The board decides who is CEO. Zuck controls the board. Zuck cannot be fired unless he wants to be.

It is absolutely impossible to know the exact details, but Musk has a history of shady deals (even having his companies bill each other for expenses), and so it's not much of a leap of faith that these moves are to absolve himself from lenders and investors by shifting debt around and moving losers into winners.

I bet that SpaceX will buy Tesla any day now.

Musk somehow weasles his way through lawsuits and gray areas and corruption and legal loop holes to just have his companies buy each other out when they start sucking, all on the teat of others and the government.

It would have to be a very good cause though, disliking him or ordinary bad business decisions won't cut it.

Why does he support Putin?

Sen. Chris Coons says investigating Nvidia's CEO is top priority for Democratic Congress

https://www.npr.org/2026/11/09/nx-s1-6032682/senator-chris-c...

(sadly this is not my joke)

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/

(Taiwan. You guys have no idea how this is/will be regarded in Taiwan)

2. Ian Buck as CEO (Inventor of CUDA, PhD, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing).

Buck as the CEO.

Going only on the one day point, I wouldn't recommend it for Nvidia.

But there's no real competitors still? Even for the medium term?

So AMD, Google are not "real" competitors?

Conspiracy theory, the affair news came out to bury this story lol

Training must not be allowed by normal people. The resulting models may work stuff out that they're not supposed to and that would be bad and wrong.

I expect shit show funnier than when OpenAI tried to put Altman with same result.

Does Nvidia have such a policy? Unless laws have changed, this isn't an issue as far as the law is concerned.

(Googling - seems they may actually have this policy...)

From what I've heard: Nvidia's operations is heavily reliant on Jensen. He's embedded in everything. Early in the pandemic, I interviewed with them. The recruiter said that pretty much every engineer at the company will, at some point, be in a meeting that includes Jensen. I spoke to a friend who worked there and he confirmed it.

(Probably no longer true as they've grown a lot since then).

It certainly isn't something for Ronald fucking McDonald to have an opinion about.

"Having sex with a direct report" is not on that list of prohibited reasons.

But does that make it reasonable for hackers to think that drinking a glass of water is some kind of horrible offence, like some lunatics seem to think about workplace relationships? Which are one of the most common way that people meet and get married.

Your remedy for that problem is not to accept that job or to refuse to sign the contract and negotiate.

It is for that reason that no job in the US has that term.

Keep that in mind.

> During the conference, Nvidia executives were at a nearby hotel for meetings. Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell were seen being affectionate at the hotel. One bystander captured the interaction on their phone, three people briefed on the incident said.

> Mr. Huang’s security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

Well, at least there will be one way to make money after AI takes my job...

Jokes aside, I would expect we will soon learn there is more. Given that Nvidia was vouching for Megaspeed while exporting those chips, I still think there's a reasonable chance Jensen ends up in jail over this. Not large, but possible.

Do they offer $20k? $200k? $2M? He stands to potentially lose tens of billions over this.

When I encountered this ( in much smaller, non strategic companies!) both parties took great care to hide their affair and appear completely professional in public. The fun and games were kept behind closed bedroom doors. I don't get it.

Some folks get a thrill from getting caught, too.

Seems like this video and the first affair with the spy was a classic blackmail operation used against him as I said before [0] and Huang likely said no to the wrong person.

It is over.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50417105

Hopefully this teaches the market to migrate away from proprietary CUDA and NVIDIA and their proprietary drivers.

The coup of Jensen Huang was precisely organized by the same large institutional investors.

They want NVIDIA to lock-up firmware and prevent any open-weight models from being run. Everyone (at least in US/NATO/US-aligned world) will be forced to use Anthriopic/OpenAI or some other US based closed source model.

Open models will be banned at the GPU level.

This is done to cement the multi-trillion dollar valuation of the AI labs and prevent AI bubble from popping due to customers using free open-weight, instead of pay-per-token closed models

the rest of the world will be starved of GPUs and chipmaking equipment and chemical supplies for chip making

no biggie if their valuation will deflate a bit just like Cisco did in 2000.

pure-software business like openai/ant, will be protected and their global market will be protected

Not because they care about the rest of the world, they care about their own domestic market/sales though.

They successfully re-invented half of modern consumer tech inside China already, the the US closes a market, it hurts them for a few years then they close that gap.

For decades it's been "Yeah they closed the Gap on X but we have Y" then "Yeah they closed the gap on Y but we have Z" and Z starts to look pretty uncertain.

At a certain point you have to realise that with enough capital and people you can do the things that the other people with enough capital and people are doing, there isn't really any secret special "America has to be the tech leader" sauce, there wasn't when the British where the world leaders or when the Italians where or the Middle East and back through history.

Exceptionalism eventually kills your lead.

Such a move would also be transparently dystopian... though, in fairness, I suppose that makes it more plausible than it would otherwise be...

if Uncle Sam has not approved your model, it will be illegal to run it as a AI risk.

Americans have swallowed even worse limitations on their freedoms, so nobody will even notice that, because all notices will be sent to hyperscalers, neoclouds, and other large operators of GPU farms

Is this actually technically possible?

Might have worked if they did it suddenly and all at once a decade ago.

I don't think anyone thinking that is possible has thoroughly understood how much soft power the US has lost in the last decade.

invoke Nato article 5? or loudly complain to see a manager?

Two, How's that "Hard Power" working for them, Strait of Hormuz open again?.

vassals will bend over and let the US capitalists fleece them via token tax

> US/NATO/US-aligned world

NATO really barely exists anymore as a consensus mechanism, it doesn't make that kind of policy or have that sort of policy influence, the "US-alignment" of the world has never been weaker, and the genie is really out of the bottle on the technology anyway.

This premise is most likely incorrect: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-state-of-the-ai-economy

If anything this should impact the IPO only to the extent it affects the production of new compute capacity, because it is clear that is the #1 thing they need to scale revenues.

The US taxpayer wins.

/s

I'm scared about how this in turn shapes society.

You would do well to look at the history beyond the modern era.

More than a century of "do-nothing kings" who did not "soon find out about it".

Inertia and corruption are the default state. If we want nice things we have to be vigilant about letting power concentrate.

I haven't found the answer. But I do know one thing from my (smallish) sample: the nice guy never let the money get to his head. He drove his own car (a VW Rabbit, ok, a nice one) and lived in the same house that he lived in when he started his company. And until the day he died he just kept doing what he loved without ever feeling the need to lord it over others. More like a Wozniak (who is the other 'nice billionaire' that I'm aware of but I've never met him).

A human being is so unlikely to be good on their own, pretty much all cultures practiced infanticide and child sacrifice and pederasty and only changed because a few hated these practices and forced them to stop.

But a lot of people the only moment they get to act in an unaccountable manor will act very badly. This is not all people but probably above 90%.

I don't like CEO worship or tech culture (I know I am on hackernews but I am a developer and did like software development and related topics), but this take is crazy most people you know would probably take the bait on an operation like this even 'good' people.

