is on those who claim such a person was not a spy.
This does not imply that the Chinese people or even its government are "evil" or that we shouldn't do business with them. It's just something that everybody who deals with China needs to be aware of.
I think my pedantic gripe here is that I don't see the people who are made offers they can't refuse by China and are Chinese citizens as "spies" as conventionally defined - they are generally not pretending to be anything other than Chinese business people, and business people passing info along or being asked to do things for/by government don't really make them "spies" IMO - at least not until they've changed citizenship or are working directly in something sensitive. Starting a business in another country to serve the interests of the home country with home country money is more akin to the British East India Company or something like that than being a secret agent as I see it.
> zero public evidence of this
yet it was an open secret among those in the know, both the affairs and the export violations
I don't understand. Who's driving this change? The board, the administration, or who?
Given the report that the US gov knew about this for a while, it seems more likely that it's coming from the administration?
China hawks in the admin. Trump was on board with loosening the export controls so that Nvidia could stay in the game, which ironically would've prevented China's domestic chips getting off the ground. The Stephen Miller types (and whoever connected to ant/openai) didn't want to concede anything. This is beyond personal vendetta stuff.
More likely the hardliners/security establishment. Rubio reportedly let Trump know of the affair/spy suspicion earlier this year (April? I don't recall), and he clearly ignored it because he likes Jensen and/or he wanted to get in on the action as Nvidia was making bank selling GPUs to China.
This breaking just before a meeting with Trump/Xi and just after the midterms show a changing wind in Washington is a hell of a coincidence—or not.
Securities lawyers, among others. All this scandal is going to lead to shareholder suits, which puts a LOT of pressure on the board to act. They have fiduciary duties!
Do you have any good materials on reading about Rubio? I wouldn't have clocked this at all.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/11/09/rubio-huang-tru...
From Game of Thrones: - Men without cocks. You wouldn't find me fighting in an army if I had no cock. What's left to fight for? - Gold? - I spent my life around soldiers. What do you think they spend that gold on? - Family. - Not without a cock, you don't. - Maybe it really is all cocks in the end.
Illuminating, truly.
He didn't resign because of two affairs. He resigned because there were a LOT more than two affairs. I'm sure they wouldn't stop coming after enemies and the press smelled blood in the water.
Eh, I think they wouldn't care except that both affairs are potential conflict of interest issues. If it were like a random person with no connection to the business that he had an affair with it'd be treated as less of an issue I think.
..and because American culture is really prudish about that.
The French and Italians wouldn't blink an eye. Us Brits, we'd talk about it, he's get a slap on the wrist but wouldn't be sacked.
It seems to be a uniquely American thing that the CEO can basically do anything (lie, cheat, fraud etc) just as long as he doesn't get caught with his pants down.
Prudish about affairs with spies? Or about affairs with people who, if they break off the relationship could lose their jobs (or if they continue it they could get promoted)?
These aren't just affairs.
Also, fraud remains to be seen, and shopping chips to China sure seems like questionable judgement.
I think you are too narrowly focused.
When you engage in an affair with a superior you have more leverage than you think. Yes you could lose your job, but if you lose your job you have nothing left to lose and can fuck up their life if you have the right evidence.
Assuming this is correct, it's even more reason that a board shouldn't tolerate this from a CEO.
If you lose your job you lose your source of income. Your way of paying for your children, your house, food. You're left broke financially and mentally while the other party remains at the top with all the power to control the story and to further threaten you.
I don't think that the US *care* about spies? Look who has been put in charge of the NSA, FBI. There's even someone who is strongly suspected to be a Russian spy working in the Pentagon.
These shipments to China - I remember there being a deal made with the President which allowed these sales to happen contingent on some kind of "risk fee" being paid.. to the President.
Yah, the UK has an odd practice of ignoring sexual abuse, especially with regards to men in power and young women or children
Americans are prudish, but not such that he would lose his job over an affair. A few Americans would boycott his company - but not enough to matter. There will be general disapproval, but that is as far as it will go.
However he will lose is job over an affair with someone that he has any form of business relationship with. He can have an affair with a nurse in the local hospital of the waitress of a local cafe and we will ignore it. However the girls he had an affair with are off-limits, and should be for any culture for reasons that we think should be obvious.
Isn't there a thing that when it's consensual, tell HR and done? Or you have to be on the level at the org? It is not a law, but in my previous not big, but ~ 1K international org, many marriages and many babies.
Did he do anything besides infidelity, as it seems that the "board" knew about that anyway.
In any case, he fell on his sword, and I wish him well in the afterlife, nothing is black and white.
Not tell HR and done. Tell HR so they can ensure you are never in a place where you can influence her business success. It happens all the time and the rules about what companies do are very complex. As CEO I doubt he can every avoid the conflict of interests that HR is concerned about in these cases and in turn he can't be both CEO and have these affairs. (but the nurse or waitress down the street would be okay, even the CEO down the street so long as they are not competitors and careful to avoid any interaction with each others as customer/supplier - this is often possible since the CEO doesn't decide which widget to buy)
Hi. I was musing, not pro / con. I mentioned the power imbalance, and I am shrugging at his "wisdom" given his status, but hear me out, it's that everyone seems to have know and kept the fact as an ace in their sleeves. I am sure he didn't fly himself and his mistresses commercially, there is a crew, and gossip spreads. The truth is elsewhere, regardless of each's view on infidelity. I give you Gates, Bezos. Cheers.
This isn't about affairs. It's about knowingly violating export controls and misleading investors
absolutely not true.
he resigned because there's some proof that he knew that nvidia was selling cards/chips to china -- the affair only made that extremely public.
Hasn't that been known for at least 6 months?
> Us Brits, we'd talk about it, he's get a slap on the wrist but wouldn't be sacked.
Several BP executives resigned in a sex scandal just this year
https://news.sky.com/story/bp-chairman-removed-from-role-aft...
Seems like a narrow-minded take.
He wasn't getting sacked yesterday. It only changed when the second affair leaked.
Narrow-minded? I don't know, given the levels of insanity and in-your-face corruption we've seen pretty much every day coming from the US and particularly from the entire tech ecosystem it's really hard to understand the "norms".
I've read about how the US President raped a young girl (13) and multiple other victim accounts. I've watched how we've shown consequences to Prince Andrew, Mandelson and many others. I also see on Twitter the owners of this very site standing behind the disgusting people on the US.
I can't square that with the Jensen situation.
I should add that I'm personally in the camp of leaders who cheat on their wives or who make or accept bribes should be removed from their position. I don't agree with the British (or French/Italian) takes at all.
Just because tabloid news are full of usgov garbage doesn't mean every single human in the world accepted such behavior as new norm. There are still decent folks out there, dare I say a majority.
But yeah how can US folks stomach child rapists at the top of their power is beyond me, I've met plenty of folks with flexible spines while working in banking but this is on completely another level and that level is whole nation.
I agree - and I still believe that the vast majority are decent people. The issue is being ill informed.
The problem is that a whole layer of society have been completely and utterly corrupted to an extent which makes say a country like India seem to be a paradise.
You're wrong. Having sex with your employees is not just an American faux pas. Hopefully you're not a leader of a company.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/06/lululemon-ceo-laurent-potdev...
https://fortune.com/europe/2024/06/11/bp-managers-given-ulti...
By the same token, why are you disenfranchising the choices made by a married woman to sleep with her boss?
Probably because of the power dynamic makes it really hard to see how free that "choice" really is.
And also puts doubt on any decisions by the boss that affect the employee - companies don't want people "sleeping their way to the top" as that's not putting the business' needs first.
This is a very successful woman, career wise. She’s clearly not incapable of navigating high stakes power dynamics and you shouldn’t just absolve her of responsibility in this.
(Your second statement carries far more weight)
We don't really have the ability to judge the power dynamic without intimate knowledge of the people and their personal lives, we don't even know when things started and what place their lives were in then.
It's why we generally frown upon relationships if there's any direct business link.
"All men command women, we command all men, and our women command us." - Cato
Because a boss has the power to reward the otherwise lesser competent women he is sleeping with over someone else who is otherwise better at the job but not sleeping with the job. If I'm a shareholder of the company I care about that, and the person wronged also cares.
As an aside, the above applies to any one of any gender sleeping with their boss (again of any gender)
Why should anyone care about that?
Because it’s actually misogynistic to cast women as passive and subservient victims of power abusing men, when for millennia women have been doing all they can to get as close as they can to men with the most power, money and status. This is the most recent example.
