From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.
This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.
He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.
I don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure.
It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.
Cheating on your wife of 40 years OTOH...
But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught.
Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes.
You can say it was luck but it was definitely not "average".
Nvidia thrived because it paired great hardware with great software.
AMD and Intel think hardware is enough; it’s not. There’s a reason neither has ever been able to compete with Nvidia.
They have a giant ego, but I’d argue it’s probably well deserved.
Apple is/was similar. They also see that hardware without great software is useless. Spend as much; if not more on software to make your hardware shine.
Yeah, it pretty much does. CUDA is why they are positioned where they are. Other players like AMD and Intel could have done that, but they didn't, and if they had, they wouldn't have persevered for 10+ years with essentially nothing to show for it.
Whether CUDA will continue to maintain dominance is less clear. It may become a literal victim of its own success, as CUDA-based models gain the ability to migrate themselves to new platforms.
Let's be clear, she is just the interim CEO (primarily because Huang neglected to ever even start a transition plan) while NVidia searches for a permanent CEO. The names I've seen floated are Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, and Ian Buck, the creator of CUDA.
Let's expect better of leadership than to be criminal.
Unless it's like super far in, if this counts as heated then I just don't know what you expect.
If the Chinese Communist Party are going through such great lengths to obtain these advanced Nvidia chips, it further invalidates a lot of what I've been reading here and elsewhere about China "catching up" or that being the leading models isn't what matters (commoditization). You don't do stuff like this unless you really need something.
WSJ reports that U.S. intelligence says Chinese intelligence approached Alice to become an asset after she met Jensen in March 2024. So, she wasn't targeted.
That said, I don't have any special insight into the specifics of who was driving the demand backing Megaspeed.
China catching up does not mean they are not still behind.
Also, China is a big country with many companies. While some may be trying to catch up via local development, others may still prefer getting western hardware right now e.g. in order to get a competitive advantage over those catching up.
If they don't need NVIDIA then why is the now former CEO of NVIDIA trying so hard to allow exprt controls to be relaxed.
And it's because brute forcing only allows you to not fall behind, but you can't catch up to frontier models or surpass.
Let's assume for a second that the compromat story on Huang is true, how much would that have cost? It could be everywhere from 10k to 10m $, depending on how difficult it was to get access, but it would still be a rounding error for AI invest.
Chips aren't what maketh SI anyway. The US is ahead because of a trifecta of having the best (most) hardware, best data, and best talent. You might also throw in business culture. But the same way Google is leading from behind in the US AI eco system, China is behind the frontier on LLMs, but laying foundational work in robotics, multi-modal models and integrated factories that might prove a big advantage down the line.
But here's a link to the podcast episode if you want to give it a listen. It will inform a lot to the discussion taking place here and help you understand a few of the things he said that are probably now wrong: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang
Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
(and could leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future)
For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.
And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.
It's just myopia.
If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before there is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has been misaligned to desire.
AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.
Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?
An economy kept dependent on American tech is unlikely to drop bombs on America and vice versa. Co dependency prevents war.
"Good thing China doesn't have a long memory or anything!!"
Good luck with that folks...
NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.
End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.
No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War. Subsequently they managed to starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then righted themselves.
They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use. They make almost everything in the average household.
Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.
If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.
Suppose you want to build something that requires technical knowledge (a GPU, a fighter jet, ...). You have engineers, but they don't yet know how to build it.
If no one on earth has ever built this thing, you need to consider the possibility that it can't be done at a cost you can pay. Perhaps it violates some law of physics, or it can't be manufactured without knowing some chemistry/physics that we are 100+ years from discovering.
If a company in some other country is already building this thing, you can be sure it is possible to build it. That is a critical piece of information! It means you don't need to discover (much) new physics. It means you can buy/steal a working copy and look at it to learn about it. It means there are engineers you can hire/spy on to understand their design process. It means you can more easily convince a bank/government to fund development, as they have proof your goals are achievable.
Inventing a thing is much harder than inventing a clone of a thing. The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
The phrase is “fait accompli”, without a D, and is French for “accomplished feat”.
The ever closing gap between the capabilities of frontier models vs chinese open weight models.
