If you call letting a spy blackmail and control you, just a mistake being at such an influential level, I don't know what to say. A mistake, a bug in code, or slip of the tongue here and there. This is a catastrophic level of security gap where your CEO can be making decisions for another controlling and governing entity.

If you cause a data leak at NVDIA, or say making decisions at your level based on an external entity blackmailing you and got caught, would your boss still say, "We shouldn't push people out for making a mistake"?