> it’s actually misogynistic to cast women as passive and subservient victims
What the hell are you talking about? Nobody is saying anything like that. Why are you even bringing culture war garbage into this conversation?
Obviously over your head. Please don’t flame and cast peoples takes as “culture war garbage”. I was responding to the OP’s framing as the women as passive participants in this saga. Hard to believe that’s the case.
> Please don’t flame and cast peoples takes as “culture war garbage”
You're the one that's flaming by introducing culture war garbage where none is necessary.
> I was responding to the OP’s framing as the women as passive participants in this saga.
I don't know who you think you're talking about, but you responded to my comment, and I didn't say or suggest anything like that.
Didn't we have a whole movement a couple years ago, "me too", where everybody was up in arms about men abusing power to sleep with women?
You think the women that have caused Jensen to come undone this week are passive and powerless victims of him abusing his power? Except for his wife, it seems like it’s the opposite.
I am not talking about the spy, but the women who reported to him. Being powerless or weak is irrelevant. He had power over her and that was what "me too" was calling out.
I think the power imbalance is actually quite slight. Has she lost her job and her husband today? Hard to say.
in italy you'd get a promotion if you are married and manage to show you have been with multiple lovers without getting caught
Americans really don't care that much either. It's drama, but no one was shocked and appalled to the point of calling for his resignation.
Now cheating on your wife with a FOREIGN SPY, yea that's a big deal no matter what the country.
> Americans really don't care that much either.
Speak for yourself. The sanctity of marriage is pretty important to a lot of Americans. Not everyone lives in a Berkeley polycule.
Oh, like about 50% of them not batting an eye when their president sleeps with a porn star while being married, and probably worse.
So that leaves what, another 50% that didn’t approve? Nations are not a monolith
Considering the antics that Elon gets up to, there seems to be a double standard.
The French would not blink with an eye about a spy spying on the top tech company of the country? The French intelligence would probably got her killed.
My appraisal as well. There's a reason French Foreign Legion soldiers get a fake name and DOB.
Downvoters are too young to remember Greenpeace vs. the French security apparatus.
> American thing that the CEO can basically do anything
American CEO would get meetoed. Any sort of sex (even consensual) is illegal, if you have no way to prove it! Lets way a few weeks...
The second one was a direct report to him, and I wouldnt be surprised if he granted her favors in exchange for the sex (whether it was "promised" or not) typically no executive 'survives' having an affair with a direct report and stays in the company.
Who you have an affair with matters more, in this case a Chinese spy wasn't enough, which almost makes you think, he was not the only one at Nvidia who knew.
Yeah, it's the treason-y bit that the affairs revealed.
The "nVidia are selling chips to China" thing wasn't exactly a secret though. It was all over Twitter and the tech/investment communities I was in. And in the gamer communities (as we're pissed at how nVidia and the rest of tech have screwed us).
What you know and what you can prove are not the same.
What we can prove in the near future likely changed a bit when Congress went to the Dems a few days ago. Republicans weren't gonna make a scene about their $25M donation to the ballroom project.
It was reported on at the time:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/14/us-clears-h200-chip-sales-to...
I need to find the links but the reporting in Europe was that this was part of a deal where Trump got given a 20% fee for it (I believe those were his own words!).
It was reported together with the victim statements of the children Trump allegedly raped. I understand that the US media aren't allowed to publish any of these stories though so I can understand why few people would know about them.
Lots of things exist as open secrets, but once they become official news reports with lots of coverage the need to address the issue increases.
It's not just that they were selling through China, but that they bribed their way through the Trump admin's efforts to investigate it. But even that was partly known, it's just everything is now coming up all at once, making it so obvious he had to take a fall.
The emporer was naked the whole time. Someone finally pointed it out. This is the fallout.
Not particularly new situation in the recent US times. Far from the last time this will happen.
It's interesting to see SMCI down 11%. Losing their protection?
What an incredibly embarrassing downfall.
It’s only embarrassing because of the GPUs that ended up in China.
I don't know, I just have a feeling he'll be back. Steve Jobs style.
That would be so awesome.
Sure, that Steve Jobs, the guy who had an affair with a Chinese spy and slept with an employee. What an egregious comparison.
Frankly, you're being naive. When it comes to a massive $4 trillion market-cap US corporation and one of the most important companies on planet Earth, money is everything.
If the company struggles without him and it's obvious they need his leadership, he'll be back. Morals be damned.
Thanks for clarifying where you stand on "morals" v. "money", despite the nature of both of the allegations here.
Now, back to the main point: your egregious comparison of a potential Huang-return to Jobs-return unfortunately still remains just as terrible.
If this is some kind of competition about who made the worse moral choices, Steve definitely wins there.
No, the Steve Jobs who screwed over his technical cofounder and abandoned his daughter. You’re right, the comparison is egregious… ;-)
He's going to have a 6 year vacation. putting my bet here on the internet history books.
Jensen should not have resigned. This entire thing has been played like someone in Washginton wanted him out. It's a sad day to see him go.
He didn't. He was fired by the board. This is how that typically goes. That's why the CFO is acting as interim CEO.
I predicted yesterday that he'll resign and that he'll eventually join Tesla to lead the TeraFab business unit.
Why fire and not admin leave?
The investigation is just starting. He's been indicted but not proven guilty yet. What if the facts come to light and the issue is overblown or wrong?
He also hasn't had the chance to properly defend himself.
This is a permanent fix for a potentially temporary problem, and that is short sighted
I think it will come to light the board was aware well before it became public. There are likely more damning details that are yet to be public.
Interesting that 18% of Nvidia's revenue comes from their 2020 Mellanox buyout. Might rank among YouTube as one of the most profitable corporate buyouts ever.
About their new interim CEO Colette Kress:
Jensen bought Mellanox for $7B in 2020. In Q2 2026 it generated $17.5B in revenue or ~18% of Nvidia's total revenue.This is going to be very unpopular here, but this domino triggered by the China hawks in the current admin (and the handful of dem lobbyists in the pocket of openai/ant) is going to go down in history as a massive geopolitical and technological blunder.
Huawei just announced a fully domestic computer, Deepseek is rumored to be training v5 right now on entirely domestic Ascend chips.
I know eventually there will come out all the justifications for how this was to protect AGI, etc. But this move has also now tipped the scale beyond just the hardware bifurcation, but also the open vs. closed and commons vs. sovereign models. This isn't just chopping off your nose, this is America purposely gouging out it's eyes and removing it's ability to see down the road. Jensen Huang was the world's best shot and trying to keep a global AI world together, but one side has made their voice on that extremely loud and clear.
I wish there was more commentary on your point of view. HN has really disappointed me today. I come here for the deeper insight and instead I got Reddit lite. I read the NVIDIA way when it came out and was gobsmacked that all these years the company was operating the way that it did. It really made me admire the perseverance the employees went through and made me realize Jensen was a hidden gem. Seeing China announce their own GPUs made me think NVIDIA was in for some sweat but now? Its as if they are torpedoing NVIDIA for a short term gain only to not realize they have just tossed the long term win to China. The conspiracy theorist in me think they are hoping to pin the blame on the left or they think they can remain in the shadows and break companies that dont play ball no matter how important they are and walk away unscathed. This is a serious fundamental problem in modern American governance that might scare talented people away from the country.
Astroturfed talking points is prevalent since like maybe 10 years I believe. There was this huge shift when 'influencers' became a thing and people realized there was power in that for real.
100%, it's annoying to see so much noise and very little signal on this topic here.
It doesn't seem fair that you're being ousted from your own empire by a bunch of randos, an empire you built from scratch and nurtured.
One should never give up control it seems. Zuck is right.
Don't go public if you don't want to answer to the public.
I feel this is a hasty and suicidal move for the company, and for the American AI chip industry as a whole, esp. when they haven't figured out a transition plan.
>Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board
Suggestion:
Replace Jensen the President with Tim Cook.
Replace Jensen the CEO with Ian Buck (Inventor of CUDA, PhD, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing).
Or better yet, train an LLM around Steve Jobs quotes and make it the CEO.
Really disappointing to read the comments on HN
None of them are able to put two and two together that this was a deliberate coup
And it seems like nobody is paying attention to what Jensen Huang was fighting for. He was against regulation of open source local models. He was against regulation shifting liability of local model developers as well as frontier models.
All in all without Jensen, it isn't just about NVIDIA, there's no one to champion for open source models and running them locally is going to get a lot harder and expensive. It's actually going to accelerate the monopolization of closed models and they will have to pass on the costs to consumers.
