I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me.
Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.
Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA's Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company, and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy."
For sure he has excellent PR and comms advisors. He gets credit, I guess, for taking their advice, but none for betraying his wife and family. It speaks volumes that so much of the leadership class in American tech and business is so morally compromised.
All you have to do to moot 100% of that massive adversarial effort is to decide (ahead of time) to not be a POS and keep your dick behind your zipper. Not deciding that and sticking to it makes you a garbage husband and a dangerous and unreliable CEO.
Crisis communications is a real field. Most companies aren't prepared for it in advance and do it poorly as a result, but there are specialist consultants who are good at getting it right (source: close friend who did this kind of work for many years - it is not a pretty business, and often involves significant human failings).
I don't mean to belittle the letter, but Jensen's PR firm undoubtedly helped with the letter and undoubtedly had advisors who specialize in this.
Or, you know, you could be a stand up person and be genuinely contrite.
He's a big time CEO and his company is impacted by how well he handles it. So of course there are PR/crisis people around. They specialize in making psychopaths look human.
But leaders are where they are because they make good decisions - their character does matter. Calling in the image-fixer types to clean up your mistakes is easy mode.
Yes, total failure on many counts. But when called to answer for it, you can respond like a flawed human or you can have a pr crisis firm present you as a bland corporate robot who says things like “if anyone was offended I apologize” or “we’re going to investigate how this happened.”
I think his answer was solid and seemed genuine. Doesn’t mean I think he’s got good judgment generally, but at least this was not a shitty thing to say.
As apologies go it’s skillfully done. But it’s almost entirely about his personal failings (the affair), and it leaves plenty of room for a slow-walked board investigation that will end with a report designed to look thorough while concluding nothing.
Even if he didn’t know she was an intelligence asset, it’s hard to believe he didn’t at least suspect Megaspeed was a conduit to China. If you read the press reports, there were a ton of red flags.
Nvidia has also said he’ll stay on as CEO while the investigation runs. I can’t think of many CEOs who would survive this, let alone without taking any time off.
Its all calculated down to the pretend patriot lines near the end even though he's constantly looking for ways to bypass export restrictions to sell to china.
sounds like an easy buy, if it wasnt already way expensive.
i guess we'll actually find out if he gave away useful nvidia secrets in years from now, but by then the tech might not matter all that much to Nvidia.
he was cheating on his wife before now, and Nvidia was doing just fine
People reading the nvida article will be wondering what is suspected. Probably why this article is trending as well as the original.
Whether tabloid, or completely inaccurate, Nvida make reference to it and that there is an independent investigation. It is reasonable for people to wonder what it is about.
Strongly disagree with changing it to that URL. This the kinda news you don't want to get from an involved primary source... that page is missing a crucial detail (the national security concern mentioned is espionage) and could just disappear whenever it becomes convenient to get the news cycle on the next thing. It will almost certainly be a 404 Not Found by the time 3 years have passed.
I disagree. Giving NVIDIA / Huang the stage and a microphone is begging for disinformation. Legitimate reporters can provide context, important information omitted by NVIDIA/Huang, and fact-checking.
I guess that’s one good thing about the whole “sex cult” thing, that everyone in it is more or less immune to sexual blackmail. The trade-off being susceptibility to in-group sexual manipulation. Not sure if that’s better or worse tbh.
robots for now will lack the status danger and thrill of a human partner - it's not typically about the physicality of a relationship, but actually power differentials, status, movement
If you're the CIA, wouldn't you want to plant employees, or 'hire' employees at major firms like this? I guess I assume they do already. Probably each major corporation has 10-50+ employees getting kick backs from the government.
They do, according to Jonna Mendez, but those placed don’t collect a company salary, only a government salary. This causes some contention since they are paid far less than salaried employees and get no equity, so it leads to high turnover
> but those placed don’t collect a company salary, only a government salary
Technically, they collect the company salary, and then the CIA reduces their pay by the same amount. (They have to be indistinguishable from ordinary employee, including to payroll.)
At one point, they couldn't keep any excess if the company pay was higher. Now, they're apparently allowed to keep an amount that doesn't significantly exceed comparable federal pay.
From the context, I believe the question was about infiltrating _American_ companies. If Mendez has made that claim, do you happen to know where she said it?
She gave 2 fireside chat style events at the commonwealth club of California and it was at one of those. They’re on YouTube, how I found them. There is other press coverage though.
Infiltrated is not necessarily the right word. Company executives know, but few other employees do
The US intelligence agencies would have a hard time planting employees in US firms while remaining within the bounds of FISA. They certainly have assets inside major Chinese firms though, of course.
Why do you doubt that? And who do you suppose wants to work for the CIA in this aspect, when the job description is pushing pencils as an intern at a tech company trying to get sad old men to have sex with them?
Most large US companies if they want to have the government as a client, have special rooms with employees with security clearances that work mostly on projects that the CEO and even their line managers do not know what they are. HR also have a special employees or a private section that deal with these people. There is some deniability also: the managers can tell the truth under oath and say they have no knowledge about the projects!
It's part of normal business operations not some secret illegal shady kick backs operation within some kind of spy movie.
There's no need to secretly infiltrate a company when the company is working happily with you. People underestimate how close big business and 3 letter agencies actually are in many cases.
It doesn't quite work like that. You don't go off and find some super smart person who can easily get a job at Nvidia and tell them "Hey you, go work for this company". You find someone who already works at Nvidia, and you bump into them at their kids' little league game, and you get chatting and build a rapport and over time you build trust and before you know, you've got a trusted source inside Nvidia. They don't even need to know they're a plant. And then, if you really do need something more than information you can go further. But you start with someone already at the company and you target them, rather than the other way around.
And that's not even talking about the less clandestine methods of just ringing their General Counsel and saying "Hey buddy we're the US government we need X Y Z".
How integral is Huang to the success of Nvidia? As much as he seems to have done a good job, he appears less integral than with some companies like Bezos/Amazon or Zuckerberg/Meta (whether these are/were or not is besides the point, they are seen as such).
I'd expect a board to fire a CEO over this, so he will have to be critical to the business, more than a normal CEO is critical, to survive. The market reaction to him going would also be interesting. Seems like the markets are starting to figure out what the value is here.
These aren't all entirely drop-in replacements, there are some trade-offs involved, but there are many companies with alternatives that could take Nvidia's market if they stall.
Navigating this political/diplomatic climate is key to Nvidia's success, and he appears to be driving that? In normal times maybe it would be different.
Not to sound too negative but IMO NVidia has largely been "right place, right time" and I don't think Huang has had much to do with it. NVidia made computer graphics cards and CUDA long ago; they just happened to be in the right place, twice, in quick succession: first crypto/blockchain, then AI, neither of which they really had any part in boosting. It's like they set up a general store that sells pickaxes and drills, then someone found gold in the mountain right next to them, and then the goldmine ran out but someone found oil right under them.
The one big thing I will given Huang credit for is not going all-in on blockchain and recognizing it as a bubble. NVidia never really pivoted from their core business/customers to support crypto miners, unlike what they're doing with AI.
Maybe the verb tense was unclear. NVidia currently boosts AI, for obvious reasons. But OpenAI was the company who did all of the legwork to make AI into an industry, with some minor support from NVidia. NVidia wouldn't have 10x'd since 2022 without OpenAI.
AI has been a (minor but existing) industry before OpenAI. E.g. Deepmind exists since 2010, 6 years before OpenAIs founding. Sure, OpenAI has contributed to it, in great deals, but Nvidia has always been there during the growth of AI. In 2012, AlexNet has been trained on GTX 580 GPUs, in 2016 AlphaGo used Nvidia GPUs, etc.
Yeah, but in this case they also built the pickaxes and drills and did it better than any other pickaxe and drill builder. In your analogy, they are commodities and a shop like that can be set up by anyone. But in this case, that doesn't apply. And if you look at their sales composition, they never pivoted away from gaming, but data centers clearly became ludicrously more attractive in the AI era. But they were always very good at computing triangles, perhaps the best in the world. They were lucky that market forces made that computation very valuable but they were not lucky in their ability to build it.
I do agree! They execute extremely well and Huang deserves praise for that. I just don't see him as a visionary leader shaping the industry in the same way that e.g. Jobs was. In an alternate world where the NSA doesn't create bitcoin and OpenAI is never founded, NVidia would be a stable, reliable producer of consumer electronic parts.
how can you be sure though we wont find a good use of computing triangles in that alternative universe? that technology would always have abstract value, how it is impmemented will depend on market forces but you have to admit, they know how to go with the flow, maybe to an extent where it seems like they just keep getting lucky
It's not that Musk is not smart, he's just erratic, and growing increasingly so. He is the Howard Hughes of our day. They will find his body in an expensive hotel room at some point, surrounded by bottles of his own urine.
I challenge anyone who says “Elon not so smart” to name a topic in his wheelhouse that you think you can discuss in more detail than him. Because I’m certain he’d run circles around all but experts, in rocketry, auto tech, power cells, and more.
I mean: dude is smart. Everyone just wants to deny him that because he’s now an anti-immigrationist and they can’t stand the thought of him being both awful and smarter than them.
He'd better. It would be a pretty severe embarrassment for a layman to know more than you about your own industry.
The trap he and many other smart idiots fall into is believing that having a high degree of expertise in one area qualifies you to speak authoritatively in unrelated areas. These days maybe you could call it Claude-smart: pairing situational brilliance with unwarranted confidence at other times. The really properly smart people I've met are good at tempering their statements with their degree of certainly based on their own qualifications.
Sure, I agree. My beef here is with people who insist he’s a dummy when it comes even to rocketry, etc. That he only just hired people, but otherwise is not himself any sort of expert. Just lucky (over and over and over, apparently).
There were a lot of computer graphics cards manufacturers back in the 90's. Nvidia survived amongst the whole pack of them. 3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATI, Cirrus. How much of that is soley due to Jenson vs outside factors outside of his control, only he really knows, but I think her deserves a bit more credit than right place right time. CUDA was a very expensive investment with zero guarantee of payoff. The market could have gone an entirely different way and Nvidia would have failed.
That's fair. NVidia's execution has been rock solid for as long as they've been around and Huang deserves credit for that. But I would say most of the reason they've 100x'd since 2017 has been external forces.
Yes the demand of comapnies for AI compute which Nvidia delivered. These are still the external forces which let it grow at 100% YoY despite >$200b in revenue.
What percent of nvidias success was due to vision, vs luck?
I made a boat load of money off of the Tesla IPO(and then holding for 12 years) but I only invested because I thought they wouldn't be a successful car company but would produce a bunch of patents that would be valuable when licensed to the big auto makers.
Obviously I got that wrong, but my investment still worked out - and I still have friends and family coming to me for investing advice because I made the right move but for the wrong reasons
Although I'm still more of a "Voodoo person" myself, the "Riva128 guy" has shown bold vision and relentlessly fierce execution on top of it - consistently - since the early 90s..
The dude is 63, there has to be some kind of succession planning? Or is it just expected the company is one helicopter accident away from becoming completely doomed?
I'm skeptical that he gets fired for this. The "Spy I loved" James bond style twist combined with his iconic leather jacket might actually come off as badass.
A spy like this isn't looking for chip schematics, they're looking for strategy. Strategy that comes from the CEO. Ultimately the main thing a CEO brings is judgement, and this was extremely poor judgement.
Strategy changes all the time. It will change overnight with the election results. What matters most is the information underlying that strategy, like, if ASML was coming out with some very specific new thing that would tilt the industry - that would be key.
Not knowing someone is a spy is extremely poor judgement? Telling his mistress all kinds of corporate secrets would be "extremely poor judgement" but at this point I see no evidence that this happened?
I don't care that he had an affair (none of my business; who knows the terms of his relationship with his wife; Americans / humans are far too moralizing in controlling sex) and, even if it was wrong in the context of his marriage, I don't think someone should be fired for that.
If he knew / suspected she was a spy, yes, absolutely. If she was given access to confidential information, yes, absolutely.
If he thought it was a romantic relationship, fine, that doesn't affect me / NVDA / America.
Obviously he should stop now that he knows! But if he didn't at the time, you know, I think I can still trust him to make computer chips.
I agree. Judgement on love affairs and judgement on chip strategy are completely unrelated categories of judgement.
"Bad judgement" is a tool used in political rhetoric used to blame someone when there's nothing of any substance to blame them for.
However, all of this changes if it turns out that he gave his lover's company any kind of preferential treatment or that she was involved in China related lobbying.
This is what the investigation will focus on in my opinion. If they find anything at all then he will have to resign.
> There's very little he could ever accidentally tell someone that would matter that much.
I think the practical implications matter a lot less than the PR and legal ones.
If the stock price plummets tomorrow and doesn’t recover, the board may have to act.
Similarly, if the right governments start asking hard questions, the board may have to act.
This is likely going to be a slow-rolling shit show for a while. At the very least, it’s legitimate grounds for one or more congressional investigations, which may start here but could go anywhere.
If the stock price plummets tomorrow and doesn’t recover, it is likely ppl are afraid he'll be replaced. If the board "act" by replacing him, the price is likely to dive more, not recover
He denied, implausibly, all knowledge about Supermicro. I don't think that is going to work this time.
The crime here isn't giving secrets to the Chinese, it is helping them evade export controls. Again, this is something that Nvidia and Jensen has been investigated on repeatedly. If he knew that Megaspeed was a front for China, quite hard to deny given that Alice Huang seems to have brought Chinese execs to every meeting with Jensen then it is very bad. And yes, the stuff that Jensen would have said would have been very useful because, I assume, the inference is that he would have been helping them evade sanctions.
The very best case from here is that the board fires him.
Direct interaction, not in-person. And many more interaction with high level Russian and Chinese state actors. Huge investment from Chinese state banks and critical contracts for data collection.
> The crime here isn't giving secrets to the Chinese, it is helping them evade export controls.
This would have generated extra profit for Nvidia. So I doubt they'd care unless the US government chose to take legal action against Nvidia. And that's unlikely to happen under the current US administration.
As an Nvidian, I strongly disagree. I'm sure somehow the company would be fine in the long run without him, but until today I believed that his vastly superior judgement to his peers is to credit for Nvidia's success. Not to minca words, I think he is a far more qualified and intelligent CEO than pretty much anyone in big tech. There's a reason Nvidia doesn't have to lay people off ever.
I don't think the second half what you're saying is true. He has had a good hand, yes, but I think what we're seeing is "simply" the effect of a successful company being run by one of its founders. There is always a kind of reversion to mean once a successful company moves away from founder control, and that hasn't happened for Nvidia.
> ...but until today I believed that his vastly superior judgement to his peers is to credit for Nvidia's success.
Have you considered how many billions of dollars of Nvidia sales were through entities diverting chips to China?
While there's no doubt that this is not the majority of the company's revenue, it's also not an insignificant amount.
If you had to pin Nvidia's success on one thing, the honest answer would be "right technology, right time." Without AI...And the questions about how sustainable that market is are now being asked by the market.
They've been investing in CUDA and machine learning for a long time before the current wave of LLMs. It's absurd to say "right technology, right time" when they were the ones who helped develop it.
The technology was built for 3D graphics and video game processing. The company was very smart to recognize the opportunity that AI presented when AI researchers realized that gaming GPUs could vastly outperform CPUs for their workloads, but this was a "happy accident", not something Nvidia actually predicted, planned for or initially pushed.
Except it has been. There are people in multiple countries, including the US, Singapore and Taiwan, facing lengthy prison sentences for this. In the US in particular, violating export controls is a game you only play if you're looking for years of free federal accommodation.
> until today I believed that his vastly superior judgement
What changed today?
Every major leader and CEO has obvious blind spots. They're geniuses at X but idiots at Y.
Look at all the great CEOs with ridiculous political views. It's fine: they do have vastly superior judgement, just not in areas where it doesn't directly affect their business.
For the NVDA CEO, it happens to be a woman. That puts him in probably the 80-90% of great leaders on whom that works.
Even ignoring the alleged spitting, shagging someone who works in a position of authority at a customer company if obviously a massive conflict of interest.
I have seen and read this a lot over the years and I am starting to wonder may be it isn't Pat Gelsinger that called Nvidia lucky but people actually felt it that way naturally.
For over a decade CUDA was nothing but a money and silicon wasting function that brought in very little extra revenue for the amount of company resources it uses. And arguably it started even before CUDA with Cg. And I will say another unpopular thing, they are in hardware business, apart from the past 1 - 2 years which they are enjoying massive success, for most of the past 30 years hardware business are 10x tougher than Software side.
Most CEO would have given up. Paul Graham invented the term to describe it, Founder Mode.
And for another note about comments elsewhere in the thread that Open AI is what brought up the current AI craze. Nvidia was already selling to OpenAI via introduction of Elon Musk in 2016.
I seriously doubt Nvidia would have been anywhere close to what they are today without Jensen's Leadership.
What's this puritanical streak? Men in power have been having affairs from time immemorial. It's not great but it's also not original. The guy works for a corporation, not a church. Yawn.
He's a vulnerable founder just like Steve Jobs was and he's also the closest to Jobs in terms of brilliance and impact in the current playing field.
He's been consistently showing up and proving himself over decades to be core to Nvidia's success - core as in leadership. I would look to sell my Nvidia shares without knowing him being at the helm.
At the current state, maybe not much. He was integral to the journey, of course.
The bigger threat is Jensen selling all his stocks at peak (if he was fired). Then, this dude with $100B in the bank could've easily started an NVIIA competitor. He has every component needed for a success. This is why NVIDIA's board would never let this guy go.
Not really. The key difference IMHO is not the CEO, it is that ATI/AMD always was the smaller underdog, while the established players Intel/NVIDIA get thrown money at them due to the "no one got fired for buying IBM" effect.
I've interned at NVIDIA and my impression was, he is extremely vital to its past and ongoing success. I don't know about him personally and his character, but he knew how to foster a motivating work culture with a sense of excitement and purpose. Maybe Nvidia is now at a place where he could be replaced, but I don't think Nvidia would be where it is now without him.
That's unfair. Most people are helpless against trained mind-tricksters; anyone could fall into that trap. Don't tell me you have never wondered how soldiers returning from war stop having panic attacks and soiling their clothes after seeing a qualified shrink, who does nothing more than talk. Words alone can heal, convince and mislead you. We have no idea what that woman used to lure him. He's not some random guy from Ohio who cheats with a stripper, he's a high-value target. We're talking about Hitman 3 (videogame) level espionage here.
The Ethan one is especially shocking because his whole shtick is being the "better man" compared to all the people he reacts to and sues. Throwing it all away just to doink a coworker is pretty out there
Now we have to re-evaluate all his statements in favor of selling to China. For example, we want China to build on "our stack". On the face of it, that seems correct. If China has multiple stacks to pick from why wouldn't we want them to pick our stack? But do they have such a choice?
I was curious, so I researched it (aka prompted ChatGPT). SFO-PVG was established in 2000, long before Apple offshored all of their manufacturing to China. An article from the time describes it being something that was in demand among Silicon Valley in general[1] rather than Apple particularly. In 2019, United revealed that Apple does spend $35 million/yr on that single route, averaging 50 seats/day[2], so I suppose that's the source of the legend.
Another is the pretense of overcoming Chinese resistance. China sent a cute spy to bang the CEO of Nvidia, but they simultaneously set a "strict limit" on import of Nvidia chips. How does that make sense? It makes sense if the purpose of the "strict limit" is so that any sale of H200 to China can be seen as overcoming Chinese restrictions. Anything that is against the Chinese government's resistance must be good for the US, right?
It could be that they wanted design information and other details from him, and were going to use those to build up domestic manufacturing alongside import restrictions.
It's hard to say from the outside what the goals would be - pushing him in certain directions, extracting intel, etc.
Apart from his direct family, who cares? Why is this an issue? It's 2026, we literally had a human child trafficking ring with multiple presidents involved and it didnt lead to anything or move the needle on stuff.
Integrity matters for maintaining corporate secrets. Someone who is having an extramarital affair is a target for blackmail. Most of getting a security clearance is not lying.
Probably more like the administration, given how they were briefed more than a year ago.
There’s been recent power spats (JD Vance’s tweet, Susie being replaced by Steve Bannon, and probably more infighting).
As much as I want to believe there’s greater 4D chess and motivation, I assign a modest probability to someone going “fuck it”, opening a massive short on NVDA, and then leaking it just for the love of insider trading. Rather than anything strategic or real.
You misunderstood what I meant, obviously the newspapers all cover these things when they become public. The difference is that this time, it’s an intelligence agency that went public with it (or someone leaked it from there), the spying angle is quite unique.
> It's 2026, we literally had a human child trafficking ring with multiple presidents involved and it didnt lead to anything or move the needle on stuff.
He admitted to the affair. No one has admitted to being a pedo. Much less forgivable.
And how long has US government known that she is a spy and only watched and not investigated?
There could be only 2 options:
1. There is no national security issue -> all a nothing burger
2. US government looked the other way -> THE REAL SCANDAL HERE
The leader of the central company in the AI boom was compromised by a spy from the US’s biggest adversary while US and Chinese companies are in an AI arms race.
We have a sitting president who freely shares state secrets with dictators upon request. This seems rather high effort when they could’ve just asked nicely no? </s>
It isn't whataboutism if it's directly relevant to the point at hand (as opposed to attempting to distract from it). The question posed effectively amounted to "why is this particularly noteworthy compared to everything else of a vaguely similar nature that's been going on".
I know you are trying to make some point for your political team but if you look up what a fiduciary is then you will see why this would be a good thing and a way to avoid other legal issues. But I know, OMB and all that!
Why does it matter that one of the key leaders of our aI strategy was having an affair with a Chinese spy while advising the president on our policy of selling chips to China?
I'm a shareholder, and the fact that both the US government and Nvidia itself is going to investigate him is very, very bad. So yes, I care about it a lot because I'm probably going to lose a lot of money tomorrow!
I'm not sure what actual letters like this are supposed to achieve (besides protecting his ass I mean). Are employees supposed to stand beside their fallen leader, are they supposed to go about their business differently? Anybody having affairs with subordinates can't be trusted to make good judgement calls with respect to internal leadership / delegation, at least it wouldn't seem so to me.
It sounds like your problem lies more in his mistake, not in coming clean about it. Him being the one to do that takes any influence the woman had over him away.
I feel like every thing requires a tin foil hat now. Is this some last ditch ploy to stimulate noncompetitive regulation from the US government? I find it more difficult to trust anything these people say everyday.
Just to be clear, this was probably already happening, but I can imagine the board being like "hmmmmm..... opportunity?" Then we see titles with "Chinese spy" plastered onto every major news network. Seems a little convenient to me.
I heard a guy I respect say “there’s a short list of things people will ruin their lives for.”
I’m not sure if this will ruin Jensen’s life or not, but it’s a good opportunity for us all to remember that the short-term high is usually not worth it.
He wasn’t photographed in a romantic context as far as I know, and he just signed the upper part of a woman’s chest with tons of cameras around, clearly a marketing ploy rather than him trying to enter into a relationship with her.
I could not access the article (or I did not want to pay), hence the question.
Given the celebrity status of Jensen, it seemed unlikely that scandalous photos of him would be publicly distributed and it not already have been a huge story.
It is possible the scandalous pictures (not just him walking in front of her or sitting next to her) were already floating around, and I am not up-to-date on celebrity scandals, and the wife was already planning a divorce, as you claim.
But without those photos, it could be the wife is finding out about the affair just now.
I still have not seen the pictures you are referring to, but I’m not that interested to look for them either.
And there’s cheating on your wife and having the feds write up intelligence reports about it, the Financial Times running an article about it and having to send a public admission to every single employee at your company including your two kids who you employ there.
Did you ask yourself how his wife would not know this was happening? They were seen in public in intimate settings.
Don't kid yourself about the reason he wrote the letter. He's only writing this because of national security optics and buries it in a shit sandwich format.
This video of Lex Friedman and Jensen hanging out and drinking in Taiwan came out 3 weeks ago. Jensen and his wife seem pretty happy together in it. So today’s news is genuinely new news or they’d already gone over it and sorted it out. Jensen seems to do a lot of booze fuelled entertaining…
I received this authoritatively from a famous divorce lawyer of my city/country that “feeling” bad usually happens only when young children are involved — or marriage is young and love was involved in the marriage (this is an arranged marriage country, so that part is different from USA). Other than that if a huge parting sum of money is involved that sense of liberation outweighs everything else. In fact if anything else, it’s an overwhelming sense of relief.
All he had to do was say no and keep his dick in his pants. Use some judgement, think about your wife and kids (oh yeah and all that national security bullshit). The man with all his money and power can't say no, that's what's absurd.
The question is how long took and if he was happy with his family.
It's easy for a professional with china backend to play with your feelings, much easier if you have normal family life or worse.
Is the woman likable it's just a matter of times. (Independent of the gender)
If this happens within a week, I would agree, if this happens within months the gender you like can makes your heart jump if you are I a very long term relationship.
> But I'm not sure how hard it would be to resist a honey trap.
The guy has enough money to have sex parties with the prettiest girls on Earth every single night until the end of his life, I'm pretty sure resisting a state-sponsored honeypot is not the hardest thing ever.
Honestly a terrible way to deflect responsibility. If you're finding your judgement impaired take a breather, the opportunity is usually not going to disappear right away.
It's not going to ruin his life. At worst he will lose $100 bil and maybe if it's really bad, he will get kicked out of Nvidia. He will still have $100 bil and can do whatever he wants at that point.
He is the the tech CEO most aligned with the current government’s optimism towards the AI build out and also its key orchestrator. What are the odds he will be held to any real punishment ?
Spy is rather easy to define though, and it hardly depends on what the State Department decides (although of course, they can call anybody a spy, for political or other reasons, I agree on that).
I don't know why this is being downvoted. The federal government has never really prevented a terrorist attack that they themselves have not recruited. It is entrapment, and it is legal in most cases. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but even mainstream media has covered this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment...
It is perfectly reasonable to suspect similar claims of catching "spies".
Your article doesn't support your claim that the 'federal government has never really prevented a terrorist attack'. And a lot of that was highly motivated reporting itself by people like Glenn Greenwald who was basically denying that things like ISIS were real threats at all in 2014 and then went full victim blaming for things like Charlie Hebdo the year after (it was harder after the Bataclan).
Will you next claim that the police have never really prevented a murder?
I gave a link as a reference of how the Federal government operates. I did not think that I needed a whole bibliography to prove something that is very easily verifiable.
Not only that you think the reporting is not reliable because of the reporter without pointing out what is wrong with the actual report.
These are all the cases that had some investigative reporter poking, or the jury/judge seeing through the bullshit. Here is initial reporting on recent cases. The "Iranian Agent" sent to "Assassinate Donald Trump"(emphasis mine):
>Asif Merchant traveled to New York in June for the purpose of meeting with men he thought he was recruiting to carry out the killings, even paying a $5,000 advance to two would-be assassins who were actually undercover law enforcement officers, federal officials said
The woman arrested for "plotting to bomb the NY state capital":
>According to the criminal complaint, an FBI confidential source drove Bowie to the Home Depot in Rensselaer and gave her $200 to buy bomb parts. It’s not clear if they told her what items to buy.
I hope all of these sources are of sound character by your standards. Now I would ask you; can you give me an example of the FBI catching a terrorist that:
a) They did not recruit, or
b) Did not provide materials, or
c) did not provide the target
AS for the police in the US, they are indeed very bad at preventing crime. Though that is due to multiple reasons, mostly policy related, rather than institutional malfeasance like the FBI.
That is not an automatic fact. Humans are very emotionally complex creatures. And Jensen didn't call his secretary and say "can you pencil in 'humiliating my wife and kids around 4PM'? You can? Great, thanks".
He has full agency over his actions, so yes, it's an automatic fact. He knew what he was doing and he knew what the effects would be on his wife. He knew what would happen when this came out. If you're saying he DIDN'T know what would happen, then you're saying he's extremely stupid. I haven't seen any evidence that he is even a little bit stupid.
Are you saying this was an accident and he didn't have control over himself?
If he doesn't have control over himself and he isn't accountable for his actions, then how does that factor into him being the CEO of the most important globally strategic company in the world? Are you saying that he is capable of making actions that he isn't in full control over? Does Nvidia need to have a CEO that doesn't accidentally make mistakes like potentially giving secret information to Chinese spies?
This seems like an emotionally compromised perspective (which is very, very normal, and I am not insulting you).
It is, of course, not an automatic fact. The context here is emotions, so it makes no sense to point only to agency as proof of an emotional "fact". Such a thing doesn't even exist.
Humans are complex creatures. Plenty of men and women who have loving families and genuinely love their spouses cheat on them and destroy their lives/families. It just takes a moment of weakness. Stay vigilant.
Love and sexual attraction is totally different thing. As long as you get married Male usually lose interest and sexual attraction on female and want to try new things.
That happens to me too and its like both biological and mental.
It's not really a moment when the moment is stretched over months and years, but yes we are all human and all make mistakes. That does not absolve us of the consequences.
Way to minimize cheating. Describing it as a “moment of weakness” makes it sounds like it’s a minute of lapse of judgement, meanwhile we’re talking about pre-mediated, long-term cheating.
I have zero sympathy for this guy, generally speaking. But this is one of those very few things where what you have said is the socially "correct" thing, and actually is probably healthy to believe, but is factually wrong.
Lamentably, people don't have cartoon emotions. Life would be so much easier if they did.
Sometimes, it's the humiliation that comes from the public finding out and putting a spotlight on it that is the kicker; not the random side piece(s) (ex: Bill & Melinda Gates).
I agree, though.
___
edit: Funny enough, there's a House of Cards scene that goes over this exact scenario. Francis is sleeping with Zoe the reporter (they're both using each other for the perks/their own agendas). When Claire finds out, her response is something like "you know you must not embarrass me (publicly) with this", which Francis already knew because he would never do that to Claire... she doesn't say those exact words, but that was the vibe.
If he loses his family over it, it will ruin his life. There’s more to life than money. I hope for your sake that you don’t really believe this morally bankrupt concept.
Allegedly he was assaulted by a spy and wasn't able to deflect that assault. Who knows what techniques they use, wouldn't be surprised if they can sprinkle something in a drink that switches off half the frontal cortex.
> I’m not sure if this will ruin Jensen’s life or not, but it’s a good opportunity for us all to remember that the short-term high is usually not worth it.
I think what you've just described is "post nut clarity". I'm sure he knew what he did immediately, but the gravity of the consequences might've taken a bit to catch up to him.
One can't help but think of Sergey Brin who famously had an affair with an underling on Google Glass, Amanda Rosenberg [1]. This of course blew up his life and he divorced Anne Wojcicki in ~2014. Of course he got married again and divorced again with another expensive divorce (although neither was in the realm of the cost of Jeff Bezos's divorce).
I think it says a lot about what wealth does to you. A lot of people dream of wealth but I suspect many would be less than thrilled by the reality. It must be incredibly isolating. You constantly have to fend off people who are trying to use you. It must make it harder to trust anyone. A lot of ordinary life experiences are now barred to you.
For example, a lot of executives in these trillion dollar companies are forbidden from flying commercial for security reasons. Nobody would think about missing the airport and everything that entails. In most places it's an objectively awful experience but it's still a shared experience. Going to a private FBO by helicopter to take a Global 7500 direct to your destination is something only a tiny portion of the population can relate to.
So I think this kind of isolation makes such wealthy and/or powerful people more susceptible to this kind of thing because, in a way, they're starved from a lot of human interaction and experiences in a way most of us can't understand (and wouldn't want).
What really is the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth? You kind of have to have sociopathic tendencies (IMHO) because such wealth simply cannot exist without the impoverishment of millions of people. And for you it's kind of a golden prison.
If there are any billionaires out there who are too alienated by their inability to wait in line at the airport: don’t worry, you can give me the money. It’ll be a burden, but one I think I can handle.
The airport was just an example. You simply can't do normal people things.
I might not like airport lines but I'd hate to be forbidden from going through that process. I also couldn't just walk down the street to get a pizza. Or go out dancing at night. Or to play board games. Or take a random walk or bike ride around the city. If I was rich and everyone knew it, I'd have to live in a bubble.
That's different from "comfortable rich" where you own your own home and a retirement fund and live mostly normally.
If you’re that rich but you can’t live a normal life, and you aren’t willing to restructure things to prioritize your life, you’re obviously making a choice in favour of continuing to accumulate wealth or power.
> I also couldn't just walk down the street to get a pizza.
Well, not necessarily. Jensen Huang was famous for going to random food stalls in Taiwan and eating street food.
It might be harder and riskier, and I get what you mean, but it's not like you actually can't do those things.
