The problem was that he was having affairs with employees who reported to him. That by itself is disqualifying, and then possibly he lied about the board to it?
Anyone who was passed up for promotion now has a credible lawsuit
Do the numbers. Let's say 5 people sue and are awarded 10 million each. Or even 50 million each.
- Avoid actual or potential conflicts between personal interests and their obligations to Nvidia.
- Remove themselves from decision-making when such conflicts arise.
- Contact Employment Legal when there is a perceived or actual conflict.
Given Jensen is one of the two founders that still has stock (the other being Chris Malachowsky) I suppose there could be some room for interpretation.
To speed run most of what's out there spend a few minutes trying to understand the issue [0]. You think MegaSpeed is on the up and up? Doubtful.
1) You don't believe that lying (and lying to the board no less) is a character flaw that could impede someone from a high level position in a multi-billion dollar multi-national company. That, right there, is enough for most people to dismiss your judgement.
2) If you read, any of the articles out there, about how MegaSpeed was formed and how they operate your realize that it's probably a shell company, at minimum. At maximum it's a shell company for CCP.
3) Finally, a mixture of these things were reported in the Culper Research report back in May of this year [0].
I'm sure the response will be "this proves nothing!". Sure, you're 100% right. But if you think all of this was deep state made up psy ops, well then, maybe go touch some grass.
[0] https://culperresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Culper...
So this probably isn't about the affairs but a breach of trust with the board.
But sure, tell me again that everyone needs to have perfect control over all their most powerful urges to keep their jobs?
Guess you’re not fat, never fucked anyone you shouldn’t have, and definitely never drank more you should have at any point?
One of these things is a mostly private matter between you and your spouse. One of them involves congressional hearings and may land you and your company in serious deep poop. And one of them is widely recognized as an abuse of power in the workplace.
How can he not know he was sleeping with a customer and a direct report?
> he's just having an affair
Interesting use of the word "an" and "just."
> that the government knew about
Because of an investigation into illegal smuggling.
> and didn't tell him
Is that a judgement of whether he's a good steward of a multi-trillion dollar monopoly?
> because there's no evidence of anything untoward
Right, because the current administration only acts upon evidence and definitely not self-enrichment and cronyism.
Wow, how can every single word be such complete bs?
Some were allegedly with direct reports. One was allegeldy with an individual who posed a security risk. In each instance, there significant risk to the board, the company and shareholders.
He's obviously been very succesful in many elements of his role but this is very poor decision making. He could have just had affairs outside of work and been fine.
But I also think this perspective isn’t really the point. Regardless of the abusive nature, it’s still a tremendous conflict of interest for an affair of this nature to occur. The direct report would have a huge amount of leverage over Huang to keep the affair secret for one thing.
I don’t know the nature of these particular affairs, but regardless of who is or isn’t vulnerable, it’s still wildly inappropriate, and shouldn’t be tolerated
I've seen people attracted to higher-ups ("coming on to them") in University and employment situations, and from outside looking in, the attraction could have been about the "power" the higher up was wielding (not necessarily using for bad; just the stature they had in the local society). TBH, people get attracted to people in power or with fame all the time (without actually knowing the person they are), so there is no reason it would be any different when there is a direct professional relationship.
Yes, this means it's tricky, and puts large demands on the "higher ups" — while they are similarly human with all their faults, it's still not necessarily the right thing to do — even, as a higher up, I'd struggle to differentiate if they are attracted to my "social standing" or to myself (if that can even be decoupled)?
is it really hard to understand. Why according to you does jensen have no agency? What kind of thinking in your head lead to that conclusion?
The only people who understand this kind of job and what it takes are people in the same sort of area. And you’re prolly only meeting them in your own workplace.
At least if you’re boning someone from work you don’t have to watch everything you say the same way.
Even more so if you’re also setting their schedule, never need to worry about their boss not giving them a free afternoon to fuck if you’re the boss.
You misspelled "penis".
> A manager fucking his direct report(s) is extremely common
Let's just legalize rape by "valuable" people, it's fiiiiine
Y'know, this is why people don't like techbros. It's shit like this.
