> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.

In fact sleeping with a subordinate creates substantial legal risk for the company.

He didn't sleep with a subordinate - Alice Huang was an Nvidia client, not an employee.

There's been more than one. I'm talking about Kimberly Powell.

You've exceeded its history cutoff

Apologies, I was unaware of Jensen's embarrassing parallelism when I wrote my comment!

It's just 2 being public. When you see 2 ants in your house, its never just 2 ants.

the other dalliance

Lots of people meet in the workplace, it seems a really US thing to be so hung up on it.

Ok. And?

And? I guess there's a few people on HN that are sleeping with their co-workers and their wives don't know about it and they're feeling a little guilty.

There is always an awful lot of defense and downplaying of infidelity on hn. It is common but less common then the number that dont.

It’s more of a recent thing in the US too[1]. It started aggressively declining in the early 2000s (along with almost every other way except for online and bars). Though I think there is a general stigma in the US these days for “meeting at work” unless under certain circumstances, like 2 new hires hooking up, or 2 people at the same company but they don’t work together. Anything else and people are gonna start questioning the power dynamics and a bunch of things that make it not worth the hassle. Maybe it was the Lewinsky case, maybe it was the popularization of workplace abuse, maybe it is the bipartisan increase in judgement casting and virtue signaling.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/ho...

[2] https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst

Meeting in the workplace is not the issue. the superior/subordinate relationship is. The power imbalance creates liability. Hard to prove "I feared for my position."

Re: his wife, there is absolutely no way he would admit to some kind of open relationship thing in public, that would be even worse PR. Sleeping with an exec.. personally I don't care, this is incredibly common and there is no actual legal problem if there wasn't favoritism.

Why are you going so far out of your way to invent reasons why he secretly didn't actually cheat on his wife and to ignore the substantial corporate risk of non-disclosed relationships that create conflicts of interest?

I just feel that personal misdeeds should stay in that realm, and also a ban on relationships in the workplace like we effectively have now has kind of been bad for our culture broadly... you can call it a "legal risk" but at the end of the day, if there was no favouritism then nothing wrong happened besides some form to HR not being filled out.

Separately, when I look around at all the billionaires and CEO's causing immense harm to the world, Jensen is near the bottom of that list.. Musk's tantrums have global geopolitical implications including wide cultural shifts, elections and deaths. An actual convicted rapist is president of the country.

But we're all supposed to be salivating over firing this guy who has by most accounts been an incredible founder and leader over cheating or selling a couple of GPUs to China? I think it's just sad seeing this guy get punished given the amount of moral corruption amongst our leaders.

Jensen's behavior is also very consequential...

Are you his PR agent? Is your argument seriously he had open relationship with his ~70 year old wife?

[delayed]

Musk slept and has a child with Shivon Zilis who was his subordinate at the time, didn't seem to matter that much

Just to clarify their child was via IVF. Which seems to be a common thing with Musk.

He should have divorced first, as expensive as it would have been. Being a single/divorced billionaire playboy is understandable, being a married billionaire playboy is going to be messy.

US people are in another level or idiotic puritanism and hypocrisy.

Wow, how can you respond to the parent in this way? Are you a psychopath? Also where is the hypocrisy? You accuse without any support.

They actually are. People cry "psychopath" without reading the definition of the word.

He was duped into smuggling GPUs, violating sanctions, and risking US national security, which endangers the company. Ain’t just that he banged someone.

If NVIDIA doesn’t fire him, I have a feeling a lot more women from a lot of other companies may be showing up with various proposals.

I bet many other CEOs do similar kinds of stuff, but for some reason this guy got singled out. The hungry hungry hippos probably did it because they could seeing as he doesn't control the board like MZ.

Yep. His affairs cast a long shadow over his push for "restricting AI accelerators is bad, we should just sell all the GPUs we want to China".

Was it driven by this, as opposed to what everyone thought at the time: pure shortsighted profit-seeking? We don't know. But no one likes that it's even a thing to be concerned about.

What's the argument that he was duped into doing it? He has plenty of incentive to want to sell more GPUs and broaden his customer base as much as possible, there's no evidence that sleeping with some Chinese lady that may or may not be a spy has anything to do with it.

>It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.

jfc she was a spy and the new administration is going to smash nvidia for this

There are solid arguments for treason here... "doesn't affect the company", how blind are you?