It's an L across the board and I'm noting the degraded quality of discourse on HN and that nobody is seeing through the veil here.
Agreed. People are too eager to signal moral outrage to actually see the bigger picture.
idk how people can symphatize a cheater. he could divorce his wife and continue to do his private affairs but he chose to lie
Not everyone is controlling of their partners sex life.
eh, there is a rumour that it was one of those 'open' marriages, given that his daughter was seen with him and Alice Huang in a video, implying they were ok with it. (dunno about the second one though, but given the first, the second seems excused as well)
Nah, this is about the indirect Chinese access to chips, and this whole cheating thing is a cover. He's confessing to a 'lesser' crime to save himself for the real threat of jail.
Any guesses if that correlates with earnings? Are they bad, so they can they, look we already have new CEO, now everything is going to be better. Or are they that good, that they can say, look we will manage without Jensen.
So does this pretty much confirms the spy thing? I think it was only an assumption
You're getting mixed signals because it's both a yes and a no. Very likely not a "spy" per se - she's a proper business woman with a long career. Very likely in touch with China's information services - because she's a business woman with a long career.
But yeah, the "model" memes are completely offtopic. She's nearly 50.
The big question for NVIDIA investors is how much of their sales came from skirting export sanctions because you can bet there is an investigation coming.
I only wish he got ousted for being a liar about where the money was coming from during the crypto boom, or the super anti consumer policies like prohibiting OEMs from having a top of the line series with anything other than nvidia, refusing for years to support standard vrr and pushing for g-sync, artificially nerfing silicon capabilities in consumer grade dies and helping this bubble get bigger and bigger with bad accounting practices.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
The problem i see is that I dont see anyone who is suitable to be a ceo of Nvidia. It’s a special blend of hardware and software chops that no other CEO has imo.
Very very few HW CEOs have even the slightest ability to appreciate the key strength of Nvidia which is ability to build hardware and then drive it with outstanding software.
Look at AMD. Great hardware but hamstrung by their software for 20 years.
Hardware is not enough.
Funny how that perspective completely changed because CUDA ended up being a better idea than initially anticipated, while the need for well-designed and -maintained linux graphics drivers.. somehow subsided? (my nvidia drivers still deadlock way too often)
Jobs was forced out of Apple, then had a second (and third!) coming. I wonder how Jensen will fare.
Extremely well.
There is a lot of discussions on Export Ban. Does selling to a Singapore Company with Chinese Stakeholders considered illegal under those ban? Does Nvidia have to track every single GPU sold or even resold?
I was under the impression he sold it to a Singapore company, or even any other companies. What those companies do with those GPU is not his fault.
This whole thing is just a sad story.
'Singaporean' company whose former managing director (Chinese national Alice Huang / Huang Le) and owner (through a self-titled company) is the same person he's had an extramarital affair with.
The same company they've audited the datacentres of, and saw dummy non-running servers within which had been stripped of their GPUs, and were 'fooled' that they were simply yet to be commissioned.
Plenty of companies are started by Chinese Nationals. Including inside US.
On 2nd point, even Hyperscalers have large stack of GPU sitting idle yet to be commissioned.
The point is that there is clearly knowledge of the company having heavy ties to China - his affair partner owned it. Therefore, heavy caution should be taken with regard to export controls. Instead it acted like a gold stamp.
Yes US hyperscalers have plenty of hardware but are running out of 'warm shells' to put them into. It's not much of a problem in Southeast Asia.
The investigation was also halted
my take someone powerful wanted Jensen out.
whether that's good for nvidia or the u.s at large - I doubt - but time will tell.
Affairs and jokes aside
He's the hero we needed but didn't deserve. If this thing didn't happen my guess is open models wouldn't exist and we would be deeper and darker into the whole AI boom
o7
What if he goes and joins a Chinese company?
Completely unrelated, but he was the last CEO I really enjoyed watching speak at conferences.
Felt like he knew what he was talking about, and spoke with real passion and vision.
Watching tech keynotes these days feels like the same boring marketing script on repeat.
I’ll miss that.
> Felt like he knew what he was talking about
I lost faith when he was on Ezra Klein's show and said he doesn't think kids should learn math any more.
The board is considering both internal and external candidates. Who has experience in hardware, has led a trillion-dollar company, has deep connections in Asia, and might be available?
It's possible Tim Cook's phone is ringing right now.
It would be interesting if the story unfolded with Jensen going to TSMC [1] and Tim Cook taking over NVIDIA.
[1] https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-founder-morris-chang-...
It's hard for me to imagine Cook taking over Nvidia unless it was strictly temporary. I get the impression Cook retired because he wanted to relax and enjoy his golden years. But I agree he'd be a good choice to manage the chaos at Nvidia.
I don’t think Tim Cook would even give the time of the day to the Nvidia board or recruiters. He can bear and hold a grudge for a long time, similar to Steve Jobs. His firing of Scott Forstall and Apple’s dissociation with Nvidia after its GPUs failed in Macs are just two examples.
There’s a rumor that Apple’s Johny Srouji may be tapped to be Nvidia’s CEO. But I’m guessing Apple will do whatever it takes to retain him.
I got the same impression about Cook's retirement. But experience leading a trillion-dollar company is not a credential every executive has.
I'm not saying this will happen, just mentioning that it would be interesting to see it happen.
Hard not to think this wasn't orchestrated by Anthropic.
I mean... It is so obvious that I truly have to think that everyone in the comments who pretends it isn't are just Claude bots.
Weird move. There is something more to it. My guess is that he spilled some stuff.
Is it weird that there were no Jensen stories on HN's front page Mon-late Weds? The scandal was deepening and yet it wasn't showing up here. Flagging?
Stories drop from the front page (ie. penalized) if they attract a high comment to upvote ratio, indicating an overheated comment thread.
the front page is heavily censored, best to use /active or hckrnws
There were two on Wednesday, from WSJ and NYT. You probably just missed them.
WSJ at least was late Weds. What time was the NYT one?
Late? Both were posted midday PT.
This is insane. Firing someone for their personal life choices instead of their professional life choices is absurd. The reporter that went after the second affair story was a proper misandrist too (as per reels) who had a history misandry in the past.
I don't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
RIP Jensen. Man had his flaws but great work on build the stuff he did.
Though I think it's best for everyone atm for him to have checked out, it's not fun to have your life be out through this nonsense.
I would have to assume that that the amazing almost rockstar esque popularity was the cause of the mistakes he made.
There’s no public evidence his lover was a Spy.
Export controls have been skirted since the Bronze Age.
Sure on the merits, there’s enough for the board to ask him to resign.
But it’s his company. He built it from nothing. You have to start with that.
Despite his personal affairs, he brought significant growth and stability to NVIDIA thanks to which we all have access to excellent products so his dismissal does not seem like a wise decision. I wonder if his successor will be able to measure up to him. And what would be the cost for nvidia? It all seems political and every politician has an affair to hide...
The obvious succession choice is Lisa Su, but AMD is now almost a trillion dollar company. I can't imagine her actually jumping ship at this point.
She'd be an absolutely terrible successor. If she'd make a good successor then AMD would already be competitive with Nvidia for GPUs.
“Hey Lisa! How’s it going? So ya we just fired your cousin who created our company. We were wondering if we could get on a call with you about replacing him and leaving your rival company? If you could call us back on 1-800-NVDA that would be great.”
i mean if she puts on a leather jacket she looks just like him lol. evidently they are actually related
This will be a disaster for NVDA losing their leader. The company will eventually descend into chaos when the roadmap dries up.
Who of you guys is applying?
https://jobs.nvidia.com/careers
This might be due to violations or breach of his duties as the CEO, especially given the nature of who the other party has loyalties too, but nonetheless, its a lesson for us all. Because even if he didn't directly provide any IP, would that party have reasonable access to any IP during the events. Guess only time will tell
>Huang, Nvidia's fourth-largest shareholder with a stake of about 3.61%
This was the founder? Damn!
I get that hardware requires much more capital and investment than a pure software company, but he had crossed the board-being-able-to-fire-you rubicon looong ago
For intents and purposes, consider NVIDIA compromised for some foreseeable future. For operations and future purchases/CAPEX, more than a passing due dilligence is warranted if considering NVIDIA.
The specific truths about anything hardly matter when a story becomes this big. The hubbub is too much of a distraction and Jensen was going to get hauled in front of Congress by reps trying to score points with anti-AI constituents.
this is more concerning for hf than it is for nvidia
Personally I am not a fan of companies being moral arbiters, or company's reputation and such be the organizing axis around which we decide whether a person has the right to a livelihood, companies after all are not people. Though Jensen is insulated from economic security concerns, for any other "normal" person, the coercive power of a corporate with it's army of lawyers can effectively ruin a person's life.