Also maybe it's not necessarily a billionaire thing, but more like a fame thing. Billionaires tend to get famous just due to being rich, but I'd imagine a random person wouldn't recognize 80+% of the people on the billionaire list if they saw the billionaire chomping down a pizza in the local pizza place.
With regards the "What really is the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth?" question, I've been thinking a lot about this recently, as the billionaires accrue more influence than ever before. And I think that's the keyword - 'influence'. After a point, wealth doesn't buy you more things, it buys you power, which is seductive. It goes far beyond making your family comfortable and doing right by your company, employees and shareholders; it becomes a means to lever the world. Yes, some of this drive is about being apart from the real world and possibly an element of personal sociopathy (corporations are famously sociopathic entities, too, which probably rubs off on the C-suite execs), but hedonistic adaptation (we're very good at getting used to things, even vast wealth) and wanting to change the world are (I imagine) very addictive. I imagine it even goes some way to assuaging the embarrassment of The Leader of the Free World calling you his AI Expert...sorry, 'SI' Expert.
And it really doesn't help that all these tech bro billionaires think Ayn Rand was a good writer with some fine ideas.
Related: the market cap of the stock market is basically a conversion factor between currency (for daily purchases) and power (being in charge of all the world's companies). When the market crashes after an election, we shouldn't think of it as "$3T of wealth wiped out", it should be "power gap between normal people and billionaires decreases" (it takes fewer normal people to buy a billionaire's position).
The last paragraph of my comment basically calls these billionaires sociopaths because you have to be to enrich yourself off the backs of making millions of people poor. How is that a defense of billionaires?
My point is that the "prize" isn't even worth it. It doesn't make you happy. Actually there's one way it seems to make them happy: by enjoying the suffering of others and having the power to influence people and even governments. But to what end?
Reading comprehension is fine. It’s your writing comprehension.
>So I think this kind of isolation makes such wealthy and/or powerful people more susceptible to this kind of thing because, in a way, they're starved from a lot of human interaction and experiences in a way most of us can't understand (and wouldn't want).
You’re saying here that they’re “starved” of the human contact most of us take for granted (for example in standing around an airport and being squeezed into economy). This is thus a cause for heart-bleeding.
Ingvar Kamprad flew economy and drove an old Volvo. Being extremely wealthy doesn’t have to come with this kind of isolation. If Sergei Brin was flying economy, most of the plane wouldn’t realise who he was and the few who did would be like “oh look it’s Sergei Brin, weird.”
It's obviously not irrelevant for two reasons, one practical one moral. The practical one is that you don't need to 'spill' secrets to a spy. Having one around you in private means you can be bugged, blackmailed, have your means of communication compromised and so on. It makes you vulnerable by definition.
Secondly if he's willing to lie to his wife and family he's obviously willing to lie to anyone for much less. It tells you something about the character of a person, how can anyone trust a cheater?
Arguably, cheating is now a normal every day part of society. Approximate 2/3rds of people have been cheated on in USA. Much higher in Asia. The sex industry in asia is absolutely massive and it’s primarily for married men. In Japan, only 65% of people say cheating is morally wrong.
But it’s usually don’t ask don’t tell, not explicit lying.
To give a specific example, I’m currently traveling in Vietnam, and an entire floor of my allegedly “5-star” hotel (the most expensive in the city) is reserved for prostitution. This is a smaller city with almost no foreign tourists. The rest of the hotel operates as normal, with a fancy breakfast served everyday 6-9am.
its not really about his private life its about whteher he was manipulated into it wihtout his knowledge. Psychological manipulation is a thing and if they got him to do this what else happened?
> A balanced, patient, and motivated Machiavellian can wait while they cultivate what they need. They may take 10 years to act; they may well wait 20 years. When the strike comes, it will come out of the blue – and their tracks will already be covered.
Given what we have seen happen at Supermicro, for example, CEO smuggling NVIDIA chips to China, it seems unlikely that no one at NVIDIA suspected a thing. Why wouldn't they want to bolster their China business?
An "exposure" of affair[1] could very well be the best coverup: "couldn't control my dick" is the ultimate plausible deniability. Timing also makes sense. Better open an investigation and get it closed while this Congress is still in power, as the next one is going to be more in bed in LLM companies than hardware.
[1]: The other party is overtly a customer, not some random individual.
The most interesting part might be that this is coming out so publicly.
Someone leaked intelligence assessments to the New York Times.
Maybe this was just a regular leak ... but ...
Jensen/Nvidia has not been playing ball with other parts of the AI industry and the administration, pushing heavily against export bans and promoting open source models/companies , which is clearly against the interests of SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic.
This is conspiracy theory territory, of course, but I wouldn't be too surprised if this was an intentional leak.
I suspect that the "intention" behind the leak isn't really about Jensen or Nvidia, but is just more administration infighting - Jensen is just collateral damage.
Consider the timing of the reporting - the first report from NYT comes out on Nov 6th - just enough time after mid-terms. Consider that follow up reporting clearly identifying Rubio as the author of the in-administration warning memo.
JD and Rubio (and who knows who else) are clearly trying to find ways to distance themselves from Trump without being completely cut to pieces, now that it's completely clear that the Trump brand is toxic.
remember, the only evidence of any criminal activity here is the leak of this story, which is a felony unless directly authorized by a classified executive order.
> The close relationship between the president and Mr. Huang has impeded efforts to clamp down on Nvidia’s chip sales abroad, current and former U.S. officials said.
> This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance
the most likely scenario here is that the faction that supports export bans leaked the initial story to try to blackmail Huang into dropping his support for free trade, he refused, so they released the package to damage him as much as possible. likely route, based on the named sources, is senate or house intel agency staffers, using elected officials and classified briefings as cover.
NY Times, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman would identify this as being firmly located in the anti-Trump faction, so unless it is some super devious reverse play, which seems unlikely for Trump, it is a criminal leak.
I feel uncomfortable asking in a thread like this but why would a CEO talk about his private life publically?
I know others have said this is a carefully written statement, but in my culture I would feel it would be rude not to keep it private? Sorry if this sounds autistic.
it's a public company, he's ceo, large implications for stock movements, corporate strategy, volatility if it goes to us govt intervention, divorce court, etc
Mainly because the person he was having the affair with was a customer of the company and because they are reported to have possibly been a spy for the Chinese government. All of these things have a direct impact on the confidence of employees.
I’d imagine as with most big companies having a relationship with a customer is a big HR violation. So at least that aspect would have to be addressed.
I don't think it's too big to fail. There are multiple factors:
1. Jensen is a billionaire who doesn't really need to work. This gives him a lot of leverage. He isn't desperate to make a living.
2. Imagine he is fired, unloads all stocks, and starts a new competing company. This would cause NVIDIA a much bigger issue, 10000x bigger.
3. Also, this means Jensen would get to unload the stock at the peak. Democrats won and is about to be way more responsible than Trump. Cue Luo Pai from Enron.
4. Dating a customer isn't really a big deal. Did her company get a preferential price? Treatment? I'd guess that her company doesn't make a dent in NVIDIA's revenue.
5. Her being a Chinese spy isn't Jensen's fault. If anything, he is a victim.
Not exactly subtext but yes, it would be inappropriate. I'm noting that "inappropriate" != "impossible." Many of his peers have done exactly such a thing.
Unlike some other Americans Huang seems to at least have a preference for people who are no longer minors, also, using 'girl' robs the woman of agency.
... only if she hates the word 'girl', I guess. Which we don't know. Personally, I know many grown women (30's, 40's+) who are perfectly alright with the word "girl". It is contextual, and often times cultural (i.e. your background).
No offense, but this is why it can often be pernicious to do drive-by virtue-signaling online.
> Unlike some other Americans Huang seems to at least have a preference for people who are no longer minors
What does this even mean?... do you think what you're implying is exclusive to Americans? Honestly that's what it sounds like.
Most women who are okay with being called a girl are okay with it only in certain contexts. For example I don’t know any woman who is in her 30s or 40s who would be okay with being referred to as a girl in a professional context.
Generally speaking, it's normal to keep it private.
Unless the CEO happens to be the CEO of what is considered one of the most important company for national security and future, and his private life involves somebody who appears to be a spy for the biggest competitor for world hegemony. Then it's kind of big deal for everybody.
Because the purpose was to get leverage, and Intel. Once she couldn't gather passive Intel, they would use the affair as blackmail, ole school is the best school.
It seems to be a combination of things
First off, hhe person he was having an affair with has ties to Chinese Spy agencies (not sure the ties, but either way, not a great look for someone trying to be deeply involved with America's government)
It also sounds like it was known something was going on with foreign agencies and Jensen, do this puts it out in the open and clears the air.
Lastly, if anyone was trying to use the affair as leverage over him, the best way to break the leverage is to just come out and spill the tea yourself (so to speak)
There are some things shareholders have to legitimately reckon with, that warrant a statement:
- Is this person susceptible to blackmail from the secrets they're keeping?
- Has this person performed a notable breach of trust?
- Has this person displayed a notable lack of judgement?
Even when the alleged misconduct is private, #1 is of particular concern. Airing it out is an obvious way to lessen that specific concern. The allegations here raise the other concerns too, however.
I wrote in another thread here, this is extremely serious:
Bedding an adversarial entity's agent in a regulated field is a serious matter (for the company) with potentially serious consequences. It can lead to executive decapitation, it can even lead to / criminal investigations if the operative bypassed export controls using executive proximity.. the fallout can be great and widespread.
It can also be a nothingburger and an amusing page six divorce story in the end where we all read how rich cry as well. Time will tell. What's telling of where this might lead and how serious it is, is that it was US federal government that warned about this.
I guess no one noticed because they all looked the same. I imagine Bezos in the wife store like "Oh yeah, I like exactly that look. Gimme another one of these!"
Everyone has some preferred types, but same body, different person is pretty creepy.
So that no one can extort him in private. Same happened with Bezos when his phone was hacked. He was the one who came forward to speak about what was shared by his phone.
> "Saudi experts – dissidents and analysts – told the Guardian they believed Bezos was probably targeted because of his ownership of the Post and its coverage of Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi’s critical columns about Mohammed bin Salman and his campaign of repression against activists and intellectuals rankled the crown prince and his inner circle."
there are indications that he continued the affair even after being tipped off by the US intelligence agencies -- which would constitute treason. An apology would just be a first step to ward off serious charges, if there are serious charges levied. Not that anything would happen in the large scheme of things, given JH has bought off the orange turd.
Because its already public information. In your culture would you pretend like it never happened even though everybody else knows about it and are making their own narratives.
As an Nvidian - Jensen is the single most important part of Nvidia.
Speaking personally I couldn't care less about this particular lapse in judgement because every example if have seen in professional circumstances his judgement has been stellar.
It sucks for his family life but that shouldn't become our business and should remain private.
If she really is a spy that might suck a bit for our relationship with the US government for a short period but it's not something that can't be managed and overcome.
It's not a nothing burger but if it results in Jensen leaving Nvidia that would be a travesty IMO. We shouldn't push people out for making a mistake, especially one that should in any other circumstance not become public.
If you are one of the most powerful man on earth you are going to be the target of all the secret services of all powerful countries. Period.
It is their job. You take decisions that are worth billions, you influence people that take decisions that are worth billions, and affect their countries.
They are going to study you for years. Your personality type and that of the people around you. Your weaknesses. Your problems and that of your family.
They will employ the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world to create the perfect Honey trap.
Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.
It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.
Makes you wonder if this is why Elon just doesn’t stay attached to one person.
But another reason why as someone of such a high caliber you should never be alone with other women. Always have a bodyguard or something, surely you can afford someone…
It's something someone I know that they suggested after observing so many people who have affairs, and it always stemmed from private settings where a married person and an unmarried (sometimes married, but less likely) person wound up having an affair usually emotional vulnerabilities or business was involved.
This is likely a reason that they use escort services (like those provided by a certain "hung" pimp), and they tend to marry very high-profile folks. It's not about having a "trophy spouse," but having someone that can't really leverage you.
Rich people who can’t help themselves to whatever they want/see because they are too powerful/rich and have lost perspective. They think they can do whatever they want with impunity because most of the time they can. Then once in a while there are actual repercussions and someone wants us to be sympathetic? Get outta here
Rich people, lol.
I think this tale's been told cross income net worth strata for something on the order of eons (or all of human history if you really want to know).
Lol, don't take out your anger for not being rich at random people on the internet. Affairs are common across diverse economic profiles of people, not just the rich. All that anger for nothing.
Yeah, you don't need to go that deep. Look through histories, myths, folklore from all around the world. Powerful men have mistresses. Regular men have mistresses. Powerful women go through several husbands. Regular women, too. The institution of marriage exists to counteract the natural human tendency to be "unfaithful". No one needs to make excuses, they need to accept the fact that this kind of thing happens and update their expectations.
I say this as someone who's family was torn apart by an affair, by a failure to update expectations. Well, that was the excuse; the issues were deeper, the affair was a focus-sink and an excuse not to address them. I wonder if that's the case here, too.
(I should make clear that I think Jensen Huang sucks for other reasons.)
> Jensen and Kim calculated that, for men in their first year of marriage, the divorce rate is 96 percent higher for Oscar nominees and 205 percent higher for winners
When men suddenly get more attention from women, they're more likely to cheat. Interestingly, women who earn Oscars are more likely to keep their husbands than other actresses.
>The institution of marriage exists to counteract the natural human tendency to be "unfaithful". No one needs to make excuses, they need to accept the fact that this kind of thing happens and update their expectations.
fair observation and sad society’s current script still demands it be posted under anon throwaway account.
There’s a 100% chance the dude was so hornt up that he didn’t care if he slept with a spy or whatever. Inventing a universe where he lost at Six Dimensional Sex Chess is what somebody would do for an AO3 story
A plausible reason would be that he was not looking to have an affair but rather was actively seduced. Someone not looking to have an affair would not use a matchmaking service.
lol I am not the richest man, not even close and nothing physical happened. But I once got into a parasocial relationship after decades of monogamy and no dalliances. Never planned for it, and in hindsight years later don't know what happened. And it was so cathartic.
No. Never spent money on these sites. Public website/app. You could read any comments publicly too. Never even DMed, until ... Some things just happen, quite randomly. No more details.
Remember that in the above scenario the seducer is an agent for hire (or she's doing it for patriotic or other reasons), not genuinely in love with the rich exec. Honest matchmaking can't guarantee the same experience in every instance.
Obviously the exec could have paid for the same service himself, but that wouldn't be called matchmaking (and it's not what most people seek).
Sure, so its a given that they will fall to such tricks? If that's the case, may be don't develop a one person cult of personality and power. They're paid enough to look out for precisely for these things so that they don't make mistakes that'll ruin 100s of people's lives, yet they don't have such concerns when making stupid decisions. He is not designing chips, burning midnight oil on trying to figure out how to dissipate enough heat to get best performance from the chip, the kind of problems that actually are consequential. He is the pizza guy, yet cant do that well.
I don't know... I mean I'm just a CEO of a one man company and even I get suspicious when a woman is too nice to me. Surely, with more responsibility you should get even more paranoid
> Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.
She’s a woman, not a sweet from Willy Wonka’s factory. If you find yourself thinking “wow, she couldn’t be more perfect, it’s like she’s too good to be true” then perhaps as the CEO of a billion dollar company with national security concerns you should consider hey, maybe she is too good to be true? Maybe look into that?
All else aside, if you find yourself being tempted, you make sure she isn’t around you. The CEO compensation more than makes up for your sacrifice.
I think the point is you have a nation-state adversary with millions of dollars and many teams of people working around the clock for years to figure out how to make you say yes. Including not crafting a persona who is too perfect, because that would obviously arouse suspicions.
Obviously the target has agency, I don't deny that, but it seems blindingly shortsighted to think it's as simple as "be suspicious of supermodels who are into you".
Maybe I'm just weird, but I love my wife and wouldn't cheat on her, even if a nation state tried to craft some kind of "ideal woman." It's a bit alarming so many people on this thread are treating it like a foregone conclusion that all men are doomed to cheat on their wives if given the right hair color and conversation topics.
Well to be fair, you haven't been put in that situation so it's hard to say how you would act. I'm sure many people who have affairs believed, 3 months prior, that they would never be the type to have an affair.
It could be a matter of personality. Some people are happy with what they have, while others are fundamentally unhappy. Unusually successful people tend to be of the latter type.
> Maybe I'm just weird, but I love my wife and wouldn't cheat on her
I agree with you, but, brain chemistry is weird, and "wouldn't cheat on them" is easier said than done and requires a lot of discipline in the heat of the moment when the situation arises and your own hind-brain and hormones are fighting you. A blasé attitude won't prepare you foe the sucker-punch.
I've seen grown people with multi-decade relationships throw it away because they got a tiny bit of extra-marital romantic attention, and the thrill regressed them to teenagers. In the majority if cases the cheaters' amors weren't interested in a long-term relationships.
That's a valid and measured take, but most of the comments in here are not talking about the affair in such terms. They are mostly painting Jensen as some kind of innocent child who was manipulated with Jedi Mind Tricks, when there's no reason to think her approach was anything but blunt.
I don't even care that much about what Jensen did, I don't even know what his marriage is like. It wouldn't bother me if he stayed on Nvidia. But people are defending him in a way that comes off less like "we can all make a dumb mistake on the wrong day" and more like "all men want secretly to ditch their wives, and his mistake was doing it with a spy."
I don’t even know that suspicion needs to come into it. Don’t have affairs that are connected to your job as a billion dollar CEO. She wasn’t a barista he met at a coffee shop one morning, she was a professional connection with ties to the industry. It’s not too much to ask people earning insane amounts of money to avoid mixing work and pleasure.
It's a cat and mouse game. Obviously, the adversary will in turn do everything in their power to make it look natural and get past that kind of defensiveness.
Perhaps as far as to say, the only suspicious thing about the perfect agent would be the lack of anything to be suspicious of.
A significant proportion of the people I know that won the startup lottery ended up losing the money when the girl they were into at high school flies themselves at them, has their kids, then goes back to the dude they were with before with the kids and child support, and this is relatively small fry and without any possible gov involvement.
The people in here acting like they would be immune to all this are kidding themselves.
> A significant proportion of the people I know that won the startup lottery ended up losing the money when the girl they were into at high school flies themselves at them, has their kids, then goes back to the dude they were with before with the kids and child support
What in the world are you talking about? Most successful people you know get honeypotted by their high school crush? I don't know anybody like that. How did you determine it was a honeypot and not just a regular divorce?
> The people in here acting like they would be immune to all this are kidding themselves
>That principle works for anyone with means to seize.
Believing that is the first step to a compromise. This principle works for anyone period.
Just think everyone should consider the possibility that no one really needs the head of R&D. For good intelligence agencies, the guy who does low level IT will do nicely thank you very much.
No one, man or woman, grows closer to being a 10 as they age. So if you work for some of these critical companies and your perfect man or woman shows up, you should be on your guard.
> So if you work for some of these critical companies and your perfect man or woman shows up, you should be on your guard.
TBH if I was higher up the chain of command, I'd actually give less fucks. If I have a mortgage I cannot afford to lose job or money so I'm on guard because I'm one failed marriage away from homelessness. But if I have ten million dollars to my name, and a Chinese spy shows up then what exactly do I have to lose? If the company kicks me out then good riddance, I can already retire to perfect comfort and nobody can take away the memory of spending a year with a 10/10 partner.
If you know for a fact they are a spy, are we sure that they are the ones doing the finessing? can’t you just feed them false intel and develop a syncretic religion between their confucianism(or communism/ maoism) and my catholicism such that they don’t know who is brainwashing who?
In fairness, it seems like everyone is a startup founder. I can't tell you the number of CV's and resumes I've seen that have CEO of something I've never heard of on them.
Just saying that being a startup founder is not particularly rare or special the past twenty years. You don't even have to do particularly well with your startup. People probably get targeted for a measly 750K exit. I think on HN we get a twisted opinion of what is big money to most people.
Agreed. If we’re talking inconvenient truths, I see far, far more husbands being useless married (and particularly parental) partners than I do wives. And I say this as a man.
I’m assuming “initiated by” is an objective legal term for filing the divorce. which ironically is probably oppositely correlated to fault in divorces, i.e if the husband cheats, the wife files for divorce, and it was the husband’s ‘fault’ as they breaches the marital contract
The figure comes from interview data of post-divorce couples regarding motives for divorce (and a few other questions, i.e. regret etc). It's not literal paperwork filing data.
This is how you know this is a male dominated forum: women would not be remotely surprised and in fact tend to be the only ones warning of it when it is about to happen.
And let’s face it, nerds are especially vulnerable.
The divorce rate could be 99% without GP's situation ever happening. This stat says nothing by itself.
Even if the situation really did happen multiple times, it's entirely possible that something else caused the divorces, e.g. people who came to money like this could turn out to be bad parents/partners on average. I mean, seems like there's plenty of examples of riches frying people's brains right now...
You say “mostly initiated by the woman” like it proves something about women maliciously ending marriages to make off with their husbands’ earnings. Have you met men? Many are eminently divorcible. A lot of people have bad relationships that should’ve never started, and it’s not surprising that it falls to the woman to eventually call it quits.
This sounds incredibly unlikely to happen to multiple people a person knows but “significant proportion” is vague enough for it to still be true even it’s just one. But, I think people are misreading that you’re suggesting these were honey traps rather than just high school crushes taking advantage of men they ignored earlier in life when they become rich and then abandoning them once they no longer are.
That remind me of founder of a really good, Realtime NoSQL Database .. RethinkDB .
And his wisdom that he hard earned still reminds me not to repeat his mistake..
~Don't Hire a Hot young girl before you have product market fit.
They're patriotic women in both cases; in the former case, by stealing industrial secrets, in this case, doing their duty to help decentralize their nations' wealth though the family court system, thus helping to solve the wealth inequality crisis.
This is kind of necessary with AI taking over jobs. If the situation gets worse, poor chad men will have to find themselves a rich mistress (or client) to support them financially. It might become the biggest non-tech industry. There will be entire teams of people working on just one rich tech guy's wife and competing against other teams to seduce her. The last remnant of a free market.
This reads like someone with zero familiarity with divorces or people in general.
- anyone with enough money to be targeted like this has enough money to get a prenup.
- most states do 50-50 custody these days unless one parent gives up their rights. So any child support would be decent, but not life-changing. Doubly so if the guy is rich enough to be targeted, in which case he's also rich enough to hire a good lawyer. The woman in this scenario has less money, so she can't get as strong a lawyer unless she's gambling that he'll have to pay her legal fees.
- With 50-50 custody the woman can't fly out of state to raise the kids, the court frowns on uprooting them from their hometown / school system.
The only way this makes sense is if the guy relinquishes all his rights to the kid, in which case he's hardly a hero either.
This isn't even considering the ridiculous notion that this woman has a man on the side just waiting for her to get knocked up with some millionaire's child.
I guess that with AO3 being down people have to turn to HN to post their sick fantasies. This sounds like something straight outta Andrew Tate’s fear mongering playbook. If your worldview is such that you thought that anyone would believe this nonsense story then I’d hate to know what else you believe.
Not my experience in SF. About the worst sin they’ve committed is moving to Walnut Creek to get a big house - which is admittedly fairly criminal an act.
All of this makes sense assuming you aren't married. An affair is still an affair. If it was just about finding the perfect partner, he should have gotten a divorce first.
> Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.
I think most normal people have tried Doritos at some point, which are the flavour-equivalent of what you’re describing here. It’s food designed to satisfy your human needs and desires.
It's... really not that hard. All you have to do is be content with what you have, and not go lusting after new opportunities. Although granted, anyone who can pull that off probably isn't going to be a multibillionaire CEO, because that's the kind of personality selected against among CEOs.
But if you're married, with kids, and you're willing to throw that away to chase someone else, I'd argue you have a serious personality flaw going on there.
Even if someone else is initiating it, you still have the power to say no. Especially if you're rich enough to be able to do things like apply for restraining orders or else to keep them away.
Jensen wasn't an innocent victim, he was still an active, voluntary participant.
Yes, but more or less in the same sense that drug addicts have the power to say "no".
It's not that easy to rebuff approaches from women you're very attracted to; it's much easier to avoid having the opportunity come up in the first place. I think at the very least the moral judgment should be accompanied by some empathy.
May be a better analogy is simply not any drugs, but a well funded and researched unique drug that is specifically designed for the target.
I am going to guess Jensen isn't even looking for beauty, although that is certainly part of the deal. But someone who is also business savvy, understands technology, smart and somehow well connected to AI as well as a business partner in some sense.
And perhaps it is worth pointing out the obvious, this isn't a simple beauty trap, it is a pys-op.
Although there is part of that thinks. Could Jensen knew of this all along. And it was just a way to get business going.
I'm not going to disagree with you--I've said multiple times in the past (not sure if I've said it here) that I don't think it's possible to be both ethical and a billionaire.
But that's not really a defense of the behavior, and it's perhaps a sign that we should stop valorizing billionaires.
No, it means you apply a modicum of common sense, commensurate with your risk/exposure. While it might seem the opposite of romantic you have your security people check them out.
While the dynamic for the physical security of the rich and powerful has changed a bit due to drones, up until recently it was neigh impossible for the common person to threaten the physical security of someone like this, or for nation-states to do so without being noticed.
That meant that the only way to attack these people was a soft attack in the form of social interactions or social media and as such it's always struck me as extremely foolish for these kinds of people to let themselves be preyed upon in this manner.
Like they have teams of people who keep them physically safe, but not mentally safe, so in the age of social media a motivated attacker can, with enough cleverness[0][1] directly reach the mind of someone who otherwise couldn't be reached.
Why does that happen?
I think it's not so much because they're juicy targets that entities with unlimited resources can meticulously target like you describe but because people like Jensen Huang or Bill Gates are very technically competent they probably lack the social skills so they're too often the Michael Scott to the Todd Packer in situations like this[2] and when a hint of opportunity to be sexually promiscuous is presented to them they seize on it without thinking of the consequences.
Think of the married blue collar dudes who pick up bored divorcees at some dive sports bar after watching the big game and then drive home drunk, juggling multiple mistresses and a family life with relative ease for years.
A manager like Jensen Huang may be able to handle multiple business units but he can't manage a single mistress handling his unit because that just isn't his skill set.
Maybe. Or maybe the point of acquiring outsize money and power to many people is to unshackle their experience of the world, and to impose their philosophy on it. Physical security is one thing; I reckon most aren't signing up to be brainwashed for the good of the company (beyond WUSA or whatever).
A drone is a pretty extreme measure. A mistress is a very long term plan with long term ROI if not discovered and comes with the ability to influence decisions. It is far more valuable than being able to murder random people.
Agreed. The drone comment as an aside just to head-off people saying "Well actually people aren't so physically secure anymore..."
The point I'm trying to make is that people at this level can and often do have absolute physical security but have almost comical[0] lapses in psychological/mental security that lead to the kinds of things that you're describing.
The severity of this issue makes me wonder why it seemingly isn't accounted for appropriately in security threat modelling. You'd think that that the handlers for a dweeb like Huang or Gates would take the appropriate steps to mitigate the threat, if only by adopting harm-reduction principles and getting their CEO an in-house honey pot to proactively fend off external threats.
This reminds me of Ralph Klein, the former Premier of Alberta affectionality. / derisively referred to as 'King Ralph'[0] who had a reputation for drinking and gambling. On the one hand it apparently made him exceptionally accessible to the electorate because you could saddle up to him at his regular drinking spots and give him a piece of your mind but on the other hand it lead to situations like this:
> Public opinion regarding Klein's alcohol consumption reached a boiling point in December 2001 when he visited the Herb Jamieson Centre, a 249-bed homeless shelter in Edmonton while intoxicated. An argument ensued between Klein and homeless men sleeping in the hallway who were denied a bed because they had been drinking.[153] During the argument Klein told the men to get a job, which was rebuked by some of the men who stated they had jobs but could still not afford housing.[154] An argumentative Klein was shuffled out of the centre while he tossed money at a homeless man on the way out.[154][155] According to biographer Don Martin, Klein continued with his normal schedule in the following days, and when rumors of the event began to pop-up amongst the media, Klein was unable to remember the event.[154] After the event Klein called a press conference and emotionally acknowledged he had an alcohol problem and pledged to curb or stop his drinking. He called alcohol "the devil" and an "awful beast", but did not go as far as acknowledging he suffered from alcoholism.[156] Klein admitted to being intoxicated at many moments in his life, visibly during his 2001 general election party, a month earlier when he introduced former US President Bill Clinton, and at the public memorial for Calgary sportscasting legend Ed Whalen.[154]
As I understand it Klein had a security guard / handler whose job was to keep the public safe from Klein as much as it was to keep Klein safe from the public but apparently he wasn't able to dissuade Klein from drunkenly throwing money at a homeless person and telling him to get a job that night.
I would imagine that it is an interesting dynamic being the handler for a person with a lot of power, there's an interesting level of self-awareness needed by the person in power where they have to understand that they are wilfully giving some of that power up to a person that they can trust to make these judgment calls when needed and give them the feeling that they can do so when needed without long-term consequences to their personal lives.
A way to do that is to pay them well enough so that they don't depend on you to feed their family so that they can always choose to be the person that has to put their foot down and tell you what you need to hear when you need to hear it even if you don't want to hear it in that moment.
But at the end of the day it comes down to the ability of the CEO to wilfully give personal power to another person, and time and time again that seems to be single largest failing of the people in these positions -- they just can't do that.
We’re all pretending that these people can’t afford NDAs, background checks or other people to manage these situations. What you’re saying is true and exactly the reason billionaires have an inner circle that manages all this. NFL players with a fraction of the money these people have manage that better. If you’re Jensen, there really ain’t that many excuses you can make.
i have, it's too early to speculate on what measures have or haven't been taken. i just singled out the point about NDAs because that is ridiculous to bring up when talking about espionage
But somehow, it is his company that he brought to that point, and also why would he care for being spied on by a country or another? There is nothing that said that he had to swear fidelity to the US.
Few companies can afford to be disloyal to their government for any reasonable amount of time. Not easy to see in the West because most government are quite closely lobbied, but it's important to be aware of. Nvidia is of strategic importance and has been part of the USA's sanctions regime against its so-called near-peer adversaries for quite some time.
The feds tried to disrupt the civil rights movement by faking a bunch of correspondence that made it seem like they were all cheating on their wives. They thought it would work because it worked on the commies in the 30s-50s. It didn't really do shit because their wives all already assumed they were from the get go.
Lol. Jensen Hueng's case was likely figured out in a smoke filled room somewhere in the bowels of some intelligence agency in China, agents passing around pictures of Jensen while puffing on cigarettes. One them tosses a picture on the table and just says 'he always wears that leather jacket'. The others nod, and one them sucks in the air while shaking the ashes into an ashtray, 'We have a few candidates in mind'.
I doubt this was even that sophisticated. These types of people live on deception and extracting benefits for themselves. Pretty woman walks up of course it's theirs for the taking. My God hasn't musk been paying women to birth his children? These people are more or less ill. That's why they are CEOs at high power companies.
> It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.
This is really not true. Spies are just people, there aren't that many of them, and they don't come "customized". The overlap of effective spies and "the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world" is very close to zero.
What you are describing is conspiracy-theory thinking or the kind of stuff you see in James Bond movies. Not real life.
Obviously spies exist, like here, but she's just... a normal woman who has a job as a spy and tried to seduce him and succeeded. He may have turned down five others who failed miserably in their attempts.
And sure they try to put together a psychological profile of the person, but that's also not really rocket science, and it's going to be pretty basic stuff. "Your weaknesses" is not going to be that exciting. Maybe he's really into expensive wines. It's not like he has a secret gambling addiction.
So let's just keep this reality-based and not fantasy-based.
A nerd thinking a woman is into them...that is the fantasy...No she did not happen to bump into you in the elevator, and no she is not there to attend the same AWS conference that you... and oh no... she does NOT happen to like the same SciFi you do ...and no ...you are not ohh so funny...
> The overlap of effective spies and "the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world" is very close to zero.
The overlap doesn’t have to be that great. The spies are also not random you don’t get random spies matching with random CEOs. They just have to have enough available agents and enough info on the target, physical proximity, and other factors to attempt something to work out. In many cases it’s not something that will be in the news either. It will be just a failed attempt, or just an affair.
Again, this isn't some low-level clerk that just needs a handjob or some Grindr kompromat--this is the CEO of the second largest company in the world by market cap.
Is it the assertion was that they'll do research on you (which is why having a gambling problem, large debts, or lying during a clearance interview is an issue)?
Is it the assertion that they'll pick a very pretty woman instead of some plain-looking one (which is why historically the NKVD recruited from theater and ballet schools)?
The "Hollywood fantasy" is real, it just happens in a vanishingly small set of cases.
