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.
The people in here acting like they would be immune to all this are kidding themselves.
You just need to know few people to qualify for "multiple times"
You say this like 2/3 of divorce is the fault of women, but IME they usually have good reason to do so.
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.
>"a measly 750K exit"
No kidding, lol.
And let’s face it, nerds are especially vulnerable.
Maybe he only knows one person who "won the startup lottery"
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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...
People in here are probably salty that they are not valuable enough to be targeted by some sexy Chinese spy.
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.
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.
Perhaps as far as to say, the only suspicious thing about the perfect agent would be the lack of anything to be suspicious of.
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.)
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.
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.
Yes affairs are unfortunately common but this whole honey pot thing is ridiculous. That doesn’t suddenly make me sympathetic to cheating.
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.
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).
This does exist as a service and is considered by many to be the oldest profession in the world.
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.
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.
Even the most powerful people can be really dumb.
"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
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
This is literally a state actor running sexpionage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexpionage).
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).
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.
There is no chase here. It is the other way round.
Jensen wasn't an innocent victim, he was still an active, voluntary participant.
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.
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.
exactly, although I would double down that that is precisely the kind of personality being selected for by the system
What if Huang wasn't married/with family? Would he just never get to form close relationships after becoming successful?
But that's not really a defense of the behavior, and it's perhaps a sign that we should stop valorizing billionaires.
Nothing unethical about it.
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.
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.
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.
.. whatever this is: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/teen-beat/
6 of 8. And they’re politicians, so if they had any embarrassing martial info we’d surely know about it.
Small beer stuff today, titillating gossip for some.
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...
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.
I’m not sure somebody with an infatuation and ultimate authority over you is something a security person can work into the threat model.
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."
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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'.
So just hire women? Sounds like an incredibly simple solution to being security compromised.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
“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...
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…
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.
I mean, each to his own, but there are times when I would not want a bodyguard involved.
we will never know