A lesson for future entrepreneurs. Follow the rules and lose.

Are the rules "you must not control your own company"?

Right. Maybe there's also some lesson about not cheating on your wife and skirting around export bans.

He followed the rules?

Yep. I learnt that lesson early on in my company. Never lose control of the board.

Putting his wife on the board would definitely not have helped lol

This isn’t a case of being punished for doing the right thing. The right thing is retaining control of your own company and doing so is not correctly described as “authoritarian”.

To be honest, I don't know how to succinctly tell you that this is a bad take. For starters, that company has hoovered enough tax money that we should all be on the board. Secondly, encouraging family feudalism is crazy if you even claim to be a supporter of capitalism and the free market. Thirdly, you're not a tech baron and never will be, especially if you can't trust that your investments are concerned with your interests and goals due to CEO exceptionalism. Just saying. If he was a judge, he would be disbarred. This company wants to be a stupid percentage of our GDP, so they're gonna have to suck it up and hold themselves to the standards of a public office.

He’s not a judge, he’s a private citizen, he holds no office. Your thinking is very confused.

I think you’re confused on the essence of what he was trying to say.

The comparison was drawn because when you are such a position of power, your actions have such a monumental sway. Thousands, millions of people’s of lives are impacted, for better or for worse. In Jensen’s case, that’s up to the court of public opinion.

However the thinking is that when you are in that position, a just and fair society would probably want to keep just and fair and morally tact people in those positions.

IMHO I don’t care what way you want to spin it, when you have that level of influence over one of the major drivers of the AI boom, you have INCREDIBLE power compared to what most people think of when you say “private citizen”.

The court of public opinion is steered by the media, which is entirely orchestrated. You can't pander to the mindless masses, that's a suckers game.

Agreed. The fact that he gets this perception while Musk has repeatedly betrayed the US's best interests shows that things like rationality and merit have gone out the window. However, don't mistake this for me excusing either of their behavior. Neither are not suited for that level of responsibility.

I don’t entirely follow this comparison. Maybe we spend time in different circles, but Musk in the current day is nearly universally s*t on by everybody I know. Even the people I know that still praise his work remain with a bad taste in their mouth.

My buddies and I were just talking about how Jensen is probably one of the MOST liked amongst all the leading big tech CEO/Owners. I feel like the amount of grace this thread is giving him is proof of that.

I don’t understand how that’s comparable to the perception of Musk.

Are you sure you are not over reacting?

Not the primary point of what I was trying to say.

These tech CEOs hold a lot of influence and power. Thus they hold a lot of responsibility and must be held accountable. Point blank.

No, it's a case of consequences for making incredibly poor personal decisions while being in a very visible position in a very visible company.

The man is smart enough to know he was playing with fire, and he got burned. The literal definition of FAFO.

Having a libido is fairly normal for most non-castrated men, at least historically speaking. In modern times, men are in seemingly depressed and in general need of various pills to help with erectile dysfunction, which perhaps in part explains the low birth rates.

What is it that you’re actually trying to say here.

What did he do that was “playing with fire” specifically? Having long term sexual relationships with women?

The thing he did that was actually wrong was that the NVIDIA executive he was in a sexual relationship with was herself married. That is actually wrong, that’s not “playing with fire”, that’s simply wrong.

Sorry but IMO this sort of company structure should not be allowed. Private companies should not be able to issue stocks the way Zuck & Elon have. Pull Meta’s charter and redistribute their assets. Let that serve as a notice to Elon that he’s next.

Under that standard why not just strip you of all your wealth and property and redistribute it? You’re not deserving of anything at all.

The argument is that the shareholders who own the majority of a company's stock (by value, not voting rights) should be able to control the company, not a minority owner. It is the corporate structure that allows guaranteed minority control (e.g. Zuckerberg owns something like 13% of Meta, but controls 60% of the voting power). In a free market, why should publicly traded companies be allowed to sell "shares" that are not ownership in the traditional sense?

