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 ?