But ok at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, …

It's ok a lot of places. Consenting adults gonna consent.

Elon hiring Jensen to run Terafab would actually be hilarious.

Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion. The bigger issue is that he has shown multiple poor judgement choices and the board has to weigh if he is a larger liability than he is an asset at this point.

> Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion.

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.

That we know of

At Japanese companies this happens monthly or weekly. Although J companies are more like a clan than a western corp.

The United States is not required to emulate every single cultural value of former Axis powers, I think.

At US companies or even at Nestlé (as it was quoted) or other, it continues to be the case.

He sure did.

At the time Mark Hurd was shown the door I think HP had 320,000 employees. Still got the boot.

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Many thought that was a mistake at the time.

Law For Thee, But Not For Me

Correction: Most US companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it.

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.

How would they reassign someone from the reporting chain of the company's CEO?

Asserting that they can’t be a direct subordinate should suffice in practice in most cases.

The CEOs of both BP and Nestle lost their jobs for having relationships with employees.

it's very common actually. One of my former managers was pressing an intern for sex, dangling a job. Too bad we weren't hiring at that time. Why are they doing this? Maybe the power is the point?

> In Europe, workplace relationships are considered a private matter as long as workplace peace doesn't suffer,

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

Ableton is cool though ;)

Isn’t it a conflict of interest to be sleeping with your direct reports? How does that play out in performance reviews? It’s definitely a massive HR problem

It's also really ethically dubious to sleep with someone you have that kind of authority over

Why? It’s how the mammal world works since the beginning of time. Females seek out the alpha male.

"Is-Ought Fallacy" is the right search term.

The "alpha male" is not even how wolf packs work in the wild: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-alpha-wolf...

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

Mammal world has also worked by killing another mammal with food you want if slightly hungry. Yet, for some reason, people don't question why murder is illegal whenever someone gets convicted of homicide. Selective appeals to evolutionary history are an empty argument.

It's certainly an abuse of power and a lot of companies in the US forbid this explicitly, often in employee guidebook

That's where the "disclosure and reassignments" come into play - you can date a direct report, as long as you let the company know they should report to someone else from now on.

> ...and a ban would be considered legally impermissible.

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.

the person you're replying to wrote you have to disclose.

But as far as I know, it's not illegal, as this person implied, for a European company to forbid relationships between direct reports.

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

But they didn't say you could be fired in the EU, which the comment you replied to pointed out has actually happened.

Are you guys thinking that Europe is a country and have the same labor law everywhere?

The US also does not allow banning relationships, but employers are not required to employ both persons in a couple. Europe restricts many aspects of people losing their jobs, is a more salient aspect of the legal comparison.

What US state law prevents this?

We literally do: https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/en-zz/Solutions/about-us/N...

It demonstrates poor judgement, which should be a sackable offense for a CE.

The problem is every other CEO and potential CEO has demonstrated the poor judgment of not building Nvidia.

At an America Monopoly Telecom you know, it is acceptable so long as you wait 365+1 days to marry your affair partner.

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

That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.

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.

He and Nvidia intervened to stop an investigation into Megaspeed.

[delayed]

I am an open weights model proponent so obviously I am intrigued and glad that Qwen exists (though at the moment I personally use US-trained open weights models - Muse Glimmer, Gemma 4, and I am testing Nvidia’s own Bolt - because they better fit my requirements).

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.

> That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.

> 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?

The law is one thing, and shouldn't discriminate on CEO status. but the decline of "cancellations" for various infractions of political correctness is definitely a positive in my book

I'd love statistical evidence that "cancellations" have decreased under Trump. As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."

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.

> As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."

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.

Trump literally tried to ban the press from the White House but putting that aside:

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

I'm sorry but that list HAS to be satire, right?

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.

> Amazon and Apple were cancelled?

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...

"Cancellation" is just how the rich spell "the consequences of my actions".

Being burned by a mob is technically a consequence of the action of appearing like a witch.

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

Yes, the consequence-free current administration has been soooo much better for the US.

Ummm yes, I'll take the incredibly bold position that the US in 2026 is superior to the literal Salem Witch Trials

The balls of steel is what got him in trouble in the first place.

Page, Brin, and Schmidt all dated Google employees. Gates married a Microsoft employee. I’m not sure if any of those folks dated direct reports, but does it really matter when you’re the CEO? Not condoning this behavior, just saying that there’s precedent for it not significantly impacting careers of execs. The spy thing is a another thing entirely.

Page and Brin have controlling voting shares of Alphabet, so they can't exactly be booted by the Board. Gates met Melinda 40 years ago and many things happened 40 years that would be not acceptable today.

Gates also had the most expensive divorce, paying Melinda 70B or something. We’ll see what Jensen has to pay the ex wife.