Most companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it, and for good reason.
It's a big enough deal that former CEOs of Nestle, Norfolk Southern, McDonald's and Intel were either terminated or resigned after similar relationships were uncovered.
In Europe, workplace relationships are considered a private matter as long as workplace peace doesn't suffer, and a ban would be considered legally impermissible. Europeans manage it with disclosure requirements and reassignment, not bans.
This is factually incorrect. It is entirely legal for companies in Europe to restrict relationships where one party is a direct subordinate to the other. They can also legally require disclosure of such relationships.
This is common because these relationships can create significant conflicts of interest.
As someone else in this thread noted, the former CEO of Nestle (a Swiss company) was fired because he had a relationship with a direct report that he failed to disclose, and the former CEO of BP (a UK company) resigned because of a similar situation.
Disclosure allows for people to be reassigned so that they're no longer in a subordinate position.
The researchers who coined the phrase eventually realized it only applied to artificial packs in captivity, not the wild.
He had an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy, who it appears smuggled potentially billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips into China. And now he is alleged to have slept with an Nvidia executive who reports directly to him.
If he had slept with a waitress or his friend's wife, he would survive this. Instead, he chose to have exactly the type of indiscretions that get you fired.
CEO of a public company answers to the Board. CEO of a private business do anything they want until caught.
I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive. People say he got balls of steel, chilled in his data-centers and other funny things. Shareholders are stupid. That guy's been running the firm long enough that being removed would disrupt the business so much, that shareholders piss onto their only firewood in winter. Just to be politically correct, or what's the purpose of removing him, what need does it fill? Just reveals reactive, chaotic and unstable business practices.
3) Most things speak against her being a spy and no spy would be this amateurish either. Most people think she's just enriching herself with a structured deal profiting her a lot and whoever pays most for her deals. If nationalism is involved for China, or just greed, we really don't know, but we can assume that she's surely sympathetic to China.
Jensen is just a like-able person who loves the good things in live "in full", food/sex/woman/drinking/company. I'm sure he didn't care about her business as he's a billionaire and has a lot of things to do, than caring about a crappy broker and her structured and layered shady deals.
I am aware that there’s a tension there, but the fact that I am glad the Chinese open weights models exist doesn’t change my mind about what Nvidia will almost inevitably have to do about Jensen Huang (or my own view of him in the scenario where he is supposedly naive about espionage!)
I suppose it colours my judgement about his actions re: Megaspeed if they were indeed a deliberate attempt to push availability of GPUs to Chinese customers to the limit; Singapore-washing is not something I am personally that troubled by.
> I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive
If you think being a successful CEO should mean that you can do whatever you want, it seems that you look at Trump's America and...like what you see?
And people generally seem to be arguing and trying to destroy the lives of the people they disagree with at a higher rate than ever.
Has the right cancelled anyone? Like, a single person?
The biggest thing I can think of was a single episode of Jimmy Kimmel, lol. Which came from an incredibly bald-faced lie, on regulated public TV, about a high-sensitivity murder that had just happened.
https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=List_of...
I mean, how could you forget a washed-up rockstar shooting cans of beer because the beer company inked a sponsorship deal with a trans person?
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/kid-rock-shoots-bud-light-...
Amazon and Apple were cancelled?
> tried to
Yeah I think this is the key thing. Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.
You can read, right? The list has sources:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/donald-trump...
https://www.inquisitr.com/candace-owens-apple-boycott/
> Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.
Yeah, they've been too busy grifting, running crypto scams, selling pardons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_allegations_during_...
https://americanoversight.org/investigation/corruption-in-th...
That doesn't imply that's a good and healthy way to run a society.
While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long time ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.
Not to mention another friend of the admin whose crimes in DOGE might need investigation.
However, his second term has been a lot different than his first. The first term had mostly just allegations of personal misconduct. The second term has been marked by a much more organized and systematic dismantling of the administrative state in illegal ways, which has been a lot more impactful.
I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.
I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.
> I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.
Those presidents going to prison did a coup to stay in power or had their personal shaman run the country behind the scenes. Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.
> I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.
Correct, which is why the law needs to be applied equally. That's the fundamental basis of the rule of law. Otherwise it's worth nothing.
But that isn't what we're talking about here -- we're talking about actions taken related to his official duties. That is an inherently politicized situation where even the textual rule of law does provide for special allowances precisely to discourage political opponents from abusing the rule of law as a political weapon.
> Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.
I think the evidence around the world shows that precisely the opposite is true.
Leaders do a lot of things and laws are complicated, lawfare is stupidly easy.
he would've never got reelected if the democrats of 2021-2024 resembled democrats of 2008. his reelection was a violently retarded response to the clown world antics of that era.
Not saying it will certainly happen, but there will be different people at helm this time, and his more crimes are out now.
Prosecutors "just" have to establish that the criminal behavior is not an official act, of which there are plenty such examples.
The fact that this scandal was leaked is a sign that the rule of law is returning.
They were bypassing natsec based export controls by making donations to the executive branch, and used the influence to bury a commerce investigation into the matter, from the available information.
He can sleep with who or whatever he wants. The Megaspeed story and how investigations into it were mothballed have every appearance of being a big deal even beyond Nvidia.
- William Penn & MLK Jr
I'm 50/50 on whether or not Alice Huang is actually a spy for the Chinese government, or rather just a social climber and opportunist. She certainly didn't hide her perceived closeness to Jensen Huang, and in fact actively flaunted it on her social media.
Furthermore, I think it possible if not likely that Jensen has had more than just 2 extramarital liaisons, and if more were to come out, then IMO that would actually shift the likelihood towards Jensen simply being a lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status, rather than being honeypotted by some Chinese intelligence operation.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/trump-china-t...
I'll bet 100 dollar this is just about money.
A spy is someone that deals in obtaining and sharing secret information. They would be a spy if they used their information to obtain secrets on NVIDIA hardware and shared these secrets with others. There's no evidence I've seen that this happened. Someone buying NVIDIA hardware is not a spy.
I mean, isn't that the easiest guy to honey-pot?
The best HN comment I read on this subject was along the lines of "NVIDIA sure appeared eager to avoid those export restrictions, so does it matter whether she was a spy or not?" Maybe if he was handing over, like, chip designs or something, but there's not (yet?) been any allegation of that.
Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail, assuming his wife was not aware of his affairs. Anyone who knew that was happening would have had enormous leverage over him.
Even if no one actually did so it still demonstrates a massive risk.
Do you really want to apply that to congress, the judiciary, the police. Let's face it anyone in any position of trust, which turns out to be everyone in the end because homeless, unemployed I could be a witness to something.
So we just outlawed private consensual behavior of individuals. (Not outlawed, you just lose your right to keep your job or whatever, yeah sure right...)
Doesn't seem like an american Freedom to me but what would I know?
Plenty of jobs come with personal life restrictions. Work nights. Work on an oil rig. Work on an aircraft carrier in the ocean for months at a time. Everyone is free to not take those jobs. I don’t see why a “no affairs” clause for a CEO should be all that different. If you don’t consent to the rules, take a different job.
These kinds of paths to blackmail/extortion are literally what government background checks pressure test when hiring employees. So, yes, we do want to apply those to people in positions of trust.
I'm not clear why you claim this extends to everyone including the homeless and unemployed, that seems wrong to me. You can't blackmail a homeless person into violating national security.
Are you really claiming the homeless don't matter?
Even if you can do all these things then you must deny them the ability to testify in court because they could be blackmailed.
If you don't see how this goes I probably can't help you. Read a diversity of sci-fi? Read what life was like in the soviet union?
> Are you really claiming the homeless don't matter?
Towards being blackmailed against national security interests? Yeah I’d say the risk of that is low. The GP didn’t claim anything else
Perhaps trying to make sure there aren't morality based repercussions takes the sting out of future blackmail attempts on other successful businessfolk would be a better strategy for national security than, I dunno, briefing the New York Times and trying to make it as miserable as possible?
But sure maybe the CIA is just woefully incompetent, disorganised and accountability free in pursuing this national security goal of blackmail resistance. Or perhaps this is not the best theory as to what is going on.
There's a really, really good reason we keep this kind of moral judgement private, "between you and your rabbi" as Feynmann put it.
exceptions of course for the commander in chief
Jensen's job does not rely on having security clearance. There's no evidence he has security clearance is there?
I'll admit I haven't really been following this story, but I ASSUME he didn't know she was a spy? (Given a good portion of a spy's job is making sure you don't know they are a spy) So why is this an issue either?
How'd they figure out she was a spy anyway?
