Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)

Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.

> Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)

Why? I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?

Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.

Maybe I don't understand enough the US culture.

Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.

gosh we need another 68

All this coming from a country that elected twice as President a guy that married three times, led a very sexually promiscuous life, including the notorious boasting, and was accused of sexual misbehaviours by almost 30 women. Hilarious.

Trump's key innovation was shamelessness. It's good that Jensen feels shame here.

The US system gives voters two options for president. Those options are chosen by parties, and parties make terrible choices.

In 2016, the choice was between Trump and Clinton. Clinton famously excused her husband's infidelity by calling the long list of women who claimed they were assaulted as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty".

In 2024, the choice was between Trump and Harris. Harris got into politics by being the mistress of a CA governor.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the US presidential election offered a choice between someone who was moral and someone who was as immoral as our existing political class. But that has not happened in my lifetime, and I don't expect that to change.

Willie Brown and Jerry Brown are not the same person

What does that mean?

1968

Right, and because he was willing to break a commitment that serious it de-values other commitments he's made, including those more directly relevant to the business.

It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.

But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.

> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.

Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.

> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?

This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.

Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.

And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now.

One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.

In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.

If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.

Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.

I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, he was well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, he agreed to them with his words, in fact. Then, his actions did not match those words, when that is true, where else? In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect that to be true and there are people who we know that isn't true and on some siding scale we accept it (I didn't say acceptable), for example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?

*Everything on a spectrum.

> Why?

It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.

Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.

(Agreeing, with an asterisk.)

Markets care about predictability.

To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.

Yep that's an even better point. Though I would say there's a distinction between socially-unacceptable and untrustworthy. Being forthcoming both limits surprise (per your point) and mitigates the trust component of deviance.

Somehow, that wasn't an issue for Eric Schmidt, who was shagging some publicist while he was Google's CEO (and while happily married). Wonder why.

For one, Schmidt left Google in 2011. Cultural acceptance of fucking subordinates has changed a lot since then.

Considering that extramarital escapades didn't prevent the current US president from being elected twice - and quite recently at that - I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with cultural acceptance.

You're "pretty sure" that you can isolate causality in multicausal and overdetermined systems by pointing to a few extreme examples?

I'm jealous!

I can dumb it down even further for you.

Yes, please do!

Seems like a real analytical breakthrough that I'd legitimately love to learn more about.

Was she working at Google at that time and reporting directly to Eric Schmidt?

That’s how it was for Sergei brin.

You cannot tell from the NVDA stock crash if it's because the CEO had an affair, or because NVIDIA illegally sold GPUs to China and is in huge trouble.

Or because the current stock value is highly inflated and the bubble is starting to pop.

Feels like the pop would start with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

...Or if it's because Chinese intelligence has stolen confidential information from Nvidia.

I have worked at a larger company where the CEO did something similar and across the company all anyone could ask was "why would you do something that dumb", which is not a great way for people to feel about the person supposedly leading the company.

this is something i am probably too european to understand...

At the end of the day, it's also just too simplistic.

Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.

You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.

The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.

yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.

This is more than an affair though. This is an affair with someone he has a business relationship with and thus it becomes the interest to the business. There are many many cases where someone give business favors to the person they are having an affair with.

My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.

You should be fired if you're having an affair with a spy, or with someone who reports to you.

How do you know you aren’t?

By not having an affair with anyone?

If he’d had an affair with his physical therapist absolutely no one would care and he wouldn’t be out- it’s the totality of his actions and his extreme lack of judgement at issue.

The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.

At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.

That is the unforgivable lapse in judgement.

"you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance."

If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy in other impersonal contracts?

[delayed]

If he was French, this would be “oui, et?”

You're too European to understand infidelity? Must be French!

- Signed, another European

i understand infidelity, i don't understand who would care on the job. also, not french :)

All (or nearly all) fortune 500 company has a rule against sleeping with a subordinate, and it is one of the most common reasons for a CEO to be fired. If all we learned about was the second affair, I still expect he would have been fired. So every single successful actor has arrived at the same conclusion, but you don’t understand why. This is a great opportunity to learn something new.

...must be those long vacations

Starting a c-level polycule to derisk the s1