That's not a strategy that leads to actually being the best.
Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
Sanctions should be a bigger conversation. They are almost never needed and especially trade tariffs and such are always used for the most corrupt cronyism.
There’s also the minor quibble that restricting food exports to starve another country are illegal under international law.
That sanctions only harm the civilian economy is not an argument against them. Kinetic sanctions agains oil refining are also primarily impacting the general population and the military have enough oil. But they still impact the ability of the Russians to fund the war. Civilian infrastructure and economic assets are used by militaries too.
For the record I think that less than half of the people who thought the dress was black and gold were being influenced by the Chinese government to take that position.
If the sale is not about money or share price then maybe it's ideological.
OK sure .. obviously sleeping with Chinese agent is a security issue .. very bad .. but Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense. In fact, it is counterproductive because it closes a huge market to Nvidia and makes China less reliant on US Tech - forcing them to accelerate development of homegrown GPU business.
If Nvidia was skirting the law, then they should held accountable for that.
If Nvidia merely held a position that the particular law is, say, counter-productive and lobbied against it (but followed it) - what's illegal about that?
in corporate america haha
As a business, why shouldn't they advocate for export to a relatively huge market? It is an expansion for them and from a business perspective completely expected.
China should have infiltrated ASML, not much they can do without them until they get the blueprints. Unlikely they aren't doing it already.
these are actual weapons, does anyone use GPUs to kill humans?
There is more spelunking to that situation, but that's a different thread.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Sad day for developers.
https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/trump-lutnick-nvidia-china-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...
I doubt it has anything to do with it really. China is a huge market and by not exporting to China they were missing out on tens to hundreds of billions in revenue. Any CEO would have advocated the same.
Particularly in the current political moment, saying essentially "we were using high demand in a market we can't legally sell in to increase prices for American customers" is not a good look.
(Yes,obviously, not all of this is Nvidia's doing, and demand at this volume through smuggling/front companies would still affect the legitimate market. But being an active participant in it is not a good look.)
Even if this is just a coincidence, Jensen himself came out and said he donated to the ballroom, but kept the amount hidden. In internal documents, Jensen and Nvidia said to keep the amount hidden and it only came out due to disclosure documents from the government.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think that the risk is not nearly as real as it-- as they talk. And I think the risk can be managed. And it's managed, you know who? By who? The DOJ. We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said, "Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night."
ROSS DOUTHAT: Who was this person?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Or this company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you. But we said-- "Do you like the color orange because get rid --" said, "Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give 'em a kiss good night, and--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"that's the story because--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"because tomorrow morning--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"you're goin' to jail."
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the-- if they--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted to make a deal--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --to put that (UNINTEL)--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person totally changed everything. Totally. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: "Yes, sir"?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Was it a leader of a major AI company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. Yeah.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. And--
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --and-- and I don't think--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --said, "We wanna put th-- we wanna--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --"codify this into law--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't think it was--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --would you work with them--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --done maliciously. But it coulda been malicious, but--
---
This is what losing the Rule of Law looks like by the way. The sitting president is on TV saying that he found out someone rich and powerful is suspected of wrong doing serious enough to get a call from the president threatening him with prison, but that that's the punishment. Once that rich and powerful person bent the knee, said "Yes sir" with the right tone of voice, all was forgiven.
Equal Justice under Law means that we shouldn't punish people we don't like with harsher sentences it also means that wealth and power shouldn't be sufficient to skirt the law.
We often speak of a two-tiered justice system, but I've never seen the president go on TV and tell America in no uncertain terms, it exists, I'm a part of it, and it went very well, he said "Yes sir" just the right way and so you don't need to worry about it.
cost of doing business. kiss the ring, get the blessing, make fat stacks -- illegally.
Corrupt from top to bottom.
birds of a feather, and all that
The audit on the main contractor for that "ballroom" must be wild. I guess that auditor is going to make a pretty penny.
It's not just NVIDIA that's extremely weak on China, the entire Executive branch is both weak and incompetent on what they claim is a chief concern, and Congress has been completely absent on the oversight role that it should be performing according to the US Constitution.
The incompetence and/or corruption is inexcusable. Teapot Dumb Scandal.
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.
You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.
