Prudish about affairs with spies? Or about affairs with people who, if they break off the relationship could lose their jobs (or if they continue it they could get promoted)?

These aren't just affairs.

Also, fraud remains to be seen, and shopping chips to China sure seems like questionable judgement.

I think you are too narrowly focused.

When you engage in an affair with a superior you have more leverage than you think. Yes you could lose your job, but if you lose your job you have nothing left to lose and can fuck up their life if you have the right evidence.

If you lose your job you lose your source of income. Your way of paying for your children, your house, food. You're left broke financially and mentally while the other party remains at the top with all the power to control the story and to further threaten you.

Assuming this is correct, it's even more reason that a board shouldn't tolerate this from a CEO.

Have you seen how women are treated when they are part of an affair? The mocking, excoriating, debilitating media coverage? Heck, in this forum of probably more decent than average people you have posters describing the women involved as "holes" and "sides".

Do you remember how Monica Lewinsky was treated? Decades of jokes at her expense, mockery of her and her features, jokes about dresses and semen and blowjobs. Can you imagine how hard it still must be to deal with all that shit day to day?

Bill Clinton still has enormous power. He's had to face nowhere near the burden she has, and yet he's the one who cheated and he's the one who did so with a report.

I don't think that the US *care* about spies? Look who has been put in charge of the NSA, FBI. There's even someone who is strongly suspected to be a Russian spy working in the Pentagon.

These shipments to China - I remember there being a deal made with the President which allowed these sales to happen contingent on some kind of "risk fee" being paid.. to the President.

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Americans really don't care that much either. It's drama, but no one was shocked and appalled to the point of calling for his resignation.

Now cheating on your wife with a FOREIGN SPY, yea that's a big deal no matter what the country.

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Oh, like about 50% of them not batting an eye when their president sleeps with a porn star while being married, and probably worse.

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Union of Clinton voters and Trump voters covers a vast majority of voters (at least old enough to live through both).

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absolutely not true.

he resigned because there's some proof that he knew that nvidia was selling cards/chips to china -- the affair only made that extremely public.

Hasn't that been known for at least 6 months?

The French would not blink with an eye about a spy spying on the top tech company of the country? The French intelligence would probably got her killed.

My appraisal as well. There's a reason French Foreign Legion soldiers get a fake name and DOB.

Downvoters are too young for Greenpeace vs. the French security apparatus.

in italy you'd get a promotion if you are married and manage to show you have been with multiple lovers without getting caught

> American thing that the CEO can basically do anything

American CEO would get meetoed. Any sort of sex (even consensual) is illegal, if you have no way to prove it!

You're wrong. Having sex with your employees is not just an American faux pas. Hopefully you're not a leader of a company.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/06/lululemon-ceo-laurent-potdev...

https://fortune.com/europe/2024/06/11/bp-managers-given-ulti...

By the same token, why are you disenfranchising the choices made by a married woman to sleep with her boss?

Probably because of the power dynamic makes it really hard to see how free that "choice" really is.

And also puts doubt on any decisions by the boss that affect the employee - companies don't want people "sleeping their way to the top" as that's not putting the business' needs first.

"All men command women, we command all men, and our women command us." - Cato

This is a very successful woman, career wise. She’s clearly not incapable of navigating high stakes power dynamics and you shouldn’t just absolve her of responsibility in this.

(Your second statement carries far more weight)

We don't really have the ability to judge the power dynamic without intimate knowledge of the people and their personal lives, we don't even know when things started and what place their lives were in then.

It's why we generally frown upon relationships if there's any direct business link.

Because a boss has the power to reward the otherwise lesser competent women he is sleeping with over someone else who is otherwise better at the job but not sleeping with the job. If I'm a shareholder of the company I care about that, and the person wronged also cares.

As an aside, the above applies to any one of any gender sleeping with their boss (again of any gender)

Didn't we have a whole movement a couple years ago, "me too", where everybody was up in arms about men abusing power to sleep with women?

You think the women that have caused Jensen to come undone this week are passive and powerless victims of him abusing his power? Except for his wife, it seems like it’s the opposite.

I am not talking about the spy, but the women who reported to him. Being powerless or weak is irrelevant. He had power over her and that was what "me too" was calling out.