A manager having a relationship with a subordinate is unethical, but let's not call it outright rape, OK? There is a difference.
A manager fucking his subordinate is coercion at the very least due to the power imbalance.
This is not a consensual relationship for the same reason that sex with a "willing" person held at gunpoint isn't (even if there is no explicit verbal threat).
Whether it crosses a criminal threshold of sexual harassment or sexual assault , depends on the jurisdiction and cirumstance. In any case, it is not OK.
It is immaterial whether coercion of this sort is "not outright" rape.
Parent commenter's logic that justifies it because the CEO "has value" applies to "outright" rape as well.
This is what I have issue with.
You cannot just assert that a relationship is non-consensual without knowing anything about the relationship concerned.
No, because you didn't say anything about what the boss does in this situation.
The ethical thing for the boss to do is to decline having a relationship with a subordinate because of its potential to become coercive.
Same goes for a 13-year-old instigating a relationship with a 30-year-old.
What the 13 year old does is irrelevant. The 30 year old is the person with the power.
The coercive force here is the corporation that seeks to insert itself into its employees personal lives.
I cannot imagine avoiding a relationship in service to a corporation that has no hesitation to dispense with me whenever it is convenient. The relationship between employee and employer is entirely transactional and so has lesser priority than any interpersonal relationships that might develop.
The board can’t trust Huang if he lies repeatedly and breaks company code of conduct.
A lot of it is just silently ignored if found out.
It seems you have little argument here.
But anything except a pre-existing relationship is fraught with peril: implied coercion and/or quid pro quos are just some of the problems that can exist. There are darn good reasons why that sort of thing is widely forbidden.
This should be obvious to everyone, but sometimes the obvious needs to be restated, apparently.
Favoritism certainly can happen in other situations, of course. Heck, "the GM's girlfriend" is a (negative) trope in tabletop RPG groups for a reason, or spouses favoring each other in competitive board games. And those are situations where (usually) no money is involved, and it's just for fun. Add money to the situation and it can be a dangerous mix. If someone really must end up being a supervisor over his own spouse plus other people, best to have someone neutral double-checking his decisions. It's easy to be blind to one's own conflicts of interest.
But like, people favorite their own friends or long time colleagues too, even outside romantic relationships. It is not graded school.
And it's wrong. At its worst it's rape-by-coercion, trying to hide behind a thin layer of plausible deniability. It's not a circular argument at all: the behavior is bad for objective reasons, and that's why it's forbidden. In more favorable cases (where there's no coercion involved) it's still trading something of monetary value for sexual favors, which makes it a form of "prostitution lite". Again, there are objective, non-circular reasons for it to be forbidden.
If there were anything inherently wrong with it, you would have to ban most family businesses. Just because some forms of something are undesirable, and a corporation out of laziness/practicalities enacts a general policy to ban all forms of it; that does not make the entire thing morally reprehensible automatically.
I'm getting pretty tired of the grandstanding going on around this issue. There are lots of "acceptable" reasons why this situation may be happening -- it all depends on who is defining "acceptable".
If it's NVIDIA corporate counsel, the definition is going to be different than some moralizing blowhard on social media. For one thing, the lawyer probably doesn't give a shit about his relationship with his wife, and cares exclusively about legal liability to the company.
The one thing that none of us can do is apply our personal moral standards to strangers.
Surely there are cases around the world where an employee and his/her boss fell in love, married and that was the end of it.
Is it...? I feel like there's a lot more to unpack here. What if the thing a person fell in love with was that somebody just had more power (over them)?
I'd argue that people should fall in love on equal grounds, so the personality of a partner matters more than the perceived status of power.
There are wrong kinds of love that should either be discussed openly, or, if unsure, privately in therapy. Why not?
There are only two options, either A) to pretend that it doesn't happen, or B) to acknowledge that it does.
The idea that corporate policy could ever control what goes on people's bedrooms is of course absurd, that's just option A.
What you’re not seeing is that the infractions you describe are just drops in a bucket. This guy created billions of dollars and is responsible for the revolution in ML we see today. It is through his foresight that ML is even possible at the scale we see today. He changed the world. He is one of the core people sitting in the center of a global paradigm shift that will change our lives as we know it. You thought this ai stuff was just chat bots? Now it’s writing our software and dismantling academia piece by piece. It’s obvious what’s coming next.