What if we maybe built legal and financial practices that prevented such a concentration of power and wealth that these honey pots would not be viable.
> If you are one of the most powerful man on earth you
In that case, you also have access to practically every resource on the planet to run a background check on the person of your interest. He didn't do it; that implies a lack of judgment, so he fell short of what's expected of him.
Jensen fell for convenience, or was blindsided by some trait of her personality. Otherwise, executives use escort services all the time.
Hold on, you also have China finding a person that does not have anything that shows up in a background check which they could execute with even more resources.
That trail may not have existed beforehand. You can't find breadcrumbs before they're laid. Perhaps it was her notifying her handlers of her success that was noticed.
I was very surprised to learn that he decided to stay back while the rest of Trump delegation returned back from their China state visit. The plot is clear now.
> They will employ the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world to create the perfect Honey trap.
I heard stories of the CIA doing a class with new State Department employees, or ones at a certain level, that among other things involved the instructor "rating" everyone ("You're a 4, you're a 6, you're a 5..."), with the point being "If a woman comes up to you at a bar, and she's a 9 or a 10, she's either an escort or a foreign asset, and your safest assumption is the latter."
Sorry for the newly created anonymous account to comment.
This is true.
Those of us working on classified programs get briefed on this sort of stuff and this is exactly what they tell us.
These operatives are highly trained, research their targets extensively, and are very good at their jobs. Once they get leverage over their targets they're most of the way there. Sex, money, fame, are all very enticing to some people and once the leverage is established most people will do anything to keep it going and keep it private.
Huang's coming forward and publicly admitting the affair effectively zeroes out the leverage. It's probably the best thing he could do once the full gravity of the situation came out.
I don't know if high-level leadership at every company with export-restricted products gets the security briefings they should. I bet Mr. Huang and the rest of the leadership team at Nvidia is getting it now.
I've been thinking about this issue a lot in terms of the influence on the US government. The NKVD then KGB coined the term "kompromat" for compromising material.
If you join a 3 letter agency or the military or probably many government departments and contractors, you'll have to go through a background check. The more sensitive the information you have access to, the more extensive the background check. The particular employer won't necessarily care what skeletons are in your closet. They're concerned with your ability to be blackmailed or bribed. So if you get in a lot of debt, you can lose your security clearance. Some of the most successful spies have recruited with a relative pittance of money in comparison to the damage they can do.
But there's one exception to all this: if you an elected politician, you don't need to go through any of this. The FBI can't disqualify you. Even if you're in the executive, the FBI might disqualify you but the president can overrule that. Case in point: Jared Kushner [1].
There are a bunch of politicians and senior staff who are DL (ie secretly gay). There's a running joke that Grindr has an outage every time the RNC Convention is in town (eg [2]). The ownership of and access to Grindr's platform and data is actually a national security concern.
And then there's the Jeffrey Epstein of it all.
So while things like honeypots have existed and will continue to exist (as might be the case here with NVidia), you might find yourself asking "how do these powerful people fall for this stuff or end up having dirt?" whereas I think you should be asking "do these people become powerful and/or rich because they're compromised or can be compromised?"
Someone who is compromised is on the team and won't rat you out. It's mutually assured destruction.
I'm really not sure what we do about it. Ideally politicians should be able to pass security clearance background checks but that's a moral hazard as the agency, whose head is a political appointee, could effectively veto certain candidates. This has the hallmarks of the J. Edgar Hoover years.
A system intentionally filtering out people with integrity who aren't compromised is a sobering and depressing thought.
Yet there are plenty of billionaires who do not, at least publicly, have tragic relationships. Steve Jobs? Warren Buffet? Gavin Newsom (for the past 20 years)?
Look at recent and current tech CEOs. Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg sure…but Amodie, Altman, Cook, Nadella seem to be in stable relationships, and stable in general.
No, not all men think with their dicks. Huang’s martial fidelity is below average.
I'll give you Jobs, now that he's passed away and we have a lot of the dirt on him. But everyone else, we really don't know about.
Also, (just kind of pointing this out as a relevant factor, not really trying to insult the others), but Steve Jobs is tall and good looking. The guy would have gotten plenty of women with just a guitar and not a nickel to his name. I'm thinking Musk and Gates were very likely not in that league as far as raw attractiveness.
Ronald Reagan did have a bit of old school 1950s era scandal about him - a twice married Hollywood actor type whose kids from the second marriage didn't even know they had brothers and sisters from another mother until their early teens(? not sure on timing).
Small beer stuff today, titillating gossip for some.
This doesn’t read “groomed by intelligence agencies” to me. He had relationship troubles, but they were before Apple blew up. He met Laurene Powell in 1989 and they stayed together until his death in 2011.
I also don’t think it’s an excuse that he was particularly attractive, since plenty of other men on this list are less so. Buffet married a 60-year old woman in his 70s, if he cared about looks he could’ve dated a 20-year old.
True, but we’re talking about him being manipulated by intelligence or a gold-digger, then betrayed. His relationship troubles with Chrisann Brennan happened before he got famous, and it doesn’t seem like she manipulated him, rather his obsession with work and rudeness put her off (which is the opposite of “thinking with his dick” too). Then he had a seemingly-healthy relationship for over 20 years.
What a load of bollocks. You make it sound like Jensen was some kind of victim here and had no choice. Please let's not normalize moral failings and weaknesses (especially of powerful people).
I think their whole point is that he had many choices and he should’ve known this was a risk.
He chose to start a business, stay in charge, grow it to its current state. He chose to meet politicians and world leaders and get involved in global affairs. Those choices, as lucky as he’s been, have put a target on his back.
He chose to talk to these women. He chose to have the affair. He chose those actions. He should have known the prior choices (be a major and visible CEO) would lead to a world where future choices (have affair with random women) may be complicated.
He is no victim to anything but his own ego and foolishness. Taking no moral stance of having an affair, he should have known better because he had made his choices already.
We should have known he was a security risk years ago: https://nypost.com/2026/11/08/tech/jensen-huang-ceo-of-4-5t-... (“Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang autographs a woman’s (she is confirmed not the alleged spy) bra at the Computex trade show in Taipei, June 4, 2024.”).
I agree with the first part, inasmuch as volatility in one's personal life affects one's professional conduct and ability. The two cannot be entirely separated, but there are definitely varying scales of inter-connectivity.
Common sense and judgement fluctuate. Humans, you know, we're prone to entirely unpredictable moments of emotional weakness. Maybe we're hungry, maybe we're tired, maybe the missus or the kids have been sick, maybe we just don't want to face leg-day after 12-hours of strategising. As per the attack and defense argument: A defender only needs to be wrong once.
I actually don’t have anything derogatory to say about Jensen.
But bonus instructive irony points if (de-facto gpu-based) LLMs were used by the malicious actors to psych-profile him to probe for which of the many character vulnerabilities we all share assortment of that he would be more receptive to.
I came into some fair amount of power, and the CCP honey pot shenanigans got crazy. I didn't get in-person treatment, but the DMs were off the hook. A Cantonese businessman warned me, but I have to admit it could have worked if I had been in the wrong frame of mind.
They tried every persona: Sexy, shy, homely. Same sex. Confrontational. Open, but scared her overseers would punish her. Still get a ping now and then.
My first (well, metaphorically speaking) thought after reading the news was: how many attempts did it take? How many seductors and seductresses are out there? I can only assume the other major powers are playing similar games, given the history.
>A Cantonese businessman warned me, but I have to admit it could have worked if I had been in the wrong frame of mind.
Im curious more about that. He was just some regular businessman acquaintance with no special knowledge? Was he fairly accurate and specific in his predictions?
Take this with a grain of salt, but my guess is that the board on some level has to judge him as being so high performing that they would try to keep him as long as that doesn't cause too much PR damage to the company, or the deals get them in too much trouble with the government.
This is just a total guess, but I assume what a lot of the board want is for him to sell as much to China or indirect channels as he can get away with. So whatever these deals were that involved this woman, they probably want him to get those deals through it he can get away with it (although they wouldn't admit it).
I see this more or less as Huang doing his job. And relative to international expectations at that level of wealth, one public affair is probably not something most of the board (presumably largely male) is going to (privately) judge him for.
So if the board is investigating, I assume what they are trying to figure out is if the US government is going to do anything (probably not) or waiting to see if there is going to be some kind of public demand for him to be removed. Or it there is something likely to come out that will cause either of those things.
The board is investigating because the woman he had the affair with is a Chinese spy.
Neither the board nor the US government nor investors nor the average person gives a shit about a CEO having an affair as long it doesn't compromise his ability to do his job well.
Alleged Chinese spy unless I’m reading the article wrong? A Chinese intelligence asset could mean someone who just had CPC membership in college. Not that I’m saying Alice Huang isn’t a spy, I just would want more information before deciding.
She was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy.
Also, just to be clear here: the story is that Jensen was also going to Taiwan to meet with this person who was helping Alibaba evade sanctions, when Jensen met with this person Alibaba reps were always there, and in the US Jensen was making media appearances saying that sanctions on China had to be lifted.
Bear in mind that multiple people at Supermicro were charged for allegedly smuggling servers to China, and that the reason Megaspeed is being investigated is for effectively the same thing. Jensen denied he had anything to do with Supermicro, it is going to be much harder to say the same thing here.
I don't think the affair itself is necessarily related to the direction this will shortly take.
There is a huge difference between smugglers and spies though. Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else, you definitely don’t need a handler in zhongnanhai.
Certainly no government would ever encourage its own agents to engage in things like smuggling especially the smuggling of drugs to certain Global South nation states where the capital acquired from those operations end up funding pro-American paramilitaries who topple their local government. That would be totally bananas for any kind of republic.
Contra-ry to common conspiracy theories, I'm certain any government-led self-investigation into culpability in this vein was all very aboveboard and well-substantiated, and such incidents never ever happened.
USA, which is famous for engaging in several smuggling operations, like the Iran-Contra affair or the many cases when CIA was allegedly involved in drug trafficking.
She is a CEO in Singapore, she avoids going to jail by obeying Singaporean law. I don’t know how American law would even apply to her, they definitely apply to Jensen though.
And by dictionary definition once someone has been established as a smuggler, there’s technically no way they can also be labelled as spies, or engaging in espionage. Also, spies never smuggle, never. Spy’s honour! Yeah, that makes total sense.
Smugglers can be spies actually, it’s not an uncommon trope. Just not all smugglers are spies. Or were you just trying to setup some sort of straw man to knock down?
Chinese spy can mean everything from “sell us more GPUs to China or I leak our affair” (which I think NVDA would be very happy with - they’ve already admitted to chip diversion, and their senior execs have been arrested for the same) to trade secrets being given to Huawei.
IMHO, I’m speculating, but I think the affair could’ve happened first, and then the MSS got involved for access and blackmail.
There is, after all, statistically a high correlation with rich billionaires and infidelity…
1. Singapore is a well-known hub for the smuggling of Nvidia chips to China.
2. The company was originally set up as the subsidiary of a Chinese gaming company.
3. When the US added stricter export controls for Nvidia chips in 2023, it was spun off and ownership reportedly moved to a BVI shell company.
4. Later it was sold to a company that is apparently owned by one person who is believed to live in China.
5. The Singapore offices of the company and others he is an owner or director of show little activity and according to one report, the co-working space at the address listed for one didn't even have a record of the company.
6. Despite the fact that Megaspeed showed less than $6 million in cash at the end of 2023, it somehow became an Nvidia Cloud Partner and between 2024 and 2026 purchased $4.8 billion worth of advanced Nvidia chips, making it the top Nvidia chip buyer in ASEAN.
This company was on the radar of people in the industry well before this scandal because basically nobody had any idea who it was and where the money was coming from.
Thanks for the extensive write up! Every point except 6 (the acquisition) sounds very normal for Chinese companies. 6 million is worth a lot more in the Mainland, not many AI chips tho… mmmm
Just to be clear, alleged spy, and working for a foreign government which wants to do a tremendous amount of incredibly profitable business with the company. Which he should be carefully weighing against the very real legal risks when the US government doesn't want that business to happen. And if he can't remain impartial, the board should be concerned about whether he can make the right decision for shareholders about that risk/profit.
What OP is implying is that the Board likely implicitly condoned any effort Jensen would take to make sales to China including making underhanded deals that look like honeypot operations but may as well have been a double honeypot operation. The implication is that the outcome of said affair was actually good for Nvidia. You imply that the interests of Nvidia and the US government and by extension the US public are aligned. That’s a citation-needed level assumption. Nvidia just wants to make money. The government hopefully has different interests.
The penalties for ITAR/EAR violations are severe so I suspect it's as ludicrous and incorrect a theory as one might suspect.
What is interesting is the woman appears to be extremely mid-looking.
If there is a lesson to be learned from all these extremely powerful men cheating on their wives with objectively ordinary women (e.g. Gates, Bezos, Tiger Woods) it's that the most beautiful woman in the world is worth about the same as the woman that works at McDonald's.
From observation, it seems Starbucks/High-end coffee chains attract easier looking staff. At the end of the day, you are going to get the higher paying job, and the higher paying job can afford to select the easier looking ones.
These guys are so rich they can hire beautiful prostitutes whenever they want. Looks alone are dime-a-dozen, in the end it's personality that counts (the latter notably also holds true for non-gazillionaires).
Yeah, someone like Huang probably has beautiful women throwing themselves at him all the time and it's quite possible that he's taken many of them up on the offer already, it's just never come out before. A man who has access to such abundance of beautiful women may over time become more interested in things like personality, if he wasn't already more interested in personality before -- there are some men who care more about personality from the start.
I'm sorry but what is this vapid take on personal relationships and attraction? I don't get the point of anything beyond your first sentence. Can you explain?
Not the OP, but I was also curious about how the woman looked, i.e. if she was physically attractive or not. That's interesting from a "history of honey-potting"-perspective, good for the Chinese that they knew what moved this horny CEO's gears and that they were able to match it. As far as I know it was the Russians/Soviets who were experts at honey-potting, this is the first time when I read from the Chinese doing the same at such a high level.
1. that is a bit inappropriate to just openly say "but that spy girl looks mid"
2. The goal of honey trapping is to gain trust from the target to do whatever you want to do, not to please them. They don't even have to have an actual physical contact. A "mid", unassuming, appearance is often appropriate for this purpose. This actually applies to actual assassins, 100x engineers, and millionaire landlords, too; they gain nothing from standing out, so they look mid. You may optionally look good, but your looks should not be the means by which you achieve your goals.
3. (Extension to 2.)A rich CEO having affairs with a "mid" woman for a true extramarital love is probably more damaging to their relationships than them just disappearing into a hotel room with a prostitute with a bottle in hand. The latter is probably more tolerable to those involved and to the public.
4. Forgot where I read this, some diplomat's essay or something, but allegedly, Russians will do what you want to be happening, starting with regular office staffs and moms, escalating to scantily dressed girls, to visibly gay dudes, at which point they accept that their operation had been too obvious and give up. So there is a chance, I guess, if you must have it???
Outside of your odd take on attraction, which is way more than looks alone...
There are memes that super-model looking women dating nerds are almost always spies of some sort. For this spy to have any chance at gaining real information she needed to have an actual relationship with Huang - which, see above, is more than looks alone.
It's unfortunate how it's perfectly rational for a board to want their CEOs doing just enough fraud/backchanneling/cosying-up-to-suspect-world-leaders to maximize shareholder value, as long as they're not getting caught/... in ways that overall minimize shareholder value.
That's not unfortunate: that's the way the system is designed to work:
* Corps maximize shareholder value
* Govs make laws/penalties to avoid too much harm/risk by corps
* Press keeps everybody accountable
It's great when everybody's doing what they're supposed to do, which obviously isn't often enough.
Unfortunate is when corps are so in bed with gov that they don't bother innovating or growing, and when press is so in bed with gov that they might as well not exist at all.
Sure, if by high performing you mean fully assuming the lions share of risk when establishing monopoly via personal enmeshment with a corrupt political administration on the verge of sunset. His job for this board could very well be gone-rogue fall-guy. Doubly so when the regulatory bodies will be eagerly looking for those among the "thought you were one of the good ones" cohort of power.
In parts of Asia it is "expected" that a successful politician or businessman will have a "second family". I'm thinking the spying part (Huang is from Taiwan and was possibly leaking info to China) is considered worse than the cheating part by everyone involved.
You literally have cities in China that are called "second wife villages"(二奶村) where politicians and rich people have their mistresses that are located close to ports/airports for quick access on "work trips". In Shenzhen for example its the Luohu (罗湖) and Futian (福田) districts that are for this purpose.
Don't make it sound like Japan either. It's just not possible where no family with a connection to someone powerful would be satisfied hidden away in a rural village. When caught by a tabloid, your career ends completely, not really excepted behavior.
Incredibly sad and demoralizing to see the rationalizations and excuses people are making for this behavior in the comments here (or for the likely lack of professional consequences). But I guess these are the times in which we live.
Nor did I imply there was. I was talking of consequences when they came to light (doubly so when they materially impact one’s company and national security).
I think it's more accurate to raise an eyebrow at the idea of powerful people not habitually having affairs (historically, most of which have been men in modern times).
Because power is an ability to do what one wants, and a lot of people want sex.
Read Anna Karenina sometime. Tolstoy shows both the aspect of a society in which rich men having affairs was considered the norm, and the destructive effect it has on people. (And also the double standard by which women were judged much more harshly than men for having affairs). And he also, by comparing the two main relationships in the book (Vronsky's affair with Anna, and Levin's marriage to Kitty), said "It doesn't have to be this way, you can have healthy relationships if you just reject society's advice to have affairs and instead stay faithful to your wife".
I didn't like the book when I first read it (mostly because I seriously dislike Anna, and the book naturally spends a lot of time being told from her POV), but in retrospect, it's brilliant. Tolstoy has, without a single bit of moralizing, presented one of the best arguments I've seen in literature for being faithful to one's spouse and not engaging in affairs.
P.S. I should add that I don't think Tolstoy was inventing the "rich men having affairs was considered normal" aspect for the purpose of the book. I think that was what Russian society was really like at the time, and he took that aspect of society and wrote a book criticizing it, highlighting the negative effects that that attitude would have on people.
I think that "rich men having affairs" has been considered normal for most of human history. Of course, in China there were official (and unofficial) concubines, and many cultures have accepted and endorsed polygamy.
No excuses or rationalizations here, but: Do we fire people for cheating on their spouse? Seems like a private, family matter.
Of course, the spy aspect could be relevant from a professional perspective (depending on what actions he took or what he knew), but I'm guessing you're talking about him having an affair.
Espionage aside, let's not forget that he was having an affair with a customer company's executive. If that's not a massive professional fuckup I don't know what is.
To be fair he probably spends all of his "free" time working. As the founder and CEO of it there is no personal or professional life. It's all one life.
It's not personal when you're in a certain role. You are not just representing your company, as a CEO you are practically embodying the company. It is the ultimate position, and it's compensated accordingly. If you want a personal life, resign from the job of CEO of the world's biggest and most strategically important company.
That is a very American take. I think there are other countries (e.g. Germany, the Netherlands) where there is a much stricter separation between the professional and private persona. Nvidia is american, and so is Jensen, so i guess it is OK to judge him by this standard. Just saying that different cultures judge this behavior differently.
Yeah you say that then your country elects a serial-cheater pedophile as president; I'm not sure you are so representative of your country customs as you think.
> No excuses or rationalizations here, but: Do we fire people for cheating on their spouse? Seems like a private, family matter.
It is not so clear, if this is about his character and can he be trusted. This is evidence that someone is capable for lying and doing something that might not be in line with company ethics either. I don't think we can assume from humans that "he lies only in his private life, but can be totally trusted on business side".
People who speed take reckless actions endangering others, therefore we should fire anybody who gets a speeding ticket. Thoughts?
Now take the same point and apply it to every other crime, misdemeanor, and breaking of rules. Should companies really operate based on that? Or should we maybe draw a boundary around professional life and only consider the professional life?
When they are the CEO of multi-trillion dollar, geopolitically important companies, and when we are talking about spies of geopolitical adversaries? Yes, absolutely.
In fact, the affair was less important. Even if they were just a very close but unromantic professional relationship it would be a serious scandal.
Most posters in HN don't think "poor corporations are the victims when they are hacked". They think "the corporations should be liable because they did not invest enough in security". This is morally the same.
I’ve seen some wild opinions on HN. One that particularly lingers in my mind was a suggestion that we use immigrant women as incubators to solve the population crisis. Shockingly not downvoted into oblivion.
HN cares about money and tech. Don’t take morality or life advice from here.
Well, I'm also disappointed to see the holier-than-thou bias in such full display here too. If you're unfamiliar:
> It’s the well-documented bias in which people systematically overestimate how morally they would behave compared with others—especially in high-pressure or ambiguous situations—while underestimating the situational forces that actually shape behavior.
I'm sure we're all paragons of moral virtue here but the reality is that unless you've been personally targeted by a nation state and successfully resisted, then you're really just fantasizing. Yeah bro, I'm sure you would have effortlessly resisted the Chinese sex trap, right after you benched 1000, got that hole in one and beat Hamilton at qualifying. You're just that good.
Why do people virtuously out their own personal weaknesses on here with such glee? Then again, this is Hacker News, wouldn't expect many men on here to get much attention from the opposite sex. You're probably right.
For reference, one of the first things I was taught as a software engineer working in a highly secure industry long ago was that we should take psychological manipulation/seduction very seriously to avoid damaging the company and leaking national secrets. If I did something like this I would've lost my job at minimum and likely faced severe legal action.
Regardless of how much you think we can or cannot resist actions from a foreign nation state, the ultimate fact of the matter is that he failed and thus is no longer suited for his position. If I would face worse consequences for such an action, then I damn well expect someone who's paid far above my pay grade to represent a company to face some consequences as well.
The "big deal" here isn't the affair - that happens all the time and if he were dating an employ or something boring like that we'd probably never even hear about it.
The problem is the spying and Chinese influence - which doesn't happen all the time and is a big deal because he runs the biggest chip company in the world at a time we're trying to keep that tech away from China.
Security clearance applications have a whole section asking about extra-marital affairs, money problems, and whatnot precisely because spys use those types of things to bribe, blackmail, and pressure people. It sounds like a cheesy Cold War spy movie - but it happens in real life, as we're seeing.
Agreed, and I'm not even that moralistic about the affair. It happens. This guy is in charge one of the most influential and important companies in the world. He owes the entire world a higher standard of conduct. Not for moral reasons, but for security, integrity, and consistency. If he's allowing himself to be influenced by China, the ramifications for Nvidia are staggering. If he wants some sex, use a hooker, or at least have an affair with NOT A SPY. Having an affair with a spy is unbelievable levels of incompetence, and calls into question his competence as a leader.
We're not going to do the complexity justice with our 2 comments, but..
My opinion is that - particularly with the wisdom of hindsight - it is right to say this is a serious lapse in judgement of Jensen. Especially given the potential security/strategic implications.
However to then make the jump to this saying something about his qualities of leadership is a big leap. His leadership record is exceptional: decades of foresight, strategic risk-taking, and execution. It seems wrong to allow one episode to outweigh three decades of evidence.
That's fair too. Perhaps on balance a little Chinese influence isn't worse than what he has accomplished. It just feels like one of those red lines for me. If he's willing to canoodle with spies from adversarial nations, what else is he doing exactly? And is he doing it on purpose or by accident?
I don't think that framing helps him. He's one of the most targeted people in the world for espionage. If the claim is he didn't know, to not check the background of a prominent Chinese national with which he was having an affair is gross incompetence.
Not sure these times are at all unique. If anything I imagine equivalent billionaires from the past were even greater philanderers. Hell, I was recently reading about Benjamin Guggenheim, who died on the Titanic and is known for "I played the game straight to the end and that no woman was left on board this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward. Tell her that my last thoughts will be of her and our girls" - and he was travelling with his mistress while those final words were recorded.
Pangram says that this letter is partially AI-generated. Hilariously, it's the part where he's sorry that he cheated on his wife that's AI-generated, while the part about cooperating with the investigation and affirming his love of America is real.
I've never seen a more direct statement, with the right priorities, in such a case.
As always, recovery under stress is more telling than speed on the happy path.
The other name founders - Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs - fell into the guise of their own image propagating down their leadership chain; Huang seems to be actually leading, often by example. I'd expect his team to do ok without him, but believe only he could make some of the hard decisions, particularly now that their success is bounded by their customers'.
Unless they want to keep the focus on the affair on purpose. What if she just helped him circumvent the ban on selling Nvidia cards to China or, if you want to really push it, on selling Nvidia tech to China?
This is all very distressing, but I say:
Let he who has not built the linchpin company of the industry the entire global economy is levered to and not risked it all in an extramarital affair with a chi-com honeypot cast the first stone!
Is Jensen most likely on his way out? I think yes, more interesting times ahead and will his exit eventually help in reducing Nvidia's dominance which might be a desirable result though there're quite a few conditions to be met so that it indeed is one.
Rich Americans don't face consequences. Unless he spilled secrets that would put Nvidia's competitive advantage in jeopardy he'll probably be required to attend some mandatory government/corporate seminar on espionage for a couple of weeks and then things will go back to business as usual.
When the money is this big, all ethics go out the window.
> Andy Byron, the chief executive of New York-based tech company Astronomer, has resigned from his role after he was spotted embracing an employee at a Coldplay concert, according to a statement shared with CNN on Saturday.
> Former McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook was fired in November 2019 after it was discovered he had engaged in a consensual relationship with a subordinate, breaching company rules that prohibit managers from dating employees they oversee. Easterbrook admitted the relationship, calling it a mistake, and stepped down. Initially, he left with a $40 million severance package.
What other consequences do you want? Jail? Infidelity is not a crime in the US.
Mr. Rizzo has maintained that Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were “not unusual” and consistent with the kinds of meetings he has with any of Nvidia’s many customers.
If you think last week's selloff in AI stocks was solely about the democrats winning a majority you're naive.
This was most certainly known about last week and front-run by insiders(maybe NVDA insiders, more likely Trump insiders, but we will probably never know).
There is no way he would have known that the woman was a spy. Also we can't know if the allegations are true or not either until proven somehow. The woman was from Singapore. Singapore has denied it. but lets assume that she was a spy so why hasn't she been charged yet? Where is she? The chips apparently went to Malaysia .. is there a proof that they were moved to China? There are claims that their clouds were used by the Chinese. Something doesn't add up here.
Malaysia doesnt even show up in the graph of owners but obviously has imported some chips.. were they illegal ones.. who knows. How much relative power does this malaysia have? If it did, wouldnt show up in the graph?
Spooks from CIA must be aware of this for a long time. The only question now is why this information is leaked now? What is the distraction they are trying to create by leaking this now?
It could be just as simple as taking time to be confident. Or it could have been somebody wanted to use this as a bargaining chip and failed somehow... Who knows.
Spooks is a pretty knowing term to use. Not exactly a word the average person throws around. And yes, they likely knew long before now. Right after the midterms? Interesting timing. Seems the spooks are doing what spooks do.
They had to rename it to “MI-5” for the US market. The word doesn’t have the same connotations in the US as it does in the UK. One reason is that it was used as a racial slur in WWII and after the war.
I think that's just a result of the term falling out of common use in the US. I'd expect 30 years ago "Spooks" would be a perfectly fine name for a TV show in the US. (I remember watching spy shows/movies and reading spy novels as a kid in the 80s/90s and hearing/reading that term.)
It generally doesn't. People should stop reviving the negative connotation. Sure if someone is calling a black person a spook let's call them out but if that's not how it's being used let's not insist it's an inherently racist term. It's totally counter-productive.
Not what you are doing, and I understand that's why they renamed the show but they shouldn't have. While it can be used as a racial slur it doesn't generally have that connotation. I think if you directly asked most people they would either not know about the slur or say something like "I think its a racist term for some group or something." I had to look it up myself to be sure. We can choose to let that usage of the term die.
This "what distraction are they trying to make" line is ridiculous conspiracism. It's completely obvious that someone leaked it to the NY Times because they are alarmed that the admin is doing nothing about what is obviously a huge national security problem.
It just seems like a coordinated crack down on Nvidia's relationship China.
Consider that the leak destroys the legitimacy of Huang's lobbying efforts efforts against tighter chips controls to China. In parallel the NYT released yesterday their investigation into commerce dept approvals of h200 chips to Chinese entities that the NYT claims are ghost offices linked to Chinese military contractors [1]. Also consider that these events put Nvidia under long term congressional security oversight with an installed watch dog. Nvidia is losing it's autonomy to cut international deals. Seems like the CIA/permeant state is getting nervous about China again.
He has a close relationship with Trump, so this could be an internal Whitehouse play to hurt Trump, or, he might have "disappointed" Trump, so this could be punishment.
Alternatively this could be a Chinese play designed to sow dissent and disruption in the USA post the mid-terms.
Or, it could just be a rather trivial story about an over confident and all to human titan of industry making the kind of mess in his personal life that a lot of people end up making - watch any TV mini series for example after example.
How would personal trouble in Huang’s life hurt Trump? Compared to all the other things that Trump has done to hurt himself, culminating in the midterm results?
And China, really? What dissent is this going to cause? As for disruption, Nvidia essentially has a monopoly on what they do. Who the person in charge is, or what he’s doing, barely matters at this point.
> watch any TV mini series for example after example.
> Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has not only vouched for Megaspeed, but seems to have quite literally walked alongside Megaspeed at every step, while maintaining an uncomfortably close relationship with Megaspeed’s Alice Huang, a Chinese national. He was first spotted partying with Alice Huang in June 2024 – the same month the Apex/Alibaba pledge was filed. He then dined with Alice Huang in Taiwan in May 2025 - just weeks after the news of U.S. trade restrictions.
love this comment. the ceo of one of the most influential companies in the world gets caught sleeping with a spy of a rival hegemonic nation state during a period of intense technological, political, and economical change, and OP is like "pfft nothing to see here". amazing
Not at all defending his actions, but I am reminded of someone in an earlier thread predicting that there may be some political reasons for this to come out, and that we may see NVIDIA do favors for the US government some time soon. That doesn't seem to be the case, but an observation:
"I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American." sounds like the exact words one would say if one expects to be threatened of being un-patriotic and therefore cancelled in the right-wing sense. In fact it sounds like something you would hear on South Park, it's a bit ridiculous. As others have pointed out in here, affair or not, the spy label is very much up to US government opinion.
And with one letter, Jensen ceases to be a blackmail target candidate.
Author David Brin has been outspoken lately about politicians taking active measures at neutralizing the effects of blackmail, (which Jensen’s activity happens to match), in pointing to an older post of Brin’s:
https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/09/how-hero-might-escape...
(i don’t recommend reading directly as it is verbose, but summarize with AI)
Personally I think if she's a spy he is a victim. Who knows what his relationship with his wife is. It's none of the public's business.
The only newsworthy part of this is possibility he could've been blackmailed in the past about it and I assume this is what the investigation will be about.
There are just some things that as the head of one of the world's largest companies you can't do. If Jensen Huang doesn't realise the geo-political importance of his chips, then he shouldn't be in the job. But we know he does because he spends all his time hanging around the white house lobbying Trump to let him sell his chips to America's geopolitical rivals.
> Defending a man cheating his wife because you probably have
...
> defend their depraved way of life.
How about it's none of our business what happens in other people's bedrooms. For all we know his wife was fine with it or maybe she wasn't. Either way, not my business.
He'll do exa tly what his pr company will tell him.
1. Admit guilt,
2. Apologise
3. Casually mention the thing most people are concerned about.
4. George Carlin script to follow...
I don't see how or why whether someone "cheated" their spouse would be at all relevant for anything, or to anyone other than said spouses.
Caring about this, like if that was somehow important to fixate upon, is disgustingly sick.
Have some morals
It does have shade a light on someone's moral compass and violates trust in the individual. If you break promises given to your partner of choice then you are going to break any promise period. Especially since you only apologise after you've been found out.
> I don't see how or why whether someone "cheated" their spouse would be at all relevant for anything,
I am not talking about the news. But about the people defending the cheating.
The news are not that he cheated but he cheated "... with a Chinese spy". And the post is not even about the news but an official release from Nvidia!
I do not even know anymore what is your point? Are you just asking people to stop caring about what billionaires do? Are you trying to protect the image of a billionaire for some weird reason? I do not get how do you fail to just read the news or the actual press release from Nvidia.
Exactly. Downvotes on your comment just proves your point.
OC says Huang is a victim. For real?
Owner and CEO of a TOP 3 company by market cap.
At that point he's not a private person, his actions have global consequences (his wife, kids most likely still are private persons, that's true, but I don't know about them).