For sure he is the victim of an adversarial attack against him and Nvidia, but as the leader of one of the most valuable companies in the world in am industry where IP and company secrets hold huge economic value, then you really need to expect and anticipate that spies will be trying to infiltrate your org and steal your secrets. I think you can clearly say he has demonstrated bad judgement here.
Source: The Economist. (Paywalled) https://economist.com/business/2026/11/11/there-has-never-be...
> That she might be a Chinese agent would have been obvious to Mr Huang had he inquired about her background: before going into business, Ms Huang worked at a Chinese state-run broadcaster known by its unimprovable acronym, “CCTV”.
The FBI so far has not provided a reason for the lack of a brief, but one reason they might not provide one is they suspect the target is a willing participant.
As best I've heard, nobody knows that now. We have some rumors with absolutely nothing behind them.
That assertion makes no sense, yet tits the best interpretation I can gather from your odd comment!
Surely you mean something else?!
Even more interesting given his Taiwanese citizenship.
We are so one shot by hollywood movies that if a newspaper points at an attractive middle aged women, whos foriegn, and says shes a spy we'll all believe it.
There's literally nothing to prove this, not even anything suspicious. Its just the Trump admin, whos owned by Silicon Valley oligarchs saying so. Wanting to buy GPUs, even if its for China does not make you a spy. It makes you a business person.
I know Ill get another 5 downvotes for saying this, but its true. Zero evidence. Its the perfect story to kick off the war against Chinese open source models which have really put a damper on Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue.
If you allow your employer to control your sexuality you are not fully human.
Bill Gates met Melinda Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.
Many such cases. Rupert Murdoch. Larry Ellison.
Maybe I would have worded it differently, but I generally agree with the grandparent poster. It seems rare that a founder would be ousted over this type of thing.
My guess is that the China dealings are the most important part, and that part is being undersold because it's actually illegal and puts both him and anyone with knowledge of it at risk of going to jail.
Bill Gates met Melinda ~40 years ago. It should be blatantly obvious I'm taking about where things stand today. Lots of things happened 40 years ago that would be generally unacceptable today.
The U.S government have known about this for a year. How serious would it be (i.e in terms of Jail time) for them to just give a warning and sit on it for a year?
When has legal fallout from an affair with a subordinate ever destroyed a Fortune 100 company? That doesn't happen.
Do you think a CEO is a King or what that they are destroying a company and that's not enough to get booted? CEOs get fired all the time. A Board certainly doesn't need an affair pretext to boot one that is actively tanking the company.
It matters for the very obvious reason that a less senior employee may feel pressured or may lose their job when the relationship ends, that usually office affairs result in other employees feeling compelled to keep secrets, that it may result in others losing out on promotions to the employee in the affair, that they often result in abuse of resources, because it opens everyone up to blackmail, that it’s a display of bad judgement and ethics, etc. etc.
It’s nothing at all to do with political correctness.
I am not sure it makes sense given why companies exist in the capitalist system. Stockholders, I'd think, on average care more about the returns less whether the CEO is a likable character.
The real problem is potentially illegal behavior, of course.
This ignores the direct consequences like "worse" employees getting promoted (affecting business) or put in charge, or like in this case, potential national security issues.
I'm sure Jenson knew sleeping with his direct reports was wrong. And that plenty of CEOs got fired for that. Nothing arbitrary about that.
How does it NOT make business sense to consider firing bim here (outside of manosphere thinking)?
I am not debating the spying, smuggling angle here; but it this was just the affair, its a decision by the board, whereas if he run over an elderly lady at a crossing, its no longer a choice - law is law.
Btw, re: ad hominem 'manosphere' or 'woke' whatever. I have nothing to do with either.
By the time it’s public knowledge and reflecting on the company, yes, that’s a failure—and the failure of discretion is probably closer to the board’s clammy little hearts than any particular fluids (or allegations of favoritism) that may have been swapped along the way.
While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.
I agree with you on the first and second point. Perhaps you can argue it's in bad taste to have an affair but the private matters of adult lives should be of no interest to outsiders.
I wouldn’t call this particularly nuanced, certainly if they were sold to intermediaries not subject to the export controls (Singapore)
More [1].
They were married years before he founded the company, and lived in California, a community property state. And they got married right out of college. Unless he somehow knew that he would start a company and got a prenup that says "if I start a company it's all mine", a prenup wouldn't matter anyway (and would probably but null and void anyhow).