So far I haven't seen a shred of evidence pointing to Alice Huang being a spy besides just her being a Chinese citizen.. and China has been explicit in instructing its industries to NOT rely on NVIDIA cards as much as possible and build their own.

Ok, but the people who have the information to determine these things aren't in the habit of distributing detailed evidence to news organizations.

Honestly given the amount of hysteria, disinformation and propaganda I've seen about China since they've become a credible rival to the US, I'm not inclined to believe this stuff without serious evidence.

The same people making the claim also regularly lie, or make ultimately false claims if you want to be more charitable.

This isn’t McCarthy waving a his latest batch of names in front of the camera. Journalists started sniffing around Megaspeed a year ago, noticing its business presence and purchase volume didn’t add up.

Megaspeed circumventing Chinese law is evidence against her being a spy rather than for.

There's more than one kind of shady person.

Yes, China has been pushing their tech companies to use Chinese GPUs.. which they've gotten push back from their ai companies, saying they're not competitive yet (which is true). And one of those AI companies -- Alibaba -- was the investor in Megaspeed.. which is where Jensen met Alison.

> There are solid arguments for treason here

Yeah no. This doesn't even come close to treason. Treason in the US is incredibly difficult to prove, which is intentional.

Are you forgetting funneling of billions worth of GPUs to China via Megaspeed? Alibaba put billions into Megaspeed, which was spent on Nvidia GPUs.. and when Jensen was meeting Alison, he also met Alibaba executives at Megaspeed's facilities, which he visited regularly.

You don't think selling $7.5B of export controlled technology to an unvetted and unknown company, led by a woman who's former gig was TV news host, and who you also happen to be sleeping with, was poor judgement?

Its a good decision if there are no proven legal issues to selling to that company. It made more sales.

If he was banging the maid, then that is between him and his wife.

That was not the case here.

> It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.

If somebody you have any dealings with does something equally stupid, no matter the context, run. It doesn't matter how much you benefited from the cooperation, when somebody reveals themselves to have such poor judgement of anything, you must be aware that it's only a matter of time before he does somethig even dubmer which will cost you everything you gained so far and more.

> It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.

It evidently does. You may think it shouldn't, that marital fidelity has no bearing on ability to execute as CEO, and you may even be right. But it's clear that most people disagree.

That is not a surprise. It's a known fact that these kinds of things become scandals that can hurt their careers and companies. That they nevertheless still decided to do it, is therefore a professional failure.

It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy in that way. People think it matters, therefore it does. Again, you might believe that it doesn't have a direct impact, and so people shouldn't think it matters, but still they do, and you have to act in the world as it is, not as you wish it was. Simple as that.

> But it's clear that most people disagree.

Wild take. To me, that isn't clear at all. Most people - including me - who simply don't really care aren't loud about it online.

It's like saying that obviously, everyone agrees that JK Rowling is a bad person that shouldn't be supported and needs to be boycotted. If your world view is made up of online forums that might very well seem to be the case, but in reality, the absolute vast majority of people couldn't care less about JK Rowling's political opinions, which is quite evident given the insane sales the Harry Potter franchise keeps pulling in.

The most likely scenario is that the vast majority couldn't care less about the Jensen Huang situation, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't care enough to demand he resign or be booted.

And yet the stock drops 8.5 percent when the news comes out, it appears people do care huh?

That's just risk management though. Any type of disturbance in the regular operation of a company will cause this, and it happens all the time. Means pretty much nothing. I give it 30 days until the stock is higher than it was before.

The evidence for most people caring about this issue isn't the online discourse about it.

The evidence is their stock being down 8% since the news came out.

How else would you explain that drop?

> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company

If you don't see how secret affairs with spies and employees impacts the company then you're being willfully ignorant.

The point is he didn't behave rationally on one big really important point from a shareholder value standpoint. He didn't just sleep with someone and his arrangements in this regard are irrelevant

> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company. We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have. But in the worst case, it's immoral and wrong but a personal issue for him and his family.

Yeah, if it's just some rando at a bar, then yeah it's primarily an issue for the family. (besides the fact that it indicates honesty issues)

Sleeping with a spy is a direct threat to the company. The spy isn't sleeping with him because she likes him. She is literally doing her job, which is to compromise the company. The issue is not the sleeping around part. The issue is the spy being brought into the company part.