The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.
At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.
That is the unforgivable lapse in judgement.
If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract with a person to whom you've promised utter faithfulness, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy with regard to some boring, impersonal business contracts?
My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.
- Signed, another European
Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
Markets care about predictability.
To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.
Why? I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?
Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.
Maybe I don't understand enough the US culture.
This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.
Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.
And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.
In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.
If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.
Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.
In 2016, the choice was between Trump and Clinton. Clinton famously excused her husband's infidelity by calling the long list of women who claimed they were assaulted as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty".
In 2024, the choice was between Trump and Harris. Harris got into politics by being the mistress of a CA governor.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the US presidential election offered a choice between someone who was moral and someone who was as immoral as our existing political class. But that has not happened in my lifetime, and I don't expect that to change.
But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.
> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.
Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.
*Everything on a spectrum.
I'm jealous!
Seems like a real analytical breakthrough that I'd legitimately love to learn more about.
"It's not the crime, it's the coverup."
Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes. I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents, and he pretty much encouraged the agents to publish the photos.
No? All it requires is for Jensen to want to remain with his wife and for his wife to be willing to divorce him if she finds out he has an affair.
Or, even if we suppose he doesn’t care about his wife’s feelings at all, he might be very incentivised by losing half of his assets in a divorce. It’s worth many, many millions to him.
Very little involvement from society in that one.
You don’t have to be a prude to think cheating on a spouse is condemnable.
In general, it also doesn’t really matter what society thinks. You can just threaten to reveal the affair to the spouse. And even in the case the spouse doesn’t really care it’s fodder they can potentially use in a divorce to get a better deal.
One thing worth pointing out is that in this case in addition to the affair with the Chinese spy he was allegedly having an affair with a subordinate, which is always problematic.
For better or worse, this is the world we live in.
Sukarno. "Project Happy Days", lol.
He (Sukarno) thought it was hilarious and sent copies to his friends.
CIA was pissed w/ him because he killed a lot of Communists but then started leaning to China and beefing with Malaysia, which irritated the British
Although if you read his Wikipedia page, he had many, many wives, some concurrently, and the youngest was 19...so it's probably true, lol.
Then you read about a certain EV company CEO and his escapades and repopulating the planet, and you don't know what to think.
Or Charlie Sheen...
I guess politicians, celebrities and CEOs are another world from us mere mortals.....
There are many examples where the outed affair resulted in nothing material when neither of the above was true.
This case, seems to touch both.
It is true for anything with a board, of course. But there is no rule mandating boards.
> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out
There is no "* only applies to publicly traded companies". Hence, it is incorrect.
The bigger point I am trying to make here being that not everything is investor-driven. People can run businesses without that. It annoys me greatly that HN regularly forgets that.
In theory, Nvidia shareholders, if dissatisfied with today's decision, could vote to oust the current board and replace it with people more sympathetic to Huang, who would, as their first decision, re-hire him as CEO, as would be their prerogative. This is... unlikely to happen.
None of the above is investment advice.
I can hardly imagine anything more stupid than judging the aptitude of the CEO of a 5T$ business based on his private love life.
You should be concerned about corporate crime.
That doesn't change that there is a conflict of interest here and any company should fire someone who has a conflict of interest that they are not carefully managing to ensure they don't become real.
It's not entirely about humiliation.
Having an affair (or multiple, in this case) demonstrates poor decision making. You don't want someone who can't make wise choices running your company.
Marriages of 41+ years can get into any kind of dynamic.
It's clearly the CN link and/or the cosying up with a customer that is the problem; the board would not care about his private life (and neither should the public, tbh).
And the open letter sounds more like it was written the way the public would expect a CEO to write.
His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?
He has also said so very many times in so very many ways that Nvidia was absolutely not involved in violation of export control laws regarding the export of its products to China. That -in fact- there was absolutely no smuggling going on and claims to the contrary were utterly baseless and without merit.
I agree with ohnnyApplePRNG's assertion that we know literally nothing about the private life and situation of Mr. Huang and his family.
> we know literally nothing
He "literally" wrote about how his actions hurt his family, I'm not sure why there's a second account parroting the exact same phrase.
Uh... but we do!