He's in an incredible position of power against the majority of world leaders, but he's apparently "a victim" in an eyes of HN oligarch apologetic crowd?! Because he was allegedly seduced by Chinese spy? What in the sinophobia and oligarchophilia is this?
If Huang wouldn't be of ultra-billionaire class and the woman would truly is a spy - he would be in prison for treason in a heart beat. I can bet - nothing will happen and by next Monday this all will be forgotten, washed by best PR firms he can buy.
I have friends who as an adult one of the parents had an affair and and it was pretty tough for them, and the parent child relationship has never been the same again.
I don't know why you seem to be so against considering Jensen's children. Some people really value the commitments of marriage and see adultery as something very serious and damaging.
I don't consider his children because they are nepo-babies that were hired into Nvidia, make tens of millions of $$$, and stand to inherit billions. They will be fine.
There are so many other children in the world that deserve consideration before his (grown adult, very rich) children.
Jensen should be apologizing to Americans for compromising NatSec.
There's a tacit expectation that you don't use the privilege of doing business with/within a country to put the people you're doing business with at risk.
I disagree. Even as an adult I would be distraught if one of my parents decided to cheat on the other. Your children being adults doesn't mean you no longer have a responsibility towards them.
Then its time to grow up, people change, interests change, lifelong love and happy life together is and always was a fairytale. Once you are 20 and somewhat independent its time to relax your responsibility claims on your parents. They already spent a great deal of their so very limited life time on you, at least be grateful for that.
Of course people change, but there's a way to go about it that doesn't involve going behind your partners back and making national news coverage in the process. The fact you don't see that difference is bizarre.
The national new part is only because he is a CEO of the gigantic and strategic company, I was addressing the idea that parents are responsible to adult children in general.
>Then its time to grow up, people change, interests change, lifelong love and happy life together is and always was a fairytale.
If this is your attitude then you should just never get married in the first place. At the very least you owe it to a partner that expects a real commitment.
I think many of his defenders are very worried about the financial implications and are defending him to try and steer the conversation in a way that will minimize those implications.
So, they are not allowed to be upset if daddy decided to cheat on their mommy after long marriage with some chinese honeypot? I hope you are not planning on start your own family any time soon
I believe parent post's point was that the children are allowed to be upset, but it's a bit rich for the internet to be clutching its pearls on behalf of them if they're adults.
"Think of the children" is a rhetorical appeal to pathos.
There's plenty to talk about here that doesn't require assuming how an adult is going to feel about another adult's behavior.
He may be a victim, but note that he had to choose to participate.
To play devil's advocate here.. If she's a spy trained in psychological manipulation and seduction we'd be right to call him a victim instead of a participant since he'd be a target of those techniques applied to him. Maybe?
That can help explain what led to him deciding to cheat, but no it doesn't make him a victim. People have to be responsible for their actions rather than being labeled a victim of their own choices.
I would personally agree that it is possible he is a victim of advanced psy-op technology. I don't personally believe we have nearly as much 'choice' or 'free will' as NA culture of the past 40+ years has led most people to believe.
At a deeper level we do get to choose our overall environment and what kinds of things we are exposed to frequently, the recurring patterns of life can be consciously managed and shaped. But in the moment, we are more like an LLM doing a forward pass on next token. If a specific weight relating to refusal has been abliterated, it's not realistic to expect the next token to somehow still come out to refusal.
We can control our training better than we can control our inference.
We have ego-ideals and specific mental makeup that can be exploited if identified.
There are other ways to compromise a target that do not involve infidelity. These “techniques” just facilitate the process for an at least somewhat willing and/or interested target.
So, no, he’s not a victim, his existing personal potential for infidelity was exploited. It worked because he would have done the same thing if the right non-spy were to arrive on the scene. The spy takes advantage of that.
What if she wasn't a trained spy but someone naturally gifted in psychological manipulation and seduction? No longer victim but participant? Even though the effect he faced was the same?
He's married... he made an oath, signed a social contract to another person, his wife, that he made the conscious choice to break.
Its clear his wealth generated a level of narcissism here that rose to a level that permitted him to invalidate the feelings of his wife, who, again, he made a vow to.
It does not matter if some hot chinese spy tried to get into his pants. He still let it happen. He his actions spoke for him: "I know i have a wife, but this chinese spy is so hot. I dont care about my wife anymore, but im going to keep this a secret from her because I know its wrong". For a loooooong time.
I'm personally so tired of excusing infidelity. He is a big boy. He can make big boy decisions.
We just don’t know the story enough to judge. What if he was given benzos and was immediately blackmailed for example? This is a nation-state organized affair after all, not just a poorly judged night at the bar.
> Personally I think if she's a spy he is a victim. Who knows what his relationship with his wife is. It's none of the public's business.
This is an interesting take. I'm not sure I agree with it. I understand the principal: that she might have been being dishonest towards him, so he's a victim of lies.
Anyone who's worked in and around any high value, high risk or regulated areas has done the training courses on these sorts of risks though: specifically, people will lie to you to get information out of you.
Sure, on a personal level, consider him a victim if you want. On a professional level, this is him ignoring training, at great risk to the business.
> The only newsworthy part of this is possibility he could've been blackmailed in the past about it and I assume this is what the investigation will be about.
What ? If she was in his house and was a real Chinese spy who knows what data she extracted. Sorry, that's news worthy.
> If she was in his house and was a real Chinese spy who knows what data she extracted.
Not sure, if I follow. Are you saying that he has confidential papers just lying around his house? Or a computer (or other device) with confidential data without a strong password and an encrypted drive?
If any of this is true, I would say that this is actually a bigger problem, than the whole affair thing.
I'm just a humble software engineer and wouldn't let myself to handle any work related data so carelessly. Not sure, why a CEO of a huge multinational corporation would be held to lower standards.
Advanced security technology does nothing against the old attacks of "look over the person's shoulder while working in bed" and "your work is really interesting and important, please tell me more".
> "look over the person's shoulder while working in bed"
I don't know, maybe you're right. I, personally, am very uncomfortable (almost physically) if I know that someone is seeing my screen and I wouldn't be able to get any work done in such state. Maybe I'm just weird.
> "your work is really interesting and important, please tell me more"
This one is unrelated to physically being inside someone's house.
Actually non-advanced security technology can prevent that by locking the system / user entirely if they're using their work laptop or accessing company data like... emails while not in a secure location, e.g. the office.
Corporate security is a strong reason for leaving your work at work.
> Corporate security is a strong reason for leaving your work at work
Never met a tech executive who left work at work. Also never met an IT security team who had the juice to tell the CEO what he could and couldn't do on his corporate phone...
Or she's not a spy and both are victims of more yellow peril shenanigans. Like a Chinese national spins up SG proxy to legally buy Nvidia cards. Jenson wants to legally sell Nvidia cards to China within export control limits. He hardly needs pussy as incentive to sell more hardware. Business people running billion dollar companies (megaspeed is) talking to domestic politicians isn't a fucking espionage, just like Jensen phoning Trump isn't. Like is PRC going to lock up any western businesses men that's ever been to the white house? It's just business as usual except useful idiots will by the yellow peril narrative that a moderately attractive Chinese MILF is a spy and business friend with benefits being used undermine Jensen for following letter / not spirit of law, aka customary fiduciary duty stuff.
>Is the "yellow peril", only Chinese or does it refer to all asians?
I mean, Shou Zi Chew was grilled by Congress for his "links" to the Chinese Communist Party, and made to state that Tiananmen Square 1989 was a massacre despite being born, raised in Singapore, and served the Singapore military.
Because he isn't from China. It's racial stereotyping that everyone that looks a certain way is a threat to America. It's dangerous especially when violent attacks on Asians in the United States have skyrocketed as a result of this kind of discourse.
Change the race and ethnicity and tell me that it's okay.
The real joke is the sexism that says this is somehow uniquely a problem with men. Women do plenty of stupid things because they’re horny and/or lonely. That whole ‘little head’ thing seems like a bit of harmless cheek until you start looking at it in the broader context of sexism and gender roles, then it gets a lot more tedious.
how is he a victim for choosing to cheat on his wife? Leave alone a possibility of the honeypot. Like he willingly was engaging in the relationships with that chinese women behind the back of his wife. How is he a victim now?
As I said, I’m not commenting on personal vices. I’m commenting on foreign intelligence operations because that’s the only question of legitimate public interest here, as opposed to prurient gossip.
Your analogy would be good if Jensen was a sex addict who frequented brothels and China developed an asset at one of these brothels.
But these arent great analogies because you dont have to have sex with a spy to be a victim of a foreign intelligence operation.
The gambler goes to the casino to gamble. And Alice Huang was sent to meet Jensen Huang under normal business pretenses.
The analogy cant quite represent it but its more like the casino sent a dealer-in-disguise to the gambler on some plausible non-gambling pretenses to spy on him. So he's a victim of the casino's spy operation. Then he gambled. Except he's not a sex addict, as far as we know.
And while I usually wouldn't care if he cheated on his wife, because that's between him and his family, in this case, he was also incredibly dumb. This guy could have cheated on his wife with any number of women, but he chose to do it with a Chinese spy. I think having somebody who makes incredibly dumb decisions be the CEO of the world's most important company is definitely newsworthy.
"You're not talking to someone who woke up a loser, but you are talking to someone who woke up next to a Chinese spy."
I think the cheating is newsworthy as well, but separate: Lori likes to donate money and she would be a great target for donations if she leaves Jensen.
There's $50B at stake, so there's a huge incentive for foundations to ruin what's left of the family.
I don't know; at some point “don't put your dick in people from the Other Side” should be a pretty well known rule if you're someone important. She didn't even hide her nationality.
He may be a victim of espionage, but he isn't a victim of adultery. He knew what he was doing, a spy didn't make him take his pants off against his will.
I hope it’s apparent to everyone that the natsec state (whether CIA or FBI for its domestic counterintel mandate) had to actively engage in ‘conspiracy theorizing’ in order to determine whatever exposure Jensen had, which seems to be bearing out to some as-yet-unknown degree. Worth keeping in mind next time you’re feeling shy about expressing your own latest conspiracy theorizing.
Probably he had to have an affair with that woman to give the CCP some leverage over him. Powerful financial entities nowadays won't allow you to have any opportunities unless they have have leverage over you.
Maybe he had to do it in order to be allowed to make sales in China.
I think I may have lost some big opportunities myself when I was in crypto because I was faithful to my wife. Powerful people need people who they can control. They need kompromat.
It's actually called espionage.
Take a read of the UK cops infiltrating animal rights groups.
When jo blo cops get the protesters they are investigating pregnant....who can only guess what goes on with the people at the pres's table.
I don’t really understand what’s the issue with “cheating” his wife.
That’s his personal life and I fail to see why are we supposed to behave like some kind of religious zealots on marriage.
The best way to handle this should probably be to be upfront about it so that he could not be blackmailed. His only mistake was that he didn’t disclose it earlier when rumours surfaced
It's not about religion, it's about trust and keeping promises. Like it or not, the default understanding in a marital relationship in many places in the world is monogamy. Some people, of course, engage in other practices, after an explicit discussion, and agreement and understanding. But presumably Huang's wife believed she and her husband were in a monogamous relationship, and trusted Huang to keep it that way. That's the issue; religion is irrelevant. (And different religious practices have different things to say about monogamy vs. polyamory, and atheists decide for themselves if they want to be monogamists or polyamorists; religion need not be involved at all.)
But regardless, I think his infidelity is not his employees' business; IMO it's weird to bring it up in this way. The bit about his affair partner possibly(?) being a spy is the thing that actually matters to NVIDIA and NVIDIA employees, but he only dedicates a few sentences to it.
It's mostly a US thing, I've seen a huge divide about marriage between old Europe and the US that's due to influence of puritanism. Only 20% of men in the US cheat, that's a relatively low figure.
The moralists also conveniently ignore that the vast majority of men is not very attractive. Cheating would take a lot of effort for them. In contrast, I knew some men who were attractive enough they had to fend off women almost daily. For them, not cheating takes a lot of effort. The bottomline is that most of the 5/10 guys who say "I would never cheat" would do so the very next day if a 9/10 woman suddenly got interested in them, which is exactly what happened in this case.
he will only have to deal with the embarrassment of figuring out how to spend his golden parachute money. IF he gets ousted, which is not a guarantee at all.
If he had moved the Nvidia HQ to France it might have reached the back-pages in the news but nobody would have cared.
It’s interesting how overall virtue signalling is presented as important whereas the bubble shaped valuation of Nvidia and built upon bubble valuations of major clients is not considered important enough for related statements or actions.
Anyone else think that they’re only making this public not because it happened but because he’s tried to go against Trump and releasing this is payback/coercion
no. this is a national security failure, and reflects poorly on the administration considering there's reporting they've known for months and still had huang in close proximity to the white house.
china has to resort to honeypots because they have few legitimate political tools to influence decisions of an american company. not so for Trump et al - there are much more effective ways for the president to coerce a ceo than telling the world they let a potentially compromised individual help make policy decisions lol
The political move was to wait until after the midterms for this to come out, because data centers/AI has such a negative public perception. Turns out waiting didn’t help
Essentially all CEOs of big companies have affairs and employ prostitutes. There are very few if any exceptions. Some hide their behavior better than others, some feel no need to do so. It's how 50+ heterosexual men behave if they have the resources to do so, and these guys have the resources to do so.
The consequence of this for security is twofold. First, compromising someone with sex is both much cheaper than compromising someone with direct payments of money and much easier to hide in an operational sense. Second, this is particularly so when the married mark's image (even sincere mentality) is one of rectitude and hard work and so forth.
Opinions on the affair and the public discourse aside, I have to say though that it is the first time in a long time that I see an apology letter written from a business person in the name of the company that actually admits wrongdoing and has accountability.
Usually they are more along the lines of fake apologies like "I'm sorry that you feel that way", or in this particular case I would imagine something like "I'm sorry that I was spied on, I was doing my best and nothing prepared me to deal with a foreign agent".
It's refreshing to see words like "My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.".
Look, Jensen got whatever he wanted, China got the GPUs it wanted - China also turned Jensen into a staunch advocate for selling GPUs to China - everything's good - everyone wins.
"Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang challenged US export controls on advanced semiconductors, arguing that continued technology collaboration and access to the Chinese market are ultimately in America’s best interest. Speaking to reporters in South Korea this week, Huang described China as a “singular, vital, important, dynamic market, and nobody can replace that.” He asserted he would continue campaigning for full access to this market, stating he is "optimistic" that China will remain a key consumer of US chips."
I'm being a bit weirded out to see, for this story (not just this thread), how the top comments are positive takes on Jensen.
He's a victim, he apologizes well, he's working with the board on this...
Is HN just this millionare-friendly? astroturfed?
Not that I expect a metaphorical lynching, but it's certainly a take when the news is "one of the most important roles in the US is potentially losing national secrets by absurd oversight".
He is a billionaire and people here fall over themselves idolizing figures like him. You get the sense reading HN comments that they respect founders they don't know more than their own spouse or kids.
No, you should be negative about him because he's exposing an industry to sexual blackmail and espionage in a position way too high to not know better.
I'm implying him being rich is making people blind to this fact.
He had an affair(into which he was lured by someone professional) and accepted his fault and responsibility. He did not poison people for profit and tried to hide it, so personally I see this more as a internal family issue for him and not so much the worlds buisness.
If he had stored an important password on a postit on his laptop, would you call that a private matter?
I'm personally not interested in the morals of cheating, but claiming this is a private issue is crazy, as is removing his agency and implying it was something done to him. You don't fall in a random's bed by stumbling.
> If he had stored an important password on a postit on his laptop, would you call that a private matter?
Whoa, whoa, who, whoa, whoa! You know the rules: no leaking next week’s headlines in advance. What kind of outfit do you think we’re running here?
I do agree though: regardless of whether the woman is a Chinese agent or not, and regardless of whether he knew or suspected (I doubt he did), this affair represents a serious lapse in judgement that has implications far beyond his personal life.
If you can be compromised personally, you can certainly be compromised professionally.
I suspect it won’t happen, because it would likely tank the stock, but really he should be thinking about resigning.
While I agree with the top level in this thread that it _is_ refreshing to see someone like Jensen taking responsibility for once, I disagree that we should absolve him of all wrong doings. This is also not just a personal matter. If this person was indeed a Chinese spy (I believe this is still not confirmed), then that can have big impact on NVDA. Naturally, it may also not have any impact, but regardless, if it is the former, it certainly is not an internal family issue.
"I disagree that we should absolve him of all wrong doings"
I did not. If there was more to it, leaked confidentials, blackmailed deals etc. then yes, he will be responsible. There is an investigation. But what is known, so far he "just" cheated on his wife. And this is what they have to deal with.
Whether it happened or not I don't think is relevant, the lack of judgment in opening himself to blackmail, etc., was a lapse in judgment that at least IMHO disqualifies him from leading one of the most valuable and strategically important companies on the planet.
For what it's worth, I believe the military would agree, that would lead to a pretty quick loss of security clearances.
The dude isn't running a McDonalds franchise, after all. Everyone is saying he "took responsibility". No, he admitted it after it was already public (which is no great act of courage), now the board needs to actually make him accountable. And unemployed.
Based on HN, a programmer who used company laptop for interview is total irresponsible unprofessional looser, no one should hire him. Whoever says something else is heavily downvoted.
CEO who gets honey-trapped by stripper agent ... is well meaning smartest person ever.
I think this is the wrong take. Being rich doesn’t suddenly reduce people’s humanity.
Assuming the spy angle to be true, He IS a victim as a target of a concentrated effort by a nation state to compromise him.
If all it took to compromise US national security was for a nation state to exploit the oldest backdoor in the human/male psyche, then I’d say there’s something wrong with the national security defense strategy.
Don’t blame the single point of failure, blame the design, maybe the designers.
It should never have been possible.
Having said that, Russia/China wouldn’t use this strategy unless it worked against most powerful men and their psyche.
I see a lot of comments like this, but I’m not sure people thinks he should’ve done. He cheated on his wife, that’s a bad thing. But let’s say he was single and got into bed with a spy, the situation wouldn’t be any better for I’m. So, what’s the actual criticism?
- he should’ve been more careful? How?
- he should never get into a romantic relationship because they could be a spy?
It's stockholder psychosis. Similar to AI psychosis. It's easy to convince the poor to defend you when you give them the illusion that their fortunes are riding with yours.
Because Huang's decision to invest heavily in CUDA and GPGPU for years and support it across their entire consumer and enterprise product stack, before even crypto, was impressively prescient.
Say what you want about the Altmans who lucked into a rising tide, but Nvidia has been doing hard engineering, consistently delivered, strategically brilliantly for a couple decades now.
Plus, the primary risk here isn't that secrets were exposed but rather that Huang attempts to hide the thing and makes himself vulnerable to blackmail. The facts leaking (three letter agency off the record?) nuked that possibility.
It is rewriting history to think that this was prescience.
They lucked into being the available useful product when the transformer dropped. This was not some megabrain multi year preparation they had been doing.
Jensen did attempt to hide the affair. That's why it was an affair. Even now he does not mention the fact that he sold billions of dollars of chips to his girlfriend's shell company, violating export controls and creating a NatSec risk.
I don't know about HN being millionaire-friendly (it probably is), but right now it looks like prop 40 (one-off tax of 5% on billionaires) in California is about to fail. Make of that what you will.
Not being facetious, but it is very possible that the person/people in the PR team who wrote it were familiar with similar situations or had a higher emotional intelligence.
Including at your own job? Or does it apply only to other people?
I also see this behavior quite a lot in people that claim that meritocracy doesn’t exist in our society. But they never go far enough to end point where they admit they don’t deserve their own job.
> Are you suggesting that so many other companies’ PR teams are simply incompetent
No.
I'm suggesting that a writers emotional intelligence and personal experience can show up in their writing. Especially, when the party they're writing for is receptive of the style/direction.
So they are top-flight PR and crisis management companies that are terrible at emotional intelligence, and Huang just got lucky that rather than hiring one of the apparently-universally-incompetent companies, Nvidia hired the one good one, which nobody elsewhere thought to hire before?
And that’s a simpler answer than Huang actually wanting a more direct apology?
The PR agency writes what one of the world's most powerful CEOs tells them to write. They can strongly advise sounding sincere, but it's not their decision. I would venture that the reason so many corporate and celebrity apologies sound fake is simply because the client doesn't want to do a real one.
Sounding sincere doesn't mean they actually are, but it does mean they didn't let their ego get in the way of it, which is more than can be said about many who would be caught in a position like this, rich or not.
The GP isn't saying Jensen took the wrong action, he's saying that this is a carefully crafted message from a top PR firm, and that the posters saying how its "genuine and heartfelt, I can see he really cares" are just eating it up. Those lines will become advertising for the agency as they land the next big client, like book reviews, but for the "publicly vulnerable executive" PR package.
Its not that Jensen is wrong, its a good play, the GP is just saying how sad it is to watch people eating this up like they think Jensen cracked open his laptop and drafted a note, pushed it up to the public web site, then forwarded it to axios or something.
There were lots of people involved in a carefully crafted rollout, the wording of which has nothing to do with how Jensen or his family are handling this. We will never know how he personally feels or how any of this really played out behind closed doors. For all we know he and his wife are talking divorce and shouting it out and this piece is just crafted damage control.
I can definitely see where you're coming from, but I think both can be true at the same time: Jensen regretting genuinely what happened and taking responsibility, while the PR department also steered and approved the message.
GP's take seems to assume bad faith, regardless of the message. Mu question was aimed at finding out what GP would actually consider a "genuine" response in this situation.
The problem is precisely that there is no reliable way to discern "genuine" from "competently synthesised".
Many social situations have this signalling problem -- in fact I would say it's the rule, and the exception is the case where it's rational to believe another person's signals because it's known to be costly to generate them.
> GP's take seems to assume bad faith, regardless of the message. Mu question was aimed at finding out what GP would actually consider a "genuine" response in this situation.
We have no way of knowing what he feels genuinely regardless of the words which doubtlessly were crafted by experts and approved by him. We do know his actions that caused this though. And the only real and verifiable thing will be future actions. Rest is fluff.
<For all we know he and his wife are talking divorce and shouting it out and this piece is just crafted damage>
...just like Bill Gates and Bezos, both were found to be "foolin around" behind the backs of their spouses. A pic of a young Russian babe appears on the net with Gates. Money = power and corrupts most of us. But to Huang's credit, it likely was not he that "chased down" this Chinese spy. The Spy was the one coaxing him into an affair.
It's sort of like 1st degree versus 2nd degree. If you kill a person in cold blooded murder it is 1st degree, but if you have a good reason, or, are "lured" into the act, it's 2nd degree. I would argue for 2nd degree in this case.
What do you genuinely believe that a person looses if they choose empathy? And what does a person win if they choose the opposite?
Let's say there was a false apology. And a person here on HN fell for it. What exactly have they lost by falling for it? Let's say a person here on HN didn't fall for it. What exactly did they win?
People get to caught up in being right and "not being a sucker" that they forget if it's worth their time and worry. It seems people are most competitive when stakes are the lowest and there's nothing to gain.
I think it is proper to have compassion. It is ok to be sad for him as well as his family. That doesn't mean you absolve him of consequence.
If he was goofing around trying to juggle a bowling ball and it slipped and smashed the coffee table next to him, I could feel sorry for him. I'd still expect him to pay for the damage.
Doing stupid things with a bowling ball and cheating on your wife and family are not the same level error. I can still feel sorry for him in his mistake. And I can still expect him to pay for the damage. In this case, it isn't paying for a new coffee table. And it isn't just writing a public letter.
The levels of trust he has violated are deep. Not just for his wife and family. He has been smoozing the President of the U.S. to influence U.S. foreign policy towards China. Do we trust this was for the best interest of the U.S.? The world? So that his company could make more money? Or for his personal gratification?
I believe in second chances. I think he can work to rebuild trust. But rebuilding trust doesn't mean you start over with 100% trust. Put him back in the mail room and trust him with small things. Then trust him with increasingly important things as he earns that trust back. Maybe someday he might earn back enough trust to regain his current position. Ok, maybe don't restart him in the mail room. But don't restart him where he is.
--
All of the above is a mostly useless opinion. I am not on the board. I am not in any position to dictate anything about the situation. It is mostly none of my business. I just offer it as some food for thought for anyone trying to form their own philosophy. Consider compassion with consequences.
Uh, Do you feel sad for his family or sad for him, because I think he's a real POS. We men should lead by example. He's a leader, but behaves like a weak coward.
And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.
What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. Expel the wicked person from among you.
Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
That’s an odd take. The CCP was literally doing their job, just like US and other spy agencies also engage in espionage. Whether or not they “should” be doing so is a geopolitical debate that it’s easy to moralize about but difficult to change.
Huang had many responsibilities that he failed to live up to. Sure, he’s a victim of sorts, but he also failed everyone.
I've heard Bill Gates had two affairs. It's hard for me to be sympathetic for his actions. Jensen being targeted by a spy agency and fell for it could be a little more nuanced than that. I want to learn about what exactly happened. I'm not denying his failure in any case.
Bill Gates is a good example. If you’ve heard him talk about it it’s pretty clear he still loves his ex wife and would get back with her if he could. People make mistakes. People with that much money and power are dropped into situations most of us can’t imagine.
I’m so tired of the rote cynicism. If he doesn’t apologize, it proves a sociopath billionaire who cares for nobody. If he apologizes, it proves he’s a sociopath billionaire who cares for nobody. I’m reminded of Life of Brian.
We can’t know what he really thinks, but as apologies go, this is a good one. And it’s not healthy to see every piece of evidences as further proof of one’s own unshakable beliefs.
Responsibility is only mentioned in the context of who to contact regarding this. It’s basically do not bother my wife I cheated on, she only found out about it from the news like all of you.
Responsibility implies consequences and as far as I can tell there are none so far, other than minor embarrassment.
Haha, wow, yeah I'm sure the reason for all this was that Jensen couldn't find a therapist. Aside from assuming he cheated for mental health reasons (not sure where you get that, maybe he just wanted some strange), the man could literally buy an entire therapy practice for his private use or just put one on $250k retainer to be available at all times. I would be surprised if they didn't have coaches / mental health professionals that attend to him all the time anyway.
Sometimes people cheat, especially when they have lots of offers, money, free time, travel, and time away from family. It feels good, and gives a sweet rush of dopamine, and is part of men's biological wiring and selected for over the eons.
It only feels good if the act of cheating is what get you off, which, then again, is another problem entirely.
And please, no, cheating is not part of “men’s biological wiring”. Not one is “wired to cheat”. It’s a choice. A conscious choice. We have enough will power to stop ourselves at any moment regardless of whatever bullshit “wiring” theory you might have. It was his choice and he chose poorly. Simple as that.
It always astounds me how billionaires (of all people) can be the stupidest people on Earth while also being the most powerful people on Earth.
Yes, crazy how ignoring the evidence for all of human history to support your theory means that otherwise the most rational, educated, successful people in the world are complete buffoons.
On the other hand if we are partially controlled by biological drives, it explains these patterns we repeatedly observe, despite the consequences. I posit Jensen is not among "the stupidest people on earth" but that the skills that allow him to head a trillion dollar company are separate from the have-an-affair part of his biology. Of course, you could be right, maybe Bezos, Gates, Juang, Clinton, and others are just really stupid.
See the TV series The Americans for a fictional depiction.
You know product ABC has ongoing yield problems from an outside source. Wait for moment when Person Z looks burnt out/stressed/etc and walk through emotional available "you can talk to me about anything" routine.
Don't pry about specific topic but wait until Person Z volunteers some vague conflict at work you know is the yield issue and try to gently redirect conversation using your insider knowledge Person Z isn't aware of to specific area you're interested in.
His PR firm definitely does, this piece gives no indication of how Jensen is actually feeling or his EQ. I assure you he didn't draft this and push to a public website. There are literal investigations of national security implications, as well as billions on the line over this. This is the most strategic and controlled rollout of a story you will ever read. The wording is designed perfectly to minimize impact to stock:
1. take responsibility (by saying you take responsibility, hopefully there is no actual fallout from this).
2. Admit wrong doing (people hate someone who tries to cover up)
3. Talk about how much you love your family and how wonderful they are and you would never want to hurt them (relatable).
4. Write in a tone of sincere regret to avoid any public backlash (stock price depends on this).
I feel like with all the stuff coming out and congress and Nvidia both looking into it, it was only a matter of time before the facts became public and he's getting ahead of it this way.
And honestly, we are all human and all of us make mistakes. Having an affair is usually something that should be resolved privately, in your personal life, not in public. The business context of this affair is clearly something he wasn’t aware of at the time and punishing him for being deceived seems extreme.
A lot of people cheat on their wives and husbands and are still trustworthy. Bill Clinton didn't auction off the nuclear launch codes to prevent the Lewinsky scandal from becoming public. A person being unfaithful to their partner is in and of itself not a deathknell, so it's less of a risk to other aspects of that person's professional life than it might have been in decades past
Sorry do you make an oath to your partner or not? Cheating on someone after explicitly promising to be a faithful partner is as low as it gets and burns trust forever.
Good point. Most people do make oaths to our partners. "Till death do we part."
But then we culturally decided divorce doesn't count. "Till death do we part" became "Till death or major or minor inconvenience or whim do we part." Then culturally we decided that marrying an oath-breaker is just Tuesday.
Or we just culturally decided that a centuries-old tradition didn’t mean we had to forever put up with something we only later found out we’re unhappy with. Marriage should not be a life sentence nor an unbreakable commitment.
Funny things, the rules we make up to justify nonsensical behaviour.
OP only mentioned him cheating on his wife, so my comment was related to that: his infidelity to his wife
The entire scandal is a scandal to be sure. That he cheated on his wife with an intelligence operative and whatever happened beyond that is a problem and needs to be investigated and dealt with
But this thread was about him cheating on his wife full stop. He could have cheated with anyone else and it would not have been a problem. The cheating wasn't the problem, it was who he cheated with and what happened downstream
Heh, good example, because that was the primary justification for trying to remove him from office over that, and turns out not to be such a good reason.
The argument around the Clinton impeachment was that he had lied under oath. Yes, the circumstances of his relationship with Lewinsky were shocking and got all the press but the charges brought against him in the House was that he had lied in previous sworn testimony in a deposition where he said he hadn't cheated on his wife by having sex with anyone else
> Bill Clinton didn't auction off the nuclear launch codes to prevent the Lewinsky scandal from becoming public.
I mean... he did lie through his teeth to make it seem better, so not exactly trustworthy no. That he didn't sell the nuclear codes doesn't mean people trusted him after that.
The people who didn't trust him after that didn't trust him before and would never have trusted or liked him. On the whole people didn't care about what he did with his dick and he ended his presidency just fine
Maybe that's many people, but I can think of at least myself who liked him before that and didn't trust him after, so I think there's more to it than you suggest. It also followed his wife around in her political life, and she was asked about it constantly, or is she in the category of "didn't trust him before and would never have trusted or liked him"? To this day his affair and the lies thereafter are the top of what's talked about for his whole 8 years in office.
Moral absolutism has shown itself to be largely incorrect.
I’m not religious at all, but one of our oldest texts in modern circulation says “let he without sin cast the first stone”- we’re all guilty of something after all, and while some poeple have no moral compass at all, some people rationalise ”a little” indecency or indiscretion.
I’m not defending him, but it doesn’t tell me he is not trustworthy in totality, its just distasteful and I don’t like it and I think this behaviour is worth some social punishment.
But the knee jerk maximum-cancel for any offense is a problem. CEOs are not saints. Very few people are. If our standard for corporate leadership is not just to be good at business but also to be above reproach personally… who’s left?
It’s an unfortunate fact that humans are generally fallible and imperfect. Jack Welch cheated on his wife. Many other execs have. It sucks, but the world would not be better if there were a career death penalty for doing so.
Literally nobody would be left. This is big issue with our cultural moment right now. In the past, it was understood that all humans are fallible and worthy of forgiveness. The standards seem to be so unrealistic right now that it is making everyone miserable. This is not to say there should not be accountability. But there should also be proportionality and second chances.
If every C-level in the world is morally suspect, we have a bigger problem. Seriously, is your claim that being a bit iffy is a pre-requisite for the job? That's a pretty damning statement about capitalism if that's the claim.
They aren't saying "maximum cancel", they're just saying maybe this guy shouldn't be running one of the most consequential companies in the world when he's more interested in dopamine farming.
At the end of the day, asking a billionaire to resign his role, so he can sail off into the sunset on his yacht and have all the affairs he wants for the rest of his days isn't really on any scale of punishment or cancelling I'm familiar with.
Somehow we live in a world where with great power comes no responsibility or accountability, and it's quickly becoming too big of a problem to handle.