And just take a look at the scum running things outside of Tech a lot worse then a moment of infedality, look at all western leaders you will probably find few better (or even equal) to Jensen. Jensen did not shape the shitshow you are seeing now (not saying he is not part of it), it was corrupt from the start, Just a worthless veneer of morality.

Don't morn your societies decay it was a cadaver from the beginning only by putrefaction will it become the soil to plant strong trees on.

And that "scum also exist outside tech" is just a whataboutism. It'd be a better discussion if you actually interacted with my arguments.

> Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point?

Was not trying to be dishonest but was meant to be what I felt you comment boiled down to, I will revise my comment to change the '>'. > And that "scum also exist outside tech" is just a whataboutism.

What I was saying is not just that scum exists outside tech but that the society that created this tech culture and space is the curruption it's self and it's not worth thinking about as something to save but to replace entirely.

> This post was after a second affair, to me that's a moral flaw, not just someone exploiting him.

I am not saying it's not a moral flaw but compared what Trump has done Epstein, wars, etc. He looks like a Saint. It's pointless even talking about morality in the way you do when Trump and his weak cronies are in power. (and yes I know Nvidia under Jesen no doubt has benefit from this corruption). Infidelity is so common in are time but if only that was the worst of it.

What I was saying is not just that scum exists outside tech

He's out as CEO but he'll continue to be a force at Nvidia. If the new CEO is smart, he'll keep him in the company, but it will be hard since Huang will be seen as the company's leader and it will be very hard for Huang to act any other way.

The bigger issue is the conflict of interest stuff, but until that’s proven this is a horrible look for NVIDIA if they actually go through with it.

The no-going-back issue is the corruption. Jensen corruptly quashed an investigation into Megaspeed. He then quite clearly expected Republicans in Congress to back him, which is why he only came clean when forced to.

I don't care about it. But I do understand folks who are dismayed to see someone who many of us–myself included–saw as a bit of a paragon until a few weeks ago turning out to be a total shithead.

He was never a paragon.

https://mustsharenews.com/jensen-huang-signs-woman-chest/

Don’t look to billionaires if you’re looking for paragons. They all fail basic ethical checks. It’s very easy and convenient to not look for these failures. But, inevitably, when somebody starts looking hard, they find them.

I'm disappointed in him as a business person, not in a some moralistic sense but because he's clearly very smart and capable yet made himself vulnerable with these two dumb mistakes. In his position there are a lot of external interests who want leverage or control over you.

His board must think he's a lunatic. They have every right to know if he's having an affair with anyone (because marital infidelity is a personal corruption issue that is rarely not a problem when it's a CEO, since carrying off an affair usually involves suborning staff in some way). But this? Madness.

Stepping outside of your marriage behind your spouse’s back is still scummy behavior.

one was a direct report, one was a spy

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang_spying_scandal

Regardless of that, the comment above still seems correct, and a sibling comment points out that (as a rather new development), that they are separate women.

Considering the current administration and the amount of corruption by trump and co, I feel like not following the rules is too simplistic an explanation for being targeted like this.

Affair of a CEO with a direct report and member of senior leadership? Kind of a big deal

Affair with a Chinese intelligence agent? Quite a big deal

One affair was a mistake. Two, with a spy and an employee, are a real failure of responsibility -- and those are just the ones we know about.

The second one will get you fired just about anywhere.

It’s not just the affair(s), it’s with who, and the subsequent appearance of conflict of interest, and the appearance of national security implications, and the appearance of lobbying the government on behalf of a foreign agent, and the appearance of enabling smuggling to get around trade sanctions, and the implications for employee morale in an unfair workplace, and and and…

I don’t understand you Americans; you live in a disproportionately violent society, tolerate all sort of abuse and manipulation, then will scream hysterically at anyone having an unconventional sex life.

Give me a fucking break.

It's nothing to do with prudishness about his sex life and everything to do with his actions endangering the company.

But so does walking around in public without covering all body head to toe, indeed some countries ban women from doing so.

Simple risk aversion or trespassing on personal freedom?

It is simple risk aversion. A CEO has a whole world of people to have an affair with outside of his or her direct reports, and indeed company. Everyone has equal access to walk around in public. Surely this difference is obvious?

To use an example where we aren't talking about lawsuits, teachers are typically prohibited, by policy and / or law, from relations with their students before they graduate from highschool, even if the student is of legal age. There's both the power difference as well as an implicit duty of care where, even if the relationship is nominally consensual, the teacher is abusing their role as a trusted adult in power. Once the student graduates, there's no longer any official prohibition.

Recent trend is quite the opposite. What's Tesla without Musk selling pipe dreams ? Pretty sure there is 0 plan for replacement.

Huang expected to run the company well into his 80s, with no clear successor.

SMH

EDIT: I assume the bubble will collapse into correction eventually, sooner is better than later.

NVidia doesn't need Jensen in the short / medium term - they are printing money. Unless we discover that all this circular financing was some kind of scheme.

We have 2 other companies though, Tesla and SpaceX, which CEO represents 90% of the valuation. That will be the real one.

I think this is one of those " the question is the answer" moments.

It’s the Dot Bomb days all over again.

Obviously, the affairs are a very serious issue, but the investigation needs to determine whether there were any security conflict of interest breaches

Let’s be clear: any abuse of power involving related-party relationships is wrong. Jensen should not get a “free pass” just because he’s Jensen. This is very serious.

Jensen’s leadership of the broader company is unparalleled, and replacing him would be nearly impossible. That step should only be taken when it’s extremely clear there is no other option. Even if the board does replace him, that brings significant risk, not just to NVIDIA but to all the other businesses connected to it. I hope a warning shot across the bow is enough for him to clean things up so everyone can get back to focusing on the work.

As for which way the board rules, the details are all that matter. When boards react emotionally, before a thorough investigation and before they have the full picture, they make bad decisions. They shouldn’t rush. They should investigate and dig into every detail.

Then make a decision. These decisions will carry enormous weight.

None of us really know the details. NVIDIA board: do your job and take it very seriously. Deliberately measure three times, cut once. Don’t spectate. The public likes/wants Hollywood drama, but what we really need is good corporate governance.

It’s just sex mate, it’s really not a big deal unless he giving favourable deals to his mistress’s company.

The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.

But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed" [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...

The Board–correctly–fears for themselves personally in a case involving Jensen's public and multinational corruption scheme.

This is going to be easy political win. Jensen's only saving grace is that he is in bed with Trump so he won't be sitting behind in prison cell.

There is a real corruption angle here that a lot of folks out west are missing [1].

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/answer-in-front-of-...

I hope he's allowed to do so. He now knows how not to get trapped into a tactically targeted honeypot, he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.

This minus all the cruft and legacy overhead of a company as old as Nvidia. I'm now hoping he gets fired.

Those lawyers were hired by Jensen.