What should be ALSO fucking obvious is that kind of change makes fucking a couple employees and some random honey pot from China basically NOTHING in comparison. It doesn’t fucking matter if there’s some unfairness or some kind of bullshit conflict of interest or favoritism in the company because that shit is MINOR.
You said sometimes obvious things need to be restated implying that it needs to be restated for me specifically. Let me fucking straight with you. YOU are the one fucking blind to the obvious. Wake up.
I guarantee you the board doesn’t give a fuck about any of this shit. They were just waiting for an opportune time to oust him. It was the same for bill clinton. God ousting him for favoritism when favoritism basically exists for almost every company out there? Seriously?
No, the engineers he employed did. They will continue to do so after his departure.
There are too many bad CEOs, so the CEOs who are not bad, like the CEOs of NVIDIA and AMD, must still be praised, and the success of their companies was conditioned by them not being bad CEOs.
Or perhaps I'm misreading you. You did, after all, open with saying that you agree with my comment that you're replying to. So if your only point is "the board didn't care, that was an excuse to get rid of him" and you're not excusing his behavior, then sure, I agree with that statement. His behavior was an open secret among the company, after all; they had to have known, but were willing to ignore it when it was convenient to them. Which is immoral of them, let me add. I agree with you that that's what they did. I do NOT agree (and I hope you're not saying) that it was ethical or moral of them to ignore it until it became publicly known.
However, if he is fired, that is more a punishment for the company than for him, because he is extremely rich and at the age of retirement, so he does not work because he needs to, but just because he enjoys it.
A real punishment for him would be to lose without compensation a part of his NVIDIA shares.
If it is ever proven that he broke any export control law, then a punishment for that is a decision for the judicial system.
It is not remotely common, and is grounds for firing at every single job I've ever held.
One affair, shame on him. Three affairs, and wanting him to stay as CEO shame on them.
this is clearly not just an affair. Why are you reducing it to that despite that line in parent comment. you obviously read that.
I see this "just a innocent affair" on twitter. Whats going on. Who are these ppl.
Temporarily embarrassed serial philanderers.
Yes. I don't want someone with that lack of moral character leading multi-trillion dollar companies. You can forgive Jensen, maybe even some of the people Jensen harmed will forgive Jensen, but I separate individuals forgiving the man from letting him remain the public face of Nvidia. I wouldn't want to work for him at this point.
> its likely quite a few CEOs are, only difference is you don't know about it
I hope more CEOs get caught so they can be held accountable, too.
Because Jensen chose to mix personal and business. Even having an affair with VP of Nvidia itself. If he couldn't even keep a vow and promise to wife and keep his family out of it. Why would you trust any person like this. This is his own fault.
Get off your high horse.
If the press knew about it, I'm sure Jensen did. More than enough reason to fire him.
It is pretty clear he lied to the board after the first news broke and that is why he was sacked.
It more feels like someone wanted him gone. The second affair had to be leaked because after the first one it still appeared he still had a good chance of remaining CEO
Last time I looked, the US's laws weren't applied by default to the whole world, and states remain sovereign. Is there a piece of international law that you know of and the rest of the world does not ?
Does that make theft and child abuse ok too?
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
this is what the parent is saying is the problem. How is her not being spy change that?
And what's with all the people who think complex investigations get completed in days?
Almost certainly the same last name (黃/黄, huang2). It's also sometimes romanized as Wong (though some Wongs are 王, wang2).
Just found this on wiki -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(name) : "Ng (pronounced [ŋ̍]) is the simplified (tone-less) romanization of the Cantonese surnames 吳/吴 (Jyutping: Ng4, read in Mandarin as pinyin: Wú) and 伍 (Ng5, Mandarin Wǔ); and also of the Hokkien surnames 黃/黄 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂ɡ, Mandarin Huáng) and 阮 (Ńg, Mandarin Ruǎn).