---
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. 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.
Jensen
---
Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much a promoter of monogamy.
I think it is naive to assume that such public statements are the whole truth of a matter.
People who fuck up a company (or have an affair, or get caught snorting drugs off a sex-worker) aren't really 'stepping back to spend more time with their families'. Historically the classic example of executive public statements.
Yes, and it would have helped. CEOs have "exciting" relationships all the time, and folks seem entirely willing to accept this.
These are entirely different stories:
"My wife and I have a non-traditional relationship and would prefer to keep the specifics private, but no harm was caused by my actions."
"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."
If you have stronger evidence that the statement was untruthful when it said he hurt his family, you may present it.
Until such time, the statement strengthens the bayesian prior, which is that his affairs hurt his family, and thus that is what we can conclude. We need not be 100% confident to conclude this absent further evidence. >50% confidence suffices.
he was fucking a spy
he was fucking one of his direct reports
what are two things you shouldn't ever do as a CEO of the biggest company in the world?
this wasn't Cindy the random waitress from the Palo Alto Ruth Chris', these were literally two people he should never be fucking
he put the company at risk of national security issues and HR lawsuits for what is otherwise painfully mid-tier pussy. he's gotta go.
This is an extremely unnecessary misogynistic comment.
It’s unambiguously a good thing that the next NVIDIA CEO (even if just an interim CEO) is a woman, and that the AMD CEO is a woman.
This is how things change. Slowly and then all at once. If the board were more in love with him, they'd probably have been willing to turn a blind eye for just a little while longer. No such luck for Jensen, but we make our own luck in these things.
In a Goffman Front Stage/Back Stage sense, you are supposed to keep the front stage presentation on the level of a pious monk or nun.
The irony to me is this just another asymmetrical advantage for Chinese culture.
That's a very narrow view that's a function of one's religion, culture, and values.
When I was in school, (US) my very Catholic French teacher explained that his uncle, in France, had a mistress. His uncle's wife knew and was okay with it. What my teacher was explaining is that the culture around marriage varies considerably through the world, and you can't take for granted that what we were taught (monogamy) is the standard that others live to, or even expect from you.
Please don't make the mistake of assuming that American culture is homogeneous: It's not.
Perhaps it’s you that is out of touch?
Both partners in this case know and/or participate, you don’t want drama at your games night after all. There is no wrong here, it turns out that many partners like seeing their partner have a great time.
That’s not quite true. A more accurate statement would be: A marriage may be annulled in some U.S. states if one spouse entered the marriage with a concealed, permanent intention not to consummate it, and that intention constitutes fraud going to the essence of the marriage.
If the couple was having sex after marriage, and then one partner decided to cease having it some time later, that is generally not grounds for annulment.
If it were permitted, this would make many, if not most, late-stage marriages subject to annulment. People get sick and injured or just incapable in old age.
Well we don't know that, you are not legally required to love someone you are married to and I have no clue what their relationship is like or whether they have any sort of "arrangements". I could hardly care less really since its their private matter.
> just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
I don't really see a correlation between those things. All sorts of immoral degenerates (e.g. Musk, (potentially) Gates and I assume plenty of other lesser known CEOs) have generated massive amounts of value for their shareholders.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc. And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.
Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?
As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?
They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.
I think NVIDIA lose more things by firing Jensen.
He put US national security at risk just because between his wife and his other mistress, he couldn't keep it in his pants.
There are some things more important than stock valuation.
Given that the economic growth of the USA during the last few years was entirely due to this man and his technologies, I'm going to say nah.
China having access to GPUs is not a national security threat. It's an economic threat. Not sure why people treat China as some enemy nation. It's just a competitor.
It is far far worse than that - he lied to shareholders.
Or maybe he just simply wanted to make more money by increasing demand for Nvidia's GPUs by tacitly allowing for them to be exported to China though Singapore.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
And Jensen isn't just any CEO, he is the founder and has run the company for thirty years.
He would have survived the affairs if it wasn't for the export control violation aspects.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.
So for example, a stolen Porsche could end up being driven by a Russian oligarch.
Porsche is not on the hook for this. The car was stolen by a third party.