Because he can start a new company knowing everything that he got wrong the first time around, be able to hire absolute badass engineers who got fired from Nvidia because some Manager or HR thought they smelled wrong and was a hygiene risk, or quit Nvidia because they didn't like the work they were being assigned, be able to raise capital from investors who currently won't invest in Nvidia because of reasons, be able to strike new deals that hasn't happened because someone at Nvidia isn't letting them happen.

Nvidia is a very old company, not as old as Intel but close. Old companies build their own internal overhead you just cannot get rid of that would just kill a new company

And what do you mean by "the things he did wrong the first time"? NVIDIA was the most valuable company in the world at one point either this year or last year, and it's still in the top three. He did everything right from business perspective.

This is … oddly specific

> Jensen Huang... also had an extramarital relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company.

2. Huang does not have the same control over the board that Brin and Page had. That doesn't make it "better", but it does affect the outcome.

Sure. After he's done responding to the Congress and various investigators and his family, something I suspect will occupy a good part of his next decade.

Does he? Plenty of serial cheaters out there getting caught repeatedly.

Building an Nvidia competitor would be a long, hard slog that almost certainly ends in failure for anyone including Jensen Huang.

They (NVIDIA) have tens of thousands of patents on their technology that would be hard to build around and commitments that lock up 60-70% of TSMC's CoWoS capacity.

Jensen has a very good relationship with Musk. I think he would hire him and put him CEO of Terrafab, of course only if Jensen is down for it as well.

Almost worth the time I wasted reading through the steaming pile of trash that all the other comments on this story are...

One of the greatest failures of Nvidia's Board was in failing to push for a successor. (Musks' companies face a similar risk.)

SpaceX has Shotwell to cushion the blow. Tesla will obviously crash into the cellar the moment he OD's or gets thrown in jail for pedo shit.

The trillion dollar valuation would be gone for sure.

It’s not like Jensen predicted it

Tim Nvidia.

I'm just parroting what is typically said about him in the business press as part of a non-serious joke here.

I'm not an Apple fan and don't really follow his career.

That said, Apple makes almost 3 million dollars of revenue per employee, so I don't know if suggesting they hire too many employees really lands?

Bad things happen when you concentrate all praise on a single person, let me remind you of the Iran war.

Are you implying that Tim Cook should single-handedly run the worlds largest, highest throughput global supply chain? Like the screws of the Mac mini, the walk throughs of thousands of factories all over the planet, the coordination of fedex and UPS shipments of 100M units in a single day for just ONE of their products? Coordinating the DHL shipments to Germany? Sourcing the supply of the sapphire crystal glass? Coordination of mass producing the 3nm silicon at TSMC and the C1 modem in Shenzen? All Tim Cook. All by himself.

Seriously, i hope this was just a joke that landed badly. Cause oh my god, man.

Do you know how many parts go into all Apple products ?

Its a very large number, nobody at Apple could possibly know the requirements or reasoning for why one is selected and another dismissed.

It would takes years just to read thru the entire list and understand the engineering choice for each one.

> Sourcing the supply of the sapphire crystal glass?

Do you know how many different types of glasses there are and all their physical properties and costs and suppliers ?

I dont know but im pretty sure it would take a long time certainly more than a year just to get the contact and technical details and possible samples from each supplier.

Getting that sample is just the start. Gathering requirements, understanding testing methodology and equipment and many other items requires a very large team of engineers of all kinds.

There is no way a single person could do just this one task.

Its simply not possible for a single person do the glass and screws and we have only started.

As i said before Apple has thousands of highly skilled people because it requires all of them. You are dishonouring their skills and efforts by pretending its all Tim.

Its extremely anti free market, anti competition. The AI labs spent ungodly amounts of money lobbying US policymakers over the last 6 months. Jensen has been one of the few people speaking reasonably on the China question, and that wasn't acceptable to the western oligarchs trying to control AI.

Regardles what you think of China, the average person only has access to useful amounts or AI because of China. They seem to be the only group interested in actually democratizing AI. We should think hard about our biases regarding China and question if those assumptions are actually projection.

Seems like everything we accuse China of being, we're actually guilty of that. Surveillance, govt interference in markets, dystopian justice systems.. These are all traits of the US Empire. I say this as someone whos lived in both, and am a white American (if that matters).

I got a misdemeanor in America for something I said in my own home, by myself playing a video game, that was picked up over a ring camera doorbell in the townhouse on the other side of the wall.... Does this happen in China?

Do we have any evidence this lady was a spy, or is it just US propaganda outlets leaks.

Americans brains are so one shot by hollywood that you can say any pretty foriegn lady is a spy and we'll believe you.

Would love to hear what you have a problem with.

Getting rid of Jesen might be useful for the US AI labs, but what exactly would be the plan their. I can not see a benefit to them with this move, though I can not see any thing particularly negative for them.

The only evidence we have is Jensen drinking wine with this lady, I dont think him having drinks with someone is evidence he was participating in a conspiracy to circumvent export controls.

I dont really care if he jad an affair or not, but I think its crazy how easy it is to manufacture consent around the idea that he's a double agent by just posting picture of him being in the same room as someone.

Maybe more will come out, but there's no texts, emails or anything. Its just WSJ articles that had three pieces of legislation introduced to ban Chinese access to GPUs.

Its also wild how people think having GPUs is dangerous. China isnt going to harm us with matrix multiplication lol. Now Huawei will build better platforms, constraints are the seeds of innovation, if I was the US I would much rather flood their market with cheep back-doored GPUs. Which leads me to believe these actions are all on anti-competitive measures on behalf of Anthropic, who's spent a boatload on political lobbying.

Irattional things continue to be irrational i guess

There's a different angle here worth listening to: https://youtu.be/IC3Kh40dEQY

I don't agree with everything David Sachs says on the All in Podcast, but it looks like it's about political control over all frontier AI models from democrats.

We cannot glue ourselves to the backs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. We need to be anti-fragile and support a robust spectrum of AI inference being developed from all angles.

This would permanently wed us to a handful of vendors that will soak American businesses and innovators dry while their own products fail to reach the peak of what an open weights inclusive environment could lead to.

Source?

It doesn't matter who leaked what eveybody knew, the only think that matters is timing.

Dual-class share structures have become the defacto standard for founder led companies, giving founders disproportionate (even majority) voting power.

Someone like Zuckerberg effectively controls the board and would be extraordinarily difficult to oust against his wishes (absent some exceptional legal intervention or a decision to step aside)

Humans need someone to be accountable to, even if it’s just some guy walking behind you saying “memento mori” twice a day.

1 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthropic%27s_corpor...

2 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OpenAI_corporate_str...

So much for theory!

Remember all men are created equal.. except in reality they werent, just ask the Blacks, natives, Chinese and all the others.

Even today how many average Americans can call the President and have a chat even once ?

That figure raises to about half if you include all officers/directors.

[1] https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Lowry%20-%20Buck...

I even wonder whether some elements within the Chinese government has a hand in it -- not (only) the mistress part but the ousting part.