Whether one deserves such ruination is a moral matter, and everyone is entitled to their own judgement, but it seems wrong to concentrate such power in a private for-profit entity. The entire basis of anti-fascist doctrine is infringement of individual liberties and modern societies, while mostly conditioned to be against government coercion are remarkably comfortable with corporate coercion, dressed up in the pretty language of compliance and organizational reputation. A company is an economic entity, not a moral entity. It is fine with being a moral entity when it comes to matters of its own reputation and operations, but conveniently becomes an economic entity when it is time for layoffs. Ultimately, it comes down to who has a bigger stick
The thing is an organization is not just a place where you work; it is a provider of economic security, livelihood, and dignity. This concentrates extraordinary power in your place of employment; you are to clock in 5 days a week for at least 8 hours a week; and then work in a highly locked down corporate machine, which you are not allowed to customize even though this is where you will spend the majority of your week in, and one has to ask the question to what extent a company owns your life.
I think that we must also identify the cultural contradiction here; where Hollywood and the like in a sense glorify promiscuity and depict wealth as flaunted with assets and women, as a cultural ideal, and then turn around and hound creatures who are products of such a culture.
Of course, in this case it is far more likely that Jensen was involved with some national security incident.
Not to be insensitive, but stock is at 164.53 right now (down from almost 240). Good time to buy or is there worse to come?
Huang has shown catastrophically bad judgement and lied publicly [0]. Many commenters here harbor lots of sympathy for him, I assume out of respect for the technology and company he's built, but that doesn't exonerate him.
He was sleeping with one of his customers—a huge conflict of interest. That alone is good grounds to get a CEO fired, but it only gets worse! Alice Huang, a Chinese national, was previously working for a CCP propaganda channel network with an impeccable acronym: CCTV. Her company was accused publicly and investigated by the government for suspected smuggling of sanctioned NVIDIA hardware into China. Now we learned he also had an affair with one of his direct reports — another diabolical conflict of interest, which alone could be good reason to oust the CEO and possibly the VP as well.
It's yet to be determined whether he disclosed secrets to the Chinese spy, or whether he at least privately admitted to the second affair (if not, that's even worse!)
It's not a single, horrendous mistake anymore but a pattern of disastrously poor judgement. Building an extraordinary company and technology shouldn't mean lack of accountability, and thankfully we found out today that even at the highest level it doesn't.
[0] https://fortune.com/2026/11/09/nvidia-board-probe-jensen-hua...
I don’t get why no one seems to talk about the first point
All the china stuff aside you cannot have a relationship with someone you made a business deal with
That’s like conflict of interest 101
Yes, exactly.
It seems to me that he had two choices, the company or the family, he chooses the latter,i hope that's why he resigned.
His family works at the company.
This is insane. This is the best case scenario for China, much better than just getting the chips. They just crippled their biggest competitor. The stock might not crater immediately because of ongoing AI demand, but it will at some point.
I've seen some people speculate whether or not he'll be a prosecuted/arrested. It's difficult to believe, but surely would be the biggest imprisonment that I can remember from recent memory.
Jensen being ousted as President & CEO is one thing, but he is also off the board.
Am I the only one who feels this is a smear piece to oust Jenson to retain optics?
Outside of the continued selling to China/skirting the export ban I’m of the belief that he was offered a better deal in China, took it, then signaled he was departing, the timing on this seems…suspect.
Recalling the May POTUS and CEO field trip to china, the lot returned together with Jenson extending his stay nearly two weeks afterwards.
IMO this ongoing theatre provides cover to oust Jenson and vilify him before he appears somewhere in China —- imagine how the share price would fair if it came to light that he was leaving as CEO to take a position in Huawei…
I'm afraid this will only hurt open source.
Regardless of the implications, even just as a change for NVIDIA this will be one of the moments we look back on. Keep hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times!
There’s a lot of questions without good answers but what’s clear is this is almost certainly about a lot more than just the CEO cheating on his wife.
Now I'm in danger of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I think there are several layers to this current drama. Most of the reporting is very "surface level". I also don't pretend to have the full picture myself, but there are many players and many agendas at play, and those agendas can change over time. [edited for typo]
Anyone has internal views of what Jensen bringing, and how the company would be missing without him?
What would the severance package be in a situation like this?
He resigns so he would forfeit much of contractual severance in most cases. A negotiated settlement is likely as part of the resignation and if he’s rehired elsewhere (eg at terafab or tsmc) it will generally terminate ongoing payments, healthcare, access to private aircraft and security.
He co-owns ~800mn shares in the company with his wife, so losing severance isn't going to be much of an issue to him.
oh 6 months or whatever at Terafab then succeeding Musk after he's kicked out would be funny to watch
3 leather jackets
And a gift card for Spatula City!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE
Oooh Red Snapper, very tasty
He'll be back one way or another, Jensen is NVIDIA, and a finance person for sure cannot fill the shoes of an innovator
I can think of one company that rose from $347 billion to $4.6 trillion market cap after their finance person successfully filled the shoes of an innovator
The board, made of 10 members, only has 3.94% of Nvidia share in total, out of which 3.58% is owned by Huang.
Meaning that the 9 people pushing him out add up to own 0.36% of Nvidia share, only 0.36%
This is betray of shareholder interest. The board doesn't own Nvidia, this is not their business, yet only they can vote. they just want to finish as soon as possible, and you get a mad result.
The board of Nvidia is elected by the shareholders.
Shareholders voted on them in June:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026...
They have the legality, but this particular decision is still a betrayal.
Just look at the stock price plunge after he resigns, and I think this is structural in loss of company value instead of temporary sentiment.
He IS the company's value.
If the board cannot fire the CEO they are not really a board
Huh, between the Anthropic IPO, the big shift in political environment, and the change in outlook for tech stocks, this comes at a pretty pivotal moment to see if AI train keeps accelerating at the same pace or if we start to see the end of the bubble.
I don't want to sound like a Jensen apologist, obviously huge missteps on his part, but he was quite a figure in shaping the last few years broad economic narrative. Good or bad, he was a force in shaping one of the largest investments ever. Does that shift without him? Does it shift really quick?
I would have preferred a slow fade into the sunset as a opposed to a dramatic exit. Yes, there would have always been a correction, but the bubble bursting explosively vs a more measured, slower correction will have different broader impacts and I just hope this doesn't push more towards the outcome that hurts a lot more.
My conspiracy theory is that its American spies who let this go public to pressure him out because Jensen was fighting their agenda of stopping China getting advanced chips. The flow will probably slow for a while, domestic Chinese companies will be forced to adapt, and as a bonus the USA wont even be competitive because they took their best horse out behind the woodshed and shot it to stop someone else from getting a ride. 12 months from now Jensen is gonna be VP of AI hardware at Huaweii or similar, calling it now. Another A+ geopolitical move from an administration that has been in a class of its own right from the beginning. Im a nobody who knows nothing but if I had to bet it would be on this.
And kitty remains undefeated.
Guessing Trump was talking about Jenson on 60 minutes this past weekend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2aC8lAOQbg&t=1458s
"We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said get ready to go to jail."
Wish the interviewer would have let him talk more instead of changing the subject.
Looks like there are a lot of duplicate threads that will have to get folded together...
this is extraordinarily funny
This is the beginning of the bubble burst. for AI… In history, big things always start with little things.
Bad luck for Microsoft. That Surface computer, team up probably goes up in smoke.
I must say I really wasn't expecting this.
There's huge risk in firing a very successful CEO without anyone ready to replace him.
No one really cares about the affairs, so I think the only thing that could push the board do this would be the threat of more damaging stuff coming out, like nVidia skirting the China ban, or a legal threat to Jensen that envelops the company. Or back-channel pressure from the US Gov.
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy.
Someone with an actual long term mindset wouldn't have slept with a suspected PRC spy, while simultaneously flouting the intent of export control laws, and setting his company up for federal smuggling probes, and congressional investigations.
Someone with an actual long term mindset and who had the interests of the company would have groomed one or more successors, and, if, for some reason, they felt they were indispensable, would have probably avoided jeopardizing the company by allegedly having an affair with a subordinate.
There are plenty of people in the world to sleep with besides subordinates and spies. Failing the most basic of marshmallow tests is not a indication of a consistent long-term mindset.