I think I'm with ModernMech on this one. It's too easy, I think, to focus on the idea of CEOs being forced to resign as a "career death penalty" to the degree that we lose sight of how well-off the people we're talking about are. Jensen Huang's wealth is estimated at over $150 billion dollars. That's more than most corporations in America. If he never worked another day in his life, never earned another cent of interest on investments, lived to be 100, and spent $5M per day for the rest of his life, he would die being worth over $80B. I understand "death penalty" is metaphorical, that he probably wants to work, yadda yadda yadda, but goddamn, let's not pretend that is an actual penalty.
(For that matter, let's not pretend that if he resigned now he wouldn't be able to immediately pick up work again if he wanted to. Because, to reiterate, he is worth over $150 billion dollars. He could start a new company. He could start ten new companies. He could buy an island and build a secret underwater volcano lair to start a new career as a Bond villain. Assuming he doesn't have a secret underwater volcano lair already, of course.)
Nobody is saying he can't retain most/all of hi billions and do something else. But, leading a multi-billion dollar business should come with some minimum expectation of morality. If for nothing else because being an immoral turd opens you to extortion.
I really don't get the sentiment that flying around the world to cavort with a Chinese spy is ok-ish. That's insane.
You might have picked a better example than the guy who systematically hollowed out the American institution that was GE by evangelizing cartoonishly corporatist short-term MBA culture then leaving when the bill came due and washing his hands of that destructive movement that he propelled to the forefront of American business. There are tons of great leaders who did hurtful things in their private lives. I don't think that Jack Welch is exemplary of that first criterion (unless you count a legacy of financial engineering and grinding employees into pulp as great leadership).
I suspect most folks like myself are simply not a fan of cancel culture. If he leaked secrets I would agree, he needs to leave. Cheating on his wife? It is not great at all. It is worthy of evaluating that person as a business partner but canceling them? No way. Humans have been cheating on each other since the beginning of recorded history.
I don’t know why so many people jump so easily to canceling someone.
Absurd, internet-only opinion. He's led Nvidia to a 4 trillion market cap and then cheated on his wife? Is it shitty, yea. Does it have literally anything to do with business? no
> Does it have literally anything to do with business?
Yes. The cheating is only a small part of it, although it does confirm he's a piece of trash and thereby throws into question his capability as a leader. More seriously, he potentially colluded with this person, an agent of a foreign government, to bypass export restrictions. The investigation that will follow exposes Nvidia very badly.
It could still be an issue if his wife divorces him, takes a significant portion of his stock and decides to sell it off. The NVIDIA board would have to consider that possibility.
I'm all for having CEOs take responsibility. But unless it comes out that he actually leaked anything of substance than it really doesn't matter that he cheated on his wife from the business perspective.
It could still be an issue if his wife divorces him, takes a significant portion of his stock and decides to sell it off. The NVIDIA board would have to consider that possibility.
The worst she can do is sell them off. And at something like 1.75% she would own that is not likely to damage them seriously. Besides firing him or not, he already has the stock so it would accomplish nothing.
There was always that risk, whether or not he had an affair. People get divorced for all kinds of reasons and you have no idea how she felt about their marriage before she learned of the affair. You also do not know how she feels about the affair, she might have some kind of private (i.e. none of your business) arrangement with him because she sees enough value in keeping the marriage intact.
Also keep in mind that divorce is not some formulaic thing. Most divorces are settled out of court and a hypothetical settlement could have terms that allow him to keep those shares in exchange for something else (e.g. maybe he agrees to pay her the cash value or agrees to a large and permanent alimony structure). I doubt the Nvidia board is worried about this issue considering the other, more immediate problems here (like the fact that his mistress is a Chinese spy).
One could certainly question his judgment. As CEO of Nvidia, he should have recognized that his position made him an exceptionally valuable target for foreign intelligence operations
>the first time in a long time that I see an apology letter written from a business person in the name of the company that actually admits wrongdoing and has accountability
Yeah, but how often is a "business person" (a) clearly personally, entirely responsible for a mistake like this and (b) is a significant enough "business person" for such a public letter to even matter?
To put it another way, Huang's apologie is how someone in his position would address a situation like this. It's not very impressive to hear a CEO make a personable apology for making such a personal mistake. Like, how else would it read?
Like, it wasn't that long ago that Bill Gates' got called out for similar things and made a similar apology (https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-apologizes-to-founda...). Of course, Bill Gates isn't at the center of the world's entire economy while getting caught sleeping with a Chinese spy, so there wasn't as much scrutiny on him.
Responsibility means taking consequences when you/your company failed or you took missteps. Too often I read of "taking full responsibility" as an empty phrase that invalidates said ownership of responsibility.
It's the least important part of it. Huang's conduct, and even the romantic affar, are not important.
The corruption in terms of PRC GPU import policy and Huang's relationship with the US administration are important.
This is not a prurient sexual scandal, it's a major corruption and infiltration scandal in one of the most important companies in the world. Huang personal travelled with the US President and advised him on regional strategy, and gave him tens of millions of millions of dollars in gifts.
Huang can handle it correctly and be as contrite as he wants but it won't take away the geopolitical impact created by the operation.
I listened to Jensen give a rousing speech extolling the benefits of hard, important work that you enjoy at a university more than a decade ago now. It wasn’t until many years later that I’d realized he’d shamelessly lifted the idea from Daniel Pink’s Drive (worth the read btw). I’m now wondering if his comments that his brains were what attracted his wife to him and him to his wife were perhaps less than honest as well.
by the way - are we allowed to debate whether the alleged honeypot was in fact herself an intelligence agent of one sort or another, or was it just the (somewhat justified) background level of ‘she / her company is a Chinese national / has significant Chinese ownership whether private or public, and therefore subject to China’s version of our US national security letters.
I just was seeing very little advance-neutralizing of 1950s Red Scare talk in these comments.
How did they met? If it was a spy operation, then it will be an interesting case study to learn how the spy agency managed to connect these two without raising suspicion, and the information can serve as a warning/education.
This reminds me of President Clinton's apology to his wife and the nation, except in this case, it's a letter so we can't be sure he even wrote it himself or feels the sentiment expressed therein. In any case, it matters not to the price of GPUs.
This is a strong worded letter from a person with balls.
Yet this person immediately demonstrated political obedience before trump, calling AI "super intelligence" immediately when trump renamed it and multiple times in his twitter.
I suspect nothing will change at Nvidia although Jensen does not have any sort of "super shares" so he can easily be deposed by the board if they really want to. But why would they.
"To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust."
I hope he told them in person. I don't understand why this is mentioned inside the NVIDIA press release.
If you're a spy you can be whatever they want you to be. You like abstract geometry? Oh my god I have a PHD in abstract geometry. Would you like to come back to my room and read my thesis? You're so funny! People don't normally get my abstract geometry references!
Unlike a "regular" affair. The spy may have used many tactics available to her including knowing all his weaknesses, having the ability to manipulate his relationship with his wife by her state hacking the phones etc. With enough resources you can probably manipulate anyone to cheat or at least 99% of the population.
I wonder if this was all planned out. Perhaps NVIDIA can't spearheaded by someone unimportant and dispensable like Jensen Huang. Watch him get replaced by someone from a very specific ethnoreligion.
It boggles my mind that you think Singapore and China are the same thing. Because why? Lots of ethnically Chinese people? Is Taiwan and China the same thing too then?
I can't believe the naivete of people in this thread taking a well crafted statement to be a definite representation of how he feels. How the hell would you know? It feels direct and authentic? Yes, that is why the personal crisis management agencies are paid a load of money - to make things seems genuine.
The only thing verifiable so far is what he did.
Watch what he does in coming days, not what he says today.
holdingunsteady | 17 hours ago
Subject: A message to our company
Body: "I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.
Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA's Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company, and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy."
janalsncm | 17 hours ago
readthenotes1 | 17 hours ago
There was, no deflection "this is not who I am", No blaming the spy.
He owned up to his mistakes
adriand | 17 hours ago
reverend_gonzo | 16 hours ago
It is one person, and your enemies have all the resources at your disposal.
It is very easy to say, “I would never do X” but when you literally have a nation trying to get you do X, I presume it’s a lot harder.
Noaidi | 16 hours ago
asadotzler | 12 hours ago
yodon | 17 hours ago
I don't mean to belittle the letter, but Jensen's PR firm undoubtedly helped with the letter and undoubtedly had advisors who specialize in this.
shermantanktop | 16 hours ago
He's a big time CEO and his company is impacted by how well he handles it. So of course there are PR/crisis people around. They specialize in making psychopaths look human.
But leaders are where they are because they make good decisions - their character does matter. Calling in the image-fixer types to clean up your mistakes is easy mode.
TheOtherHobbes | 16 hours ago
Can we assume this was a one-off because she was uniquely persistent and persuasive?
shermantanktop | 12 hours ago
I think his answer was solid and seemed genuine. Doesn’t mean I think he’s got good judgment generally, but at least this was not a shitty thing to say.
TheOtherHobbes | 16 hours ago
Anyone who believes he personally agonised over this alone in a darkened room is being rather naive.
charlieyu1 | 16 hours ago
benzible | 16 hours ago
Even if he didn’t know she was an intelligence asset, it’s hard to believe he didn’t at least suspect Megaspeed was a conduit to China. If you read the press reports, there were a ton of red flags.
Nvidia has also said he’ll stay on as CEO while the investigation runs. I can’t think of many CEOs who would survive this, let alone without taking any time off.
greenchair | 16 hours ago
Noaidi | 17 hours ago
8note | 17 hours ago
i guess we'll actually find out if he gave away useful nvidia secrets in years from now, but by then the tech might not matter all that much to Nvidia.
he was cheating on his wife before now, and Nvidia was doing just fine
madaxe_again | 16 hours ago
jjtheblunt | 17 hours ago
is it pre consumer level trading, with institutional trading happening on different time windows?
Noaidi | 16 hours ago
tcdent | 16 hours ago
Noaidi | 16 hours ago
Noaidi | an hour ago
goodcake3963 | 17 hours ago
MiroslavPokorny | 17 hours ago
b--l | 16 hours ago
yoyohello13 | 9 hours ago
93po | 13 hours ago
kridsdale1 | 10 hours ago
muddi900 | 8 hours ago
DeepLogin | 17 hours ago
intunderflow | 16 hours ago
vhiremath4 | 16 hours ago
DeepLogin | 16 hours ago
vhiremath4 | 16 hours ago
rc1 | 16 hours ago
> admitted to having a romantic relationship with a suspected Chinese spy
markdown | 16 hours ago
He admitted to having a relationship with a woman.
There's a separate question of whether the woman was a spy.
avazhi | 16 hours ago
I mean, it's pretty clear it was a spy. Have a look at WSJ, NYT, etc. It isn't tabloidish to say so.
rc1 | 16 hours ago
Whether tabloid, or completely inaccurate, Nvida make reference to it and that there is an independent investigation. It is reasonable for people to wonder what it is about.
creatonez | 16 hours ago
DeepLogin | 16 hours ago
I mean they are literally the same article in essence. One is from the official source and the other is paywalled with nothing worthy added.
The choice is clear.
mmooss | 16 hours ago
kittikitti | 17 hours ago
mbgerring | 17 hours ago
The US National Security blob certainly cares, but not because of the infidelity.
mbgerring | 16 hours ago
yeeetz | 16 hours ago
solyin | 16 hours ago
yeeetz | 14 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 15 hours ago
shermantanktop | 16 hours ago
dnw | 17 hours ago
theandrewbailey | 16 hours ago
*Crash in progress.
jryan49 | 16 hours ago
hackernud3s | 16 hours ago
nwhnwh | 8 hours ago
rossant | 7 hours ago
calvinmorrison | 17 hours ago
jackweirdy | 17 hours ago
JoshTriplett | 16 hours ago
Technically, they collect the company salary, and then the CIA reduces their pay by the same amount. (They have to be indistinguishable from ordinary employee, including to payroll.)
At one point, they couldn't keep any excess if the company pay was higher. Now, they're apparently allowed to keep an amount that doesn't significantly exceed comparable federal pay.
dcrazy | 11 hours ago
jackweirdy | 5 hours ago
Infiltrated is not necessarily the right word. Company executives know, but few other employees do
derektank | 16 hours ago
calvinmorrison | 16 hours ago
nozzlegear | 11 hours ago
dcrazy | 11 hours ago
thinkingemote | 6 hours ago
It's part of normal business operations not some secret illegal shady kick backs operation within some kind of spy movie.
There's no need to secretly infiltrate a company when the company is working happily with you. People underestimate how close big business and 3 letter agencies actually are in many cases.
Traster | 6 hours ago
And that's not even talking about the less clandestine methods of just ringing their General Counsel and saying "Hey buddy we're the US government we need X Y Z".
danpalmer | 17 hours ago
I'd expect a board to fire a CEO over this, so he will have to be critical to the business, more than a normal CEO is critical, to survive. The market reaction to him going would also be interesting. Seems like the markets are starting to figure out what the value is here.
dingaling911 | 17 hours ago
teknologist | 17 hours ago
Tadpole9181 | 16 hours ago
danpalmer | 16 hours ago
These aren't all entirely drop-in replacements, there are some trade-offs involved, but there are many companies with alternatives that could take Nvidia's market if they stall.
andsoitis | 16 hours ago
Which of those sell chips at the Nvidia caliber sell to AI model builders in the US (not use internally)?
IncreasePosts | 14 hours ago
SJC_Hacker | 8 hours ago
teknologist | 8 hours ago
jsw97 | 17 hours ago
mjr00 | 16 hours ago
The one big thing I will given Huang credit for is not going all-in on blockchain and recognizing it as a bubble. NVidia never really pivoted from their core business/customers to support crypto miners, unlike what they're doing with AI.
javier2 | 16 hours ago
est31 | 16 hours ago
Nvidia boosts AI a lot. They are the central bank of AI. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673098
mjr00 | 16 hours ago
est31 | 16 hours ago
altmanaltman | 16 hours ago
mjr00 | 16 hours ago
altmanaltman | 14 hours ago
SXX | 16 hours ago
Even when AI boom was imminient but 10 times smaller 2-3 years ago they did not invested heavily enough and Nvidia went all in.
I have no clue what percent of that decision making was Huang, but all the competition leadership was certainly incompetent.
So at least he did built company with a good leadership. Its a fact. Even if I personally dont like Nvidia or its products.
xiaoyu2006 | 16 hours ago
hcta | 16 hours ago
that is generally what it looks like when someone is smarter than you
mjr00 | 16 hours ago
Maybe. This is also what everyone said about Elon for a long time, though.
CamperBob2 | 16 hours ago
N_Lens | 7 hours ago
khazhoux | 6 hours ago
I mean: dude is smart. Everyone just wants to deny him that because he’s now an anti-immigrationist and they can’t stand the thought of him being both awful and smarter than them.
smrq | 6 hours ago
The trap he and many other smart idiots fall into is believing that having a high degree of expertise in one area qualifies you to speak authoritatively in unrelated areas. These days maybe you could call it Claude-smart: pairing situational brilliance with unwarranted confidence at other times. The really properly smart people I've met are good at tempering their statements with their degree of certainly based on their own qualifications.
khazhoux | 5 hours ago
solyin | 16 hours ago
mjr00 | 16 hours ago
Jlagreen | 7 hours ago
Kudos | 6 hours ago
iambateman | 16 hours ago
andsoitis | 16 hours ago
He's the visionary behind what they do and the person who influences industries around him to make it real.
IncreasePosts | 15 hours ago
I made a boat load of money off of the Tesla IPO(and then holding for 12 years) but I only invested because I thought they wouldn't be a successful car company but would produce a bunch of patents that would be valuable when licensed to the big auto makers.
Obviously I got that wrong, but my investment still worked out - and I still have friends and family coming to me for investing advice because I made the right move but for the wrong reasons
mrheosuper | 13 hours ago
But CUDA, Ray tracing acceleration, DLSS? It's not luck anymore.
musha68k | 12 hours ago
Frieren | 7 hours ago
So, he is responsible for the crypto and AI bubbles? If tomorrow AI crashes and Nvidia share value with it would that make Nvidia CEO an idiot?
CEO worshiping is going too far.
RussianBot9580 | 7 hours ago
Jensen is extremely hands on. If he is replaced NVidia is cooked.
bigDinosaur | 6 hours ago
RussianBot9580 | 59 minutes ago
Intel is apparently fine (it's not fine) with a rotating cast of CEOs.
You are right though. At least whoever is trying to oust Jensen is nice enough not to bring out the usual tools.
plaidfuji | 16 hours ago
hoppp | 16 hours ago
bluegatty | 16 hours ago
God god, no.
There's very little he could ever accidentally tell someone that would matter that much.
Other than handing over very detailed schemas etc, there's almost nothing important he could tell them.
Maybe some future ideas and plans, maybe some government things about the Administration, it's small peanuts.
Nvidia is an operational success, their IP is embedded within deep layers of know how and expertise.
He's the 'father' of that org, he set the tone, they like him there.
Nvidia would risk being an Intel without him.
danpalmer | 16 hours ago
bluegatty | 16 hours ago
denkmoon | 16 hours ago
tyre | 9 hours ago
If he knew / suspected she was a spy, yes, absolutely. If she was given access to confidential information, yes, absolutely.
If he thought it was a romantic relationship, fine, that doesn't affect me / NVDA / America.
Obviously he should stop now that he knows! But if he didn't at the time, you know, I think I can still trust him to make computer chips.
fauigerzigerk | 8 hours ago
"Bad judgement" is a tool used in political rhetoric used to blame someone when there's nothing of any substance to blame them for.
However, all of this changes if it turns out that he gave his lover's company any kind of preferential treatment or that she was involved in China related lobbying.
This is what the investigation will focus on in my opinion. If they find anything at all then he will have to resign.
moregrist | 16 hours ago
> There's very little he could ever accidentally tell someone that would matter that much.
I think the practical implications matter a lot less than the PR and legal ones.
If the stock price plummets tomorrow and doesn’t recover, the board may have to act.
Similarly, if the right governments start asking hard questions, the board may have to act.
This is likely going to be a slow-rolling shit show for a while. At the very least, it’s legitimate grounds for one or more congressional investigations, which may start here but could go anywhere.
fuzzythinker | 15 hours ago
bluegatty | 14 hours ago
Most investors don't care.
Unless there was some 'materially detrimental disclosure' this is just tabloid.
The fact that Elon has a literal harem, Tesla has $500M loan from Chinese banks with all sorts of conditions etc.
Elon literally does Zoom calls with Vladimir freaking Putin.
I think this is a nothing burger.
skippyboxedhero | 15 hours ago
The crime here isn't giving secrets to the Chinese, it is helping them evade export controls. Again, this is something that Nvidia and Jensen has been investigated on repeatedly. If he knew that Megaspeed was a front for China, quite hard to deny given that Alice Huang seems to have brought Chinese execs to every meeting with Jensen then it is very bad. And yes, the stuff that Jensen would have said would have been very useful because, I assume, the inference is that he would have been helping them evade sanctions.
The very best case from here is that the board fires him.
bluegatty | 15 hours ago
If that were true, then it's fair game, but I don't think that's what is going on.
US gov has not stated they are targeting him.
Also, there is a gigantic difference between 'avoidance' and 'evasion', like with taxes.
We'll see.
mandeepj | 14 hours ago
Do we know that yet for sure? There's a closed-door US congressional hearing scheduled for nov/18
bluegatty | 12 hours ago
I think it's very unfair to suggest they are targeting him, when there isn't even mention if it.
He's obviously entangled in this so he'll at least be the subject but beyond that it's not fair to say.
It would have to be 'very, very serious' for the US Gov under a super pro-AI/pro-business agenda to take down their #1 CEO over something indirect.
Musk has direct meetings with Putin for gosh sakes.
mandeepj | 11 hours ago
You mean over the phone?
bluegatty | 10 hours ago
mandeepj | 10 hours ago
He admitted having talks with Putin during 2023/2024.
His Tesla China can help him circumvent any investigation or questioning from US authorities
hnlmorg | 6 hours ago
This would have generated extra profit for Nvidia. So I doubt they'd care unless the US government chose to take legal action against Nvidia. And that's unlikely to happen under the current US administration.
jwilcoxson | 3 hours ago
agnosticmantis | 16 hours ago
Conscat | 15 hours ago
InsidiousWombat | 15 hours ago
N_Lens | 7 hours ago
atq2119 | 10 hours ago
ElProlactin | 8 hours ago
Have you considered how many billions of dollars of Nvidia sales were through entities diverting chips to China?
While there's no doubt that this is not the majority of the company's revenue, it's also not an insignificant amount.
If you had to pin Nvidia's success on one thing, the honest answer would be "right technology, right time." Without AI...And the questions about how sustainable that market is are now being asked by the market.
dchest | 7 hours ago
i-chuks | 3 hours ago
ElProlactin | 2 hours ago
swyx | 6 hours ago
its always been well known. its that line item of suspiciously high sales to singpapore. its never been a real concern.
ElProlactin | 2 hours ago
Except it has been. There are people in multiple countries, including the US, Singapore and Taiwan, facing lengthy prison sentences for this. In the US in particular, violating export controls is a game you only play if you're looking for years of free federal accommodation.
Examples:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-authorities-shut-down-majo...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/chinese-national-and-tw...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-man-arrested-smugg...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2d9y18g73o
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/25/taiwan-ch...
https://asiatimes.com/2026/11/taiwan-to-criminalize-nvidia-a...
unsupp0rted | 8 hours ago
What changed today?
Every major leader and CEO has obvious blind spots. They're geniuses at X but idiots at Y.
Look at all the great CEOs with ridiculous political views. It's fine: they do have vastly superior judgement, just not in areas where it doesn't directly affect their business.
For the NVDA CEO, it happens to be a woman. That puts him in probably the 80-90% of great leaders on whom that works.
rsynnott | 5 hours ago
ksec | 15 hours ago
For over a decade CUDA was nothing but a money and silicon wasting function that brought in very little extra revenue for the amount of company resources it uses. And arguably it started even before CUDA with Cg. And I will say another unpopular thing, they are in hardware business, apart from the past 1 - 2 years which they are enjoying massive success, for most of the past 30 years hardware business are 10x tougher than Software side.
Most CEO would have given up. Paul Graham invented the term to describe it, Founder Mode.
And for another note about comments elsewhere in the thread that Open AI is what brought up the current AI craze. Nvidia was already selling to OpenAI via introduction of Elon Musk in 2016.
I seriously doubt Nvidia would have been anywhere close to what they are today without Jensen's Leadership.
ahartmetz | 6 hours ago
stickfigure | 14 hours ago
musha68k | 12 hours ago
He's been consistently showing up and proving himself over decades to be core to Nvidia's success - core as in leadership. I would look to sell my Nvidia shares without knowing him being at the helm.
ergocoder | 10 hours ago
The bigger threat is Jensen selling all his stocks at peak (if he was fired). Then, this dude with $100B in the bank could've easily started an NVIIA competitor. He has every component needed for a success. This is why NVIDIA's board would never let this guy go.
cowlevel | 9 hours ago
mschuster91 | 7 hours ago
mschuetz | 8 hours ago
carlos-menezes | 17 hours ago
No, you do not.
tetrisgm | 17 hours ago
iLemming | 16 hours ago
petit_robert | 16 hours ago
Looking at her picture might provide a hint.
axegon_ | 17 hours ago
Betelbuddy | 16 hours ago
Yajirobe | 17 hours ago
shoobiedoo | 16 hours ago
wmf | 16 hours ago
flowerlad | 17 hours ago
tsunamifury | 16 hours ago
markdown | 16 hours ago
est31 | 16 hours ago
anonymous908213 | 14 hours ago
[1]https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/shanghai-to-s-f-flig...
[2]https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/11/apple-united-airline-pu...
ppsreejith | 10 hours ago
From the book: Apple in China
stingrae | 8 hours ago
flowerlad | 16 hours ago
nemomarx | 16 hours ago
It's hard to say from the outside what the goals would be - pushing him in certain directions, extracting intel, etc.
flowerlad | 16 hours ago
For this it would be much easier if the Chinese spies banged Nvidia engineers.
interlocutor | 16 hours ago
stickfigure | 14 hours ago
tyre | 9 hours ago
thenthenthen | 2 hours ago
augment_me | 17 hours ago
DragonStrength | 16 hours ago
stingraycharles | 16 hours ago
This letter is just part of the ceremony of events that is expected to happen afterwards.
dannyw | 16 hours ago
There’s been recent power spats (JD Vance’s tweet, Susie being replaced by Steve Bannon, and probably more infighting).
As much as I want to believe there’s greater 4D chess and motivation, I assign a modest probability to someone going “fuck it”, opening a massive short on NVDA, and then leaking it just for the love of insider trading. Rather than anything strategic or real.
jryle70 | 16 hours ago
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/coldplay-kiss-c...
Jensen Huang's case is even more high profile because of the spying accusation.
stingraycharles | 13 hours ago
Noaidi | 16 hours ago
She was also a Chinese spy.
> It's 2026, we literally had a human child trafficking ring with multiple presidents involved and it didnt lead to anything or move the needle on stuff.
He admitted to the affair. No one has admitted to being a pedo. Much less forgivable.
Jlagreen | 7 hours ago
There could be only 2 options: 1. There is no national security issue -> all a nothing burger 2. US government looked the other way -> THE REAL SCANDAL HERE
anon7725 | 16 hours ago
Would that count?
fastily | 16 hours ago
dolebirchwood | 16 hours ago
fastily | 16 hours ago
fc417fc802 | 16 hours ago
dinkumthinkum | 16 hours ago
DragonStrength | 16 hours ago
Jlagreen | 7 hours ago
So how much of a security issue is there if the government hasn't cared so far?
techblueberry | 16 hours ago
fwlr | 16 hours ago
bluegatty | 16 hours ago
reenorap | 16 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 15 hours ago
Trump himself relaxed laws on chip exports to China.
P.S. If you have any other liquidity available, maybe 'buy the dip'?
method_capital | 16 hours ago
kraken_cult | 16 hours ago
method_capital | 16 hours ago
dieselgate | 16 hours ago
twodave | 16 hours ago
plant-ian | 16 hours ago
plant-ian | 16 hours ago
iambateman | 16 hours ago
I’m not sure if this will ruin Jensen’s life or not, but it’s a good opportunity for us all to remember that the short-term high is usually not worth it.
voidfunc | 16 hours ago
His likely ex-wife is about to be very rich tho.
dannyw | 16 hours ago
How much of NVIDIA’s sales and revenues is actually to China? Would that be allowed to happen still?
caminante | 16 hours ago
If the camel had a back, then it was already broken, IMHO.
lotsofpulp | 16 hours ago
caminante | 15 hours ago
What? [0]
You just touch someone's lower back, throw an arm around their neck, and share seats for one at lounges with platonic friends?
[0] https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/jensen-huang-rom...
mlmonkey | 10 hours ago
crossroadsguy | 9 hours ago
caminante | 5 hours ago
Giving a source to someone who hasn't done any checking and asserts a falsehood is not inhumane.
lotsofpulp | 3 hours ago
caminante | an hour ago
"shallow dismissals" are against HN guidelines [0]. Worse, the article dates the paparazzi photos pre-2026.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lotsofpulp | an hour ago
Given the celebrity status of Jensen, it seemed unlikely that scandalous photos of him would be publicly distributed and it not already have been a huge story.
It is possible the scandalous pictures (not just him walking in front of her or sitting next to her) were already floating around, and I am not up-to-date on celebrity scandals, and the wife was already planning a divorce, as you claim.
But without those photos, it could be the wife is finding out about the affair just now.
I still have not seen the pictures you are referring to, but I’m not that interested to look for them either.
caminante | an hour ago
> I still have not seen the pictures you are referring to, but I’m not that interested to look for them either.
I figured you were acting in bad faith because the article addressed your question and you didn't mention you skipped the article.
Not mentioning is categorical bad faith-- another HN guidelines faux pas. Then, you double down with "not interested."
Please don't be toxic to others, too.
ungovernableCat | 15 hours ago
And there’s cheating on your wife and having the feds write up intelligence reports about it, the Financial Times running an article about it and having to send a public admission to every single employee at your company including your two kids who you employ there.
caminante | 14 hours ago
Don't kid yourself about the reason he wrote the letter. He's only writing this because of national security optics and buries it in a shit sandwich format.
gizajob | 9 hours ago
This video of Lex Friedman and Jensen hanging out and drinking in Taiwan came out 3 weeks ago. Jensen and his wife seem pretty happy together in it. So today’s news is genuinely new news or they’d already gone over it and sorted it out. Jensen seems to do a lot of booze fuelled entertaining…
caminante | 5 hours ago
Why?
They'd been photod publicly since 2024.
nozzlegear | 11 hours ago
She was already rich
briansm | 8 hours ago
ergocoder | 11 hours ago
But I agree with you that both of them or one of them will be very rich because they will get to sell at the top without upsetting the market.
OH NO WE HAVE TO SELL BECAUSE OF THE DIVORCE NOW. BEFORE THE DEMOCRATS NUKE AI COMPANIES. OH NO. [insert croc tears here]
You can google Luo Pai (from Enron) to learn more.
mmmBacon | 10 hours ago
crossroadsguy | 9 hours ago
itemize123 | 9 hours ago
Betelbuddy | 16 hours ago
rustyhancock | 16 hours ago
But I'm not sure how hard it would be to resist a honey trap.
I mean a state sponsored enterprise to get you to have sex with someone (or one of a group of people).
Getting him to have sex with her was literally this woman's day job and she was probably told it was a matter of national security.
It is quite absurd once you think about it.
olyjohn | 16 hours ago
ungovernableCat | 15 hours ago
This is just deeply embarrassing. His adult children both work for his company so they’d also receive this exact memo.
crossroadsguy | 9 hours ago
0x073 | 10 hours ago
It's easy for a professional with china backend to play with your feelings, much easier if you have normal family life or worse.
Is the woman likable it's just a matter of times. (Independent of the gender)
If this happens within a week, I would agree, if this happens within months the gender you like can makes your heart jump if you are I a very long term relationship.
shakow | 4 hours ago
The guy has enough money to have sex parties with the prettiest girls on Earth every single night until the end of his life, I'm pretty sure resisting a state-sponsored honeypot is not the hardest thing ever.
giwook | 16 hours ago
chasd00 | 16 hours ago
giwook | 14 hours ago
Tarq0n | 7 hours ago
hackernud3s | 16 hours ago
People continue to under-value the spank bank. SMH.
reenorap | 16 hours ago
TheAlchemist | 15 hours ago
AI and chips are, for better or worse, considered a national security matter.
krainboltgreene | 11 hours ago
ramraj07 | 11 hours ago
TheAlchemist | 10 hours ago
Spy is rather easy to define though, and it hardly depends on what the State Department decides (although of course, they can call anybody a spy, for political or other reasons, I agree on that).
muddi900 | 8 hours ago
It is perfectly reasonable to suspect similar claims of catching "spies".
bigDinosaur | 6 hours ago
Will you next claim that the police have never really prevented a murder?
muddi900 | 16 minutes ago
Not only that you think the reporting is not reliable because of the reporter without pointing out what is wrong with the actual report.
But I'll humor you.
- Here is the judge calling the US government the co-conspirator in the same case: https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/07/27/judge-quest...
- The Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot:
- https://www.rawstory.com/plot-to-kidnap-michigan-governor/
- https://reason.com/2022/04/08/gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-pl...
- The liberty city seven: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna22249838
- The cleveland bomb plot: https://truthout.org/articles/cleveland-anarchist-bomb-plot-...
- Sami Osmakac: https://archive.is/NINN0
---
These are all the cases that had some investigative reporter poking, or the jury/judge seeing through the bullshit. Here is initial reporting on recent cases. The "Iranian Agent" sent to "Assassinate Donald Trump"(emphasis mine):
>Asif Merchant traveled to New York in June for the purpose of meeting with men he thought he was recruiting to carry out the killings, even paying a $5,000 advance to two would-be assassins who were actually undercover law enforcement officers, federal officials said
https://www.ksat.com/news/politics/2024/08/06/pakistani-man-...
The woman arrested for "plotting to bomb the NY state capital":
>According to the criminal complaint, an FBI confidential source drove Bowie to the Home Depot in Rensselaer and gave her $200 to buy bomb parts. It’s not clear if they told her what items to buy.
https://cbs6albany.com/news/local/feds-say-capital-bombing-t...