Since US counterintelligence has known about the relationship since late 2024, they would be completely incompetent if they had not:
1) taken measures to ensure that she did not get US secrets,
2) collected information on Chinese priorities and methods for acquiring AI hardware, and/or
3) fed misinformation to the Chinese.
1. ASML (a Dutch company) is not allowed to sell EUV lithography machines to China; and
2. NVidia is not allowed to sell their best GPUs (made with those machines) to China.
This is all done under the auspices of "national security" and the vague hand-waving notion of "military applications". China is rapidly developing EUV on their own. I kinda expect this to be commercially producing chips by ~2030. Other people believe it will take a little longer.
So what's the problem? By banning the sale of chips to China, the US has inadvertently created captive domestic demand for Chinese made chips because Huawei (etc) cannot buy Western made chips. This is really kickstarting China's lithography efforts because anything they produce has billions of induced demand with no competition from foreign imports.
That is I believe Huang's argument: we should be selling the chips but not the lithography. I agree with that assessment. But Us foreign policy really is just blinded and can be summed up as "China bad".
Frontier labs (and Nvidia) have started using AI in chip development.
AI that requires frontier chips to train (or you steal chain of thought and try to distill…which has mixed results).
That in turn becomes a flywheel for developing domestic supply chains for chips.
See the latest reports for super intelligence takeoff. They (again assuming the timelines are semi correct as it’s all guesswork) show takeoff significantly before 2030.
The worst thing you could do is allow China to accelerate their domestic chip development via giving them access to chips needed to accelerate the AI flywheel.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc do not want Nvidia chips to sell to China because it makes the GOU supply constraint even deeper to American companies and it increases model training/inference competition.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of these players worked behind the scenes to try to oust Huang.
The only other way is that these people want to go war with China as soon as super intelligence is invented.
I'm as big as an AI bull as anyone here but we still have physical laws. Everything is a sigmoid.
She's alleged to have been an 'intelligence asset', which is not the same thing as a spy (assets are not agents). Assets are often just good sources of insight and analysis, whereas agents are tasked with active deception and exfiltration of information. Jensen Huang is arguably an intelligence asset; I'm sure he's given informative briefings to spooks on the state of the world, albeit not necessarily knowingly.
A related question to this is whether Jensen Huang even has a US government security clearance.It's not obvious to me that he's privy to any government secrets, even if the US regards Nvidia as a strategic asset. To pick up on your point 4, he might have been knowingly violating the law, a problem for any CEO. But if he's not definitely violating sanctions and is instead just chasing profits, that's considered the norm.
To be frank I think this is a storm in teapot because there have been rumors about his affair floating around since last May, and if the US government has known for at least that long and hasn't intervened or arrested him it's probably not that big of a deal. I can't help wondering if it's a case of the current US administration trying to look tough after the President suffered a humiliating election defeat.
Even reading the history of European nobility, it is amazing how often you'd come across married nobles who didn't even live in the same city as their partner, and who openly had mistresses or young handsome men hanging around all the time.
I've also talked to Chinese business men who lamented that they are expected to have an overseas girlfriend, almost as a sign of status.
And hell, Saturday Night Live has been joking about rich old ladies and their love of hiring pool boys for literally decades now.
My point is not to normalize cheating, but rather that all sorts of arrangements have existed throughout time and different cultures and instantly saying "he's sleeping with someone who isn't his wife!' doesn't mean that person is devoid of morals.
This kind of morality is between you and your Rabbi. We are allowed to look down on it all we like. It has no relevance to law or keeping your job because if you allow this kind of thing to have relevance it never ends. Rank selfishness comes out in so many ways.
"You got a parking fine, your social conscience is clearly lacking..."
Hard to estimate it precisely but less than 1% is likely to be accurate, no?
Is it true?
1) This is a huge matter of character. If you cannot be faithful to your wife, what makes you a faithful leader of a company? There is also the issue of respect: when a leader is morally compromised, the people he is leading lose confidence and respect in him.
2) Isn’t there something of a power dynamic issue here too? He has a greater responsibility to use his authority and power as a superior to not abuse that authority, and committing adultery with an inferior is a huge problem.
3) On what basis is this a huge deal and the previous two are not? Where’s the nuance? It’s just arbitrary.