If a Porsche exec instead had sex with the thief and tossed them the keys to a brand new 911, then they might be on the hook for violating sanctions.
A famous guy had an island and it was extrajudicially a place where alot of powerful people internationally could come to his island and interchange info and ideas and make deals and things could occur and he collected up all that kind of stuff, including arms deals and the sex stuff.
But Americans are only right now aware of the sex stuff in what he collected up.
The sex stuff is essentially a distraction, the oily film on the deeper ocean of truth.
People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Sad day for developers.
dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open ops...!!!] may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
This is obviously something that has been postponed for after the midterms.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
The more sane explanation is that Jensen Huang just wanted to capture more revenue.
This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
That suggests no treason.
Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.
We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.
The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
I've seen a theory floated online that somebody inside the government, who was part of the faction advocating for stricter sanctions on China, leaked this in a way to cause maximum damage to the anti-restrictions faction. Whether Huang (female Huang) was actually a Chinese spy in the first place is also up in the air, keep in mind that while the affair has almost certainly occurred, given that Huang (male) has admitted to it himself, the Chinese spy allegations are still unverified. It could possibly have been a "grain of truth in a sea of lies" play.
That's literally how the world works? And has worked for many centuries or longer. By "value" you mean wealth, and wealthy people can get away with murder. They buy and write the law and have the best lawyers in the world.
We won't have billionaires/trillionaires/kings AND rule of law for /everyone/ equally - the world doesn't work that way.
> if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Hmm... I wonder why that is. Could it be because a bunch of CEOs, prominent politicians, and business people were found to have taken multiple trips to an island where the had sex with children and nothing happened to them? No, it couldn't possibly be that. I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age, while we excuse pedophilia.
Do we have evidence that his legally-recognized other half consented to these relationships? If so, fine. That still doesn't remove the problems with those relationships, like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset, or the fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.
>while we excuse pedophilia.
Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???
bipartisan bill[1] needed to decapitate[2] opposition[3] to expanded controls/moratoria and install “neutral” caretakers[4] until passage
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/09/10/2026/bipartisan-ai-saf...
[2] https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2120745928722087948
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035303
[4] current CFO Kress or former Apple CEO Tim Cook (suggested by president in social media post)
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got redirected or forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
Interesting times
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
His argument was “we must not make it more convenient to develop a fully domestic stack”
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is a fairly reasonable adage
It would have been simpler and more profitable to sell China the GPUs.
One woman from the CCP just burned a couple of trillion out of your 401Ks. Have you said thank you even once? Are you sick of winning yet?
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
Lots of this has been known since may, and it sounds like the president was informed she was a spy a year ago.
One wonders if this happened now since the Dems took control of the investigation bodies.
If they had not, would they have kept right on as is?
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
wong?
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
Remind me: when did Huang direct NVDA funds to the Trump ballroom fund?
According to who?
If the second affair didn’t come out, this wouldn’t be a discussion.
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
I think it was the affair with the direct report that did him in.
That's a bigger no-no than selling to spies, especially when the administration knew about it and did nothing.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm 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
For someone not familiar with American law: How the fuck is that a bigger problem than the Chinese spy ?
Is there any explicit rules at NVidia forbidding that in a code of conduct somewhere ?
You really think Nvidia would let Huang go (without a replacement matching his skills, experience and knowledge in the field) because he cheated with an employee? It is the spy affair while Huang promoted an open export policy.
Plus thanks to Huang, Nvidia is now under investigation by federal agencies.
None of them care about a CEO cheating.
Also, being fired from the company you founded is a serious consequence.
Hah. He doesn't have a prenup. That's going to lead to serious enough consequences for him in divorce court.
...maybe. Or maybe not. Consistency in application of the law is not exactly at an all-time high right now.
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
So it’s no longer about national security. What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care? Did Jenson reduce SpaceX’s allocation?
We all now know that Trump knew about it, that's what has changed. It was fine when this was private, but now his administration is starting to get questions around why his Commerce department punted the initial investigation to DOJ where it ultimately died as the opposition party is about to retake Congress with investigations top of mind.
It's hard to believe the US government was so incompetent that they didn't do the investigation a YouTuber did (But not impossible).
