I'm sure he was thinking about it. doesn't mean he has to. now he probably will

Someone mentioned that the 2nd affair was known about by the board for a long time, and this is pretty common in boards. They don't really care, they just keep it in their pocket until they need the ammo to fire someone. It sounds right to me, affairs are very hard to keep secret for someone that public, and then this news dropped right after the first one. As bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels or if they had some open relationship type arrangement, and it's not really material to his running the company because it's been doing very well during all of that.

> As bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels or if they had some open relationship type arrangement, [...]

If that's the case and she backs him up on this, then it's sordid but not cheating and _that_ part of the scandal can be overlooked, but espionage is a different matter.

Honestly I think espionage claims are overrated. Politicians made up a trade war that scientists and engineers never wanted in the first place.

I mean it’s complicated, and I wouldn’t say scientists and engineers get much credibility on foreign policy decisions, it’s not their domain

I'd say it is much more their domain than that of the politicians who have no idea how the technology being restricted is used or built.

> but espionage is a different matter

What evidence have you seen that espionage has taken place? I've seen people speculating about espionage, but very little evidence to back this up.

Look around these threads. There's a great deal of suspicion of espionage, and then there's the actual spy that compromised him (so, espionage -- a CEO of that importance falling for a honeypot is a big deal in and of itself).

Suspicion of espionage based on what evidence? Also the "spy" isn't confirmed to be a spy, and there are other explanations that are more plausible in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

The espionage allegations are against China though, not against him. He is the alleged victim.

Having your house unknowingly bugged by a spy makes you a victim. Having an affair with a spy, in what now appears to be a broader pattern of questionable ethical behavior, not so much.

If your lover gets recruited by a spy agency you are a victim of spying.

People frequently accept that their spouse has an affair as long as it's not in their face. Basically a tacit arrangement that is never talked about.

That matters I would think. A concern for a powerful person is whether knowledge of an affair could give someone else leverage. If you are keeping up appearances then that signals appearance (and secrets) have value.

Assuming the second affair claims are legit, he was also having an affair with a subordinate. That's a huge violation of many corporations' policies, for the average worker I'd expect its an immediate termination offense.

Yes, but at that level, and with less press attention, that sort of thing can be swept under a rug with enough $$$. Not defending it, just saying that it might not have been enough on its own. But cheating is definitely not very good since if you cheat on your spouse you might cheat on your employer.

It's not that boards don't care about the affairs, they prefer to keep it in their back pocket when a takeover is planned.

Yeah I mean they don't seem to care about the moral implications or view it as poor judgement like some people here say, or else they would act when they find out. They just see ammunition..

If I were on the board and considering firing Jensen, I’d first maneuver to sell all my shares ASAP.

That would be illegal

By the way that is an interesting insider trading question.

You didn’t get a tip or give anyone a tip. You are not the only one whose decision affects the outcome. However you choose to divest yourself of shares by selling them, and then bring it up.

I am not a securities lawyer or an expert on case law. But would the board member be able to file a Form 4 and sell shares, before their actions that may affect the company?

Even knowing that the board is considering to fire him should fall under insider trading. Its one thing to speculate on board actions, its another to be on the board and know what you or other members may be planning to do.

Huh I didn’t know the board knew about the Powell case. I was wondering why all the affair stories were coming out at once.

> As bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels

Polymarket prices in a 32% chance of divorce by end of March which is about a third of his chances of getting fired over the same timespan, so...

https://polymarket.com/event/jensen-huang-divorce-in-2026

Gamblers aren't known for being particularly rational, so I don't know why this would provide any insight at all. It's just gambling.

> Polymarket prices

WHO CARES. sorry, I don't meant to be mad at you. But we need to stop using the wisdom of the crowd when such crowd is... that crowd.

The issue isn’t a moral one from a a company perspective, it’s a conflict of interests issue.

Dating a customer and subordinate potentially undermines objectivity in customer pricing, customer chip access, promotions, performance, etc. That’s why it’s explicitly forbidden in Nvidia (and most companies) code of conduct

this is like a theory and practice situation. in theory this is conflict of interest issue possibly undermines objectivity and so on. in practice Nvidia thrives and the man is a substantial reason of this. removing him will be plain stupid from the point of view of the company's performance.

Company success has nothing to do with the conflicts of interest above though.

But keeping him potentially exposes them legally. If she ever accused him of using his authority to coerce her into said relationship (purely hypothetical), the board is now complicit in covering up legit criminal behavior. This is why conflict of interest policy exists.

fair point but is it solvable by other means? like the board "to conduct investigation", discuss with this woman if she has been coerced and if she claims she is not — avoid firing him?

Why should we assume corporate codes are morally just though? I do not. In fact I would argue this is evidence that company codes are in a general sense draconian and/or disconnected from social reality under capitalism, etc.