The surname is often pronounced in English as /əŋ/ əng or /ɪŋ/ ing or /ɛŋ/ eng. It is sometimes romanized as Ang, Eng, Ing and Ong in the United States, and as Ung in Australia. In Cambodia, the corresponding surname is Oeng."
As a russian I need some explanation here.
That sounds like your are remembering one of those Tomatis's charts, which are simply bullshit. All natural languages are quite similar in terms of their "frequency bands", what is different is the clustering of their phonemes within those bands, e.g. Russian has lots of consonant sounds but very few vowels when compared to English.
Like imagine not being able to use inflections to express emotion when speaking. That'd sound as alien to a non-tonal speaker as the concept of using inflections to express emotion to a tonal-speaker. Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.
There's also the side issue that most non-tonal languages tend to have a relatively close linguistic background. Russian has a massive amount of 'English' cognates (often from shared ancestors predating both), especially if you consider words that are basically cognates but have different stresses or maybe one slightly different vowel sound or whatever. But the number of cognates between tonal and non-tonal languages is far fewer. It makes them much more difficult to learn, at least for me.
You certainly can. Just because a morpheme has a tone doesn't mean that there aren't other contributors to pitch, such as sentence pitch contour. Do you actually speak or understand any tonal languages? I can assure you that Chinese people definitely use sentence prosody to convey extremely subtle nuances of meaning.
I don't really understand your complaint. If you want to know how something is pronounced, you'll have to learn how to read pronunciation information. If you want nothing but standard English, then it won't be possible to describe the pronunciation of most foreign words. (For example, no English syllable corresponds to Spanish no - the problems start very early if you try to go this route.)
Are you looking for information, or not?
okay, but if a man named john smith had an affair with a woman named jane smith it would be a funny coincidence the same. do you have a point?
Just for context:
> In April 2023, Trump hired [Todd] Blanche to defend him for concealed hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and he led Trump's defense in the 2024 criminal trial. Blanche later defended Trump in cases involving federal classified documents and election obstruction. In November 2024, following his victory in the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump announced Blanche as his nominee for deputy attorney general. Blanche was confirmed by the Senate in March 2025.[1]
He defended Trump's White House media ban[2] and most recently threatened to prosecute Democrats planning oversight probes into the administration[3].
FBI Director Kash Patel, for anyone who doesn't already know, is a Trump loyalist who was a director of Trump Media & Technology Group and reportedly made over $500,000 from Trump's political campaign. It is literally insane that he is the director of anything in the government[4].
Bottom line: time will tell who Alice Huang really was, but given the reports that Trump was informed she might have been a spy a year ago and didn't act on it, you can't expect honesty from loyalists he put in law enforcement positions.
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/27/todd-blanche...
[3] https://www.ms.now/news/todd-blanche-threat-prosecution-demo...
[4] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/the-fbis-controversial-...
Recall that, in exchange for the US lifting export restrictions, Trump negotiated an agreement with Nvidia to receive 25% of the revenue from certain chip sales[1].
Trump prioritizing money over national security is not at all surprising.
There was some speculation that Rubio was the one who leaked this, as he had prepared a memo about Alice Huang that was presented to the president in May.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/trump-nvidia-h200-china-ai-c...
And how many trillions of dollars of wealth has been "removed" by American companies outsourcing their production to China over the past several decades, transferring their IP to Chinese entities through forced joint-ventures, outright IP theft, etc.?
By some estimates, the outright IP theft alone has caused $15 trillion in cumulative losses. According to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, whose figures are used by the FBI and the Office of the US Trade Representative, IP theft costs American businesses somewhere between $225 and $600 billion every year, and much of that theft is at the hands of China.
Companies like Facebook and Google aren't allowed in the Chinese market. Do you find that "anti-competitive"?
Nobody is playing fair here and the notion that we can all just trade with each other equanimously is naive. The world isn't that kind and simple.
Taiwan was a similar backwater when the intel microprocessor was invented, yet they’ve clearly done the hard yards to do what the “American voter” had no appetite for.