The export ban was always BS. Unless you are going to do a total ban and all parts are manufactured in the US, then it is just 1 additional hop to get stuff into China.
Likely there was at least a feeling of mutual understanding between Jensen and key people in the administration. Now the wind has turned in a big way and none of that is on paper. And in fact what is on paper points in the wrong direction.
Probably the only thing protecting NVDA from prosecution right now is that nobody in the White House wants to pop the AI bubble. That might protect Jensen too because he would entangle the company. There will be an interesting tension with congressional oversight. Buy popcorn and NVDA vol.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
> Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?
For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
This whole saga has been a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. There's no compelling argument that points to these new innovations not otherwise happening if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
The demand for high-ram consumption applications is higher than ever and rising. That demand is not created by nvidia, but nvidia's customers. nvidia's customers are buying nvidia parts built with other's ram because they have customers renting the compute.
Whoever nvidia is buying ram from will simply sell to the next highest bidder, and the ram will still be sold out through the coming years.
RAM prices are a result of skyrocketing demand. That's hardly a fever dream.
You can hardly blame RAM suppliers for taking the money of people who are coming to them begging to pay more than the person before them in line. It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket.It's the customers who are willing trying to pay more for better access. The innovations and the price of RAM are so non-sequitur at this point; I can't understand what point you're making. Sure, if RAM were as easy to get as the circuit boards they're being put on, innovation would be the same (or accelerated!) but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that RAM is incredibly supply constrained and ramping production to meet the demand of a seemingly insatiable market takes a long time for a product this complicated and specialized.
If any of the manufacturing companies could have seen this coming, they'd have started ramping production to insane levels 5 years ago, and they'd be taking in just as much money as Nvidia is.
Harming Nvidia would only make us more compute constrained, and raise prices further.
It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.
Harming the producers of [thing] or disincentivizing profits will not make [thing] cheaper if demand remains the same (or if it is growing, like in all of the areas I mentioned).
What type of person are you referring to?
Huang has served as CEO for a whopping 33 years - hard to argue he wasn't crucial to NVIDIA's success, and how many of the board members are the original from when he was first chosen-selected and continued to be hired as CEO over the crucial early decades?
What nuanced knowledge-understanding does he have that no one else can have?
Maybe sleeping with spies was a necessary part of survival, perhaps if he wasn't prone to that then he'd have been assassinated and potential replacement CEOs who are toeing certain lines may have been attempted to replace him after his murder?
This is, frankly, an outlandish statement.
> Behaves like a fool, risks national security to get his dick wet, has unethical affair with subordinate.
> The problem is that people like this get held accountable for their misdeeds instead of being left to do what they want!
Respectfully, I don't engage with conspiracy theorists
Pumping billions of dollars, the source of which is obscured, into it looks like a cut out, is not just a national security problem. It undermines confidence in the numbers that you claim are the basis of shareholder value.
the stock value just represents what people think the company is (or will be) worth, them selling products at 50% margin is what brings the money, the stock value doesn't give NVIDIA extra cash (unless they're selling or leveraging their own stock reserves to get even more cash?). And definitely shareholder value is not the economy.
and also, how is the efficiency bad now? surely that allows for innovation and other companies and people to get cheaper hardware (assuming they somehow have to lower their margins because Jensen left, still don't get that argument)
Nonsense. Nvidia's employees created that value, not Jensen. Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created, just like in every other company. CEO worship is absurd.
Like it's an extremely common sentiment when working for a large company to look at the SVP or CEO and go "that person is a dumbass, everyone in charge is a dumbass". Yet when looking at other companies somehow we forget about that and put the companies success on the CEO or top level execs. Instead of remembering "no, it's probably the small army below them figuring out how to manage upwards to prevent the idiot in charge from tanking everything"
It took the corporate structure and top-down direction decision ATTRIBUTABLE TO JENSEN to allow them to work so productively together.
Leadership matters. Labor Talent is only able to operate at 10% effectiveness with shitty leaders in place.
CEOs in large companies do not play a role like that.
That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?
A lot of people play crucial roles in a company. HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation.
If you've ever been in a company with poor leadership and one with great leadership, you'd see the impact of it on everyone working there and on the value being created.