Many (most?) companies have specific policies against romantic relationships in the office, especially with subordinates.

It isn't necessarily about morality if there are rules in place that all employees, c-suite or otherwise, are expected to follow.

I don't know Nvidia internal policy, but assuming their HR policies include such a stipulation it shouldn't be treated as a "rules for thee, not me for" situation.

He's the CEO. It's _his_ code of conduct.

Sure, but he answers to the board and the shareholders. Everybody's got a boss.

> if they had some open relationship type arrangement

His public statement about hurting his family suggests they did not.

If I was in his position and I did, my statement would be something like "We're not monogamous, and we're both content with that arrangement. That was meant to stay private, and I'm sorry it came to public attention".

Then I'm just eccentric instead of an asshole.

I think some people who are in open relationships of various sorts would handle it the way he did. Some amount of women are at least willing to tolerate a one-sided open relationship so long as it does not result in public humiliation. Most people in an open relationship, either partially or fully open, do not publicly advertise it as it's non-conventional.

I thought I covered the privacy angle well enough; once it's exposed, admitting it's cheating seems far worse to me than admitting it's an open relationship.

Cheating may be more conventional, but it's almost universally considered immoral.

Yeah, he should leave. Next earnings call is Nov 17, he needs to be out by then so that he is not a distraction (CFO could do the call).

As a large shareholder and world's 7th richest person he would certainly retain a lot of power, even with a new CEO. Time to start his own personal VC firm or something.

There is some nepotism at Nvidia, those people are likely going to be very annoyed with him since their positions may not be tenable.

Do you own any NVDA?

Its like cheering for firing Steve Jobs. We know how this story ends.

It is like firing Jobs yes. But when they had fired Jobs, Apple wasn't a trillion dollar firm. Was it?

Nvidia will do just fine with another CEO as they're deeply entrenched.

Had you said this maybe 5 6 yrs ago then yes, it would be firing the visionary leader before his vision was implemented

Apple is doing fine for many years before everyone started questioning a lot of its decisions and directions.

Right but back then Apple did well, but not as well as it did when Jobs came back.. right?

Nvidia is an extremely successful company right now. It was called the central bank of AI just a few months ago

I'm one of those people that says CEOs are overpayed and interchangeable but this is absolutely not the case for Jensen

Nvidia is already a trillion dollar company. They've peaked haven't they?

Declines can be managed well or poorly

Maybe NVDA will keep going for a few more years until everything Jenseng Huang imagined is built. And after that it will start circling the drain.

It will be a pity to see the company go down because the board feels the need to pry into his private life.

Affair with Chinese spy is hardly prying into private life.

There is zero hard proof she was a spy, othwerise she would have been arrested already.

What is it that he is supposedly divulging? What is it that she is influencing?

Jensen was incentivized to sell as many chips as possible. He openly tried to sell as many as possible and openly lobbied to sell to China. As CEO, he is obliged to do that.

Not to be overly pedantic, but we pretty much all own NVidia, by dint of it being rolled up in the various indexes that our retirement funds track.

It's kind of hard for US techies to not have exposure to a company that accounts for >5% of the S&P 500.

> It's another serious lapse in judgement and a failure of integrity that is not befitting of one of the most powerful corporate leaders on earth.

failure of integrity is the operating mode for the most powerful corporate leaders on earth.

> who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy

This is a common fallacy. Often being incredibly smart in a few areas leaves you incredibly naive in others. If nothing else, your success in some domains will lead to overconfidence in others.

His Dwarkesh interview should have tipped everyone off that he had a, rather powerful, irrational side.

I missed it. Which parts stood out to you as irrational?

> might also experience some just desserts in the not too distant future.

I don't know. Some people have too much power to be held accountable for their actions, e.g. Trump

What is wrong with Jensen's sex life? It seems to disturb you.

Does he have to be a monk to head this company?

Have you checked with his wife that they are not in an open relationship, or polyamorous?

The security aspect is a totally different story, but the rest is his personal life and none of your business.

Everybody has to be flamboyant rainbow people or monk. That's mandatory today.

He can have whatever sex he likes.

But not with his employees or staff at companies he sells to, he’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, being paid billions, it’s not a big ask.

Random low level managers in a supermarket have been fired for sleeping with their staff.

How many companies in the world do you think make no use of any Nvidia products?

Come on, there is a difference between a company having some Nvidia, and sleeping with a salesperson at a company with a massive conflict who wants to buy lots of your hardware and import it in China, possibly in breach of laws.

Do you really think this is the same as sleeping with a random person at a company which happens to use some Nvidia products?

People are using the argument that Larry Ellison, Brin, Bill Gates, and other tech moguls also did this and really didnt face major consequences.

When former Intel CEO Brian Kraznich did it he was on the chopping block and they used as an excuse to fire him.