1/ China is still interested in chips

2/ Chip exports to China will now (presumably) be under even more scrutiny

What would their motivation be to leak this info?

Maybe?

Over the next two years, Congress is going to haul in every tech CEO who licked Trump’s boots. I think Jensen tried to get in front of it and now journalists and institutional short sellers are digging up the dirt.

It's NVIDIA being sued because they defrauded investors by including illicit chip sales in their Q3 figures

https://x.com/ChinaSelect/status/2120253050845593723

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...

Wasn’t the swap drained in 2016 too?

Within weeks I saw the naked racism and left the whole party behind. Having learned more about Trump and Republicans since has been ... humiliating after decades of voting 'R'.

I can imagine people souring over lack of follow through on economic promises, or the naked corruption with your $coins, but from a racism/xenophobia/morals perspective, I'd feel like most of the signal was there in the 2016 campaign was it not?

A larger fraction of Americans voted for a supported Trump because he seemed to credibly criticize the Iraq War and promised no new fuckups in that category.

The mask-off racism was just beyond the pale, and lead me to look deeper into his past and how he was starting to govern. It became obvious that he'd mostly cheated or lucked his way into fortune and fame.

> Morally I didn't expect him to personally be a paragon of virtue.

Lot of people respond with this, but honestly, that is setting up a straw man to knock down isn't it? No one claims that we should expect any politician to be a paragon of virtue but in terms of how they conduct themselves and the language they choose, there is still a reasonable bar that Trump blew past and set an awful precedent.

In hindsight there were signs I should have known about it taken more seriously. Which is why I suppose Jensen is on the ropes now.

Wherever you land on your views in the future, being willing to question everything is a superpower.

Onward!

Now that's something I'd like everyone to believe, if I was the CIA.

That's why Huang doesn't get to decide whether chips should be sold to China. He can advocate all he wants, speech is cheap.

When some dude's sex life quashes an investigation into Megaspeed, yeah, it becomes germane. (There are serious questions around Lutnick, for example [1].)

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/answer-in-front-of-...

I don't get it. Huang doesn't get to decide who chips can't be sold to. Presumably Huang wants to sell chips to everyone whether or not he's fucking them. Nvidia will always say yes to another billion dollars. It's up to the state department to say no.

If Lutnick was sleeping with a Chinese spy and approved the sale, sure throw him in jail. If Huang secretly bribed Lutnick to approve the sale, sure throw them both in jail. But that's not what we're seeing?

What am I missing? Seriously, ELI5.

You’re absolutely correct that we have no smoking gun in the public record. What we have, instead, is smoke. Lots of it.

> What am I missing?

"Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year.

The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.

But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.

It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company’s representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.

The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler’s interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident” [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...

Maybe the board knows more, and that's why they are "preparing to oust" him. Or maybe it's about the sex scandal.

I don't have money in NVDA but if I did I would certainly want him to stay at his desk until we have the actual gun.

I do have money in Nvidia. I want Huang gone. If he stays, there is a real chance the hammer about to fall on him destroys Nvidia as well.

This seems awfully handwavy. Civilians don't get to quash investigations.

The legality will depend on what we find under that handwaving, but I doubt very much we will find personal checks written to Lutnik.

I have to ask: If he hadn't slept with the woman, would you feel the same way about the whole affair? If not, why does the sex matter?

Correct. It's called corruption.

> I doubt very much we will find personal checks written to Lutnik

You don't need this to trigger undue influence issues.

> If he hadn't slept with the woman, would you feel the same way about the whole affair?

Yes. That seems to have blown open the scheme Jensen was running [1], possibly with the knowledge of the White House.

I'm flying from Silicon Valley to New York today. The bubble that has people publicly calling this a nothing burger is the exact reason Americans are furious and fed up with our tech sector's leaders.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/nvidias-disappearing-s...

You're ignorant, by accident or on purpose.

She could have been his chess partner, and if he'd acted the same way on her behalf it would have been fireable. The six is immaterial and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't read up on this or is selling something.

The sex is just the icing on top of the poor judgement.

What they care about is the US leading China on every militarily and economically relevant technology.

The hawks have long chafed at Huang’s position that we need to sell our best chips to China to keep them on the US tech stack. It’s very obviously giving them the ability to catch up.

Energy is the hard part, and US is deeply behind on that.

Megaspeed being Nvidia's largest customer in the region... And when it raised suspicions causing the US to investigate, Jensen vouched for the company, saying Nvidia already investigated them and found nothing.

If I ignore the words, and instead observe behaviour, all of the actions I observe indicate the opposite;potential competitors are treated as very credible threats, even existential ones; and actions indicate that 'maintaining special access to hardware' and 'vying for regulatory capture to shut out competition' are major strategic goals.

You’re looking for a conspiracy when this is a pretty straightforward story. Jensen’s credibility is shot. Of course they’re preparing contingency plans.

I've already heard stories in social circles in Silicon Valley from senior folks in the industry that they didn't share before. Not because they were hiding anything. But because it wasn't topical. There are a lot of scumbags, and there is a lot of corruption to go around right now.

The first story came from sources close to the White House, or something along those lines. Makes sense since it was a national security issue. The second story is internal to the company.

If someone thinks there is not a lot of sex going on in the c-suite maybe you need to get out more.

Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy, as well as an affair with someone he manages. Either one of these would be grounds for dismissal at any company I've worked at. Committing both of these offenses shows appalling judgment by Huang.

Firing him seems like a very logical conclusion, not some CIA Illuminati bullshit conspiracy theory.

This scandal has felt like a litmus test for free market idealists vs realpolitik thinkers. Nvidia's board and Trump both knew about the spying allegations for over a year, allegedly. This is not a situation you can navigate with strong principles or a moral compass, you just have to follow the money.

This is up there with the most fireable things that have ever happened.

Paraphrasing the apocryphal quote:

Anti-corruption never took root in America because the commoners see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed future CEOs.

Nvidia has a large market share, but AMD, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Qualcomm all produce AI chips... these are all American companies.

Apple has no product like the SuperPOD, or AMD's CDNA, or Google's TPU, or Amazon's Trainium, or OpenAI's Jalapeño, so on and so forth.

If the Chinese spy lady really were a spy, all the govt agencies would have known about it long ago, but chosen not to reveal it. The whole business stinks of manipulation and "don't interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake", and the salacious headlines are what's selling this Manufactured Consent.

Regarding the original person, whatever conspiracy may or may not have occured doesn't resolve the original problem.

That's a tautology, of course. And the board should have been doing its job handling the key man in question

It's most obvious in hindsight, obviously. Across the history of such governance debacles.

Did he circumvent export restrictions?

TPUs and AWS's Trainium seem to be at least in the ballpark of being competitive but does that matter at all?

The thing is, this is just what's been reported. There's almost certainly more going on if 2 affairs are public disclosure. If there is a sexual harassment angle here as well, he's toast.

I mean, that's acceptable these isn't it?