Jensen is a colorful, important figure in the history of technology. He did make many solid long term bets. But if the company falls apart because of his reckless actions, that that's on him too.
And if it doesn't fall apart, then the credit goes to him for resigning.
Where do you think that someone who is surrounded by bodyguards, always traveling, and working 7 days a week is going to meet someone normal?
I’m not even a billionaire, but the only people I interact with are people who I work with or who insert themselves into my life because they want something.
To go full devils avocado: Surely a CEO selling more chips isn't a bad thing for his company?
All I've seen is his personal relationships drama and advocating for softening of useless export laws that didn't stop a single CPU or GPU get into China in the first place, selling to Megaspeed is hardly anything unlike what AMD or other suppliers does right now.
It's a hitjob and he probably could have fought it but chose not to.
Much like the broken unenforced rules that lets OpenAI/ycombinator sell trillions upon trillions of tokens into China each week despite all the export restriction laws against them doing it.
You really think the Chinese can't pay and access ChatGPT/Anthropic/Google premium models today?
lmao spoken like a true shareholder
does that imply OP is right that Huang is the best person to lead the company and efforts to pressure him to step down are just people trying to cancel him over his sexual escapades? Otherwise what is "spoken like a true shareholder" supposed to mean?
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA. Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
What would happen if a Chinese company CEO did similar?
The CEO would vanish and not be seen anymore.
And now nothing is stopping him from defecting over to China and Deepseek. Lost his family, lost his job, and China has plenty of money mountains and a very dedicated workforce. The idea must have crossed his mind.
is today the best day in over a year to buy NVDA? From a long-term perspective, how much was he the one driving innovation, and can they be something like an Apple who overcame founder's reliance?
never catch a falling knife with your hands.
the market is reflecting the risk. youre not smarter than the market
it's not a risk, it's definite nosedive. How the f*cking board selected the replacement? Unbelievable stupidity!
imo no. not yet. The world moves fast but it can get worse.
I think he was forced out
Be interesting to see if he ends up hollowing out Nvidia if the talent moves with him to his next venture.
I suspect the real reason the board fired him is he's been lying to the board. It's not the indiscretion it's the lie that gets you.
If he was lying about his affairs with staff then maybe he's been lying to the board about following export controls and other things.
I was hoping we wouldn't return to woke witch hunts
If this was about national security or evading the law, it would have happened when it was discovered.
The board didn't have the determination either to fire him or to protect him, and he realized they wouldn't be able to make a decision, so he did it for them.
Now we'll see yet another jewel taken over by bean counters because the board was so dependent.
Let's hope other founders have boards who can actially handle their responsibilities.
all over getting some pu*y on the side.
What I think is hard to argue: Jensen did a remarkable job leading his company, especially during the development of CUDA, which required an enormous investment in the 2000s but eventually created an ecosystem that outside developers and companies now help sustain and expand. CUDA is a major reason Nvidia has such a dominant market position and should continue to achieve far into the future, regardless of who is CEO. Nvidia's massive risk and its extraordinary payoff will likely be studied for a long time.
AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.
The irony isn't lost on me that Jensen Huang suffered consequences for his involvement with mature, consenting adults and a whole bunch of other tech billionaires didn't for their island antics.
I think the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. That opens up NVidia to a lot of legal exposure.
The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Skirting export bans is an unknown. I honestly don't believe this administration would let anything bad happen there. Jensen Huang is simply too rich and NVidia too big.
> The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Yeah, this is the most interesting part to me.
It points to the US government knowing about this, and holding onto it as compromat until the time was right to kick him out. But I don't even have a guess as to why this was viewed as the right time...
> consenting adults
The affair with his subordinate brings this into question. The power dynamic makes consent extremely iffy. There is a reason it is not allowed.
What a sham, the loss of aura is incalculable. A Coordinated effort by those who disagree with him.
He had two back to back scandals that would normally oust any other CEO. Don't fall for the story this is some targeted thing, he screwed up at least twice publicly and they came out very close together ensuring his ouster but both of these individually are likely tenure enders.
It might be a coordinated effort (given the back-to-back timing of the reveals), but he still made his bed.
If others want him out, it was still Huang who loaded the gun and handed it to them.
He cheated on his wife and family, got done by a spy, and you're a simp
Twitter is saying Anthropic founder Jack Clark forced him out.
Lame bigots.
good for her!
Lots of HNers chiming in that consent is all that matters, so the affair with a subordinate is totally fine.
Perhaps this may help explain why it's unethical to date a direct report to those HNers:
- It's unfair to the coworkers of the subordinate, because the affair can give the impression of influencing promotion, personnel and monetary decisions you make in favour of the subordinate.
- It places your direct report in a compromising position. Such a relationship is potentially coercive, because the direct report may fear reprisal, rendering any consent invalid. Many have commented that imputing coercion to any power imbalance leads to the absurd conclusion a rich person shouldn't date at all - however, this use of "slippery slope" doesn't offset your ethical duty as a leader. As the boss, you have to protect your employees, and placing them in this situation in the first place violates that commitment.
tl;dr you violate your duty of care, plain and simple, to everyone underneath you by doing this.
A pragmatic, ethical workplace policy is to instead date people not in your reporting chain. If that means you shouldn't date your employees as CEO, then that's responsible behaviour, not a chafing limitation.
---
Others have commented that Jensen's affair is plausibly fine because "we don't know his private affairs". Jensen has made an unambiguous statement about hurting his wife and family - if they were non-monogamous, Jensen has had the opportunity to disclose it. Absent that, you have to assume this was an illicit affair. Moreover, none of this changes the fact that having an affair with a direct report was entirely unethical.
Still others have attempted a whataboutism by asking why "other CEOs" haven't had this level of blowback for having an affair with a subordinate. Unfortunately, not every tragedy gets the same level of public reaction, for no other reason than timing, luck, or lack if engagement. We should be equally upset about all the other cases as a general rule, rather than relying on normalized apathy to lull us into complacence.
Hopefully this will not cause a shift in the way nvidia operates, for example in relation to research and open source.
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
Huang does owe permanent allegiance to the United States. Treason comes with a price.
Why did the senior exec rat out on him?
There are lots of reasons to do this. Many of the work in the favor of the the person ratting. There are strong whistleblower protections for some of the reasons that work against that person.
It is unfortunate it can't just be a strong romantic connection.
Anthropic is behind this.
Jack Clark Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic / head of the Anthropic Institute is the nyt and @AnaSwanson "source" he is the one coordinating a coup against Jensen.
But they are going to be hit by this as well - this is a strike against the whole AI ecosystem and honestly, the US economy as a whole considering how propped up it is by the hype.
interesting. the timing would favor their IPO in terms of flexing their ability to move policy through extra-judicial means. but it would also benefit them to coattail the narrative even if they weren't players so I wouldn't assume it without evidence.
I wonder who thought they would make more money with him gone.
You know the industry has concentrated too much power into too few people when one person's midlife crisis can wipe ~$600 billion in market cap
Yeah, just buy a corvette and another leather jacket... sheesh.
Well well somebody did not play by the books.
Maybe it's all just staged so he can play GTA VI in peace?
Come on, that's conspiracy thinking.
Ocarina of time, on the other hand...
And is it going to get cheaper to build data centers?
Nvidia was/is such a fundamental cog in the american ai economy/ machine, what spies, what cheating are people obsessed about? Nvidia created the capital for its own success; read about it, think about it, be against it, be for it. The capital did not exist, they created it by neoclouds buying hardware which they wouldnt need for two years ahead by lender and vendor-backed financing; hardware, which would be replaced in another 2-4 years.
Will nVidia continue to provide the same backing to neo-clouds? Without nVidia backing are lenders willing to give more or less?
Forget about chinese openweight models, antropic or oai, I see this development as a huge spanner in the us ai economy, maybe the biggest blunder of the year, the biggest own goal if it came from within the us administration under or without guidance.
And finally: Jensen selling to the chinese iron. Okay, was he the only one, god amongst mortals, in the fricking room. Who the heck comes up with these shallow plots...
I think at this point, what is more interesting to me is not the events themselves, but observing the dichotomy of moral stances in this thread.
Gives some light to understanding why the world is the way it is. No further comment :P
Jensen caught playing with his Huang.
He resigned to spend more time with his families.
> Jensen Huang was fighting hard to hang onto his role with the company he founded, according to several people briefed on the discussions. But an interim plan for the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, to take over Nvidia was well underway yesterday.
From the NYT live updates.