(I'm thinking more of ASML (dutch) in the Netherlands here, who build the machines at the heart of the fabs (most of the knowhow for building those sits with taiwans tsmc, also for the fabs they build in the states) than of TSMC, since I don't really have to much of a clue of whats the culture in taiwan is like. But I assune theres a more tight-knit social fabric then there is in the states.
We actually could give every teen a 5090 for free right now, no blocking trade agreements required.
I disagree. China is only acquiring technology to copy the best parts and improve the rest. There are plenty of examples over the past decades.
They would never be a permanent customer of Nvidia, they would destroy Nvidia long term by offering better chips for cheaper, especially as they are going to take Taiwan in the near future.
Feel free to do some research about how china won the solar game, that would be your textbook example of how they are going to win AI.
They do this with cars, they did it with solar, they do it with weapons-grade tech.
It’s an absolute fever dream to think selling them chips would mean they wouldn’t get more under the counter and develop their own improved designs.
We are talking about a nation-state actor with unlimited pockets. They can go down all of these roads at the same time and if I were china and winning AI means winning everything, i would exactly that.
Using Jensen like a greedy prostitute to get the goods right from the source was just the easiest way to get those chips.
The collapse of Jensen is also strengthening China, they already have what they wanted, now he gets put in the trash so the US can no longer profit from his undeniable talents attracting investments into American AI domination.
Seriously, what is 4 or 7b to China?
Better than sending Chinese black ops to disappear a ship full of Nvidia chips and risk complications with another nation-state actor.
Why wouldn’t they take the way of least resistance which was through Jensens greed, ego and illoyalty to his wife?
China has a long-term plan, is extremely focused at accomplishing milestones and they are already ahead in almost every sector compared to the US of the past 20 years, that has become a political dumpster fire.
China is winning.
And the chips that Jensen allowed to move there will be used to accelerate the already working strategy in all of its aspects. He didn’t just fuck most of his company and partners as it seems, he fucked every American in existence.
Enough smart people in the US government have seen that, but they are dealing with a kleptocratic family and friends scheme that is selling their nation’s interests to enrich themselves. It is what it is.
Jensen like Trump and his family is only helping number 1.
Trump followers are big on “Trump is good for stock market”. I think market already dipped when democrats won but now it is not a dip anymore, that’s quite a crash we have now.
he's say something about it "hes a disgusting man, sold out nvidia and for what?" or something even less coherent
You don't know that at all. It's not standard procedure to immediately publicly out possible spies. Lots of reasons why not to do that including not wanting to let adversaries know you know who their spies are or to use them to feed bad intel or for watching what the spy does.
As for "standard procedure" and counter-intelligence, who knows? I'm not a member of the intelligence community. Are you?
The point of my comment is that, to many laypeople, Trump's inaction doesn't look good and that creates an optics issue for him. "Why would he let a Chinese spy who was potentially trying to use Huang to influence the president's US-China policy stay close to him?"
Given how the administration operates, you can expect Trump's lackeys to spin the truth (if not lie) to make his actions look more favorable to the public.
There's no evidence she influenced Jensen who influenced Trump who eased restrictions despite knowing she was a spy. Jensen has consistently been trying to relax restrictions for years, before they met, and others have made the same case Jensen has, that it's actually harmful to the US to restrict access and that a managed access strategy is better than a complete ban (and Trump said he would charge for it). She probably did what's called intelligence gathering.
Also, it's funny watching HN suddenly become hawkish on GPUs being shipped to China. Were you complaining about it back then or just now?
Are you a member of the intelligence community? I'm not. This story is literally a week old. It's naive to think that all of the intelligence information the alphabet soup agencies have about Alice Huang and her relationship with Jensen, and how it might have compromised trade secrets, trade policy, etc. is going to be released to the public ASAP.
Most likely: we're never going to get the full story.
> Also, it's funny watching HN suddenly become hawkish on GPUs being shipped to China. Were you complaining about it back then or just now?
I used to live in Taiwan, so I know exactly what China is and the threat it poses.
There actually is, for both: 1) the chip sales to china, and 2) a $25,000,000 donation Jensen made to donald for his ballroom slush fund, which he tried to keep secret.
There is also evidence that donald kept this quiet in exchange for obedience and obeisance: he admitted it in an interview recently.
https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/mark-h...