Also to all the people saying how terrible this will be, would you really want someone running your company who can't keep his word to his wife? Maybe it is a quaint idea in 2026 but I think people who break their word shouldn't be trusted, particularly to be in positions of power.

You can also argue that he wasn't aware n as far as he knew this was just a company in Singapore. It will be interesting how it plays out based on the facts.

From an HR and legal perspective, if Alice was a spy, Jensen is arguably the targeted 'victim' of a foreign intelligence operation. Before anyone freaks out, yes I agree it was stupid and negligent of Jensen. There may also have been violations of company policies like mishandling confidential information or not following IT security policies but, legally, these aren't "Fire the CEO Now" types of policy violations. Slamming the sheets with a direct report absolutely requires some kind of immediate action.

The real question is who wants Jensen gone? Because the first leak clearly intentional and placed by 'White House sources', citing a confidential NSC report. Now the second leak of the inappropriate affair happens immediately after. This was a designed sequence. Both of the underlying events are several months old. Given the facts, both Claude and Gemini think the most likely source is 'China Trade/AI Hawks' in the White House (possibly the NSC). The reasoning being that Jensen has consistently been lobbying to lower restrictions on selling AI to China (which is, arguably, his job as NVidia CEO).

jfc

He knowingly helped advance China’s AI ambitions against the direction of congress. He got caught selling 7.5 Billion dollars of restricted chips to china.

Also he cheated on his wife with some Chinese woman, which is a totally separate and unrelated fuck up.

If you seriously think he got tricked by some random woman who batted her eyes, you are out of your mind. He founded the fucking company, he isn’t some clueless executive. He’s also not senile and he doesn’t have dementia. This is the only viable excuse for him to use, but it’s complete bullshit.

Think about it: He betrayed his longtime wife, who by all accounts supported him from the beginning. He betrayed his company and its shareholders. And he betrayed his country (BOTH of his countries?) who specifically forbid the chips to be sold to china. He’s fucked

Did he know she was a spy?

Did he give her any secrets?

Did he break up with her after finding out she's a spy?

Was she trained as a spy and sent to entrap him specifically? Or did she form a relationship with him, then get told by the Chinese Communist Party "Xi wants you to steal him some secrets from your boyfriend. This is an offer you can't refuse; spy for us or your family in China will be beaten, jailed or worse"?

Is he a victim or an asset? Is she a willing patriotic spy for China, or a victim of blackmail from the Chinese Communist Party? Has she been arrested as a spy, or did she make it to the Chinese embassy before the story broke?

Honeytrap.

Reveal the information to a trusted journalist.

Destroy Huang's credibility.

Force his resignation.

Damage Nvidia.

China moves further in the AI game.

Game set and match. Sounds like this might have been China's real goal.

It all unwound a few months later, much to my chagrin (and my lost stock options, obviously).

Recall that most bubbles do not pop due to one, key material cause. Instead, they pop due to adjacent troubles that, in turn, lead to cascading effects.

That was true of:

- LTCM failure (1998; Thailand and other SE Asian countries defaulted);

- 2000 market crash (dot-coms crash, then telecom crash of 2001);

- 2008-2010 financial crisis (mortgage backed securities); ... and so many others before these.

It's entirely possible that NVDA, despite earning $$$$, could unwind the circular funding within the ecosystem (the very crux of telecom market crash of 2001)

From an HR and legal perspective, if Alice was a spy, Jensen was arguably the targeted 'victim' of a foreign intelligence operation. While it was certainly very dumb and negligent, it may not have been a policy violation or may only have been a violation of company policies like mishandling confidential information or not following IT security policies. Those aren't usually "Fire the CEO Now" things, while slamming the sheets with a direct report absolutely requires some kind of immediate action.

The real question is who wants Jensen gone? Because the first leak was clearly intentional and reportedly placed by 'senior White House sources', citing a confidential NSC report. Now the second leak of the inappropriate affair happens immediately after. This was a designed sequence. Both of the underlying events are several months old. Given the facts, I think the most likely source is 'China Trade/AI Hawks' in the White House (possibly the NSC). The reasoning being that Jensen has generally been trying to minimize restrictions on selling AI to China (which is, arguably, part of his job).

Ousting him is pretty much the worst case scenario for the company.

Looks like both Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia CEO have Single Instruction Multiple Threads (SIMT) architecture.

I think the real story is not the affair, which was already reported in asian media in 2024, but what specific catalyst broke that protective shield and made continued containment untenable.

But "whatever" happened to make them count.

E.g. Jensen angers some important people.

I figured there will be quite a lot of people taking actions like this ... but nVidia was a surprise for sure.

standing on its' head your statement reads as :

"If the US doesn't allow government intervention into the business dealing of important private entities during times of scandal, to protect lies and initiate cover-ups, then China will win."

do I interpret that correctly?

> Some of what appears in it sort of actually makes sense, but when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. It’s perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men, it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields, and it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures. All of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.

not 100% the same, but many have made careers out of writing simple ideas that can perfectly well be conveyed with ooga booga language (or alternatively "few word" like that one guy from the Office), using instead flowery impressive-sounding prose

I can't believe everyone is not focusing on that part of the story, and the stories just can't seem to rise to the top of the page for one of the biggest tech stories in years.

If not exporting to Singapore, it will be exported to more countries that have more opaque business practices.

Kneecapping Nvidia in this case is absolutely a windfall to China, by allowing them time to catch up in semiconductor technologies

This, right here. I'm no fan of the "CEO as god" line of thinking but given the past few years there's a strong indication that having him as CEO is going to produce a better outcome than the opposite case.

Do we even know thats the end of this? This is only whats public at this point... It doesn't feel like the end of it but more like beginning to middle.

Midterms over, major loss of power for faction Huang seems linked to

Distillation getting harder

Anthropic IPO

I think a new regulatory regime is coming.

I’m not deep into this story, but my initial reaction is that marital infidelity doesn’t seem like a strong reason to oust him, aside from him possibly being compromised by an international spy. Haven’t other successful leaders continued to lead after having their affairs exposed?

(And no, I don’t believe what he did is morally excusable for the record.)

Not really that complicated of a scheme! The main thing is that the sales people... they "know" this is likely export control circumvention but choose to not make a stink about it. Willful ignorance.

Often times these export control issues play out like:

- big deals made with shell companies

- most people involved are incentivised to play along and pretend to not notice the shell-ness of the company

- one person doesn't get the memo and is like "uhh... wait isn't this bad?"

- now that the phrase has been uttered, either cover ups happen or a bunch of other nasty shit happens

At this stage, there is no reason to not sign the contract to provide whatever they ask. DD done, risk management done, risk but acceptable etc.

So yes everyone is playing the game.

...which may or may not be a violation of the export controls but it violates the intent.

Then Nvidia's general counsel contacted the commerce dept in 2025 to ask about a smuggling investigation into Megaspeed and whether the U.S. was involved in Singapore's detention of Alice Huang. Direction for this likely coming from Jensen.

Align that with his active lobbying of Washington officials to loosen export restrictions to China specifically

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000011275138/nvidia-j...

you answered your own question.