Ah well, I'm somewhat seeing parallels to the 2023 OpenAI drama, not sure if this is gonna be how things end quite yet.
I don’t think Jensen has much say in this matter
> But an interim plan for the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, to take over Nvidia was well underway yesterday.
Oh good, a business suit with no engineering experience. Nvidia is doomed.
I was telling yall I knew something was off with nvidia when they had those remote controlled “lets pretend they are ai” Disney robots on stage - I was like that’s not cricket.
Have to stay positive, AMD stock price is up!
I remember Jensen saying he doesn’t have a contract with TSMC. The whole supply is based on a trusted relationship and handshake deals between the two CEOs. I wonder if that relationship is transferable to his successor.
Who ordered the hit? This was coordinated. None of the info was new, it was dwelling for years.
himself
I hear Michael Carrick is available
At the point, the lesson is to have affairs big and early, so you are invincible to media-coordinated attacks. What a tragedy.
No, the alternative is not to “not having affairs”. Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.
> Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.
Except that we have evidence in this case: he literally admitted to the affair. I don't see any "spin."
Would anyone bat an eye for “one admitted affair”? It is the “spy, Chinese, export ban, a blonde” caught on. No evidence whatsoever on these. It is the imagination of if you have “two ANT in the kitchen…”
Banging Chinese Spies presents a conflict of interest the Board cannot overlook.
Banging 1000 women while married is Chinese "Boss" behavior.
The cause and effect is that any and all future CEOs caught in a honeypot will be easier to compromise. Xi loves the news. Nerds with one billion dollars hoping to attain unlimited groupies will need proper Hollywood Handlers. HR for whore intake if you will. Until the sex robots arrive.
Since this company has abandoned gamers for AI. Plus allegedly giving away a few million plus chips (gamers get fucked) to China. I am fully on his wife's side. She was there at the beginning.
Luckily we know that American courts are one sided. Making the upcoming divorce more costly then the Bill Gate's Foundation implosion. What's the over/under divorce cost trending on Polymarket right now? Seems undervalued.
How do you have $150B and squander your 30 year position at the head of this company for either of those two affair partners. Wild work.
This is the reason no other ceo projects an image of being good guy. One affair and everything you build just collapses. And on the other side rich people can be doing anything and nothing moves markets for their deeds lol
As a CEO, you can sleep around. Just don't f** with the business.
Sleeping with a spy or sleeping with a subordinate are both f**ing with the business.
The affairs are horrible behavior. Going around export restrictions.
But talk about ruining a legacy before it really took off. I don't really have sympathy. But this guy should have carried around a piece of paper with some short aphorisms to look at everyday to anchor him back to reality.
With valuation down a two figure percentage it will be interesting to see what other problems they will now publish and kitchen-sink.
that leather jacket was a givaway.
"The state of the world economy and the future of open models would be in turmoil due to the affairs of a person who's not even a politician" was not on my 2026 bingo card.
Who appointed this clown of an interim CEO??? Mark my words... It's gonna be long way down for NVDA from here. SAD. REAL SAD
I’m sure Nvidia will have great leadership to substitute Jensen, but man is this a generational fumble from Jensen.
The king’s crown tumbles. Stock is already down 10% this morning.
I wonder if this will be the catalyst for Nvidia losing the lead
NoKings is about more than Trump
Meanwhile, twitter is all up on Elon hiring Jensen as CEO of Terafab!
I mean its not like Jensen needs to work anymore, but that would be an interesting alliance
Financially, this is probably the best thing that could’ve happened to him…even with the almost assured impending divorce. Wonder if he’s gonna start a new chip company.
I guess everyone looks at infidelity and goes oh the horror. Thing is these are puritanical views and has no bearing on the companys wider performance. Not to mention the fact we dont really know what was going on with these people's personal lives. Now going around sanctions otoh is a whole different problem. Although tbf, given the clown that is the US president right now, I am not sure the US has the moral high ground to suggest selling to China is a problem or anything. I dont see the point of these sanctions, so I understand if Nvidia found a way of going around the sanctioned pathways.
He wanted to take time off to play gta 6, but ran out of pto days so he resigned, what a chad!
maybe denny's will offer him a role
(bad) jokes aside, it seems that the us gov probably dont believe enough on the affair case for gpus to appear in china and they got rid of the guy
i think this might be the end of an evolution era for nvidia.
I guess no one wants an Emperor, and someone needs to teach the tech lords a lesson after mid-term, let's see how NVIDIA holds up.
Liquor, ladies or leverage - choose your poison.
3 "L"s of downfall.
we'll see whether it was about the affairs if Nvidia keeps promoting open weight models or just becomes a supplier for openai and anthropic's closed ecosystems for 'national security' reasons.
The biggest layoff because of AI :xD.
Those are some world-changing, high impact, most consequential genitals right there. Impressive.
Lets see if suddenly loosing a CEO has an impact.
Maybe as a little test of the necessity of CEO's.
Maybe plug in an AI CEO to see what happens.
The memeing on r/wallstreetbets is off the chart today. At least we have that...
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
The American empire cutting off its nose to spite China.
Jensen Huang getting caught with his pants down was not on my bingo card for how AI ponzi schemes will crash. This is the same guy and the same board that has been loaning peter to rent compute from paul who buys from them. ie circular financing juicing forward revenue.
Huang/Nvidia = House Atreides Lisa Su/AMD = House Harkonnen GPUs = Sandworms US Govt = The Emperor/House Corrino Smugging GPUs to China = Smuggling Sandworms off planet to try and break the spice monopoly
This event = some stuff that happens in book 2/ movie part 3 Stuff
coup brought to you by anthropic?
Not surprising at all is it?
Is this how nationalization of strategic assets are done?
At least the Chinese spy story is more charitable than if they had found his name in Epstein files.
Elon can do the most hilarious thing by hiring him for a chip company.
He got tired of winning.
Elon knocking on his door rn ;p
Eh, i think he's acting as a heatshield for Nvidia, his affairs are irrelevant, but the Chinese sales could put both Nvidia as a company and him as CEO in jail... this allows them both to pretends it's a 'personal issue' and get away with it.
That bit with Dwarkesh was very prophetic in hindsight.
Good. Now do Elon.
Were he gay this could have probably been avoided. Oh well...
Or owned a big yacht and kept the personal business out on the water like all of the other billionaires
Moving fast, I see.
Fucking Trump just blatted out on his propaganda outlet that he's "chosen" Tim Cook to be the next CEO at Nvidia.
a night with venus, a lifetime with mercury
Oh no. They're giving the reins to the Chief Financial Officer.
May God have mercy on us all.
always helps to keep it in your pants
Supposedly this was known a while ago.
Handy thing for Trump to keep in his back pocket to distract Democrats attention if they won the midterms.
Chinese spy? or a plant from one of the AI companies to install a CEO?
So … Johnny Siruji the new CEO when?
[macrumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/12/johny-srouji-eyed-as-po...)
> NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people...
Think they take this stance when it's time to hand out yearly bonuses?
I believe Jensen is still the largest individual shareholder for Nvidia.
Waiting to see how market reacts, I am selling my shares.
Dear Jensen, time to start another company.
And if you believe in conspiracy theory, I guess anthropic is very happy.
god the bean counters are running the company now. queue amd
Jensen's other biz, but with a different outfit, possibly alternate days of the week
I thought they were cousins, but now that you mention it, I don’t remember seeing them in the same room…
I love the stock dive for nvidia. I hope it never stops.
so a week ago a picture leaks and now he’s out. I’d like to know the story behind the story.
Every influential person, even middle managers, have a laundry list of “scandals” . The real question is why now and why him.
Let this be a learning experience for everyone here: if you ever get the CEO if a US tech giant, then never f** a Chinese spy! (and never circumvent export bans while you are at it)
Could have just powered through it. I'm surprised he decided to resign.
I'm not sure he decided to resign. "X has decided to step down" is often PR speak for "X was forced to step down".
Both of these scandals individually are usually pretty rough to weather, together they were essentially guaranteed to have him forced out by the board. He's choosing to resign the same way a cop under investigation resigns to avoid more public consequences and to hope to sneak away to a new job.
Can't help but wonder if he is also getting out while the getting is good.
He is at retirement age and a zillionaire. So he is going to start cashing as he is no longer required to report the sale of the stock. He is going to liquidate.
Also, there are signs that the bubble is weakening. Probably a good time to leave that specific game.
Pushing the sale of the chips into circular ecosystem was a sign that it was topping too.
I know. But the legacy story looks pretty bad at this point. He's been running it for decades.