4) Well yeah, it looks like he was complicit in breaking sanctions. It’s no longer an arms-length deal.
5) Again, why are the first two worth shrugging shoulders and this one is not? It’s no big deal, people cheat and break the law all the time.
6) That sure undersells it. It underlines the stupidity of sin, and the sinfulness of man.
7) I can’t argue with that.
Whether he would be the most profitable CEO is absolutely irrelevant. The guy is literally facing prison time if he can be directly tied to the violation of those sanctions. If the board takes more than about 30 seconds to come to a conclusion they should probably all be replaced as well.
https://fortune.com/2026/03/19/supermicro-arrested-founder-s...
Or is the evidence right over there next to the evidence of WMD?
I know some people believe anonymous govt officials but I kinda don't so if there's actual evidence, let's see it, or note the the doubt legitimately exists.
It seems a very odd thing to be briefing newspapers about rather than the very many other, seemingly more useful ways of using that information if it is true. How does everyone feel about the CIA briefing the New York Times in general to seemingly get a CEO removed? Who takes responsibility for making that decision?
Or just... not cheating on your wife
> sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort
I really don't like Jensen but I think this actually shows decent character! Sleeping with a femme fatale is rather romantic.
Not to mention that Nvidia has a huge stake in the ai space being a backstop to a bunch of players in all its circular financing deals.
Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.
There's no scenario in 2026 where sleeping with a boss or subordinate is acceptable behavior for corporate leadership.
And... look, I get it, and maybe you can write it off as just something that happens in the real world.
But the fact that he would do it, also screams, "This is someone who thinks the rules don't apply to him."
Which again puts him squarely in the "not someone you want as a leader" category.
I don't think you can reasonably argue that their relationship must have had a significant power imbalance or what have you if you can't even decide which direction the power imbalance went in. Why is it impossible that the relationship was, all things considered, on roughly equal terms?
>>> Or he's a predator.
>> the woman is 42...
> In general, adulthood does not confer an immunity to coercion.
I'm only responding to the idea that one must be young to be victimized by a predator, which is silly and false. I am not, however, supposing anything of the sort is what happened here.
1. Cheating on his wife when that will likely significantly change the ownership of the company is a big deal;
2. Here's where I disagree most. A married billionaire CEO sleeping with an also-married subordinate is a huge deal and that alone warrants an ouster. It creates huge legal exposure for the company;
3. The biggest issue with the Chinese spy is he's wealthy enough that this shouldn't happen. I'm sorry but you can afford corporate security who can vet the people you're involved with and do so discreetly;
Huang hired Heller (a crisis PR firm) a year ago. It seems like he knew something was coming and possibly failed to inform the board. Ok, that's more grounds for termination.
I too am reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
I very much doubt it stops here.
On one hand I firmly believe that if a rule is stupid you have no moral obligation to obey it. There might still be consequences though, however unjust.
On the other hand so many rules can be in place for years because people just don't obey them so their stupidity is mitigated to the point of invisibility.
The tl;dr is she slept with Jensen in return for large benefits for her Husband's company.
Her actual role in this doesn't have a real good direct translation to English.
Because those are independent from each other in a way that the corresponding institutions in China are not.
Every large Chinese company is under the direct control of the CCP. Working for a large Chinese company means you are working for the Chinese government in the same way as a state department employee (very differently from someone working for Intel, at least if they haven't individually received a National Security Letter).
That is absolutely a huge deal, I have no idea why you don't think it is. That is the kind of behavior which anyone in an American workplace knows is not tolerated in the slightest and would lead to firing. The fact that he did it anyway shows he has shockingly poor judgement.
Not knowing doesn't make it any better!
Judge not, for in the measure of your judgment, it will be measured to you.
Desire is the enemy of happiness. To abandon sorrow, abjure want.
We are all in wanting. Our want is lesser than the needs of our partners, our friends, and our world.
I pity you.
I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.
The Chinese spy thing and illegal dealing with China are far worse but they should be investigated properly.
He shouldn't be ousted from the company he built to be the biggest company in the world because he cheated on his wife.
Huang himself said his infidelity hurt his wife and his kids. The people rushing to normalize this behavior are elevating sexual freedom above family obligations. Those people are wrong.
Well...
to what extent do you believe his public and almost entirely content-free apology letter ( https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company ) reflects his personal thoughts?