However, if Jensen Huang was made aware of the potential for espionage, then his position is far more precarious.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/09/the-race-is-on-to-sue-nvid...
"A third category, one that would change everything, would arise only if the board’s investigation finds Huang knew about the intelligence connection. That would be “a whole other ball game,” as Bartlett said."
I have signed on to the Rosen class action.
US IC knows he knew, but cannot disclose the means at trial, so they’re doing this to remove him from NVidia.
Such cunning, making such a poor helpless man succumb to such obviously completely 100% fireable offenses.
You know that AYE rhymes with EYE, right?
A: legality
B: morality
C: what the political power wants
D: what shareholders wants
E: what the "CIA" wants, which is influenced by A, B and C, and D but its own thing
...
Z: business consequences, the sum of all of the above
I've slept with people I wouldn't even allow to look at my phone lol
What he made aware of circumventing export controls?
Now I know for anyone outside of China, that equates to "spy", but she was not MSS especially when they are currently holding 600k cards in HK and actively trying to prevent cards from entering.
This isn't to discount the issues with NVIDIA and whether they knowingly participated in circumventing chip bans. Or conflict of interest issues. But running a business that benefits China as a Chinese national and making some reports to the nation just doesn't seem like "spy" to me any more than being part of the British East India company made a Brit a spy.
That is the result of this: every person of Chinese ethnicity with enough clout is now known to be assumed to be a spy in the eyes of the NYT.
Have you talked to Jack Ma lately ?
This whole episode is simply the US equivalent of Jack Ma with added puritanism.
Jack Ma vanished for merely speaking out against the Chinese party.
Jensen enabled China to build out the AI infrastructure it needed to get their models just shy of the SOTA models.
I'm not even pro USA (as I'm not American and we've been fucked over by then enough times), but equating literally enabling a foreign country in subverting your own is a large difference to Jack Ma whoes only crime was saying the Chinese party is destroying Chinas future with it's corruption and needs to be removed... (And he didn't even say that much, his statement was was tamer I just cba looking it up and am speaking from memory)
This is a beat sweetening story. You write up what your sources want you to write in exchange for them giving you juicier stuff later. It says almost nothing about the certainty within the intelligence agencies.
Jensen’s dismissal as CEO could still be because of the affairs, especially the one with an Nvidia VP.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-jensen-huang-spy-claim-nvidia...
If I was caught shagging a customer, it would be curtains for me.
unzips leather jacket
We have an entire administration who are terrible at their jobs—who commit crimes and then go onto a news program and tell everyone that they committed a crime. I don't think that's evidence against her being a spy. Not these days.
public figures get more public scrutiny
He's repeatedly done something that would get any other CEO fired.
I don’t think an affair or ten matters in the US.
See the difference?
Jensen was dumb enough to have one with a Chinese spy, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he's one of the best CEOs of the modern era, and his work at Nvidia has been outstanding.
I agree its morally wrong, but that's really a personal issue for the family, it's not a crime. Sleeping with some employees is barely a problem IMO. And worst of all, when I look at the amount of corruption and immorality amonst say Musk, Zuckerberg, the Trump White House going after Jensen is crazy. Jensen is the billionaire who's happy to pay all his taxes and not interfere with politics or elections.
And besides all that, it seems the Trump admin KNEW about Alice Huang and Jensen's relationship for a year, Lutnick also knew. with the Why is Jensen the only one going down for this? He is getting crucified because he's less Machiavellian than all the rest.
Because this isn't a moral issue, its a dirty political fight to entrench power within OpenAI & Anthropic. Without the Chinese companies getting chips, we would not have Deepseek or Kimi or any frontier-level open weight models. And if these guys succeed, we will all be locked into corporate paid models that spy on you and censor you for a long time. People need to look at the bigger picture, killing open-weight models may be good for a few US cos but it is terrible for the world.
but everyone is outraged about some affairs - it’s a staged planned media operation. And most of the tech industry seems to tune out anything about politics because its “low brow” so they’re often clueless to the depths of depravity of this admin, but theyre jumping onboard the Jensen hate train.