Gates did it too and they still think he is a guru which he never was by the way; all of them are into this stuff when the hit their 50s feeling left out of the game while accumulating zillions.
Whether he can do that might be determined by any divorce proceedings, I guess.
He's not going to be left with zero from the divorce proceedings.
The criminal ones might, though.
Someone of incredible wealth and influence suffering negative outcomes for something wrong that they did?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
These kinds of fines and CEO drama pass.
The real question we must ask is if a current $30k consumer GPU that initially sold for $2.7k is just as inflated as the 'AI' holdings revenue predictions.
The smart money will wait till the legal mess starts, as the dead cat bounce in the panic sell off is probable as people try to buy the dip. ymmv =3
> NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
Who are the insiders that arrange the coup?
Those who were against supporting open weight models and specifically selling Nvidia GPUs into China.
The AI labs do not want any of that and there is one that certainly has never released an open weight model.
You can take a good guess on the sort of people that are also associated with that AI lab.
It's kinda crazy to me to point at open weights here when we got proof of foreign interference of this kind. The case for considering China a fair or respectable actor in this regard is now absolutely dynamited.
This proves that not selling to China was a good idea, and throws into question every narrative pointing otherwise. It also should make it evident that yes, China is most certainly spreading propaganda regarding these points, there's just no way it's not happening.
Yeah, that could be the case.
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
Who is incentivized to mount such a coup, I wonder....? Could it be the nation accused of inserting a spy into his life?
Sam and Dario, along with the NatSec hawks
He was at the top of the world just last week and now his career is over. Slept with a direct subordinate - who btw rose quickly through the ranks - also slept with a Chinese spy and allegedly sold one of the most precious commodities in modern times illegally to an economic adversary. Hit job or not, he really fucked up.
it's jensover
because of a spy?
The spy affair was probably going to sink him eventually because she was also tied to a company that was redirecting chips to China where NVidia is banned from selling chips above a certain capability. Another affair came out this time with a subordinate inside the company which is also something that CEOs normally don't survive, the combo of them helped hammer in the nearly inevitable conclusion of each of them.
Guy sleeps with spy
Conspiracy reaction: Something is going on here... obviously not due to sleeping with a spy...
Not sure about the people thinking he didn't do much wrong.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
I think he clearly did something wrong. It just doesn't seem that bad in comparison to the current shit our leaders do weekly. We're in an age of morally corrupt leadership across the board in the United States.
And the way to fix that is to start holding leaders accountable. So the insistence that it's wrong to somehow hold Jensen accountable here is a pretty absurd angle for the exact "But but but we don't hold leaders accountable here" people to take.
You want leaders to be held accountable? Look, a leader who clearly made bad and dumb and wrong choices, and a simple opportunity to celebrate them facing accountability. Can you support that?
We don't know anything about his cheating and it shouldn't matter.
We don't know his relationship with his wife, what their stands on cheating even stands.
You can argue its an image issue, but thats a problem of the press and marketing and not that he might have cheated.
His wife is an adult and is for sure not poor, so its not a situation were she has to stay with him.
I do believe it either has to do with the whole spy story or he did something he really shouldn't have.
I never mentioned cheating? Not sure why are you bringing it up.
I said that the missteps was having sex with subordinates and chinese spies.
Now start connecting the dots with Nvidia being one of the major advocates for relaxing exports to China and selling billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies that the chinese spy represented and you understand why the board finds him a liability.
You mentioned, as the first big point:
"Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that."
Fair though you didn't say cheating, but it undermined (at least by reading it) the main argument you brought up later regarding chinese spies
Even the "chinese spies" is just unsubstantiated 'she's chinese so she should be a spy". She's not even chinese iirc, isn't she singaporean? so it's like suspect by ethnicity.
> so it's like suspect by ethnicity.
Suspect by payment from ... TenCent? AFAIK. Her company got money from Tencent and after every longer meeting with Jensen, someone from Tencent flew in and had a meeting with her. At least that is what I remember hearing.
In Wikipedia no mention of TenCent at all. In another writeup it's mentioned, but nothing clear.
Was Alice's company supposed to be the only company getting Nvidia chips (which they deny doing anyway). Or one of many and Chinese companies did it with many different others?
If many, why is her relationship specifically important or special from that aspect?
Again, I can understand snooping for confidential early information from him. But "she got with him so that this single company gets chips"?
If, as a CEO, the location and interaction of your penis ever becomes well known, then you are failing as a CEO, outside of a few very specific cases.
>or committed fraud
We're just gonna keep shoving the illegal GPU trade with China under the rug I guess.
Innocent unless proven guilty.
But yes, the fact that Nvidia advocated for relaxing exports to China and that he sold billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies is now obviously under major scrutiny.
If it was some middle manager who got fired for screwing a subordinate you'd see the typical "don't shit where you eat" comments. My guess is people are upset because their stock is down 20% over the last month because of this drama.
I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.
I agree. And to the conspiracy theorists: what is more likely? That an impossibly rich guy who thinks he is the center of the universe does something as entitled as this? Or that there is some shadowy coup going on that just checkmated him? Human nature doesn’t need that much encouragement.
> committed fraud
The jury is still out on this, re the circular financing mess with AI
i hate this moral outrage. what's wrong if he was sleeping around? let him just print gpu. his ability to print gpus has nothing to do what he does in his bedroom. i can sympathaize with the wife and infidelity is a sin. but he was supplying everybody with gpu. so that makes him a great guy too.
Because there is potentially more to the story that would impact the actual business than just affairs. The board is to protect the business and if they make a move like this, they do so in the best interest of shareholders. We will see if anything comes out but I suspect it’s not just sleeping around. There is also fears of a federal investigation and the ability to scapegoat Jensen may be the best move, business wise
The volume of glee in this thread is alarming.
There's very little glee? There's lots of "no big deal, why is he fired" and lots of "these are firable offenses", but no glee.
One tech oligarch down, many to go.
I really hope the NVIDIA GeForce Now service sticks around and doesn't get enshittified.
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
You better hope they keep producing consumer gpus at all
>NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition (nvidia.com)
One Blue Tsunami, and now all the oligarchs are suddenly turning progressive and transitioning! Trump was right all along. This is exactly what he was trying to warn us about.
Think of all the mistresses who will now have to accept and adapt to their oligarch lover's new gender -- Jensen has at least two that we know of, but when you see two ants in the kitchen, you know there are a lot more. I can't wait to see the wig Bezos picks out.
He can not resist the pretty girls.
What is, however had, more interesting is that many of his statements did not age well. Now, mind you - I still think it is his private life at the end of the day; one can reason about foreign spies, but then the same question can be asked about Trump and his strange addiction to Putin. As well as how Jen-Hsun was so obedient to a mainland-China female, when the other Taiwanese are scared of being possibly invaded and subsequently killed by dictator Xi, just as dictator Putin commits to his own personal genocide against Ukrainians right now.
But, with regards to statements, I distinctly remember Jen-Hsun berating the british as incompetent economists. I watched that on a shorts on youtube; can not find it right now (google search AND youtube search sucks to no ends now). Well - he may be right that the UK suffers huge economic problems, but boy, this has not aged well. People will poke fun at his love of women potentially being spies while berating the british as being too incompetent in economics. Perhaps he was too incompetent in his own love life?
The reason this is all going so quickly now is because they realised how deep the shit is Jensen put the company in.
There will be an endless walk of shame for Jensen that would constantly drag the price of the company down, because this is the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to fly out of the gate in January and put the fear of god into the other billionaire oligarchs again. Punish one with extreme measures the others will fall in line, because at the end of the day they are all pussys.
Remember Elon wanted to do cagefighting with Zuckerberg. Those two losers had every excuse ready not to fight in the end. They didn’t even touch gloves for a single sparring. Manly men. All they can do is tough talk.
Plus the voters will see at least one party is doing something against blatant billionaire corruption, with corruption being the third most important topic in the elections.
There needs to be made an example of what happens to you if you start selling weapons-grade technology to the enemies of the United States for personal profit, and then think you are above the law.
This is not over for Jensen. And also not over for Nvidia, so the only sane thing to do is get as much distance between the "rogue" CEO and the company. Same for the White House, let’s see how often we see Jensen and Trump still together.
They are going to throw him under the bus and say he had the opportunity and the access and the power to do this without anyone else noticing, especially as he was sexually manipulating managers that directly report to him on important corporate issues.
They will make it look as though it’s all Jensen’s fault because otherwise they stop being a trillion-dollar company.
