For sure he has excellent PR and comms advisors. He gets credit, I guess, for taking their advice, but none for betraying his wife and family. It speaks volumes that so much of the leadership class in American tech and business is so morally compromised.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure many, if not most, humans in their position could be compromised in this way.

It is one person, and your enemies have all the resources at your disposal.

It is very easy to say, “I would never do X” but when you literally have a nation trying to get you do X, I presume it’s a lot harder.

This is why I am content with being a no body.

All you have to do to moot 100% of that massive adversarial effort is to decide (ahead of time) to not be a POS and keep your dick behind your zipper. Not deciding that and sticking to it makes you a garbage husband and a dangerous and unreliable CEO.

Crisis communications is a real field. Most companies and most people do it poorly, but there are specialists who are good at getting it right.

Or, you know, you could be a stand up person and be genuinely contrite.

He's a big time CEO and his company is impacted by how well he handles it. So of course there are PR/crisis people around. They specialize in making psychopaths look human.

But leaders are where they are because they make good decisions - their character does matter. Calling in the image-fixer types to clean up your mistakes is easy mode.

Being seduced by a foreign agent was neither a good decision, nor evidence of good character, nor proof of situational awareness.

Can we assume this was a one-off because she was uniquely persistent and persuasive?

Yes, total failure on many counts. But when called to answer for it, you can respond like a flawed human or you can have a pr crisis firm present you as a bland corporate robot who says things like “if anyone was offended I apologize” or “we’re going to investigate how this happened.”

I think his answer was solid and seemed genuine. Doesn’t mean I think he’s got good judgment generally, but at least this was not a shitty thing to say.

Indeed.

Anyone who believes he personally agonised over this alone in a darkened room is being rather naive.

Owning a mistake is especially hard in the East Asian culture. It’s been a long time I have seen a public figure admitting his wrongdoings.

Info on Jensen's PR firm, which it looks like he chose specifically because he knew this news was likely to come out[0].

[0]https://www.wired.com/story/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-hired-a-...

Ethan Klein could learn a thing or two

As apologies go it’s skillfully done. But it’s almost entirely about his personal failings (the affair), and it leaves plenty of room for a slow-walked board investigation that will end with a report designed to look thorough while concluding nothing.

Even if he didn’t know she was an intelligence asset, it’s hard to believe he didn’t at least suspect Megaspeed was a conduit to China. If you read the press reports, there were a ton of red flags.

Nvidia has also said he’ll stay on as CEO while the investigation runs. I can’t think of many CEOs who would survive this, let alone without taking any time off.

Its all calculated down to the pretend patriot lines near the end even though he's constantly looking for ways to bypass export restrictions to sell to china.