I think the power imbalance is actually quite slight. Has she lost her job and her husband today? Hard to say.

If she didn't sleep with him would she have had the same position, received the same bonuses, etc? We don't know. Even if he wouldn't have gone after her if she refused she may have thought it could have happened.

Why should anyone care about that?

Because it’s actually misogynistic to cast women as passive and subservient victims of power abusing men, when for millennia women have been doing all they can to get as close as they can to men with the most power, money and status. This is the most recent example.

> it’s actually misogynistic to cast women as passive and subservient victims

What the hell are you talking about? Why are you even bringing culture war garbage into this conversation?

Obviously over your head. Please don’t flame and cast peoples takes as “culture war garbage”. I was responding to the OP’s framing as the women as passive participants in this saga. Hard to believe that’s the case.

> Please don’t flame and cast peoples takes as “culture war garbage”

You're the one that's flaming by introducing culture war garbage where none is necessary.

> I was responding to the OP’s framing as the women as passive participants in this saga.

I don't know who you think you're talking about, but you responded to my comment, and I didn't say or suggest anything like that.

Seems like a narrow-minded take.

He wasn't getting sacked yesterday. It only changed when the second affair leaked.

Narrow-minded? I don't know, given the levels of insanity and in-your-face corruption we've seen pretty much every day coming from the US and particularly from the entire tech ecosystem it's really hard to understand the "norms".

I've read about how the US President raped a young girl (13) and multiple other victim accounts. I've watched how we've shown consequences to Prince Andrew, Mandelson and many others. I also see on Twitter the owners of this very site standing behind the disgusting people on the US.

I can't square that with the Jensen situation.

I should add that I'm personally in the camp of leaders who cheat on their wives or who make or accept bribes should be removed from their position. I don't agree with the British (or French/Italian) takes at all.

Just because tabloid news are full of usgov garbage doesn't mean every single human in the world accepted such behavior as new norm. There are still decent folks out there, dare I say a majority.

But yeah how can US folks stomach child rapists at the top of their power is beyond me, I've met plenty of folks with flexible spines while working in banking but this is on completely another level and that level is whole nation.

I agree - and I still believe that the vast majority are decent people. The issue is being ill informed.

The problem is that a whole layer of society have been completely and utterly corrupted to an extent which makes say a country like India seem to be a paradise.

Americans are prudish, but not such that he would lose his job over an affair. A few Americans would boycott his company - but not enough to matter. There will be general disapproval, but that is as far as it will go.

However he will lose is job over an affair with someone that he has any form of business relationship with. He can have an affair with a nurse in the local hospital of the waitress of a local cafe and we will ignore it. However the girls he had an affair with are off-limits, and should be for any culture for reasons that we think should be obvious.

Isn't there a thing that when it's consensual, tell HR and done? Or you have to be on the level at the org? It is not a law, but in my previous not big, but ~ 1K international org, many marriages and many babies.

Did he do anything besides infidelity, as it seems that the "board" knew about that anyway.

In any case, he fell on his sword, and I wish him well in the afterlife, nothing is black and white.

Not tell HR and done. Tell HR so they can ensure you are never in a place where you can influence her business success. It happens all the time and the rules about what companies do are very complex. As CEO I doubt he can every avoid the conflict of interests that HR is concerned about in these cases and in turn he can't be both CEO and have these affairs. (but the nurse or waitress down the street would be okay, even the CEO down the street so long as they are not competitors and careful to avoid any interaction with each others as customer/supplier - this is often possible since the CEO doesn't decide which widget to buy)

Hi. I was musing, not pro / con. I mentioned the power imbalance, and I am shrugging at his "wisdom" given his status, but hear me out, it's that everyone seems to have know and kept the fact as an ace in their sleeves. I am sure he didn't fly himself and his mistresses commercially, there is a crew, and gossip spreads. The truth is elsewhere, regardless of each's view on infidelity. I give you Gates, Bezos. Cheers.

This isn't about affairs. It's about knowingly violating export controls and misleading investors

Yah, the UK has an odd practice of ignoring sexual abuse, especially with regards to men in power and young women or children

Considering the antics that Elon gets up to, there seems to be a double standard.