In an actual free market the distinction between “public” and “private” company would be really just some transparency/accounting standard or set of standards set by the particular exchange(s) that the shares were traded on.

And just to be clear in practice, stocks are not priced based on their voting rights but rather expectations of their future cash flows (dividends) or simply how much the stock is expected to go up or down by. A lot of modern financial activity is nonsense.

If you really want to actually understand what a company is you should go look up when corporations became a thing and why. It had to do with various legal protections to stimulate economic activity and tax revenues.

All of these modern notions and principles that you’re invoking or basing your arguments on about ownership are most likely just contrived nonsense. These aren’t necessarily eternal principles of anything.

Same reason people should be permitted to buy those same non-voting shares. Because nobody is forcing anyone to.

Ask almost anyone here and they'll tell you that the C-suite are mostly a bunch of morons who don't know anything about technology, and now you want to ensure that businesses can only ever be run by such technologically illiterate morons, not founders? Insanity!

So if you don't want to to happen just don't issue shares on the stock market ?

This is a terrible idea.

ah, well, I'll just have to take your word for it, since you've articulated no form of case whatsoever

Care to explain why?

Because it will demoralise people from founding companies. Control is one of the highest priorities that founders have. Throttle that (or throttle personal wealth incentives) and you won't have more companies under control, you'll have less innovators.

Why? Because most innovators have an experience of trying in vain to make contributions within a company/authority structure that directly undermined their capacity to make these contributions.

Sorry but making laws retroactive is authoritarian. We should make it illegal to propose such things and put you in prison.

why do you believe this is true?

The idea of a board of directors is one that actually has to be defended on first principles.

What is the actual value add of a “board of directors” except to basically be weak willed PMC/non founder-type people with a lot to lose reputationally and financially who can be cowed and/or blackmailed very easily.

The typical person on the board of a public company would fold to pressure as soon as they saw a NY Times called their phone.

> The lesson is that if you do the right, non-authoritarian thing, you get punished

Cheating on your wife and betraying your country is the right, non authoritarian thing? We arent having this discussion for any other reason than those two events happening. Its an insane lens of entitlement to view the situation as if he should indefinitely retain ownership due to ... what? Existing? But never have any of his actions have consequences. That's the promise you make by positioning the board shares in that manner: you promise to have accountability. Finding it a weakness to answer to others for your actions is definitely a popular style of thinking amongst the current group of wanna-be authoritarians in the presidential cabinet, "strange" how your first two examples of CEOs unwaveringly align with that political faction huh?

In neoliberalism, there is no such thing as society (Thatcher). When there is no society, you can't be held accountable for previously non-acceptable moral transgressions.

If you are competing in a neoliberal environment where other companies play by these rules, you are at a disadvantage if you are following some superset of them.

I am not saying that he did the right thing, I am just saying that if he set himself up in the same way as his competitors, he would have been fine. Maybe he would have to pay some fine/bribe, similar to what the prior 2 have done for their infractions against the people.

History has actually tested this question quite extensively, and the overwhelming result is that, on aggregate, an entity where power is distributed is more successful than an entity where power is concentrated. Setting up Nvidia like Meta or Tesla might have been the best thing for Jensen, but clearly wouldn’t have been the best thing for Nvidia. And, quite frankly, over the past few years those other two are pretty good examples of why.

You're missing the point of the commenter which is that neoliberal social order confounds the empirical evidence. The framing of "x approach is better for a company's success" is a non-question, it is beside the point. Distribution of power "under neoliberalism" is a self contradictory model.

Isn't this just an example of corporate governance working correctly where as with Elons companies there is no governance over him?

The lesson is that if you allow yourself to be held accountable by other for poor decision making then they might do that. Huang created a corporate structure that could hold him accountable for bad behavior and it did just that when he behaved badly. He did the "right" thing in setting up his company and it acted as designed.