It’s a fitting end for Jensen Huang.
He gets taken down by the holy trifecta of power, money and politics he valued above his own marriage or what this whole mess would do to his kids.
He even lied in his public apology because he still was confident the other affair with his married manager would never surface because he truly believes he is smarter than anyone else.
What a loser. 140B deep pockets and still a loser.
Money is only paper. All that counts is family.
Threw away his life’s work, his marriage and every last drop of respect for him as a man, father and husband his kids could ever have for pocket change and some ass.
Stuff like this is why AI automation is going to come faster than people think.
Invariably it will be recognized that the weakest link in any part of any organizations are the humans. Humans once had a monopoly on long-term strategic thinking so capital had to confer them authority and compensation, but once AI supersedes humans in these respects, then the human element will be aggressively excised from any company where human flaws put the strength and compettive advantage of that company at risk.
A robot employee never has affairs, never sleeps, never needs worker's compensation for injury, never sues the company. When trillions of dollars are on the line, eliminating risks like this is a trivial decision.
[delayed]
If your whole world is controlled by your greed, yes. But human beings are relational. Half the reason I go to work is to talk and relate to my coworkers.
I know some people have AI girlfriends, but most people are not willing to (nor do I think they should) make that jump to trying to relate to their robot coworker.
I hope it's the same for people making a company. If not, we are heading towards a very lonely world.
I am almost sure now that there is a lot worse thing being hidden here, beyond an extra marital affair.
If shareholders want to save the company fu-g board of directors should be replaced completely and Jensen back.
Colette Kress has brain of Marisa Mayer who destroyed Yahoo. A woke clown to lead technology company? No vision, no skills, no understanding of technology.
Because he cheated on his wife?? Or what am I missing? If that's the official reason, I don't buy it. I don't think those who can influence this decision give two shits about this type of morality. It's silly on its face. Obviously it's cover for some other agenda. I'm just surprised people buy this silly excuse instead of getting to the bottom of what is really happening.
That he conspired to smuggle NVIDIA GPUs into China to bypass a US embargo working with the Chinese government via a spy (either willingly or via blackmail). Impropriety adds insult to injury - the board have rightly seen that the market will view it more negatively if he stays than if he leaves.
> Because he cheated on his wife??
And a lot of other shady things around nvidia, half of it we probably will never know about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...
Cheated on his wife with a spy who was using her connection to Jensen to move GPUs into China through Singapore in breach of the export controls.
The cheating is just a bit of humiliation, the damning part is the knowingly circumvention of export controls.
Oh if he knew all of that, then that's what I'm missing, thanks.
Nvidia bulls are still processing
the impending investigation regarding the sanctions might have more to do with it, to be honest.
It's only been like a year since the last CEO resigned for viral infidelity.
And that was only with a subordinate, not a subordinate AND with a foreign spy (alleged). Reports say China got billions in chips imported thanks to this operation.
Politicians also drop like flies. The only person impervious to consequences has been Trump. None of his supporters care that he's the devil.
No, it's because he repeatedly lied. 20% of the company's profits were/are coming from selling sanctioned chips to China and he said 0% 0% 0% (in official filings)
The news made it sound like she was a sophisticated person using him as a simpleton, but if anything he was using her to move his products against sanctions.
...with an actual spy.
And a subordinate executive. And god knows who else.
But I imagine the billions of dollars in illicit sales is considered a bigger issue.
The board should've: "Fire you? We’ve just spent billions of our market cap educating you to be careful with spies. Why would we fire you?"
allegedly?
I have to say, this seems like a ridiculous over-reaction on the part of the board.
I think if you could know the truth, 75% of CEOs in the US probably cheat on their wives. They are not hired to be faithful to their wives, they are hired to increase the stock prices of their companies.
Like sure, if you're a good Christian, it's not good behavior, but ultimately, it's just having sex with someone. I want the guy to make me money and build a great company, I don't care who he has sex with.
They don’t care about some paltry affairs
It’s quid pro quo sexual harassment.
It's not about the sex. It's about the judgement shown in cheating with a Chinese spy and a direct report, specifically. It's the lack of trustworthiness shown by someone who is willing to cheat in their marriage (presumably they are then fine lying to their company). And finally it's about exporting gpus to China illegally.
This isn't just a case of some extramarital sex.
was it confirmed she was a spy? or is that just rumors?
Cheating in private is up to you.
Cheating with your direct report leaves you open to blackmail.
Cheating with your fucking customer leaves you open to a whole bunch more trouble.
Sure, but what about the relevant accusations?
Could 75% of CEOs in the US help foreign intelligence assets to evade export controls and not face consequences?
I think the whole "selling chips to a country we have an export ban with" thing might be more of their concern.
The only reason Jensen is out is because he doesn't pretend AI is an existential threat like Anthropic and OpenAI do to boost their own valuation/moats and to boost the anti-China sentiment for the administration.
Apologies, but I don't really get why these issues are being exposed all over so awfully about the person life of the poor person who is getting ashamed, reputation getting damaged, and what's more important, his wonderful personal, private life is getting exposed and preserved in the history...
These lovely cases must still be approached with pure respect for private life of everyone, and understanding, because we all are human who have feelings, and this is absolutely normal to make mistakes in love sometimes trying...
Relationships, affairs, love... this is personal and must be respected. These are some of the most complex subjects, if not the most... and infinitely magnificent feelings... where sometimes the heart and hope wins over rational actions...
Yet, this is true for every single human, isn't it? This is true about me, I believe, too. This is true about people I know in overly serious and responsible positions at critical decisions for business and lives of other people... and they know that, and stay careful.
And these cases, vulnerabilities, or operational risks... are also covered on military classes, as leadership and security awareness courses, to stay responsible for actions and consider the future - to remind that you must always evaluate the long term consequences, to the point to decide quickly in full action.
This is matter of the heart... human emotions... infinitely powerful aspects of human nature... the dear love... There's nothing to be ashamed of.
Yes, you must stay truthful to your half... the ring bound promise, which is a miracle if from love... But it is fundamentally... absolutely normal, awesome to try searching for your soulmate if you don't have peace at heart, making mistakes, trying hard...
// ---
Such public cases are either designed for public (e.g., to derail attention from something more important), or those that get out of control, which is relatively rare, I believe.
It is rare to get exposed on public since these relationships are known to limited number of people, aren't they? So samizdat is rarely responsible for it, and mass publishers are normally supervised by governments, which is expected for them to stay responsible for control of events.
Even if circumstances and consequences may be monumentally tragic or overly serious, this is love which is no less serious, and miraculously lovely awesome...
// ---
// ---And I just heartfelt sorry for the person to receive so much shame, hatred, mockering, hostility, ridiculing from public... for just his attempts to find love, his peace at heart...
There is no shame in that, I believe, absolutely. This is his business to be not exposed so disgracefully on public.
This is a miracle to proud of, to understand, and respect always.
Sincere heartwarming hug, dear Jensen... I am... sorry... for the people to ridicule on it you nor anyone deserves...
How do you know he did it "for love and peace at heart?"
People coming at this are coming from the opposite assumption: that he's a billionaire and uses that power to fuel an appetite for lust.
I mean, if you look at the evidence, that's what the narrative supports. Both those affairs - one with Alice and one with Kimberley - overlapped in time. It's not that he fell head over heels for someone and pined for them - it's that he didn't resist the temptation to prioritize getting laid over getting love.
Further, matters of the heart are less important than doing the right thing. You don't date a direct report, period. It's unethical for everyone involved, and affects everyone of that woman's coworkers.
I am not saying there's no complexities in matters of the heart. I'm just saying this case is simple, and black and white, and not an excuse for us to turn off our eyes and ears.
Everyone wants to think they’re morally superior, that they wouldn’t do the same. Newsflash people, having sexual desires is a very natural human thing, it’s wired into us all. You don’t know what his marriage was like. Could’ve been the most draining thing imaginable but maybe he wanted to keep it together for his kids.
He made a very human mistake and now his personal life is on display for the world to read about. I feel sorry for him.
another poor chinese guy. they will never be trusted in the america system.
Jensen Huang called Israel a "second home" while it was committing genocide against Palestinians. This is just a continuation of a pattern of corruption. I think he resented his own success because these are not honest mistakes. Jensen Huang is the AI Great Gatsby.
fwiw, this was seen at the time as a gesture to the large number of NVIDIA (Mellanox) employees in Israel. Both due to it being a major center for the company and because he had personally been spending a lot of time there meeting with the networking org.