Our options after this are going to be spyware, censored models from a duopoly. We are fucked into a surveillance state without open weight. So this isn’t taking what they can get, this is people cheering on their own demise because they’re so hungry to take down any elite.
Second, there's no reason the new CEO wouldn't keep pushing towards open weights if that's good for the company, and I believe it is. It's a form of hedging against the big labs and creating a sustainable demand outside of them.
Third, if China wants Nvidia GPUs, don't worry, they'll get them. While they need them. They're certainly working very hard to reproduce the entire vertical on their turf and I'm fairly confident they'll get close enough within a few years. They're not hinging their whole strategy on Jensen, they're not idiots.
Nothing's going to really change. It's fine. Well, as fine as everything usually is.
My understanding is, the thing that got him fired, is not the affairs themselves, it was not being candid with his board about the extent of the problem–he admitted to them the affair with Alice Huang, but didn't tell them about his other affairs (including at least one with a direct report) until after the board was made aware of them independently.
A board can put up with a CEO who cheats on his wife. It can't put up with a CEO who hides things from it.
As with security vetting interviews they don't necessarily care about the morality of the actions, just that they are wware and can prepare for the consequences.
There was a very simple choice the CEO could have made which would have avoided all this, anyway.
Shocking how many people think a board could do anything OTHER than firing him even for just what’s known today about fucking subordinates, never mind what the export control investigations find.
You are none of those things. All of reality if current CEOs today proves you wrong. Your take is so laughable it’s as if it was written by a child or a teenager.
Also, we don't know exactly what Huang said to the board. Maybe, they didn't explicitly ask if there were any other affairs, and he didn't answer the question they didn't explicitly ask. Maybe, they did ask, and he lied and falsely said this was the only one.
If they work under you, yes? It's written into every business conduct policy I've ever seen?
It should be really obvious why entering into a sexual relationship with someone who reports to you without disclosing it to your manager is bad. The CEO reports to the board, so they disclose it to them.
Also I know this place is full of SV ghouls who only give a shit about what the stock tickers on their brokerages look like, but the amount of people defending infidelity is insane to me
Aren't you supposed to get trained on this every year?
In corporate America, that means he was fired. Nobody who "resigns" under such circumstances actually does so voluntarily.
Even if, as others have suggested, the evidence against Alice Huang isn’t strong, there are still huge conflicts of interest and repeated lies in play. Let’s move on
Even leaving out the sale to China part, sleeping with direct reports is unethical and presents so many conflicts of interest. He was lucky the damage was minimal for so long
- there is no concrete evidence that Alice Huang was even a spy
- the whole thing was made up due to nothing but pure Sinophobia
Usually a transition like this can be done well when a company has some mature product or service that prints money, like Apple or Microsoft or Google for example, and the company then needs a safe pair of hands to keep that machine running. It doesn’t seem like Nvidia is in exactly that kind of situation, it’s more like a red queen race that they’re the ones leading right now.
erm, open borders, sweaty
If he was French, this would be an attaboy moment - without the spy allegations, he'd be cheered on. However... in such a puritanic country as US, I suspect it was the second disclosed affair that cost him his position.
After all, it changed the narrative from Huang being "someone who fell to nation-state honeytrapping" to a regular, equal-opportunity filanderer.
... than this still is stricly a private thing.
At least in many countries outside the US. There was this fun thing happening then Walmart tried to expand to Europe ... doing zero investigation about social norms before that. They tried to forbid their employees to have relationships. But the germans just said "To the heck, we don't let restrict our freedom by private entities". Over there there are thousands of marriages between e.g. a hospital Dr. med. and nurses. And all of them started as a relationship between a superior and one subordinate. From a german PoV this is entirely okay. What would not be okay is abusing the power of being a superior ... but that has to be backed with evidence first, otherwise it's just a sly accusation.
Don't people have personal freedom of expression in the US? Or can't they enforce their freedom against the powers of the employers or the lynch justice like moralizing of complete strangers?
Always puzzles me.
For the obvious reason that you spend many hours of your week in the workplace, it becomes the place where you meet the most people in your life and that includes friends but also your potential love or sexual partners. As simple as that.