---
This is not some fringe idea even here on HN. Here is a clear fed trying incite people to commit violence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629430
This common in most internet forums. It is called fedposting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fedpost
I hope all of these sources are of sound character by your standards. Now I would ask you; can you give me an example of the FBI catching a terrorist that:
a) They did not recruit, or b) Did not provide materials, or c) did not provide the target
AS for the police in the US, they are indeed very bad at preventing crime. Though that is due to multiple reasons, mostly policy related, rather than institutional malfeasance like the FBI.
p_j_w | 15 hours ago
It might if he loves his wife.
reenorap | 14 hours ago
m10i | 13 hours ago
reenorap | 13 hours ago
Are you saying this was an accident and he didn't have control over himself?
If he doesn't have control over himself and he isn't accountable for his actions, then how does that factor into him being the CEO of the most important globally strategic company in the world? Are you saying that he is capable of making actions that he isn't in full control over? Does Nvidia need to have a CEO that doesn't accidentally make mistakes like potentially giving secret information to Chinese spies?
kridsdale1 | 11 hours ago
4ggr0 | 4 hours ago
meaning that women are more likely to be robots? wasn't aware of this, gotta try doing turing tests on women around me.
happytoexplain | 10 hours ago
It is, of course, not an automatic fact. The context here is emotions, so it makes no sense to point only to agency as proof of an emotional "fact". Such a thing doesn't even exist.
crossroadsguy | 9 hours ago
ryanjshaw | 8 hours ago
happytoexplain | 3 hours ago
MaxHoppersGhost | 12 hours ago
v3ss0n | 10 hours ago
tudelo | 10 hours ago
pprotas | 9 hours ago
thepasch | 7 hours ago
happytoexplain | 10 hours ago
Lamentably, people don't have cartoon emotions. Life would be so much easier if they did.
m10i | 13 hours ago
I agree, though.
___
edit: Funny enough, there's a House of Cards scene that goes over this exact scenario. Francis is sleeping with Zoe the reporter (they're both using each other for the perks/their own agendas). When Claire finds out, her response is something like "you know you must not embarrass me (publicly) with this", which Francis already knew because he would never do that to Claire... she doesn't say those exact words, but that was the vibe.
DANmode | 11 hours ago
m10i | 10 hours ago
mmmBacon | 10 hours ago
yoyohello13 | 10 hours ago
throwaway89864 | 10 hours ago
bathtub365 | 9 hours ago
throwaway89864 | 8 hours ago
dannyw | 9 hours ago
bigstrat2003 | 8 hours ago
tgv | 3 hours ago
mapcars | 5 hours ago
pbkompasz | 10 hours ago
SecretDreams | 16 hours ago
I think what you've just described is "post nut clarity". I'm sure he knew what he did immediately, but the gravity of the consequences might've taken a bit to catch up to him.
jmyeet | 11 hours ago
I think it says a lot about what wealth does to you. A lot of people dream of wealth but I suspect many would be less than thrilled by the reality. It must be incredibly isolating. You constantly have to fend off people who are trying to use you. It must make it harder to trust anyone. A lot of ordinary life experiences are now barred to you.
For example, a lot of executives in these trillion dollar companies are forbidden from flying commercial for security reasons. Nobody would think about missing the airport and everything that entails. In most places it's an objectively awful experience but it's still a shared experience. Going to a private FBO by helicopter to take a Global 7500 direct to your destination is something only a tiny portion of the population can relate to.
So I think this kind of isolation makes such wealthy and/or powerful people more susceptible to this kind of thing because, in a way, they're starved from a lot of human interaction and experiences in a way most of us can't understand (and wouldn't want).
What really is the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth? You kind of have to have sociopathic tendencies (IMHO) because such wealth simply cannot exist without the impoverishment of millions of people. And for you it's kind of a golden prison.
[1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...
bee_rider | 10 hours ago
cowlevel | 9 hours ago
I might not like airport lines but I'd hate to be forbidden from going through that process. I also couldn't just walk down the street to get a pizza. Or go out dancing at night. Or to play board games. Or take a random walk or bike ride around the city. If I was rich and everyone knew it, I'd have to live in a bubble.
That's different from "comfortable rich" where you own your own home and a retirement fund and live mostly normally.
bathtub365 | 9 hours ago
gizajob | 9 hours ago
hnfong | 8 hours ago
Well, not necessarily. Jensen Huang was famous for going to random food stalls in Taiwan and eating street food.
It might be harder and riskier, and I get what you mean, but it's not like you actually can't do those things.
Also maybe it's not necessarily a billionaire thing, but more like a fame thing. Billionaires tend to get famous just due to being rich, but I'd imagine a random person wouldn't recognize 80+% of the people on the billionaire list if they saw the billionaire chomping down a pizza in the local pizza place.
GolfPopper | 10 hours ago
djray | 10 hours ago
And it really doesn't help that all these tech bro billionaires think Ayn Rand was a good writer with some fine ideas.
cowlevel | 9 hours ago
gizajob | 9 hours ago
agent_turtle | 6 hours ago
jmyeet | an hour ago
The last paragraph of my comment basically calls these billionaires sociopaths because you have to be to enrich yourself off the backs of making millions of people poor. How is that a defense of billionaires?
My point is that the "prize" isn't even worth it. It doesn't make you happy. Actually there's one way it seems to make them happy: by enjoying the suffering of others and having the power to influence people and even governments. But to what end?
gizajob | an hour ago
>So I think this kind of isolation makes such wealthy and/or powerful people more susceptible to this kind of thing because, in a way, they're starved from a lot of human interaction and experiences in a way most of us can't understand (and wouldn't want).
You’re saying here that they’re “starved” of the human contact most of us take for granted (for example in standing around an airport and being squeezed into economy). This is thus a cause for heart-bleeding.
Ingvar Kamprad flew economy and drove an old Volvo. Being extremely wealthy doesn’t have to come with this kind of isolation. If Sergei Brin was flying economy, most of the plane wouldn’t realise who he was and the few who did would be like “oh look it’s Sergei Brin, weird.”
ryanjshaw | 8 hours ago
happytoexplain | 10 hours ago
jxramos | 10 hours ago
tetrisgm | 16 hours ago
Barrin92 | 16 hours ago
Secondly if he's willing to lie to his wife and family he's obviously willing to lie to anyone for much less. It tells you something about the character of a person, how can anyone trust a cheater?
randyrand | 16 hours ago
But it’s usually don’t ask don’t tell, not explicit lying.
To give a specific example, I’m currently traveling in Vietnam, and an entire floor of my allegedly “5-star” hotel (the most expensive in the city) is reserved for prostitution. This is a smaller city with almost no foreign tourists. The rest of the hotel operates as normal, with a fancy breakfast served everyday 6-9am.
b--l | 16 hours ago
kridsdale1 | 10 hours ago
ncr100 | 10 hours ago
dokyun | 7 hours ago
saberience | an hour ago
yoyohello13 | 9 hours ago
greaterdela | 7 hours ago
https://foxandlion.pub/analysis/traitors-among-us-who-is-vul...
> A balanced, patient, and motivated Machiavellian can wait while they cultivate what they need. They may take 10 years to act; they may well wait 20 years. When the strike comes, it will come out of the blue – and their tracks will already be covered.
tgma | 16 hours ago
An "exposure" of affair[1] could very well be the best coverup: "couldn't control my dick" is the ultimate plausible deniability. Timing also makes sense. Better open an investigation and get it closed while this Congress is still in power, as the next one is going to be more in bed in LLM companies than hardware.
[1]: The other party is overtly a customer, not some random individual.
Betelbuddy | 16 hours ago
the_duke | 16 hours ago
Someone leaked intelligence assessments to the New York Times.
Maybe this was just a regular leak ... but ...
Jensen/Nvidia has not been playing ball with other parts of the AI industry and the administration, pushing heavily against export bans and promoting open source models/companies , which is clearly against the interests of SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic.
This is conspiracy theory territory, of course, but I wouldn't be too surprised if this was an intentional leak.
icegreentea2 | 16 hours ago
Consider the timing of the reporting - the first report from NYT comes out on Nov 6th - just enough time after mid-terms. Consider that follow up reporting clearly identifying Rubio as the author of the in-administration warning memo.
JD and Rubio (and who knows who else) are clearly trying to find ways to distance themselves from Trump without being completely cut to pieces, now that it's completely clear that the Trump brand is toxic.
mandeepj | 13 hours ago
It came out on Oct/29 instead; the date is there in the URL itself if you find the article behind a paywall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/politics/nvidia-china-...
icegreentea2 | 12 hours ago
I still think its possible the leak is due to administration infighting, but definitely less evidence now.
b--l | 15 hours ago
I think everyone with a brain did.
It was done intentionally to send a message to him and to wrap him over the knuckles.
Great people all round.
metalspot | an hour ago
> The close relationship between the president and Mr. Huang has impeded efforts to clamp down on Nvidia’s chip sales abroad, current and former U.S. officials said.
> This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance
https://archive.is/lwBvW
the most likely scenario here is that the faction that supports export bans leaked the initial story to try to blackmail Huang into dropping his support for free trade, he refused, so they released the package to damage him as much as possible. likely route, based on the named sources, is senate or house intel agency staffers, using elected officials and classified briefings as cover.
NY Times, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman would identify this as being firmly located in the anti-Trump faction, so unless it is some super devious reverse play, which seems unlikely for Trump, it is a criminal leak.
xyst | 16 hours ago
His fate will probably follow the Boston tech company CEO that got caught cheating with HR executive at a Coldplay concert.
ionwake | 16 hours ago
I know others have said this is a carefully written statement, but in my culture I would feel it would be rude not to keep it private? Sorry if this sounds autistic.
yeeetz | 16 hours ago
butternet | 16 hours ago
ethanj8011 | 16 hours ago
nonfamous | 16 hours ago
antonymoose | 15 hours ago
Perhaps this is a too big to fail scenario?
ergocoder | 11 hours ago
1. Jensen is a billionaire who doesn't really need to work. This gives him a lot of leverage. He isn't desperate to make a living.
2. Imagine he is fired, unloads all stocks, and starts a new competing company. This would cause NVIDIA a much bigger issue, 10000x bigger.
3. Also, this means Jensen would get to unload the stock at the peak. Democrats won and is about to be way more responsible than Trump. Cue Luo Pai from Enron.
4. Dating a customer isn't really a big deal. Did her company get a preferential price? Treatment? I'd guess that her company doesn't make a dent in NVIDIA's revenue.
5. Her being a Chinese spy isn't Jensen's fault. If anything, he is a victim.
bmitc | 11 hours ago
He cofounded the company over 30 years ago. He isn't just a rich person with a desk job he doesn't care about.
xhevahir | 16 hours ago
urams | 16 hours ago
barbacoa | 16 hours ago
vigilantpuma | 16 hours ago
Conscat | 15 hours ago
m10i | 14 hours ago
jdiff | 13 hours ago
m10i | 12 hours ago
It would not be considered appropriate for Jensen to be having an affair with someone underaged. That is the current subtext.
jdiff | 7 hours ago
jacquesm | 14 hours ago
m10i | 13 hours ago
... only if she hates the word 'girl', I guess. Which we don't know. Personally, I know many grown women (30's, 40's+) who are perfectly alright with the word "girl". It is contextual, and often times cultural (i.e. your background).
No offense, but this is why it can often be pernicious to do drive-by virtue-signaling online.
> Unlike some other Americans Huang seems to at least have a preference for people who are no longer minors
What does this even mean?... do you think what you're implying is exclusive to Americans? Honestly that's what it sounds like.
vigilantpuma | 13 hours ago
m10i | 12 hours ago
But this isn't the workplace slack. And again, correcting is one thing, but only if you're unequivocally correct, which the above poster is not.
To be honest, it seems what they've mainly accomplished is cause a distraction from the substance of what the person was trying to convey.
vigilantpuma | 12 hours ago
You are also not “unequivocally correct” so perhaps you are applying a standard to others you can’t live up to yourself.
m10i | 12 hours ago
And instead of a clarification, you replied with a straw-man:
> perhaps you are applying a standard to others you can’t live up to yourself.
I never claimed to be "unequivocally correct”.
umeshunni | 16 hours ago
TheAlchemist | 16 hours ago
Unless the CEO happens to be the CEO of what is considered one of the most important company for national security and future, and his private life involves somebody who appears to be a spy for the biggest competitor for world hegemony. Then it's kind of big deal for everybody.
ricksunny | 6 hours ago
thank you for maintining the WW1->Cold War era great-game / hegemonic frame. Nation-states love you for it.
glitchbot | 16 hours ago
wrexx0r | 16 hours ago
It also sounds like it was known something was going on with foreign agencies and Jensen, do this puts it out in the open and clears the air.
Lastly, if anyone was trying to use the affair as leverage over him, the best way to break the leverage is to just come out and spill the tea yourself (so to speak)
peeters | 16 hours ago
- Is this person susceptible to blackmail from the secrets they're keeping?
- Has this person performed a notable breach of trust?
- Has this person displayed a notable lack of judgement?
Even when the alleged misconduct is private, #1 is of particular concern. Airing it out is an obvious way to lessen that specific concern. The allegations here raise the other concerns too, however.
Keyframe | 16 hours ago
Bedding an adversarial entity's agent in a regulated field is a serious matter (for the company) with potentially serious consequences. It can lead to executive decapitation, it can even lead to / criminal investigations if the operative bypassed export controls using executive proximity.. the fallout can be great and widespread.
It can also be a nothingburger and an amusing page six divorce story in the end where we all read how rich cry as well. Time will tell. What's telling of where this might lead and how serious it is, is that it was US federal government that warned about this.
vigilantpuma | 16 hours ago
hoppp | 16 hours ago
However if he cheated with a chinese spy then he was targeted by China and that raises this to a national security risk.
bluegatty | 16 hours ago
Brybry | 16 hours ago
> “Our relationship, our interactions, have been related to Megaspeed, and it was all completely normal and not unusual,” [1]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-29/nvidia-ce... => https://archive.li/ljGPF#selection-1731.0-1731.119
hackernud3s | 16 hours ago
Not long I suspect, we don't expect much from tech CEOs. Nobody even remembers when Bezos cheated on his wife.
ahartmetz | 16 hours ago
Everyone has some preferred types, but same body, different person is pretty creepy.
RussianBot9580 | 7 hours ago
pimeys | 16 hours ago
elorant | 16 hours ago
ChrisMarshallNY | 16 hours ago
I never got to (or wanted to) see the images, but, by all reports, he ... er ... had nothing to be ashamed of.
peri-cl | 15 hours ago
Technically, it was a saw. The Saudi King was mad at Bezos because of a column in the Washington Post (which Bezos had purchased).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/21/amazon-bo...
> "Saudi experts – dissidents and analysts – told the Guardian they believed Bezos was probably targeted because of his ownership of the Post and its coverage of Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi’s critical columns about Mohammed bin Salman and his campaign of repression against activists and intellectuals rankled the crown prince and his inner circle."
ChrisMarshallNY | 15 hours ago
bradlys | 16 hours ago
Jensen is as powerful as any politician, if not more so. Same with Elon, etc.
If you don't want that then get rid of the ability for such individuals to amass so much power.
gfrttttttq | 15 hours ago
ionwake | 5 hours ago
octoberfranklin | 14 hours ago
That's the real reason that this affair is a problem. It made him blackmailable.
golly_ned | 14 hours ago
It's because the woman is a member of the PRC, and it's being made into a national security issue, regardless of whether he announces it or not.
The strategic thing is for him to come forward first.
m10i | 14 hours ago
Because it's already public. This is called "getting ahead of/seizing the narrative"
kwisatzh | 13 hours ago
[Deleted] | 11 hours ago
not-kinsale-joe | 6 hours ago
anuptalwalkar | 16 hours ago
jpgvm | 9 hours ago
It's not a nothing burger but if it results in Jensen leaving Nvidia that would be a travesty IMO. We shouldn't push people out for making a mistake, especially one that should in any other circumstance not become public.
cladopa | 16 hours ago
It is their job. You take decisions that are worth billions, you influence people that take decisions that are worth billions, and affect their countries.
They are going to study you for years. Your personality type and that of the people around you. Your weaknesses. Your problems and that of your family.
They will employ the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world to create the perfect Honey trap.
Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.
It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.
fantasizr | 16 hours ago
nunez | 15 hours ago
giancarlostoro | 16 hours ago
But another reason why as someone of such a high caliber you should never be alone with other women. Always have a bodyguard or something, surely you can afford someone…
lukan | 16 hours ago
I mean, each to his own, but there are times when I would not want a bodyguard involved.
giancarlostoro | 10 hours ago
andsoitis | 16 hours ago
That would preclude having a meeting with a female unless there's a bodyguard but not need one when you're meeting with a guy?
That would be quite weird.
Just keep your dick in your pants.
ChrisMarshallNY | 16 hours ago
rubyfan | 16 hours ago
cozzyd | 15 hours ago
InsidiousWombat | 15 hours ago
c0nducktr | 14 hours ago
slashnode | 16 hours ago
neya | 16 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 15 hours ago
method_capital | 15 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 15 hours ago
neya | 15 hours ago
Lol, don't take out your anger for not being rich at random people on the internet. Affairs are common across diverse economic profiles of people, not just the rich. All that anger for nothing.
Forgeties79 | 15 hours ago
Yes affairs are unfortunately common but this whole honey pot thing is ridiculous. That doesn’t suddenly make me sympathetic to cheating.
c0nducktr | 13 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 11 hours ago
BoingBoomTschak | 15 hours ago
fuzzythrowaway2 | 16 hours ago
I say this as someone who's family was torn apart by an affair, by a failure to update expectations. Well, that was the excuse; the issues were deeper, the affair was a focus-sink and an excuse not to address them. I wonder if that's the case here, too.
(I should make clear that I think Jensen Huang sucks for other reasons.)
14u2c | 15 hours ago
muglug | 13 hours ago
When men suddenly get more attention from women, they're more likely to cheat. Interestingly, women who earn Oscars are more likely to keep their husbands than other actresses.
https://newrepublic.com/article/121108/oscar-curse-myth
ricksunny | 7 hours ago
fair observation and sad society’s current script still demands it be posted under anon throwaway account.
jrflowers | 14 hours ago
method_capital | 16 hours ago
bonoboTP | 16 hours ago
corndoge | 16 hours ago
kshacker | 16 hours ago
lol I am not the richest man, not even close and nothing physical happened. But I once got into a parasocial relationship after decades of monogamy and no dalliances. Never planned for it, and in hindsight years later don't know what happened. And it was so cathartic.
overfeed | 14 hours ago
kshacker | an hour ago
selcuka | 16 hours ago
Obviously the exec could have paid for the same service himself, but that wouldn't be called matchmaking (and it's not what most people seek).
bonoboTP | 15 hours ago
hamdingers | 15 hours ago
This does exist as a service and is considered by many to be the oldest profession in the world.
tauwauwau | 16 hours ago
yread | 16 hours ago
afavour | 16 hours ago
> Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.
She’s a woman, not a sweet from Willy Wonka’s factory. If you find yourself thinking “wow, she couldn’t be more perfect, it’s like she’s too good to be true” then perhaps as the CEO of a billion dollar company with national security concerns you should consider hey, maybe she is too good to be true? Maybe look into that?
All else aside, if you find yourself being tempted, you make sure she isn’t around you. The CEO compensation more than makes up for your sacrifice.
ip26 | 16 hours ago
Obviously the target has agency, I don't deny that, but it seems blindingly shortsighted to think it's as simple as "be suspicious of supermodels who are into you".
Capricorn2481 | 15 hours ago
reassess_blind | 15 hours ago
ip26 | 15 hours ago
jltsiren | 14 hours ago
overfeed | 14 hours ago
I agree with you, but, brain chemistry is weird, and "wouldn't cheat on them" is easier said than done and requires a lot of discipline in the heat of the moment when the situation arises and your own hind-brain and hormones are fighting you. A blasé attitude won't prepare you foe the sucker-punch.
I've seen grown people with multi-decade relationships throw it away because they got a tiny bit of extra-marital romantic attention, and the thrill regressed them to teenagers. In the majority if cases the cheaters' amors weren't interested in a long-term relationships.
Capricorn2481 | 5 hours ago
I don't even care that much about what Jensen did, I don't even know what his marriage is like. It wouldn't bother me if he stayed on Nvidia. But people are defending him in a way that comes off less like "we can all make a dumb mistake on the wrong day" and more like "all men want secretly to ditch their wives, and his mistake was doing it with a spy."
afavour | 13 hours ago
steve_taylor | 16 hours ago
peri-cl | 16 hours ago
jayd16 | 15 hours ago
stephc_int13 | 16 hours ago
ip26 | 16 hours ago
Perhaps as far as to say, the only suspicious thing about the perfect agent would be the lack of anything to be suspicious of.
rtpg | 16 hours ago
testbjjl | 16 hours ago
corndoge | 16 hours ago
we will never know
mosura | 16 hours ago
The people in here acting like they would be immune to all this are kidding themselves.
Capricorn2481 | 15 hours ago
What in the world are you talking about? Most successful people you know get honeypotted by their high school crush? I don't know anybody like that. How did you determine it was a honeypot and not just a regular divorce?
> The people in here acting like they would be immune to all this are kidding themselves
Maybe speak for yourself.
antonymoose | 15 hours ago
That principle works for anyone with means to seize.
skhr0680 | 15 hours ago
bilbo0s | 14 hours ago
Believing that is the first step to a compromise. This principle works for anyone period.
Just think everyone should consider the possibility that no one really needs the head of R&D. For good intelligence agencies, the guy who does low level IT will do nicely thank you very much.
No one, man or woman, grows closer to being a 10 as they age. So if you work for some of these critical companies and your perfect man or woman shows up, you should be on your guard.
anal_reactor | 13 hours ago
TBH if I was higher up the chain of command, I'd actually give less fucks. If I have a mortgage I cannot afford to lose job or money so I'm on guard because I'm one failed marriage away from homelessness. But if I have ten million dollars to my name, and a Chinese spy shows up then what exactly do I have to lose? If the company kicks me out then good riddance, I can already retire to perfect comfort and nobody can take away the memory of spending a year with a 10/10 partner.
TZubiri | 13 hours ago
anal_reactor | 12 hours ago
WheatMillington | 15 hours ago
InsidiousWombat | 15 hours ago
You just need to know few people to qualify for "multiple times"
tenacious_tuna | 14 hours ago
bilbo0s | 14 hours ago
Just saying that being a startup founder is not particularly rare or special the past twenty years. You don't even have to do particularly well with your startup. People probably get targeted for a measly 750K exit. I think on HN we get a twisted opinion of what is big money to most people.
HaZeust | 14 hours ago
>"a measly 750K exit"
No kidding, lol.
helterskelter2 | 14 hours ago
You say this like 2/3 of divorce is the fault of women, but IME they usually have good reason to do so.
afavour | 13 hours ago
TZubiri | 13 hours ago
missedthecue | 12 hours ago
shdjhdfh | 12 hours ago
poilcn | 13 hours ago
Divorce implies involvement of a government institution and women feel like a fish in water when it comes to bureaucracy, while men avoid it
That's why in same-sex pairs women are twice likely to call cops and file a lawsuit regarding house abuse and men half as often
com2kid | 12 hours ago
A: It hasn't been true for multiple generations. The # comes from when divorce was first legalized and there was a huge boom in divorces right away.
B: The number of failed marriages is dramatically increased by "frequent fliers" who get divorced multiple times.
College educated adults have a 25% divorce rate.
College education adults only have a 15% chance of their 2nd marriage failing.
irishcoffee | 14 hours ago
faangguyindia | 14 hours ago
mosura | 14 hours ago
And let’s face it, nerds are especially vulnerable.
bardan | 13 hours ago
Maybe he only knows one person who "won the startup lottery"
hansonkd | 15 hours ago
InsidiousWombat | 15 hours ago
Timon3 | 14 hours ago
Even if the situation really did happen multiple times, it's entirely possible that something else caused the divorces, e.g. people who came to money like this could turn out to be bad parents/partners on average. I mean, seems like there's plenty of examples of riches frying people's brains right now...
rafram | 13 hours ago
Revanche1367 | 15 hours ago
v3ss0n | 15 hours ago
nozzlegear | 12 hours ago
v3ss0n | 10 hours ago
jongjong | 14 hours ago
This is kind of necessary with AI taking over jobs. If the situation gets worse, poor chad men will have to find themselves a rich mistress (or client) to support them financially. It might become the biggest non-tech industry. There will be entire teams of people working on just one rich tech guy's wife and competing against other teams to seduce her. The last remnant of a free market.
cgomez | 14 hours ago
pseudohadamard | 14 hours ago
On the chance that I might one day become the CEO of a very important company, could you forward me my dream girl in advance? Thanks.
PH.
zarzavat | 14 hours ago
surgical_fire | 14 hours ago
People in here are probably salty that they are not valuable enough to be targeted by some sexy Chinese spy.
in_cahoots | 13 hours ago
- anyone with enough money to be targeted like this has enough money to get a prenup.
- most states do 50-50 custody these days unless one parent gives up their rights. So any child support would be decent, but not life-changing. Doubly so if the guy is rich enough to be targeted, in which case he's also rich enough to hire a good lawyer. The woman in this scenario has less money, so she can't get as strong a lawyer unless she's gambling that he'll have to pay her legal fees.
- With 50-50 custody the woman can't fly out of state to raise the kids, the court frowns on uprooting them from their hometown / school system.
The only way this makes sense is if the guy relinquishes all his rights to the kid, in which case he's hardly a hero either.
This isn't even considering the ridiculous notion that this woman has a man on the side just waiting for her to get knocked up with some millionaire's child.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 11 hours ago
arjie | 10 hours ago
xboxnolifes | 16 hours ago
OtherShrezzing | 16 hours ago
I think most normal people have tried Doritos at some point, which are the flavour-equivalent of what you’re describing here. It’s food designed to satisfy your human needs and desires.
jcranmer | 16 hours ago
But if you're married, with kids, and you're willing to throw that away to chase someone else, I'd argue you have a serious personality flaw going on there.
ksec | 16 hours ago
There is no chase here. It is the other way round.
jcranmer | 16 hours ago
Jensen wasn't an innocent victim, he was still an active, voluntary participant.
cataphract | 15 hours ago
It's not that easy to rebuff approaches from women you're very attracted to; it's much easier to avoid having the opportunity come up in the first place. I think at the very least the moral judgment should be accompanied by some empathy.
ksec | 15 hours ago
I am going to guess Jensen isn't even looking for beauty, although that is certainly part of the deal. But someone who is also business savvy, understands technology, smart and somehow well connected to AI as well as a business partner in some sense.
And perhaps it is worth pointing out the obvious, this isn't a simple beauty trap, it is a pys-op.
Although there is part of that thinks. Could Jensen knew of this all along. And it was just a way to get business going.
c0nducktr | 15 hours ago
plasticchris | 14 hours ago
appplication | 15 hours ago
jcranmer | 15 hours ago
But that's not really a defense of the behavior, and it's perhaps a sign that we should stop valorizing billionaires.
WalterBright | 13 hours ago
Nothing unethical about it.
fxwin | 15 hours ago
What if Huang wasn't married/with family? Would he just never get to form close relationships after becoming successful?
FireBeyond | 14 hours ago
sidewndr46 | 13 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Healing_(South_Park)
blini-kot | 13 hours ago
exactly, although I would double down that that is precisely the kind of personality being selected for by the system
Teever | 16 hours ago
That meant that the only way to attack these people was a soft attack in the form of social interactions or social media and as such it's always struck me as extremely foolish for these kinds of people to let themselves be preyed upon in this manner.
Like they have teams of people who keep them physically safe, but not mentally safe, so in the age of social media a motivated attacker can, with enough cleverness[0][1] directly reach the mind of someone who otherwise couldn't be reached.
Why does that happen?
I think it's not so much because they're juicy targets that entities with unlimited resources can meticulously target like you describe but because people like Jensen Huang or Bill Gates are very technically competent they probably lack the social skills so they're too often the Michael Scott to the Todd Packer in situations like this[2] and when a hint of opportunity to be sexually promiscuous is presented to them they seize on it without thinking of the consequences.
Think of the married blue collar dudes who pick up bored divorcees at some dive sports bar after watching the big game and then drive home drunk, juggling multiple mistresses and a family life with relative ease for years.
A manager like Jensen Huang may be able to handle multiple business units but he can't manage a single mistress handling his unit because that just isn't his skill set.
[0] https://gwern.net/doc/www/web.archive.org/5e00c6993450adc597...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2010/06/08/127564512/for-the-love-of-goo...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Ci_oopVTk
fuzzythrowaway2 | 15 hours ago
jacquesm | 15 hours ago
Teever | 14 hours ago
The point I'm trying to make is that people at this level can and often do have absolute physical security but have almost comical[0] lapses in psychological/mental security that lead to the kinds of things that you're describing.
The severity of this issue makes me wonder why it seemingly isn't accounted for appropriately in security threat modelling. You'd think that that the handlers for a dweeb like Huang or Gates would take the appropriate steps to mitigate the threat, if only by adopting harm-reduction principles and getting their CEO an in-house honey pot to proactively fend off external threats.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP4d74Qk3ac
SaucyWrong | 14 hours ago
I’m not sure somebody with an infatuation and ultimate authority over you is something a security person can work into the threat model.
Teever | 13 hours ago
> Public opinion regarding Klein's alcohol consumption reached a boiling point in December 2001 when he visited the Herb Jamieson Centre, a 249-bed homeless shelter in Edmonton while intoxicated. An argument ensued between Klein and homeless men sleeping in the hallway who were denied a bed because they had been drinking.[153] During the argument Klein told the men to get a job, which was rebuked by some of the men who stated they had jobs but could still not afford housing.[154] An argumentative Klein was shuffled out of the centre while he tossed money at a homeless man on the way out.[154][155] According to biographer Don Martin, Klein continued with his normal schedule in the following days, and when rumors of the event began to pop-up amongst the media, Klein was unable to remember the event.[154] After the event Klein called a press conference and emotionally acknowledged he had an alcohol problem and pledged to curb or stop his drinking. He called alcohol "the devil" and an "awful beast", but did not go as far as acknowledging he suffered from alcoholism.[156] Klein admitted to being intoxicated at many moments in his life, visibly during his 2001 general election party, a month earlier when he introduced former US President Bill Clinton, and at the public memorial for Calgary sportscasting legend Ed Whalen.[154]
As I understand it Klein had a security guard / handler whose job was to keep the public safe from Klein as much as it was to keep Klein safe from the public but apparently he wasn't able to dissuade Klein from drunkenly throwing money at a homeless person and telling him to get a job that night.
I would imagine that it is an interesting dynamic being the handler for a person with a lot of power, there's an interesting level of self-awareness needed by the person in power where they have to understand that they are wilfully giving some of that power up to a person that they can trust to make these judgment calls when needed and give them the feeling that they can do so when needed without long-term consequences to their personal lives.
A way to do that is to pay them well enough so that they don't depend on you to feed their family so that they can always choose to be the person that has to put their foot down and tell you what you need to hear when you need to hear it even if you don't want to hear it in that moment.
But at the end of the day it comes down to the ability of the CEO to wilfully give personal power to another person, and time and time again that seems to be single largest failing of the people in these positions -- they just can't do that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ralph
bamboozled | 16 hours ago
kelseyfrog | 16 hours ago
So just hire women? Sounds like an incredibly simple solution to being security compromised.
jacquesm | 14 hours ago
kelseyfrog | 14 hours ago
darth_avocado | 15 hours ago
fxwin | 15 hours ago
darth_avocado | 11 hours ago
fxwin | 8 hours ago
greatgib | 15 hours ago
samus | 15 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 15 hours ago
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
yubblegum | 15 hours ago
Lol. Jensen Hueng's case was likely figured out in a smoke filled room somewhere in the bowels of some intelligence agency in China, agents passing around pictures of Jensen while puffing on cigarettes. One them tosses a picture on the table and just says 'he always wears that leather jacket'. The others nod, and one them sucks in the air while shaking the ashes into an ashtray, 'We have a few candidates in mind'.
thatsabadlook | 15 hours ago
jrflowers | 15 hours ago
“It takes the machinations of an intelligence apparatus more powerful than you can comprehend to make a rich guy cheat on his wife” lmaooo
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/49712639/49ers-owner-jed...
crazygringo | 15 hours ago
This is really not true. Spies are just people, there aren't that many of them, and they don't come "customized". The overlap of effective spies and "the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world" is very close to zero.
What you are describing is conspiracy-theory thinking or the kind of stuff you see in James Bond movies. Not real life.
Obviously spies exist, like here, but she's just... a normal woman who has a job as a spy and tried to seduce him and succeeded. He may have turned down five others who failed miserably in their attempts.