That's a pretty big "aside" for a very big company like NVIDIA.

> Haven’t other successful leaders continued to lead after having their affairs exposed?

https://andybyron.wiki/ is one half of the erstwhile internet-meme "Coldplay Cam Couple".

I don't see anyone accusing China of setting up such a trap. China always denies ofc, though all these scummy things eventaully comes out to be true, and by then everyone forgets.

Now on depending on how Jensen takes it, this could be the catalyst to steer AI in a new direction. Companies will line up to scoop him up, if not fight each other to get him. He is the head of the most valuable company, he has the tightest connection to the US government, it won't take a minute before Mudita* becomes a new company being fast-tracked to the top.

* Opposite of Envy (nvidia)

I do wonder if Megaspeed and other shell companies have been monitored for over a year by the Feds where they broke export rules, failed to report to the Govt with the knowledge of several in the Administration... Everyone was making money on the side by allowing Jensen, Megaspeed and others profit off of bypassing export controls. Just recently a shipment of GPUs randomly disappeared as well.

If this all turns out to be true then removing him is a lot stronger than it seems and maybe in the long run fixing the bus factor problem will have been a good change.

Or, since nVidia is the central bank of the AI bubble, forcing him out kicks off a chain reaction that pops the bubble.

Should the board replace him or not?

It's easy to judge when you have no skin in the game. What would you think if you did?

Any Nvidia employees out there?

To me, he had the good fortune of standing in the right place at the right time. He is no Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly started the PC revolution and the iPhone revolution. This is not to deny his brilliance and business acumen, but I think too many people overstate his contribution to both the company and the United States. Of course I could be wrong so I welcome correction or alternative viewpoints.

Speaking of the US, Jensen has indeed become a liability. A compromised CEO is, of course, a liability to a national asset, and a politically toxic one at that. Nvidia is a business with sensitive political ties now. It can't afford to appear compromised in the eyes of Washington. Therefore, Nvidia's stakeholders must let Jensen go; otherwise, it will affect the company as a whole.

by being ousted from his own company and using his golden parachute while * being bought back*?

Assuming these decisions are attributable to him personally, then he deserves the description "visionary" IMO. That said, he's made plenty of other choices I don't like, and invested in plenty of silly stuff that isn't panning out for them. I don't really think Nvidia needs a visionary right now. They have the best business in the world and they just need to execute.

The common argument is, well 'x' leader has had success in 5+ companies! Surely they must be excellent visionaries. Firstly, no single person in their lifetime can possibly launch/aid enough companies to success to have a large enough sample size to prove they are a factor for success. Launching 'x' amount of companies is great but its still such a small amount that it cannot really demonstrate anything. Secondly, once you have had success once, you gain connections, wealth, e.t.c. that only bolster further endeavors that you do even if they are pretty bad ones.

Ofc, there are things an individual at the top of a company can do to make 'good decisions', but this is mostly just selecting the right people below you to delegate to (thus reading/spotting talent well) and listening to your data and people to get as much information as possible before making overarching decisions based on that. This is what I consider common-sense and what most people do in their day-to-day jobs all the way at the bottom of companies anyways, alongside all their regular hard-work (engineering e.t.c.). Upper management just has the luxury of only have to focus on the common-sense dull part; listen to incoming data, make obvious meta decision.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/ChinainAus/videos/nvidia-ceo-jensen...

Only accusations and suspicions at present, possible evidence in the future.

I don't have a deep understanding of the events, but my superficial impression is that China set up a shell company (Megaspeed) in Singapore, and put this woman in charge of it. She then persuaded Huang to engage in intercourse of the physical and commercial varieties. I get the impression he may have convinced some US officials to look the other way, to not dig into the affairs of the "Singaporean" company. That's where he may have strayed from "sucker" into "co-conspirator."

We'll call it Billy and the Bubbleosaurus.

1) The fact that he cheated on his wife isn't particularly relevant, other than the lack of a prenup meaning she owns half his stock (4% of the company).

2) The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal (although improper and opens up potential quid-pro-quo lawsuits)

3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.

4) The fact that there are allegations that he was aware that they were selling illegally to China is a huge deal.

5) Even though those export control were arguably bad, the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.

6) There is definitely a demonstration of lack of judgment (getting caught selling to china rather than maintaining plausible deniability), (sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort)

7) Despite all of this, in theory he would arguably still be the most profitable CEO (if he doesn't get charged with a crime, AND if there are no other issues to discover) in the medium term, but where there's smoke there may be fire. Does this raise the odds of circular financing and other shenanigans?

If you allow your employer to control your sexuality you are not fully human.

I am not sure it makes sense given why companies exist in the capitalist system. Stockholders, I'd think, on average care more about the returns less whether the CEO is a likable character.

The real problem of course is potentially illegal behavior, but having a relationship is nothing. Firing a very successful CEO over this is imbecillic.

I'm sure Jenson knew sleeping with his direct reports was wrong. And that plenty of CEOs got fired for that. Nothing arbitrary about that.

This ignores the direct consequences like "worse" employees getting promoted (affecting business) or put in charge, or like in this case, potential national security issues.

It matters for the very obvious reason that a less senior employee may feel pressured or may lose their job when the relationship ends, that usually office affairs result in other employees feeling compelled to keep secrets, because it opens everyone up to blackmail, etc. etc.

It’s nothing at all to do with political correctness.

How does it NOT make business sense to consider firing bim here (outside of manosphere thinking)?

I am not debating the spying, smuggling angle here; but it this was just the affair, its a decision by the board, whereas if he run over an elderly lady at a crossing, its no longer a choice - law is law.

Btw, re: ad hominem 'manosphere' or 'woke' whatever. I have nothing to do with either.

When has legal fallout from an affair with a subordinate ever destroyed a Fortune 100 company? That doesn't happen.

Are you even hearing yourself? Do you think a CEO is King or what that they are destroying a company and that's not enough to get booted? CEOs get fired all the time. A Board certainly doesn't need an affar pretext to boot one that is tanking the company.

Bill Gates met Melinda Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.

Many such cases. Rupert Murdoch. Larry Ellison.

Maybe I would have worded it differently, but I generally agree with the grandparent poster. It seems rare that a founder would be ousted over this type of thing.

My guess is that the China dealings are the most important part, and that part is being undersold because it's actually illegal and puts both him and anyone with knowledge of it at risk of going to jail.

Bill Gates met Melinda ~40 years ago. It should be blatantly obvious I'm taking about where things stand today. Lots of things happened 40 years ago that would be generally unacceptable today.

The U.S government have known about this for a year. How serious would it be for them to give a warning and just sit on it for a year?

By the time it’s public knowledge and reflecting on the company, yes, that’s a failure—and the failure of discretion is probably closer to the board’s clammy little hearts than any particular fluids that may have been swapped along the way.

Most companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it, and for good reason.