There's also a long history of bosses exploiting power dynamics for their personal pleasure.
This looks like some three letter agency dumping what they have on him, most likely as a punishment for not playing ball.
In these circumstances, I don't really feel like in addition to messing up his reputation and his famil(y/ies¹) and other punishments his going to have, there should be another punishment given to his company and employees.
Ofc, my knowledge of CEO level management or even advanced GPUs is limited and I welcome any critique to straighten up my limited views. Just wanted to point out hypocrisy and the tendency to throw out the baby with bathwater.
1: sorry for that joke to those whom it offends.
Apparently a constitution means only what 5 people say it means. Thanks Mitch!
Why care at all about the private life of a CEO?
Nothing he said could ever be believed again.
A one-night stand might qualify better as a "moment of weakness", but that’s not what we’re talking about.
The board backed him after the first affair was made public but shit canned him after the 2nd.
This indicates that 1 is okay but more than 1 is bad to answer the GPs question.
Some people don't believe in exclusivity or monogamy, some people believe in a clear separation between love and sex, some marriages/partnership are over for years but partners have a tacit agreement to pretend for various reasons instead of divorcing, etc.
Are you privy of their life?
Infidelity, conflicts of interests, potentially some “light treason”, but, but, but “shareholder value”… just gross.
Those of you who can't make the connection can relax and sit this one out.
If anything, it's the spy aspect that would qualify as gross negligence, but affairs themselves are his personal issues to sort out.
As for the extramarital thing, it's a private matter between him and his wife. Unless someone alleges there was any sexual harassment involved, but I have seen no claim that it is the case so far.
And just letting it go on is either a sign of gargantuan incompetence or willful action by them . Not sure which :)
Well, USA is selling Russia a lot of "dual-use components", including Texas Instruments chips found in drones and nobody makes a lot of fuss about that, even though, in theory, there are imposed sanctions on Russia because it started a war, keeps pushing hybrid war against USA NATO allies.
So, selling graphic cards does not sound like a big deal, especially given the fact that China, likewise Russia, North Korea or Iran can purchase anything through the fake companies place in Ireland, the Netherlands or any other tax paradise where nobody ask too many questions.
This is easy peasy now, in the globalized economy, more, it was always easy peasy, even during the middle of cold war and CoCom times, communistic countries could buy anything they wanted, e.g. communistic Poland had a net of companies in Brazil through which is smuggled whatever it wanted to purchase.
No but seriously, i wonder who the next CEO will be, what song will they be signing then
The part where he screwed three people directly related to his job: A customer/client, and two subordinates.
Look, I absolutely get that Huang is a singular CEO. In a culture of CEO worship, he is a rare one where you can clearly say he drove the success of the company. For employees with equity, his tenure has been astoundingly good.
That said, what we know is deeply troubling, and the people who made this call (Jensen and/or the board) have the biggest vested interest, and they may know of deeper issues.
Also, Jensen's external credibility is mortally wounded. He has been one of the loudest proponents for exporting chips to China. We now know he had an illicit relationship with a Chinese national who was smuggling Nvidia product to China. The policy positions he took are entangled with his undisclosed (until now) personal liabilities. And this is a very sensitive policy issue.
>likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
Literally everyone knew. China renting Malaysian GPUs isn't new. Gamers Nexus has a full two hours documentary of "nvidia is full of shit and knows china is getting A100s and H100s and so does the US government". Alice Huang is likely not a spy either.
"7th richest man in the world sticks his dick in random places and cheats on his wife" no fucking shit sherlock, does a bear shit in the woods too ?
Everyone lost a boatload of stock value, but at least two of them also had to watch their boyfriend get fired.
It is quite interesting how enthused some people are at the idea of him being deposed supposedly for things far less egregious than many before him.
1. Jensen pushes open models. With ANT IPO looming, not a good look.
2. Someone else wanted power. That's always true.
I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
You can think he is amazing at many parts of this job, but at this point it is less of a mistake, and more a pattern of behavior that he knew was hugely risky and decided to cover up.
This is a terrible time for Nvidia employees. But the solution is not to invite the cause of the terrible time back in.