And sure they try to put together a psychological profile of the person, but that's also not really rocket science, and it's going to be pretty basic stuff. "Your weaknesses" is not going to be that exciting. Maybe he's really into expensive wines. It's not like he has a secret gambling addiction.
So let's just keep this reality-based and not fantasy-based.
Betelbuddy | 15 hours ago
A nerd thinking a woman is into them...that is the fantasy...No she did not happen to bump into you in the elevator, and no she is not there to attend the same AWS conference that you... and oh no... she does NOT happen to like the same SciFi you do ...and no ...you are not ohh so funny...
That
rdtsc | 15 hours ago
The overlap doesn’t have to be that great. The spies are also not random you don’t get random spies matching with random CEOs. They just have to have enough available agents and enough info on the target, physical proximity, and other factors to attempt something to work out. In many cases it’s not something that will be in the news either. It will be just a failed attempt, or just an affair.
dannyw | 15 hours ago
Even the most powerful people can be really dumb.
blini-kot | 13 hours ago
"even"? Barring the fact that power makes you dumber, those in power at least for the last ~40 years or so had been actually selected to be dumber
mr. Huang case here is a shining example
ai_critic | 13 hours ago
This is literally a state actor running sexpionage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexpionage).
jdiff | 13 hours ago
ai_critic | 13 hours ago
Again, this isn't some low-level clerk that just needs a handjob or some Grindr kompromat--this is the CEO of the second largest company in the world by market cap.
Is it the assertion was that they'll do research on you (which is why having a gambling problem, large debts, or lying during a clearance interview is an issue)?
Is it the assertion that they'll pick a very pretty woman instead of some plain-looking one (which is why historically the NKVD recruited from theater and ballet schools)?
The "Hollywood fantasy" is real, it just happens in a vanishingly small set of cases.
For a truly bizarre version (even stranger than this!), see the case of Shi Pei Pu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Pei_Pu).
jayd16 | 15 hours ago
WalterBright | 13 hours ago
vinyl7 | 13 hours ago
WalterBright | 12 hours ago
SecretDreams | 11 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 15 hours ago
emmelaich | 14 hours ago
mandeepj | 14 hours ago
In that case, you also have access to practically every resource on the planet to run a background check on the person of your interest. He didn't do it; that implies a lack of judgment, so he fell short of what's expected of him.
Jensen fell for convenience, or was blindsided by some trait of her personality. Otherwise, executives use escort services all the time.
rileymat2 | 14 hours ago
mandeepj | 13 hours ago
Nexxxeh | 13 hours ago
micah94 | 13 hours ago
mandeepj | 9 hours ago
FireBeyond | 14 hours ago
I heard stories of the CIA doing a class with new State Department employees, or ones at a certain level, that among other things involved the instructor "rating" everyone ("You're a 4, you're a 6, you're a 5..."), with the point being "If a woman comes up to you at a bar, and she's a 9 or a 10, she's either an escort or a foreign asset, and your safest assumption is the latter."
smis92 | 13 hours ago
This is true.
Those of us working on classified programs get briefed on this sort of stuff and this is exactly what they tell us.
These operatives are highly trained, research their targets extensively, and are very good at their jobs. Once they get leverage over their targets they're most of the way there. Sex, money, fame, are all very enticing to some people and once the leverage is established most people will do anything to keep it going and keep it private.
Huang's coming forward and publicly admitting the affair effectively zeroes out the leverage. It's probably the best thing he could do once the full gravity of the situation came out.
I don't know if high-level leadership at every company with export-restricted products gets the security briefings they should. I bet Mr. Huang and the rest of the leadership team at Nvidia is getting it now.
jmyeet | 14 hours ago
If you join a 3 letter agency or the military or probably many government departments and contractors, you'll have to go through a background check. The more sensitive the information you have access to, the more extensive the background check. The particular employer won't necessarily care what skeletons are in your closet. They're concerned with your ability to be blackmailed or bribed. So if you get in a lot of debt, you can lose your security clearance. Some of the most successful spies have recruited with a relative pittance of money in comparison to the damage they can do.
But there's one exception to all this: if you an elected politician, you don't need to go through any of this. The FBI can't disqualify you. Even if you're in the executive, the FBI might disqualify you but the president can overrule that. Case in point: Jared Kushner [1].
There are a bunch of politicians and senior staff who are DL (ie secretly gay). There's a running joke that Grindr has an outage every time the RNC Convention is in town (eg [2]). The ownership of and access to Grindr's platform and data is actually a national security concern.
And then there's the Jeffrey Epstein of it all.
So while things like honeypots have existed and will continue to exist (as might be the case here with NVidia), you might find yourself asking "how do these powerful people fall for this stuff or end up having dirt?" whereas I think you should be asking "do these people become powerful and/or rich because they're compromised or can be compromised?"
Someone who is compromised is on the team and won't rat you out. It's mutually assured destruction.
I'm really not sure what we do about it. Ideally politicians should be able to pass security clearance background checks but that's a moral hazard as the agency, whose head is a political appointee, could effectively veto certain candidates. This has the hallmarks of the J. Edgar Hoover years.
A system intentionally filtering out people with integrity who aren't compromised is a sobering and depressing thought.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/officials-reje...
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/grindr-app-crashes-milwaukee-rnc-19...
armchairhacker | 14 hours ago
Look at recent and current tech CEOs. Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg sure…but Amodie, Altman, Cook, Nadella seem to be in stable relationships, and stable in general.
No, not all men think with their dicks. Huang’s martial fidelity is below average.
bilbo0s | 14 hours ago
Also, (just kind of pointing this out as a relevant factor, not really trying to insult the others), but Steve Jobs is tall and good looking. The guy would have gotten plenty of women with just a guitar and not a nickel to his name. I'm thinking Musk and Gates were very likely not in that league as far as raw attractiveness.
defrost | 14 hours ago
.. whatever this is: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/teen-beat/
armchairhacker | 14 hours ago
6 of 8. And they’re politicians, so if they had any embarrassing martial info we’d surely know about it.
defrost | 13 hours ago
Small beer stuff today, titillating gossip for some.
BoorishBears | 14 hours ago
armchairhacker | 13 hours ago
This doesn’t read “groomed by intelligence agencies” to me. He had relationship troubles, but they were before Apple blew up. He met Laurene Powell in 1989 and they stayed together until his death in 2011.
I also don’t think it’s an excuse that he was particularly attractive, since plenty of other men on this list are less so. Buffet married a 60-year old woman in his 70s, if he cared about looks he could’ve dated a 20-year old.
hnfong | 8 hours ago
Maybe you thought the context was clear, but I honestly had no idea that was what you were trying to convey.
armchairhacker | 6 hours ago
dcrazy | 13 hours ago
armchairhacker | 13 hours ago
ciupicri | 12 hours ago
rajup | 13 hours ago
tsunamifury | 13 hours ago
vineyardmike | 13 hours ago
He chose to start a business, stay in charge, grow it to its current state. He chose to meet politicians and world leaders and get involved in global affairs. Those choices, as lucky as he’s been, have put a target on his back.
He chose to talk to these women. He chose to have the affair. He chose those actions. He should have known the prior choices (be a major and visible CEO) would lead to a world where future choices (have affair with random women) may be complicated.
He is no victim to anything but his own ego and foolishness. Taking no moral stance of having an affair, he should have known better because he had made his choices already.
rayiner | 13 hours ago
spicyusername | 12 hours ago
wewewedxfgdf | 16 hours ago
However if you lack the common sense to not fall for Chinese spies then your judgement really must be questioned.
hackernud3s | 16 hours ago
wewewedxfgdf | 11 hours ago
It's not hard to guess.
BLKNSLVR | 16 hours ago
Common sense and judgement fluctuate. Humans, you know, we're prone to entirely unpredictable moments of emotional weakness. Maybe we're hungry, maybe we're tired, maybe the missus or the kids have been sick, maybe we just don't want to face leg-day after 12-hours of strategising. As per the attack and defense argument: A defender only needs to be wrong once.
ricksunny | 8 hours ago
But bonus instructive irony points if (de-facto gpu-based) LLMs were used by the malicious actors to psych-profile him to probe for which of the many character vulnerabilities we all share assortment of that he would be more receptive to.
ed_mercer | 15 hours ago
As if it were that easy? Being that rich and influental means someone out there will attempt (and succeed) to game you.
net01 | 16 hours ago
zulux | 16 hours ago
They tried every persona: Sexy, shy, homely. Same sex. Confrontational. Open, but scared her overseers would punish her. Still get a ping now and then.
NullPrefix | 11 hours ago
tgv | 3 hours ago
nonethewiser | 33 minutes ago
Im curious more about that. He was just some regular businessman acquaintance with no special knowledge? Was he fairly accurate and specific in his predictions?
listedb | 8 hours ago
Detection and prevention is key
https://foxandlion.pub/analysis/traitors-among-us-who-is-vul...
dietr1ch | 16 hours ago
ChrisArchitect | 16 hours ago
Statement from NVIDIA Board of Directors
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50416801
ilaksh | 16 hours ago
This is just a total guess, but I assume what a lot of the board want is for him to sell as much to China or indirect channels as he can get away with. So whatever these deals were that involved this woman, they probably want him to get those deals through it he can get away with it (although they wouldn't admit it).
I see this more or less as Huang doing his job. And relative to international expectations at that level of wealth, one public affair is probably not something most of the board (presumably largely male) is going to (privately) judge him for.
So if the board is investigating, I assume what they are trying to figure out is if the US government is going to do anything (probably not) or waiting to see if there is going to be some kind of public demand for him to be removed. Or it there is something likely to come out that will cause either of those things.
avazhi | 16 hours ago
Neither the board nor the US government nor investors nor the average person gives a shit about a CEO having an affair as long it doesn't compromise his ability to do his job well.
seanmcdirmid | 16 hours ago
skippyboxedhero | 16 hours ago
Also, just to be clear here: the story is that Jensen was also going to Taiwan to meet with this person who was helping Alibaba evade sanctions, when Jensen met with this person Alibaba reps were always there, and in the US Jensen was making media appearances saying that sanctions on China had to be lifted.
Bear in mind that multiple people at Supermicro were charged for allegedly smuggling servers to China, and that the reason Megaspeed is being investigated is for effectively the same thing. Jensen denied he had anything to do with Supermicro, it is going to be much harder to say the same thing here.
I don't think the affair itself is necessarily related to the direction this will shortly take.
anonymous908213 | 15 hours ago
MLK Jr. was being monitored by the FBI and CIA, who believed he was a Communist.
TychoCelchuuu | 14 hours ago
UberFly | 9 hours ago
seanmcdirmid | 14 hours ago
m10i | 14 hours ago
What you need to be a smuggler is to avoid prison.
When one side is fully aware that you are a smuggler that they can rat on to the other side whenever they want, even a child could blackmail you.
So that's one (fairly realistic imo) pathway from smuggler -> to espionage.
This is a hypothetical anyways.
newsclues | 13 hours ago
paimapi | 12 hours ago
Contra-ry to common conspiracy theories, I'm certain any government-led self-investigation into culpability in this vein was all very aboveboard and well-substantiated, and such incidents never ever happened.
mlmonkey | 11 hours ago
North Korea has entered the chat ...
mejutoco | 9 hours ago
adrian_b | 5 hours ago
paimapi | 14 minutes ago
chmod775 | 11 hours ago
seanmcdirmid | 9 hours ago
jon128 | 2 hours ago
Nothing is beyond our reach.
crossroadsguy | 10 hours ago
seanmcdirmid | 9 hours ago
jmtulloss | 11 hours ago
purpleidea | 10 hours ago
UberFly | 9 hours ago
dannyw | 16 hours ago
IMHO, I’m speculating, but I think the affair could’ve happened first, and then the MSS got involved for access and blackmail.
There is, after all, statistically a high correlation with rich billionaires and infidelity…
ElProlactin | 8 hours ago
If you look at Megaspeed, it has Chinese state asset written all over it.
thenthenthen | 2 hours ago
ElProlactin | 2 hours ago
2. The company was originally set up as the subsidiary of a Chinese gaming company.
3. When the US added stricter export controls for Nvidia chips in 2023, it was spun off and ownership reportedly moved to a BVI shell company.
4. Later it was sold to a company that is apparently owned by one person who is believed to live in China.
5. The Singapore offices of the company and others he is an owner or director of show little activity and according to one report, the co-working space at the address listed for one didn't even have a record of the company.
6. Despite the fact that Megaspeed showed less than $6 million in cash at the end of 2023, it somehow became an Nvidia Cloud Partner and between 2024 and 2026 purchased $4.8 billion worth of advanced Nvidia chips, making it the top Nvidia chip buyer in ASEAN.
This company was on the radar of people in the industry well before this scandal because basically nobody had any idea who it was and where the money was coming from.
https://en.thairath.co.th/money/tech_innovation/tech_compani...
thenthenthen | an hour ago
dcrazy | 13 hours ago
bzax | 11 hours ago
ramraj07 | 11 hours ago
lakeviewterrace | 10 hours ago
What is interesting is the woman appears to be extremely mid-looking.
If there is a lesson to be learned from all these extremely powerful men cheating on their wives with objectively ordinary women (e.g. Gates, Bezos, Tiger Woods) it's that the most beautiful woman in the world is worth about the same as the woman that works at McDonald's.
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
lakeviewterrace | 10 hours ago
There is a more crude corollary to the theory that I chose to omit for decorum's sake:
P = P
ranger_danger | 10 hours ago
andoando | an hour ago
csomar | 9 hours ago
bushwart | 10 hours ago
lakeviewterrace | 9 hours ago
hax0ron3 | 8 hours ago
tudelo | 10 hours ago
p1anecrazy | 9 hours ago
paganel | 9 hours ago
ThePinion | 9 hours ago
https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/swalwell-and-fang-fan...
Diane Feinstein also had a Chinese spy for a driver for 20 years, though I'm going to assume for my own sanity that wasn't a sexual relationship.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/details-chinese-sp...
I think this has been going on a very long time, it's just that these were politicians so I think everyone just brushed it off as "business as usual."
rapidaneurism | 8 hours ago
numpad0 | 7 hours ago
2. The goal of honey trapping is to gain trust from the target to do whatever you want to do, not to please them. They don't even have to have an actual physical contact. A "mid", unassuming, appearance is often appropriate for this purpose. This actually applies to actual assassins, 100x engineers, and millionaire landlords, too; they gain nothing from standing out, so they look mid. You may optionally look good, but your looks should not be the means by which you achieve your goals.
3. (Extension to 2.)A rich CEO having affairs with a "mid" woman for a true extramarital love is probably more damaging to their relationships than them just disappearing into a hotel room with a prostitute with a bottle in hand. The latter is probably more tolerable to those involved and to the public.
4. Forgot where I read this, some diplomat's essay or something, but allegedly, Russians will do what you want to be happening, starting with regular office staffs and moms, escalating to scantily dressed girls, to visibly gay dudes, at which point they accept that their operation had been too obvious and give up. So there is a chance, I guess, if you must have it???
matwood | 7 hours ago
There are memes that super-model looking women dating nerds are almost always spies of some sort. For this spy to have any chance at gaining real information she needed to have an actual relationship with Huang - which, see above, is more than looks alone.
noitpmeder | 15 hours ago
pjjpo | 9 hours ago
unsupp0rted | 8 hours ago
* Corps maximize shareholder value
* Govs make laws/penalties to avoid too much harm/risk by corps
* Press keeps everybody accountable
It's great when everybody's doing what they're supposed to do, which obviously isn't often enough.
Unfortunate is when corps are so in bed with gov that they don't bother innovating or growing, and when press is so in bed with gov that they might as well not exist at all.
novia | 11 hours ago
So male infidelity is not a big deal?
mlmonkey | 11 hours ago
ctkhn | 10 hours ago
GolfPopper | 10 hours ago
steele | 9 hours ago
jfrbfbreudh | 8 hours ago
steele | 7 hours ago
dzonga | 16 hours ago
the reason bond was made - was the guy who the novel was based on - being a double-agent couldn't be honey-trapped as he was already womanizing.
IncreasePosts | 14 hours ago
WatchDog | 11 hours ago
kridsdale1 | 10 hours ago
shrubble | 16 hours ago
losthubble | 16 hours ago
ii41 | 14 hours ago
That's Japan. Don't make it sound like other parts of Asia are like this.
shrubble | 13 hours ago
Also the French, so it’s not exclusively a practice of East Asian people.
augment_me | 13 hours ago
sampullman | 11 hours ago
dumfries | 4 hours ago
thenthenthen | 2 hours ago
pjjpo | 9 hours ago
Foobar8568 | 8 hours ago
shock-value | 16 hours ago
hackernud3s | 13 hours ago
shock-value | 12 hours ago
nozzlegear | 11 hours ago
hackernud3s | 10 hours ago
ethbr1 | 4 hours ago
Because power is an ability to do what one wants, and a lot of people want sex.
rmunn | 9 hours ago
I didn't like the book when I first read it (mostly because I seriously dislike Anna, and the book naturally spends a lot of time being told from her POV), but in retrospect, it's brilliant. Tolstoy has, without a single bit of moralizing, presented one of the best arguments I've seen in literature for being faithful to one's spouse and not engaging in affairs.
P.S. I should add that I don't think Tolstoy was inventing the "rich men having affairs was considered normal" aspect for the purpose of the book. I think that was what Russian society was really like at the time, and he took that aspect of society and wrote a book criticizing it, highlighting the negative effects that that attitude would have on people.
gramie | an hour ago
In South Africa, men marrying multiple wives is still accepted as long as they are "traditional". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygamy_in_South_Africa.
Most Muslim-majority countries currently allow polygamy. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
marliechiller | 7 hours ago
acoustics | 11 hours ago
Of course, the spy aspect could be relevant from a professional perspective (depending on what actions he took or what he knew), but I'm guessing you're talking about him having an affair.
specked-citrus | 8 hours ago
zurfer | 7 hours ago
Arn_Thor | 7 hours ago
kaon_2 | 6 hours ago
shakow | 4 hours ago
nicce | 5 hours ago
It is not so clear, if this is about his character and can he be trusted. This is evidence that someone is capable for lying and doing something that might not be in line with company ethics either. I don't think we can assume from humans that "he lies only in his private life, but can be totally trusted on business side".
sire-vc | 4 hours ago
Yes, in many places, absolutely. Bad decisions in your personal live suggest bad decisions in your professional life.
Aerroon | 3 hours ago
Now take the same point and apply it to every other crime, misdemeanor, and breaking of rules. Should companies really operate based on that? Or should we maybe draw a boundary around professional life and only consider the professional life?
martin- | 2 hours ago
Does it work the other way as well, so you're forced to divorce your spouse if you make a bad business decision?
lithos | 2 hours ago
solenoid0937 | 2 hours ago
tremon | an hour ago
Nowadays, we make them president.
throwaway5752 | 29 minutes ago
In fact, the affair was less important. Even if they were just a very close but unromantic professional relationship it would be a serious scandal.
Most posters in HN don't think "poor corporations are the victims when they are hacked". They think "the corporations should be liable because they did not invest enough in security". This is morally the same.
Synaesthesia | 17 minutes ago
yoyohello13 | 9 hours ago
HN cares about money and tech. Don’t take morality or life advice from here.
antonvs | 6 hours ago
olelele | 5 hours ago
sho | 8 hours ago
> It’s the well-documented bias in which people systematically overestimate how morally they would behave compared with others—especially in high-pressure or ambiguous situations—while underestimating the situational forces that actually shape behavior.
I'm sure we're all paragons of moral virtue here but the reality is that unless you've been personally targeted by a nation state and successfully resisted, then you're really just fantasizing. Yeah bro, I'm sure you would have effortlessly resisted the Chinese sex trap, right after you benched 1000, got that hole in one and beat Hamilton at qualifying. You're just that good.
GlacierFox | 3 hours ago
fzeroracer | 3 hours ago
Regardless of how much you think we can or cannot resist actions from a foreign nation state, the ultimate fact of the matter is that he failed and thus is no longer suited for his position. If I would face worse consequences for such an action, then I damn well expect someone who's paid far above my pay grade to represent a company to face some consequences as well.
NetMageSCW | 15 minutes ago
latentsea | 7 hours ago
charles_f | an hour ago
Lerc | 37 minutes ago
There's somewhat of a difference between 1:4 and 1:200 (US) or 1:300-500(most countries)
jlarocco | 43 minutes ago
The problem is the spying and Chinese influence - which doesn't happen all the time and is a big deal because he runs the biggest chip company in the world at a time we're trying to keep that tech away from China.
Security clearance applications have a whole section asking about extra-marital affairs, money problems, and whatnot precisely because spys use those types of things to bribe, blackmail, and pressure people. It sounds like a cheesy Cold War spy movie - but it happens in real life, as we're seeing.
Gareth321 | 7 hours ago
beng-nl | 6 hours ago
My opinion is that - particularly with the wisdom of hindsight - it is right to say this is a serious lapse in judgement of Jensen. Especially given the potential security/strategic implications.
However to then make the jump to this saying something about his qualities of leadership is a big leap. His leadership record is exceptional: decades of foresight, strategic risk-taking, and execution. It seems wrong to allow one episode to outweigh three decades of evidence.
Gareth321 | 5 hours ago
ethbr1 | 4 hours ago
And from the reporting I've read, it isn't actually clear if she was a spy (i.e. directly trained and employed by a PRC intelligence agency).
The details (businessperson working in a viable business) make it seem more like she was a willing asset, who likely had a PRC intelligence handler.
Gareth321 | 4 hours ago
CalRobert | 5 hours ago
yunnpp | 16 hours ago
Props up the surveillance state with Palantir, requests privacy.
jgalt212 | 16 hours ago
gigatexal | 16 hours ago
matteoraso | 16 hours ago
busymom0 | 13 hours ago
ciupicri | 12 hours ago
CTDOCodebases | 4 hours ago
w10-1 | 15 hours ago
As always, recovery under stress is more telling than speed on the happy path.
The other name founders - Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs - fell into the guise of their own image propagating down their leadership chain; Huang seems to be actually leading, often by example. I'd expect his team to do ok without him, but believe only he could make some of the hard decisions, particularly now that their success is bounded by their customers'.
ihuk | 5 hours ago
TheRealPomax | 15 hours ago
vkaku | 15 hours ago
MOARDONGZPLZ | 14 hours ago
portmanteur | 15 hours ago
oumua_don17 | 15 hours ago
waterTanuki | 15 hours ago
When the money is this big, all ethics go out the window.
ciupicri | 12 hours ago
> Andy Byron, the chief executive of New York-based tech company Astronomer, has resigned from his role after he was spotted embracing an employee at a Coldplay concert, according to a statement shared with CNN on Saturday.
Also from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/coldplay-kiss-c...
> Former McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook was fired in November 2019 after it was discovered he had engaged in a consensual relationship with a subordinate, breaching company rules that prohibit managers from dating employees they oversee. Easterbrook admitted the relationship, calling it a mistake, and stepped down. Initially, he left with a $40 million severance package.
What other consequences do you want? Jail? Infidelity is not a crime in the US.
leoc | 14 hours ago
kridsdale1 | 10 hours ago
plasticchris | 14 hours ago
Mr. Rizzo has maintained that Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were “not unusual” and consistent with the kinds of meetings he has with any of Nvidia’s many customers.
01100011 | 14 hours ago
This was most certainly known about last week and front-run by insiders(maybe NVDA insiders, more likely Trump insiders, but we will probably never know).
jimbobbam | 14 hours ago
10/10 dad joke satisfaction on this one.
jp0001 | 13 hours ago
joebig | 13 hours ago
silverFork | 12 hours ago
Malaysia doesnt even show up in the graph of owners but obviously has imported some chips.. were they illegal ones.. who knows. How much relative power does this malaysia have? If it did, wouldnt show up in the graph?
https://epoch.ai/data/ai-chip-owners?view=graph&tab=count&co...
thenthenthen | 2 hours ago
wortelefant | 11 hours ago
Harukadia | 11 hours ago
flufluflufluffy | 10 hours ago
Hmm, just like you were fully committed to your wife?
gla67890543 | 9 hours ago
datahack | 9 hours ago
nemonemo | 9 hours ago
mi_lk | 7 hours ago
ransom1538 | 8 hours ago
rdidjdi3748 | 8 hours ago
newterminus | 8 hours ago
antonvs | 6 hours ago
kelnos | 6 hours ago
nonethewiser | 40 minutes ago
Not what you are doing, and I understand that's why they renamed the show but they shouldn't have. While it can be used as a racial slur it doesn't generally have that connotation. I think if you directly asked most people they would either not know about the slur or say something like "I think its a racist term for some group or something." I had to look it up myself to be sure. We can choose to let that usage of the term die.
JohnMakin | 8 hours ago
latentsea | 8 hours ago
nonethewiser | 45 minutes ago
specked-citrus | 8 hours ago
This "what distraction are they trying to make" line is ridiculous conspiracism. It's completely obvious that someone leaked it to the NY Times because they are alarmed that the admin is doing nothing about what is obviously a huge national security problem.
sleight42 | 8 hours ago
hellgas00 | 8 hours ago
Consider that the leak destroys the legitimacy of Huang's lobbying efforts efforts against tighter chips controls to China. In parallel the NYT released yesterday their investigation into commerce dept approvals of h200 chips to Chinese entities that the NYT claims are ghost offices linked to Chinese military contractors [1]. Also consider that these events put Nvidia under long term congressional security oversight with an installed watch dog. Nvidia is losing it's autonomy to cut international deals. Seems like the CIA/permeant state is getting nervous about China again.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/07/business/economy/nvidia-c...
colechristensen | 8 hours ago
camgunz | 8 hours ago
sgt101 | 7 hours ago
Alternatively this could be a Chinese play designed to sow dissent and disruption in the USA post the mid-terms.
Or, it could just be a rather trivial story about an over confident and all to human titan of industry making the kind of mess in his personal life that a lot of people end up making - watch any TV mini series for example after example.
antonvs | 7 hours ago
And China, really? What dissent is this going to cause? As for disruption, Nvidia essentially has a monopoly on what they do. Who the person in charge is, or what he’s doing, barely matters at this point.
> watch any TV mini series for example after example.
You might have been watching too many of those.
Betelbuddy | 7 hours ago
CodeArtisan | 7 hours ago
(May 2026) https://culperresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Culper...
4ggr0 | 5 hours ago
esFran | 9 hours ago
agent_turtle | 5 hours ago
petterroea | 9 hours ago
"I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American." sounds like the exact words one would say if one expects to be threatened of being un-patriotic and therefore cancelled in the right-wing sense. In fact it sounds like something you would hear on South Park, it's a bit ridiculous. As others have pointed out in here, affair or not, the spy label is very much up to US government opinion.
treebeard901 | 9 hours ago
ricksunny | 8 hours ago
Author David Brin has been outspoken lately about politicians taking active measures at neutralizing the effects of blackmail, (which Jensen’s activity happens to match), in pointing to an older post of Brin’s: https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/09/how-hero-might-escape...
(i don’t recommend reading directly as it is verbose, but summarize with AI)
mightysashiman | 8 hours ago
Roark66 | 7 hours ago
The only newsworthy part of this is possibility he could've been blackmailed in the past about it and I assume this is what the investigation will be about.
Traster | 7 hours ago
Marazan | 3 hours ago
The chips he wanted to sell direct to China?
Frieren | 7 hours ago
A world in which Kings rule, and peasants defend their depraved way of life.
I really hope that you are a bot from a PR firm, because it his hard to image people being so servile to power.
matwood | 7 hours ago
...
> defend their depraved way of life.
How about it's none of our business what happens in other people's bedrooms. For all we know his wife was fine with it or maybe she wasn't. Either way, not my business.
qurren | 7 hours ago
If she was, he wouldn't have apologized, he would have defended his open relationship.
HappMacDonald | 6 hours ago
thaumasiotes | 3 hours ago
Ylpertnodi | 6 hours ago
bamboozled | 7 hours ago
sheepdestroyer | 7 hours ago
alcomatt | 7 hours ago
ctmlr | 6 hours ago
sib | 4 hours ago
ctmlr | 31 minutes ago
refurb | 4 hours ago
Come on, think before you comment
thaumasiotes | 4 hours ago
It's a public document; the reasons he published it aren't even likely to include whatever relationship he has with his wife.
nacs | 2 hours ago
Because it's a matter of national security.
And because he deals with foreign governmennts and should know better being of Chinese origin that the Chinese are known to use such honeypots?
Frieren | 2 hours ago
I am not talking about the news. But about the people defending the cheating.
The news are not that he cheated but he cheated "... with a Chinese spy". And the post is not even about the news but an official release from Nvidia!
I do not even know anymore what is your point? Are you just asking people to stop caring about what billionaires do? Are you trying to protect the image of a billionaire for some weird reason? I do not get how do you fail to just read the news or the actual press release from Nvidia.
trymas | 6 hours ago
OC says Huang is a victim. For real?
Owner and CEO of a TOP 3 company by market cap.
At that point he's not a private person, his actions have global consequences (his wife, kids most likely still are private persons, that's true, but I don't know about them).
He's in an incredible position of power against the majority of world leaders, but he's apparently "a victim" in an eyes of HN oligarch apologetic crowd?! Because he was allegedly seduced by Chinese spy? What in the sinophobia and oligarchophilia is this?
If Huang wouldn't be of ultra-billionaire class and the woman would truly is a spy - he would be in prison for treason in a heart beat. I can bet - nothing will happen and by next Monday this all will be forgotten, washed by best PR firms he can buy.
thih9 | 7 hours ago
Also note that his wife and children are victims of his unfaithful actions. He is the only one responsible for that - he just said so himself.
eecc | 7 hours ago
We should really stop with this "just think of the children" knee-jerk
overfeed | 6 hours ago
From the horse's mouth:
>> My actions hurt her and our children.
Parents (or "equals") can hurt and and disappoint others at any age - including adults.
not-kinsale-joe | 6 hours ago
I don't know why you seem to be so against considering Jensen's children. Some people really value the commitments of marriage and see adultery as something very serious and damaging.
origini | 5 hours ago
solenoid0937 | 2 hours ago
There are so many other children in the world that deserve consideration before his (grown adult, very rich) children.
Jensen should be apologizing to Americans for compromising NatSec.
tremon | 2 hours ago
Why? National Security is not in his job description.
vikramkr | an hour ago
59percentmore | an hour ago
joebe89 | 6 hours ago
mapcars | 5 hours ago
joebe89 | 5 hours ago
mapcars | 4 hours ago
thadt | 3 hours ago
nonethewiser | an hour ago
If this is your attitude then you should just never get married in the first place. At the very least you owe it to a partner that expects a real commitment.
yabatopia | 6 hours ago
I notice quite a few people worry more about the financial implications (nVidia's stock price) than the ethical ones.
bigfishrunning | an hour ago
pixelstack | 6 hours ago
So, they are not allowed to be upset if daddy decided to cheat on their mommy after long marriage with some chinese honeypot? I hope you are not planning on start your own family any time soon
ethbr1 | 4 hours ago
"Think of the children" is a rhetorical appeal to pathos.
There's plenty to talk about here that doesn't require assuming how an adult is going to feel about another adult's behavior.
Keyframe | 3 hours ago
To play devil's advocate here.. If she's a spy trained in psychological manipulation and seduction we'd be right to call him a victim instead of a participant since he'd be a target of those techniques applied to him. Maybe?
_heimdall | 3 hours ago
hermitShell | 3 hours ago
At a deeper level we do get to choose our overall environment and what kinds of things we are exposed to frequently, the recurring patterns of life can be consciously managed and shaped. But in the moment, we are more like an LLM doing a forward pass on next token. If a specific weight relating to refusal has been abliterated, it's not realistic to expect the next token to somehow still come out to refusal.
We can control our training better than we can control our inference. We have ego-ideals and specific mental makeup that can be exploited if identified.
MisterMunchkin | an hour ago
catchnear4321 | an hour ago
So, no, he’s not a victim, his existing personal potential for infidelity was exploited. It worked because he would have done the same thing if the right non-spy were to arrive on the scene. The spy takes advantage of that.
noisy_boy | 41 minutes ago
superxpro12 | 31 minutes ago
Its clear his wealth generated a level of narcissism here that rose to a level that permitted him to invalidate the feelings of his wife, who, again, he made a vow to.
It does not matter if some hot chinese spy tried to get into his pants. He still let it happen. He his actions spoke for him: "I know i have a wife, but this chinese spy is so hot. I dont care about my wife anymore, but im going to keep this a secret from her because I know its wrong". For a loooooong time.
I'm personally so tired of excusing infidelity. He is a big boy. He can make big boy decisions.
Unless they're a poly couple, who knows.
montjoy | 29 minutes ago
qs1ykyusPlate | 7 hours ago
1dom | 7 hours ago
This is an interesting take. I'm not sure I agree with it. I understand the principal: that she might have been being dishonest towards him, so he's a victim of lies.