It's a big enough deal that former CEOs of Nestle, Norfolk Southern, McDonald's and Intel were either terminated or resigned after similar relationships were uncovered.

He had an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy, who it appears smuggled potentially billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips into China. And now he is alleged to have slept with an Nvidia executive who reports directly to him.

If he had slept with a waitress or his friend's wife, he would survive this. Instead, he chose to have exactly the type of indiscretions that get you fired.

In Europe, workplace relationships are considered a private matter as long as workplace peace doesn't suffer, and a ban would be considered legally impermissible. Europeans manage it with disclosure requirements and reassignment, not bans.

Well safe to say that European companies are generally irrelevant, but very irrelevant in this thread.

Ableton is cool though ;)

The researchers who coined the phrase eventually realized it only applied to artificial packs in captivity, not the wild.

This is factually incorrect. It is entirely legal for companies in Europe to restrict relationships where one party is a direct subordinate to the other. They can also legally require disclosure of such relationships.

This is common because these relationships can create significant conflicts of interest.

As someone else in this thread noted, the former CEO of Nestle (a Swiss company) was fired because he had a relationship with a direct report that he failed to disclose, and the former CEO of BP (a UK company) resigned because of a similar situation.

Disclosure allows for people to be reassigned so that they're not longer in a subordinate position.

CEO of a public company answers to the Board. CEO of a private business do anything they want until caught.

I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive. People say he got balls of steel, chilled in his data-centers and other funny things. Shareholders are stupid. That guy's been running the firm long enough that being removed would disrupt the business so much, that shareholders piss onto their only firewood in winter.

3) Most things speak against her being a spy and no spy would be this amateurish either. Most people think she's just enriching herself with a structured deal profiting her a lot and whoever pays most for her deals. If nationalism is involved for China, or just greed, we really don't know, but we can assume that she's surely sympathetic to China.

Jensen is just a like-able person who loves the good things in live "in full", food/sex/woman/drinking/company. I'm sure he didn't care about her business as he's a billionaire and has a lot of things to do, than caring about a crappy broker and her structured and layered shady deals.

I am aware that there’s a tension there, but the fact that I am glad the Chinese open weights models exist doesn’t change my mind about what Nvidia will almost inevitably have to do about Jensen Huang.

I suppose it colours my judgement about his actions re: Megaspeed if they were indeed a deliberate attempt to push availability of GPUs to Chinese customers to the limit; Singapore-washing is not something I am personally that troubled by.

> I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive

If you think being a successful CEO should mean that you can do whatever you want, it seems that you look at Trump's America and...like what you see?

And people generally seem to be arguing and trying to destroy the lives of the people they disagree with at a higher rate than ever.

Has the right cancelled anyone? Like, a single person?

The biggest thing I can think of was a single episode of Jimmy Kimmel, lol. Which came from an incredibly bald-faced lie, on regulated public TV, about a high-sensitivity murder that had just happened.

https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=List_of...

Amazon and Apple were cancelled?

> tried to

Yeah I think this is the key thing. Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.

You can read, right? The list has sources:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/donald-trump...

https://www.inquisitr.com/candace-owens-apple-boycott/

> Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.

Yeah, they've been too busy grifting, running crypto scams, selling pardons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_allegations_during_...

https://americanoversight.org/investigation/corruption-in-th...

That doesn't imply that's a good and healthy way to run a society.

I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.

The Chinese spy thing and illegal dealing with China are far worse but they should be investigated properly.

He shouldn't be ousted from the company he built to be the biggest company in the world because he cheated on his wife.

Well...

to what extent do you believe his public and almost entirely content-free apology letter ( https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company ) reflects his personal thoughts?

I'll admit I haven't really been following this story, but I ASSUME he didn't know she was a spy? (Given a good portion of a spy's job is making sure you don't know they are a spy) So why is this an issue either?

How'd they figure out she was a spy anyway?

For sure he is the victim of an adversarial attack against him and Nvidia, but as the leader of one of the most valuable companies in the world in am industry where IP and company secrets hold huge economic value, then you really need to expect and anticipate that spies will be trying to infiltrate your org and steal your secrets. I think you can clearly say he has demonstrated bad judgement here.

Source: The Economist. (Paywalled) https://economist.com/business/2026/11/11/there-has-never-be...

> That she might be a Chinese agent would have been obvious to Mr Huang had he inquired about her background: before going into business, Ms Huang worked at a Chinese state-run broadcaster known by its unimprovable acronym, “CCTV”.

The FBI so far has not provided a reason for the lack of a brief, but one reason they might not provide one is they suspect the target is a willing participant.

I get you hate the guy, but think critically for a minute - he does have access to considerably more information than you do, and probably knows a thing or two about who is and isn't a spy. Additionally, it's often a bad thing to tell everyone why you know who a spy is, as that tips your hand as to what sort of counter-surveillance you employ.

That assertion makes no sense, yet tits the best interpretation I can gather from your odd comment!

Surely you mean something else?!

As best I've heard, nobody knows that now. We have some rumors with absolutely nothing behind them.

(You wouldn't fire a software engineer because they are bad at horseback riding)

On one hand I firmly believe that if a rule is stupid you have no moral obligation to obey it. There might still be consequences though, however unjust.

On the other hand so many rules can be in place for years because people just don't obey them so their stupidity is mitigated to the point of invisibility.

Not knowing doesn't make it any better!

I wouldn’t call this particularly nuanced, certainly if they were sold to intermediaries not subject to the export controls (Singapore)

More [1].

[1]: https://www.millercanfield.com/resources-305.html

Whether he would be the most profitable CEO is absolutely irrelevant. The guy is literally facing prison time if he can be directly tied to the violation of those sanctions. If the board takes more than about 30 seconds to come to a conclusion they should probably all be replaced as well.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/19/supermicro-arrested-founder-s...

1. ASML (a Dutch company) is not allowed to sell EUV lithography machines to China; and

2. NVidia is not allowed to sell their best GPUs (made with those machines) to China.

This is all done under the auspices of "national security" and the vague hand-waving notion of "military applications". China is rapidly developing EUV on their own. I kinda expect this to be commercially producing chips by ~2030. Other people believe it will take a little longer.

So what's the problem? By banning the sale of chips to China, the US has inadvertently created captive domestic demand for Chinese made chips because Huawei (etc) cannot buy Western made chips. This is really kickstarting China's lithography efforts because anything they produce has billions of induced demand with no competition from foreign imports.

That is I believe Huang's argument: we should be selling the chips but not the lithography. I agree with that assessment. But Us foreign policy really is just blinded and can be summed up as "China bad".

The only other way is that these people want to go war with China as soon as super intelligence is invented.

I'm as big as an AI bull as anyone here but we still have physical laws. Everything is a sigmoid.

Frontier labs (and Nvidia) have started using AI in chip development.

AI that requires frontier chips to train (or you steal chain of thought and try to distill…which has mixed results).

That in turn becomes a flywheel for developing domestic supply chains for chips.