But Nvidia's board has a history of being favorable to Jensen-- he hasn't done much wrong and typically they will reward performance. First responsibility is share-holders but there is a lot of self-interest at play. If they don't fire him they could face action by government or get sued by shareholders, if they do fire him they deflate the value of the share holdings further.

Now that Nvidia has blown up so much they think they can do fine without him -- but it can easily turn into the next Intel. It most likely won't 100x in two years but it can certainly crash if there are poor decisions made. If the CFO is rumored to replace him, changing leader from a founder engineer to a finance person isn't likely to go well.

He shouldn’t be shagging subordinates or senior employees of customers, basically. In a way, the alleged spy thing is just icing on the cake; well-run companies won’t tolerate the conflict of interest even without a spy being involved.

> What is wrong with Jensen's sex life?

That banging customers and execs is a huge conflict of interest and security risk. There is a good reason if C-suites typically bang escorts instead of their colleagues.

> The fact that someone like Jensen Huang - who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy as opposed to a nitwit - can somehow completely implode his life in almost the most ridiculous way imaginable...

Mmm. Infidelity is very common. [0] What's fairly uncommon is getting caught in a way that requires the infidelity to be acknowledged. Just ask the French. ;)

[0] ...it's almost as if monogamy is an unnatural state of being for many (but definitely not all!) people...

> who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy

To an extremely ignorant person on the matter like me, and genuinely asking, what has he achieved in terms of engineering and development, that makes you think he's smart? Or do you mean in the sense of knowing its way through business and politics? Idk I always find difficult to believe that people really think that CEOs are smart, when they commonly are not involved what so ever in any scientific leading or research, and just funnel money to a product that make them richer.

But I prefer to believe I'm wrong and would like to hear form the other side.

idk maybe successfully founding & managing (currently) BIGGEST technological company for 3 decades,

that's main driver behind the biggest technological innovation of humankind requires you to be quite smart, don't you think?

wtf

>terms of engineering and development, that makes you think he's smart?

yes, because only engineering and development requires smartness! Do you really think it is true? wtf

>Idk I always find difficult to believe that people really think that CEOs are smart, when they commonly are not involved what so ever in any scientific leading or research, and just funnel money to a product that make them richer.

If you really believe that picking what to invest is easy, then go ahead to the stock market - you should outperform it easily then.

what the fuck is this take :D

Well mate, sorry for triggering you, apparently. As I said, my perspective is that he's no smart person to the point of being reference for someone.

You could have been way less toxic in you comment any way. That was a very unnecessary tone.

Since you're not OP, I still don't understand how that's a smart person to look up to.

Everything you said is someone that had contacts and new how to put money in certain places. Smart of me is absolutely engineering and science. There is no product for him to sell it, if there is no research and each of those research are way smarter, in my opinion, than CEO.

But the world is a funny place, research also doesn't existe without funding so we need more Huangs, I guess?

For real. Without the crypto bubble and then the AI bubble, he would still be a guy selling GPUs to gamers.

NVidia was at the right place at the right time, nothing else.

Not really, there were other GPU manufacturers who aren't around any more and didn't get propped by those waves. There's no denying that the company was doing more things right than their competitors.

P.S. As a linux user I ascribe to the "FU nvidia" Linus' school of thought (because drivers) and I am happily running a Framework desktop instead of an nvidia rig. But credit where credit's due.

Not really, they were casting about for these kind of opportunities since day 1 in the early 00s, and pushing it with GPGPU talks at universities in the 2010s. And eventually it bore fruit.

Jensen has absolutely made his own luck here. They were in the right place waiting for the right time for decades before it hit.

Being smart and having full cognitive control over the animal part of your brain are completely orthogonal to each other.

Loads of intellectuals were also massive uncontrollable sexual deviants in one way or another

I am not sure why several top comments here express sadness for the wife and affected loved ones. Do you actually feel bad? Why is it necessary to bring this pseudo sympathy to this topic? The topics are: what are the impacts to the stock market as a whole as there's a precarious arrangement at the moment with circular financing and Nvidia being a disproportionate piece of the stock market, national security and many other problems that affect hundreds of millions of people. But let us weep for the billionaire families of this soap drama. Get over yourselves.

> can somehow completely implode his life in almost the most ridiculous way imaginable does give me some hope that at

oh boy, get outside and take a deep fresh breath of air. how limited must life experience be if someone feels that having an sexual affair is about the same like completely imploding ones life

EDIT: The fact that someone like Jensen Huang - who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy as opposed to a nitwit - can somehow completely implode his life in almost the most ridiculous way imaginable does give me some hope that at least some of the troublemaker ne'er do wells that have wielded so much power over us all over the past decade or so might also experience some just desserts in the not too distant future.

Jensen, like the rest of us are vulnerable to sin, temptation and suffering. No one leaves unscathed in this life