Anyone who's worked in and around any high value, high risk or regulated areas has done the training courses on these sorts of risks though: specifically, people will lie to you to get information out of you.
Sure, on a personal level, consider him a victim if you want. On a professional level, this is him ignoring training, at great risk to the business.
weatherlite | 7 hours ago
What ? If she was in his house and was a real Chinese spy who knows what data she extracted. Sorry, that's news worthy.
vova_hn2 | 6 hours ago
Not sure, if I follow. Are you saying that he has confidential papers just lying around his house? Or a computer (or other device) with confidential data without a strong password and an encrypted drive?
If any of this is true, I would say that this is actually a bigger problem, than the whole affair thing.
I'm just a humble software engineer and wouldn't let myself to handle any work related data so carelessly. Not sure, why a CEO of a huge multinational corporation would be held to lower standards.
pjc50 | 6 hours ago
vova_hn2 | 5 hours ago
I don't know, maybe you're right. I, personally, am very uncomfortable (almost physically) if I know that someone is seeing my screen and I wouldn't be able to get any work done in such state. Maybe I'm just weird.
> "your work is really interesting and important, please tell me more"
This one is unrelated to physically being inside someone's house.
varjag | 4 hours ago
Cthulhu_ | 5 hours ago
Corporate security is a strong reason for leaving your work at work.
swiftcoder | 2 hours ago
Never met a tech executive who left work at work. Also never met an IT security team who had the juice to tell the CEO what he could and couldn't do on his corporate phone...
rsanders | an hour ago
croon | 5 hours ago
The precautions you describe does not shield against any of those, and I'm not even being creative.
vova_hn2 | 5 hours ago
You're right, haven't thought about those.
infthi | 3 hours ago
weatherlite | 2 hours ago
yibg | 38 minutes ago
chvid | 7 hours ago
Jensen also probably got too close to Trump and now the China hawks and maybe the dems are out to make an example.
Also Jensen does not have golden shares/full control unlike Musk, Zuckerberg etc. so he can be actually be unseated.
maxglute | 6 hours ago
Ylpertnodi | 6 hours ago
scns | 5 hours ago
joey486DX4 | 5 hours ago
I mean, Shou Zi Chew was grilled by Congress for his "links" to the Chinese Communist Party, and made to state that Tiananmen Square 1989 was a massacre despite being born, raised in Singapore, and served the Singapore military.
thaumasiotes | 4 hours ago
The concept seems to have been mostly focused on the Chinese, but that in turn seems to have been largely because they outnumber everybody else.
You can read an essay criticizing the concept at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26350/pg26350-images.ht...
(It's in French, written by a Russian in 1897.)
sysguest | 3 hours ago
if I was given this much easy task on congress hearing, I'd just say it with megaphone and take the lead from there
why is it difficult to say some fact?
is it difficult for you to say so?
joey486DX4 | 40 minutes ago
Change the race and ethnicity and tell me that it's okay.
Why can't you admit that this is yellow peril?
uxp100 | 4 hours ago
sysguest | 3 hours ago
hell that's the typical "before" face of countless plastic surgery hospitals -- provides a great contrast to the "after"
philwelch | 6 hours ago
elp | 6 hours ago
Or to paraphrase a really old joke: Men have two heads but only enough blood to run one at a time.
mock-possum | an hour ago
pixelstack | 6 hours ago
philwelch | 6 hours ago
I’m not commenting on the adultery because that’s a separate, private matter.
TedDoesntTalk | 5 hours ago
Is the alcoholic the victim of the liquor manufacturers?
philwelch | 5 hours ago
John23832 | 5 hours ago
nonethewiser | 53 minutes ago
But these arent great analogies because you dont have to have sex with a spy to be a victim of a foreign intelligence operation.
The gambler goes to the casino to gamble. And Alice Huang was sent to meet Jensen Huang under normal business pretenses.
The analogy cant quite represent it but its more like the casino sent a dealer-in-disguise to the gambler on some plausible non-gambling pretenses to spy on him. So he's a victim of the casino's spy operation. Then he gambled. Except he's not a sex addict, as far as we know.
nonethewiser | an hour ago
He's not, you're adding details to his claim that he never said. He's the victim of a foreign intelligence operaiton.
InsideOutSanta | 6 hours ago
He's both a victim and a perpetrator.
And while I usually wouldn't care if he cheated on his wife, because that's between him and his family, in this case, he was also incredibly dumb. This guy could have cheated on his wife with any number of women, but he chose to do it with a Chinese spy. I think having somebody who makes incredibly dumb decisions be the CEO of the world's most important company is definitely newsworthy.
"You're not talking to someone who woke up a loser, but you are talking to someone who woke up next to a Chinese spy."
xienze | 4 hours ago
The implication here being that he _knew_ she was a Chinese spy.
InsideOutSanta | 3 hours ago
toolslive | 3 hours ago
xiphias2 | 6 hours ago
There's $50B at stake, so there's a huge incentive for foundations to ruin what's left of the family.
shakow | 4 hours ago
I don't know; at some point “don't put your dick in people from the Other Side” should be a pretty well known rule if you're someone important. She didn't even hide her nationality.
watwut | 4 hours ago
Best bet: not too good right now.
_heimdall | 3 hours ago
ricksunny | 7 hours ago
jongjong | 7 hours ago
Maybe he had to do it in order to be allowed to make sales in China.
I think I may have lost some big opportunities myself when I was in crypto because I was faithful to my wife. Powerful people need people who they can control. They need kompromat.
flakeoil | 7 hours ago
Ylpertnodi | 6 hours ago
alcomatt | 7 hours ago
zan2215 | 7 hours ago
theplumber | 6 hours ago
That’s his personal life and I fail to see why are we supposed to behave like some kind of religious zealots on marriage.
The best way to handle this should probably be to be upfront about it so that he could not be blackmailed. His only mistake was that he didn’t disclose it earlier when rumours surfaced
catmanjan | 6 hours ago
stratocumulus0 | 6 hours ago
dymk | 28 minutes ago
boyka | 6 hours ago
kelnos | 6 hours ago
It's not about religion, it's about trust and keeping promises. Like it or not, the default understanding in a marital relationship in many places in the world is monogamy. Some people, of course, engage in other practices, after an explicit discussion, and agreement and understanding. But presumably Huang's wife believed she and her husband were in a monogamous relationship, and trusted Huang to keep it that way. That's the issue; religion is irrelevant. (And different religious practices have different things to say about monogamy vs. polyamory, and atheists decide for themselves if they want to be monogamists or polyamorists; religion need not be involved at all.)
But regardless, I think his infidelity is not his employees' business; IMO it's weird to bring it up in this way. The bit about his affair partner possibly(?) being a spy is the thing that actually matters to NVIDIA and NVIDIA employees, but he only dedicates a few sentences to it.
Klonoar | 2 hours ago
That may be by design: the spying issue might hurt the stock/situation/etc more than the affair.
dymk | 30 minutes ago
jonathanstrange | 6 hours ago
The moralists also conveniently ignore that the vast majority of men is not very attractive. Cheating would take a lot of effort for them. In contrast, I knew some men who were attractive enough they had to fend off women almost daily. For them, not cheating takes a lot of effort. The bottomline is that most of the 5/10 guys who say "I would never cheat" would do so the very next day if a 9/10 woman suddenly got interested in them, which is exactly what happened in this case.
igleria | 6 hours ago
antman | 6 hours ago
It’s interesting how overall virtue signalling is presented as important whereas the bubble shaped valuation of Nvidia and built upon bubble valuations of major clients is not considered important enough for related statements or actions.
alfiedotwtf | 6 hours ago
agent_turtle | 5 hours ago
china has to resort to honeypots because they have few legitimate political tools to influence decisions of an american company. not so for Trump et al - there are much more effective ways for the president to coerce a ceo than telling the world they let a potentially compromised individual help make policy decisions lol
thordenmark | 6 hours ago
Capricorn2481 | 5 hours ago
mytailorisrich | 6 hours ago
This screams political hit job.
agent_turtle | 6 hours ago
i mean it is political in the sense that he slept with a chinese spy while also doing business deals with chinese companies.
but if you're suggesting this has something to do with the midterms, what would even be the gain
Aboutplants | 4 hours ago
contubernio | 6 hours ago
The consequence of this for security is twofold. First, compromising someone with sex is both much cheaper than compromising someone with direct payments of money and much easier to hide in an operational sense. Second, this is particularly so when the married mark's image (even sincere mentality) is one of rectitude and hard work and so forth.
usrnm | 6 hours ago
You mean, employing male prostitutes is somehow any better?
KellyCriterion | 6 hours ago
usrnm | 6 hours ago
iinnPP | 6 hours ago
A much more reasonable interpretation is that they are limiting their statement to their knowledge.
contubernio | an hour ago
Pentamerous | 6 hours ago
Usually they are more along the lines of fake apologies like "I'm sorry that you feel that way", or in this particular case I would imagine something like "I'm sorry that I was spied on, I was doing my best and nothing prepared me to deal with a foreign agent".
It's refreshing to see words like "My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.".
wewewedxfgdf | 6 hours ago
Look, Jensen got whatever he wanted, China got the GPUs it wanted - China also turned Jensen into a staunch advocate for selling GPUs to China - everything's good - everyone wins.
"Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang challenged US export controls on advanced semiconductors, arguing that continued technology collaboration and access to the Chinese market are ultimately in America’s best interest. Speaking to reporters in South Korea this week, Huang described China as a “singular, vital, important, dynamic market, and nobody can replace that.” He asserted he would continue campaigning for full access to this market, stating he is "optimistic" that China will remain a key consumer of US chips."
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/nvi...
He's not a traitor or a spy he's a capitalist wanting to make money - that's the American way.
torben-friis | 6 hours ago
He's a victim, he apologizes well, he's working with the board on this...
Is HN just this millionare-friendly? astroturfed?
Not that I expect a metaphorical lynching, but it's certainly a take when the news is "one of the most important roles in the US is potentially losing national secrets by absurd oversight".
nomorewords | 5 hours ago
Capricorn2481 | 5 hours ago
He is a billionaire and people here fall over themselves idolizing figures like him. You get the sense reading HN comments that they respect founders they don't know more than their own spouse or kids.
yreg | 5 hours ago
What do you mean by this, should we be negative about him because he is rich?
torben-friis | 5 hours ago
I'm implying him being rich is making people blind to this fact.
lukan | 5 hours ago
torben-friis | 5 hours ago
I'm personally not interested in the morals of cheating, but claiming this is a private issue is crazy, as is removing his agency and implying it was something done to him. You don't fall in a random's bed by stumbling.
codeduck | 5 hours ago
bartread | 4 hours ago
Whoa, whoa, who, whoa, whoa! You know the rules: no leaking next week’s headlines in advance. What kind of outfit do you think we’re running here?
I do agree though: regardless of whether the woman is a Chinese agent or not, and regardless of whether he knew or suspected (I doubt he did), this affair represents a serious lapse in judgement that has implications far beyond his personal life.
If you can be compromised personally, you can certainly be compromised professionally.
I suspect it won’t happen, because it would likely tank the stock, but really he should be thinking about resigning.
joyeuse6701 | an hour ago
figmert | 4 hours ago
lukan | 3 hours ago
I did not. If there was more to it, leaked confidentials, blackmailed deals etc. then yes, he will be responsible. There is an investigation. But what is known, so far he "just" cheated on his wife. And this is what they have to deal with.
mrngld | 2 hours ago
For what it's worth, I believe the military would agree, that would lead to a pretty quick loss of security clearances.
The dude isn't running a McDonalds franchise, after all. Everyone is saying he "took responsibility". No, he admitted it after it was already public (which is no great act of courage), now the board needs to actually make him accountable. And unemployed.
antihero | 3 hours ago
Edit: Oh
watwut | 4 hours ago
CEO who gets honey-trapped by stripper agent ... is well meaning smartest person ever.
akoboldfrying | 2 hours ago
joyeuse6701 | an hour ago
Assuming the spy angle to be true, He IS a victim as a target of a concentrated effort by a nation state to compromise him.
If all it took to compromise US national security was for a nation state to exploit the oldest backdoor in the human/male psyche, then I’d say there’s something wrong with the national security defense strategy.
Don’t blame the single point of failure, blame the design, maybe the designers.
It should never have been possible.
Having said that, Russia/China wouldn’t use this strategy unless it worked against most powerful men and their psyche.
yibg | 41 minutes ago
- he should’ve been more careful? How?
- he should never get into a romantic relationship because they could be a spy?
Capricorn2481 | 5 hours ago
dolkycape | 5 hours ago
ForHackernews | 4 hours ago
ubercore | 5 hours ago
127 | 4 hours ago
ethbr1 | 4 hours ago
Say what you want about the Altmans who lucked into a rising tide, but Nvidia has been doing hard engineering, consistently delivered, strategically brilliantly for a couple decades now.
Plus, the primary risk here isn't that secrets were exposed but rather that Huang attempts to hide the thing and makes himself vulnerable to blackmail. The facts leaking (three letter agency off the record?) nuked that possibility.
solenoid0937 | 2 hours ago
They lucked into being the available useful product when the transformer dropped. This was not some megabrain multi year preparation they had been doing.
Jensen did attempt to hide the affair. That's why it was an affair. Even now he does not mention the fact that he sold billions of dollars of chips to his girlfriend's shell company, violating export controls and creating a NatSec risk.
ethbr1 | 2 hours ago
It was a bet that the future would need more streaming parallel compute, and GPUs were well-placed to deliver it.
That's a shrewd bet, and one AMD (and Intel) were stupid not to also make.
figmert | 2 hours ago
nonethewiser | an hour ago
Clearly his wife is the victim of him cheating. And he's a victim of a foreign intelligence operation.
It doesn't even mean he deserves sympathy but I see no rational basis for saying he's not a victim of anything here.
coef2 | 5 hours ago
ldite | 5 hours ago
He would have presumably signed off on it, but refusing to do, or questioning their judgement, would look very bad to the board.
ethbr1 | 4 hours ago
bushido | 4 hours ago
kevmo314 | 3 hours ago
sznio | 2 hours ago
notenchange | an hour ago
I also see this behavior quite a lot in people that claim that meritocracy doesn’t exist in our society. But they never go far enough to end point where they admit they don’t deserve their own job.
bushido | 24 minutes ago
No.
I'm suggesting that a writers emotional intelligence and personal experience can show up in their writing. Especially, when the party they're writing for is receptive of the style/direction.
brookst | an hour ago
And that’s a simpler answer than Huang actually wanting a more direct apology?
bushido | an hour ago
I never said that. Both things can be true at the same time.
bpicolo | 4 hours ago
SilasX | an hour ago
cynicalkane | 4 hours ago
Sounding sincere doesn't mean they actually are, but it does mean they didn't let their ego get in the way of it, which is more than can be said about many who would be caught in a position like this, rich or not.
q3k | 4 hours ago
It's so depressing to see people eat this up.
A_Venom_Roll | 4 hours ago
program_whiz | 3 hours ago
Its not that Jensen is wrong, its a good play, the GP is just saying how sad it is to watch people eating this up like they think Jensen cracked open his laptop and drafted a note, pushed it up to the public web site, then forwarded it to axios or something.
There were lots of people involved in a carefully crafted rollout, the wording of which has nothing to do with how Jensen or his family are handling this. We will never know how he personally feels or how any of this really played out behind closed doors. For all we know he and his wife are talking divorce and shouting it out and this piece is just crafted damage control.
A_Venom_Roll | 3 hours ago
GP's take seems to assume bad faith, regardless of the message. Mu question was aimed at finding out what GP would actually consider a "genuine" response in this situation.
akoboldfrying | 2 hours ago
Many social situations have this signalling problem -- in fact I would say it's the rule, and the exception is the case where it's rational to believe another person's signals because it's known to be costly to generate them.
gramie | an hour ago
noisy_boy | 45 minutes ago
We have no way of knowing what he feels genuinely regardless of the words which doubtlessly were crafted by experts and approved by him. We do know his actions that caused this though. And the only real and verifiable thing will be future actions. Rest is fluff.
DivingForGold | 2 hours ago
...just like Bill Gates and Bezos, both were found to be "foolin around" behind the backs of their spouses. A pic of a young Russian babe appears on the net with Gates. Money = power and corrupts most of us. But to Huang's credit, it likely was not he that "chased down" this Chinese spy. The Spy was the one coaxing him into an affair.
It's sort of like 1st degree versus 2nd degree. If you kill a person in cold blooded murder it is 1st degree, but if you have a good reason, or, are "lured" into the act, it's 2nd degree. I would argue for 2nd degree in this case.
solenoid0937 | 2 hours ago
carlosjobim | 2 hours ago
Let's say there was a false apology. And a person here on HN fell for it. What exactly have they lost by falling for it? Let's say a person here on HN didn't fall for it. What exactly did they win?
People get to caught up in being right and "not being a sucker" that they forget if it's worth their time and worry. It seems people are most competitive when stakes are the lowest and there's nothing to gain.
None of us here have any stake in this.
LightBug1 | 4 hours ago
I'm not saying crucify him. We all make mistakes. But he doesn't deserve your sadness. His family does.
He made a horrible mistake which should serve as a cautionary tale and reminder to us ... that's all.
And the spy angle, and how that's being defended? Nauseating ...
freeopinion | an hour ago
If he was goofing around trying to juggle a bowling ball and it slipped and smashed the coffee table next to him, I could feel sorry for him. I'd still expect him to pay for the damage.
Doing stupid things with a bowling ball and cheating on your wife and family are not the same level error. I can still feel sorry for him in his mistake. And I can still expect him to pay for the damage. In this case, it isn't paying for a new coffee table. And it isn't just writing a public letter.
The levels of trust he has violated are deep. Not just for his wife and family. He has been smoozing the President of the U.S. to influence U.S. foreign policy towards China. Do we trust this was for the best interest of the U.S.? The world? So that his company could make more money? Or for his personal gratification?
I believe in second chances. I think he can work to rebuild trust. But rebuilding trust doesn't mean you start over with 100% trust. Put him back in the mail room and trust him with small things. Then trust him with increasingly important things as he earns that trust back. Maybe someday he might earn back enough trust to regain his current position. Ok, maybe don't restart him in the mail room. But don't restart him where he is.
--
All of the above is a mostly useless opinion. I am not on the board. I am not in any position to dictate anything about the situation. It is mostly none of my business. I just offer it as some food for thought for anyone trying to form their own philosophy. Consider compassion with consequences.
wildmXranat | 2 hours ago
It's not hard to keep it zipped up in the pants.
noJiveTV | 2 hours ago
solenoid0937 | 2 hours ago
LightBug1 | 2 hours ago
Mr Huang was tested, and failed that test.
He was weak when he should have led.
I've said before. He doesn't deserve crucifixion, but he doesn't deserve your/a defence.
Save your words for his family.
Rando's leaping to the defence of an adulterer is a lame look.
joyeuse6701 | 2 hours ago
dezsiszabi | an hour ago
gjsman-1000 | an hour ago
What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. Expel the wicked person from among you.
Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
notenchange | an hour ago
You know, the ones that actually did the spying.
brookst | an hour ago
Huang had many responsibilities that he failed to live up to. Sure, he’s a victim of sorts, but he also failed everyone.
oenvoendoskfk | an hour ago
coef2 | 54 minutes ago
montjoy | 40 minutes ago
dezsiszabi | an hour ago
brookst | an hour ago
We can’t know what he really thinks, but as apologies go, this is a good one. And it’s not healthy to see every piece of evidences as further proof of one’s own unshakable beliefs.
qlte | 27 minutes ago
When people say that the implication is they expect to see some action beyond issuing a statement.
pointlessone | 5 hours ago
Responsibility implies consequences and as far as I can tell there are none so far, other than minor embarrassment.
jaynate | 4 hours ago
rithdmc | 4 hours ago
ukblewis | 4 hours ago
program_whiz | 3 hours ago
Sometimes people cheat, especially when they have lots of offers, money, free time, travel, and time away from family. It feels good, and gives a sweet rush of dopamine, and is part of men's biological wiring and selected for over the eons.
oenvoendoskfk | an hour ago
And please, no, cheating is not part of “men’s biological wiring”. Not one is “wired to cheat”. It’s a choice. A conscious choice. We have enough will power to stop ourselves at any moment regardless of whatever bullshit “wiring” theory you might have. It was his choice and he chose poorly. Simple as that.
It always astounds me how billionaires (of all people) can be the stupidest people on Earth while also being the most powerful people on Earth.
Power doesn’t corrupt, power seeks the corrupt.
program_whiz | 24 minutes ago
On the other hand if we are partially controlled by biological drives, it explains these patterns we repeatedly observe, despite the consequences. I posit Jensen is not among "the stupidest people on earth" but that the skills that allow him to head a trillion dollar company are separate from the have-an-affair part of his biology. Of course, you could be right, maybe Bezos, Gates, Juang, Clinton, and others are just really stupid.
Aerroon | 3 hours ago
wooger | 3 hours ago
figmert | 2 hours ago
ape4 | 2 hours ago
qlte | 14 minutes ago
You know product ABC has ongoing yield problems from an outside source. Wait for moment when Person Z looks burnt out/stressed/etc and walk through emotional available "you can talk to me about anything" routine.
Don't pry about specific topic but wait until Person Z volunteers some vague conflict at work you know is the yield issue and try to gently redirect conversation using your insider knowledge Person Z isn't aware of to specific area you're interested in.
program_whiz | 3 hours ago
1. take responsibility (by saying you take responsibility, hopefully there is no actual fallout from this). 2. Admit wrong doing (people hate someone who tries to cover up) 3. Talk about how much you love your family and how wonderful they are and you would never want to hurt them (relatable). 4. Write in a tone of sincere regret to avoid any public backlash (stock price depends on this).
GlacierFox | 4 hours ago
sspiff | 3 hours ago
gokuljs | 3 hours ago
Lu2025 | 2 hours ago
mgoetzke | 2 hours ago
Pikamander2 | 2 hours ago
Happens to the best of us, really.
Insanity | 2 hours ago
And honestly, we are all human and all of us make mistakes. Having an affair is usually something that should be resolved privately, in your personal life, not in public. The business context of this affair is clearly something he wasn’t aware of at the time and punishing him for being deceived seems extreme.
bix6 | 2 hours ago
Edit: lol people would down vote this. Cheating is cool if you’re a billionaire!
mixdup | 2 hours ago
bix6 | 2 hours ago
mixdup | an hour ago
dd8601fn | an hour ago
I might evaluate someone’s good sense before investing, and this was bad decision-making, but it’s hardly the whole of his career.
boringg | an hour ago
gjsman-1000 | an hour ago
But then we culturally decided divorce doesn't count. "Till death do we part" became "Till death or major or minor inconvenience or whim do we part." Then culturally we decided that marrying an oath-breaker is just Tuesday.
oenvoendoskfk | an hour ago
Funny things, the rules we make up to justify nonsensical behaviour.
MisterMunchkin | an hour ago
mixdup | an hour ago
squidmaster | an hour ago
ModernMech | an hour ago
mixdup | 59 minutes ago
The entire scandal is a scandal to be sure. That he cheated on his wife with an intelligence operative and whatever happened beyond that is a problem and needs to be investigated and dealt with
But this thread was about him cheating on his wife full stop. He could have cheated with anyone else and it would not have been a problem. The cheating wasn't the problem, it was who he cheated with and what happened downstream
SilasX | an hour ago
mixdup | an hour ago
ModernMech | an hour ago
I mean... he did lie through his teeth to make it seem better, so not exactly trustworthy no. That he didn't sell the nuclear codes doesn't mean people trusted him after that.
mixdup | an hour ago
ModernMech | 56 minutes ago
g8oz | an hour ago
bix6 | an hour ago
boringg | an hour ago
How is billionaire related? Its such an unoriginal complaint.
bix6 | an hour ago
boringg | an hour ago
I would argue that he's not a hall pass given the coverage.
bix6 | an hour ago
dijit | an hour ago
I’m not religious at all, but one of our oldest texts in modern circulation says “let he without sin cast the first stone”- we’re all guilty of something after all, and while some poeple have no moral compass at all, some people rationalise ”a little” indecency or indiscretion.
I’m not defending him, but it doesn’t tell me he is not trustworthy in totality, its just distasteful and I don’t like it and I think this behaviour is worth some social punishment.
brookst | an hour ago
But the knee jerk maximum-cancel for any offense is a problem. CEOs are not saints. Very few people are. If our standard for corporate leadership is not just to be good at business but also to be above reproach personally… who’s left?
It’s an unfortunate fact that humans are generally fallible and imperfect. Jack Welch cheated on his wife. Many other execs have. It sucks, but the world would not be better if there were a career death penalty for doing so.
bix6 | an hour ago
geertj | 59 minutes ago
nish__ | 55 minutes ago
alistairSH | 37 minutes ago
If every C-level in the world is morally suspect, we have a bigger problem. Seriously, is your claim that being a bit iffy is a pre-requisite for the job? That's a pretty damning statement about capitalism if that's the claim.
ModernMech | an hour ago
They aren't saying "maximum cancel", they're just saying maybe this guy shouldn't be running one of the most consequential companies in the world when he's more interested in dopamine farming.
At the end of the day, asking a billionaire to resign his role, so he can sail off into the sunset on his yacht and have all the affairs he wants for the rest of his days isn't really on any scale of punishment or cancelling I'm familiar with.
Somehow we live in a world where with great power comes no responsibility or accountability, and it's quickly becoming too big of a problem to handle.
chipotle_coyote | an hour ago
(For that matter, let's not pretend that if he resigned now he wouldn't be able to immediately pick up work again if he wanted to. Because, to reiterate, he is worth over $150 billion dollars. He could start a new company. He could start ten new companies. He could buy an island and build a secret underwater volcano lair to start a new career as a Bond villain. Assuming he doesn't have a secret underwater volcano lair already, of course.)
skinfaxi | an hour ago
NetMageSCW | 44 minutes ago
alistairSH | 38 minutes ago
Nobody is saying he can't retain most/all of hi billions and do something else. But, leading a multi-billion dollar business should come with some minimum expectation of morality. If for nothing else because being an immoral turd opens you to extortion.
I really don't get the sentiment that flying around the world to cavort with a Chinese spy is ok-ish. That's insane.
moralestapia | 8 minutes ago
"He could just leave nVidia, the company he built btw., and build another 4 trillion company before he dies."
alexjplant | 34 minutes ago
I concur, but...
> Jack Welch
You might have picked a better example than the guy who systematically hollowed out the American institution that was GE by evangelizing cartoonishly corporatist short-term MBA culture then leaving when the bill came due and washing his hands of that destructive movement that he propelled to the forefront of American business. There are tons of great leaders who did hurtful things in their private lives. I don't think that Jack Welch is exemplary of that first criterion (unless you count a legacy of financial engineering and grinding employees into pulp as great leadership).
xivzgrev | an hour ago
If it does, where do you draw the line? What personal moral failing deserves to be fired for and which do not?
monkeywork | an hour ago
When did we fall back to religious level purity requirements in persons personal life in order to interact / do biz with them?
If your co-worker cheats on his/her partner should they be fired from their job?
infecto | an hour ago
I don’t know why so many people jump so easily to canceling someone.
nonethewiser | an hour ago
yibg | 45 minutes ago
maerF0x0 | 39 minutes ago
I will credit him the consideration that she is a state actor probably extensively trained in how to leverage men's weaknesses and fool them.
jmull | 22 minutes ago
limagnolia | an hour ago
etchalon | an hour ago
nonethewiser | an hour ago
34679 | an hour ago
ulfw | 23 minutes ago
robotresearcher | 13 minutes ago
richwater | an hour ago
27183 | 43 minutes ago
Yes. The cheating is only a small part of it, although it does confirm he's a piece of trash and thereby throws into question his capability as a leader. More seriously, he potentially colluded with this person, an agent of a foreign government, to bypass export restrictions. The investigation that will follow exposes Nvidia very badly.
sheikhnbake | 43 minutes ago
qlte | 30 minutes ago
rowanG077 | 50 minutes ago
sheikhnbake | 43 minutes ago
dymk | 35 minutes ago
rowanG077 | 29 minutes ago
betterunix2 | 15 minutes ago
Also keep in mind that divorce is not some formulaic thing. Most divorces are settled out of court and a hypothetical settlement could have terms that allow him to keep those shares in exchange for something else (e.g. maybe he agrees to pay her the cash value or agrees to a large and permanent alimony structure). I doubt the Nvidia board is worried about this issue considering the other, more immediate problems here (like the fact that his mistress is a Chinese spy).
d4v3 | 10 minutes ago
nonethewiser | an hour ago
bix6 | 2 hours ago
Balinares | 2 hours ago
Huang doesn't even admit wrongdoing for the actual important part of the scandal, selling restricted hardware to an adversary!
Besides, taking responsibility is something you DO, not something you say. Stepping down would be taking responsibility, for instance.
Seriously. The letter reads like 100% insincere PR hot air. Don't fall for it.
dominotw | an hour ago
I dont get all the Jensen glazing. "we are all human and all of us make mistakes. " . ok so what?
AtNightWeCode | an hour ago
nater5000 | 38 minutes ago
Yeah, but how often is a "business person" (a) clearly personally, entirely responsible for a mistake like this and (b) is a significant enough "business person" for such a public letter to even matter?
To put it another way, Huang's apologie is how someone in his position would address a situation like this. It's not very impressive to hear a CEO make a personable apology for making such a personal mistake. Like, how else would it read?
Like, it wasn't that long ago that Bill Gates' got called out for similar things and made a similar apology (https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-apologizes-to-founda...). Of course, Bill Gates isn't at the center of the world's entire economy while getting caught sleeping with a Chinese spy, so there wasn't as much scrutiny on him.
DarkNova6 | 35 minutes ago
throwaway5752 | 22 minutes ago
The corruption in terms of PRC GPU import policy and Huang's relationship with the US administration are important.
This is not a prurient sexual scandal, it's a major corruption and infiltration scandal in one of the most important companies in the world. Huang personal travelled with the US President and advised him on regional strategy, and gave him tens of millions of millions of dollars in gifts.
Huang can handle it correctly and be as contrite as he wants but it won't take away the geopolitical impact created by the operation.
jmspring | 16 minutes ago
jimbob45 | 6 hours ago
ricksunny | 6 hours ago
I just was seeing very little advance-neutralizing of 1950s Red Scare talk in these comments.
nirui | 5 hours ago
How did they met? If it was a spy operation, then it will be an interesting case study to learn how the spy agency managed to connect these two without raising suspicion, and the information can serve as a warning/education.
BTW, the woman is fine, sure, but not cheating-worthy fine. Why? A escort (a.k.a prostitute) is much safer and clean option for man like him if he's THAT desperate. https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1xrlb...
4ggr0 | 4 hours ago
ugh...
pythonRon | 5 hours ago
egorfine | 5 hours ago
Yet this person immediately demonstrated political obedience before trump, calling AI "super intelligence" immediately when trump renamed it and multiple times in his twitter.
I don't have a conclusion here.
mrkramer | 5 hours ago
christkv | 4 hours ago
lofaszvanitt | 4 hours ago
notorandit | 4 hours ago
This sentence is laughable without resignation.
Jensen does not need to resign.
He needs to stop using AI for these letters. Big power requires big responsibility (cit. S.M.)
Marazan | 3 hours ago
Shocked. Shocked I tell you.
DivingForGold | 3 hours ago
48585858 | 2 hours ago
t1234s | 2 hours ago
_doctor_love | 2 hours ago
- Devils Advocate
DerDerDaIst | an hour ago
His family is not of other peoples business....
everdrive | an hour ago
11101010010001 | 45 minutes ago
kklisura | an hour ago
[1] https://x.com/FangYi11101/status/2119586357853204813
blondie9x | an hour ago
paulluuk | an hour ago
MisterMunchkin | an hour ago
flerchin | an hour ago
sschueller | an hour ago
andsoitis | an hour ago
alexandre_m | an hour ago
That is totally unprecedented.
nojvek | an hour ago
jjoe | an hour ago
knowknow | an hour ago
aryanupardeshi1 | an hour ago
nonethewiser | 47 minutes ago
yibg | 30 minutes ago
noisy_boy | 37 minutes ago
The only thing verifiable so far is what he did.
Watch what he does in coming days, not what he says today.
throwaway5752 | 31 minutes ago
-NVDA Huang agreed to pay Trump 15% of sales of certain chips to China
-Trump gave Huang the "National Medal of Science"
-Huang on AF1 for last China trip
This seems like the tip of the iceberg on a major corruption story.