See the latest reports for super intelligence takeoff. They (again assuming the timelines are semi correct as it’s all guesswork) show takeoff significantly before 2030.

The worst thing you could do is allow China to accelerate their domestic chip development via giving them access to chips needed to accelerate the AI flywheel.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc do not want Nvidia chips to sell to China because it makes the GOU supply constraint even deeper to American companies and it increases model training/inference competition.

It wouldn't surprise me if some of these players worked behind the scenes to try to oust Huang.

1. Cheating on his wife when that will likely significantly change the ownership of the company is a big deal;

2. Here's where I disagree most. A married billionaire CEO sleeping with an also-married subordinate is a huge deal and that alone warrants an ouster. It creates huge legal exposure for the company;

3. The biggest issue with the Chinese spy is he's wealthy enough that this shouldn't happen. I'm sorry but you can afford corporate security who can vet the people you're involved with and do so discreetly;

Huang hired Heller (a crisis PR firm) a year ago. It seems like he knew something was coming and possibly failed to inform the board. Ok, that's more grounds for termination.

I too am 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

I very much doubt it stops here.

[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535

Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.

There's no scenario in 2026 where sleeping with a boss or subordinate is acceptable behavior for corporate leadership.

>>> Or he's a predator.

>> the woman is 42...

> In general, adulthood does not confer an immunity to coercion.

I'm only responding to the idea that one must be young to be victimized by a predator, which is silly and false. I am not, however, supposing anything of the sort is what happened here.

I don't think you can reasonably argue that their relationship must have had a significant power imbalance or what have you if you can't even decide which direction the power imbalance went in. Why is it impossible that the relationship was, all things considered, on roughly equal terms?

The tl;dr is she slept with Jensen in return for large benefits for her Husband's company.

Her actual role in this doesn't have a real good direct translation to English.

Because those are independent from each other in a way that the corresponding institutions in China are not.

Every large Chinese company is under the direct control of the CCP. Working for a large Chinese company means you are working for the Chinese government in the same way as a state department employee (very differently from someone working for Intel, at least if they haven't individually received a National Security Letter).

1) This is a huge matter of character. If you cannot be faithful to your wife, what makes you a faithful leader of a company? There is also the issue of respect: when a leader is morally compromised, the people he is leading lose confidence and respect in him.

2) Isn’t there something of a power dynamic issue here too? He has a greater responsibility to use his authority and power as a superior to not abuse that authority, and committing adultery with an inferior is a huge problem.

3) On what basis is this a huge deal and the previous two are not? Where’s the nuance? It’s just arbitrary.

4) Well yeah, it looks like he was complicit in breaking sanctions. It’s no longer an arms-length deal.

5) Again, why are the first two worth shrugging shoulders and this one is not? It’s no big deal, people cheat and break the law all the time.

6) That sure undersells it. It underlines the stupidity of sin, and the sinfulness of man.

7) I can’t argue with that.

Since US counterintelligence has known about the relationship since late 2024, they would be completely incompetent if they had not:

1) taken measures to ensure that she did not get US secrets,

2) collected information on Chinese priorities and methods for acquiring AI hardware, and/or

3) fed misinformation to the Chinese.

While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long time ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.

he would've never got reelected if the democrats of 2021-2024 resembled democrats of 2008. his reelection was a violently retarded response to the clown world antics of that era.

Not saying it will certainly happen, but there will be different people at helm this time, and his more crimes are out now.

What a country.

> I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.

Those presidents going to prison did a coup to stay in power or had their personal shaman run the country behind the scenes. Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.

> I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.

Correct, which is why the law needs to be applied equally. That's the fundamental basis of the rule of law. Otherwise it's worth nothing.

But that isn't what we're talking about here -- we're talking about actions taken related to his official duties. That is an inherently politicized situation where even the textual rule of law does provide for special allowances precisely for this reason.

> Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.

I think the evidence around the world shows that precisely the opposite is true.

Leaders do a lot of things and laws are complicated, lawfare is stupidly easy.

Prosecutors "just" have to establish that the criminal behavior is not an official act, of which there are plenty such examples.

The fact that this scandal was leaked is a sign that the rule of law is returning.

They were bypassing natsec based export controls by making donations to the executive branch, and used the influence to bury a commerce investigation into the matter, from the available information.

He can sleep with who or whatever he wants. The Metaspeed story and how investigations into it were mothballed have every appearance of being a big deal even beyond Nvidia.

- William Penn & MLK Jr

Not to mention another friend of the admin whose crimes in DOGE might need investigation.

While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.

I agree with you on the first and second point. Perhaps you can argue it's in bad taste to have an affair but the private matters of adult lives should be of no interest to outsiders.

Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail, assuming his wife was not aware of his affairs. Anyone who knew that was happening would have had enormous leverage over him.

Even if no one actually did so it still demonstrates a massive risk.

Do you really want to apply that to congress, the judiciary, the police. Let's face it anyone in any position of trust, which turns out to be everyone in the end because homeless, unemployed I could be a witness to something.

So we just outlawed private consensual behavior of individuals. (Not outlawed, you just lose your right to keep your job or whatever, yeah sure right...)

Doesn't seem like an american Freedom to me but what would I know?

These kinds of paths to blackmail/extortion are literally what government background checks pressure test when hiring employees. So, yes, we do want to apply those.

Are you really claiming the homeless don't matter?

Even if you can do all these things then you must deny them the ability to testify in court because they could be blackmailed.

If you don't see how this goes I probably can't help you. Read a diversity of sci-fi? Read what life was like in the soviet union?

> Are you really claiming the homeless don't matter?

Towards being blackmailed against national security interests? Yeah I’d say the risk of that is low. The GP didn’t claim anything else

Perhaps trying to make sure there aren't morality based repercussions takes the sting out of future blackmail attempts on other successful businessfolk would be a better strategy for national security than, I dunno, briefing the New York Times and trying to make it as miserable as possible?

But sure maybe the CIA is just woefully incompetent, disorganised and accountability free in pursuing this national security goal of blackmail resistance. Or perhaps this is not the best theory as to what is going on.

There's a really, really good reason we keep this kind of moral judgement private, "between you and your rabbi" as Feynmann put it.

exceptions of course for the commander in chief

Jensen's job does not rely on having security clearance. There's no evidence he has security clearance is there?

Plenty of jobs come with personal life restrictions. Work nights. Work on an oil rig. Work on an aircraft carrier in the ocean for months at a time. Everyone is free to not take those jobs. I don’t see why a “no affairs” clause for a CEO should be all that different. Don’t like it? Don’t take the job.

I'm 50/50 on whether or not Alice Huang is actually a spy for the Chinese government, or rather just a social climber and opportunist. She certainly didn't hide her perceived closeness to Jensen Huang, and in fact actively flaunted it on her social media.

Furthermore, I think it possible if not likely that Jensen has had more than just 2 extramarital liaisons, and if more were to come out, then IMO that would actually shift the likelihood towards Jensen simply being a lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status, rather than being honeypotted by some Chinese intelligence operation.