The children yearn for a tyrant I guess.
Yup, all of it. And at no point have I considered myself as 10,000x more valuable than any of the team members I led. Yet that's exactly what is done to billionaire CEOs.
You'll notice I did not say Jensen didn't create ANY value.
Critical / hard decisions are worth more than just a manager telling / trusting his team to execute on x,y,z task.
Tell me you know nothing about running a company without telling me. Just because one CEO got caught screwing over a Chinese spy that doesn't mean all CEOs are useless people. That's just lazy generalization.
Edit: Guess I am arguing with a bot lol
Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.
Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.
The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.
It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.
He cheated, multiple times, he is scum for that.
He seems to have consorted with a spy and evaded export bans. He is a criminal for that.
Oh, but he made people a lot of money? All good! /s
Throwing all morals and ethics out the window because of the eCoNoMy is insane.
The cult of personality around CEOs is unhealthy.
Anti-capitalists appealing to bourgeoisie values in their zeal to destroy a capitalist icon is pretty freakin' rich.
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company.
...
But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were
This is demonstrably untrue. Jensen is an engineer through and through, and contributed significantly to Nvidia's early accelerators: from the NV1, at least to the earliest GeForces.
In the slow evolution of the human race into the Ferengi, it is absolutely a milestone!
Long term we want efficiency. The market is SUPER inefficient right now. People are buying GPUs and stacking them up in warehouses so that they get their allocation. Companies are taking retired jet engines, and turning them into very expensive generators. SoftBank just defaulted on a bunch of power generation orders (increased cost for everyone, but didn’t create the value). My point is that it will be a painful road to get to the efficient market which will likely be a recession because of a massive slow down in spending
Instead this "bubble" is packed with people who detest AI and have extremely bearish views on it's future. If this "bubble" does pop, I think it will be the first one in history that every single person saw coming.
Absolutely correct. That's why I mentioned the niche in my comment.
But no bubble ever has been predominately detractors.
So online discourse doesn't matter much.
The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.
I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".
There is no doubt that his sexscapades were stupid, but at the same time there is only one question that should matter for the board. Will the shareholders make more money with him or without?
Supreme Court disagrees that a company is required “only required to maximize shareholder value”, do you have any evidence to support your claim?
[0]https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/13-354.ht...
I think "can we trust this person to act in the best interests of this company?" is a more accurate question
I don't think these scandals are in NVidias best interest, and the hits the share value have taken seem to support that
Sure, but his selling into China might be criminal. Or would you also excuse criminal behavior that's profitable?
When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.
Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.
Jensen messed up by splitting the power between all board members equally, and not getting a bunch of his family on a board.
The lesson is that if you do the right, non-authoritarian thing, you get punished
The man is smart enough to know he was playing with fire, and he got burned. The literal definition of FAFO.
Second, there is no proof that any moral standard is being applied at all. This could (and in my opinion likely) have nothing to do with a moral standard and more to do with extenuating information uncovered in the investigation or a strategic shift to protect against the current admin. There is likely so much happening behind the scenes and so many people have so much money to lose, I think it’s prudent for us to first exhaust all non-moral possibilities (unfortunately).
Shareholders don't care that he's having sex outside his marriage.
In my eyes, this all comes down to the perception that someone is able to be compromised by non-monogamy. Jensen came out, apologized to his wife, and (at least publicly) communicated that he broke the expectations and boundaries of their relationship. This clearly communicated that a secret relationship compromises his position. And, should there be more secret relationships they'd continue to be used as leverage.
Musk isn't subject to this leverage because it's pretty clear that his relationships are not built on traditional definitions. Non-monogamy is either a clearly defined boundary in his relationship or simply not something that concerns him as leverage.
The biggest questions are:
1. Did Jensen knowingly compromise national security (criminal implications) 2. What is the fallout / impact in the AI arms race
Yes Elon and Zuck are abhorrent, but when they have tried to break the law, they have been held accountable in some sense. Not to the extent that they deserve it, but still.
If they become as big a libility to their businesses, even their controling shares won't save them
Government could hold him accountable, and some of those gears have been turning over the last decade. In response he has spent a lot of money trying to steer elections and gain the influence of the ones in power to try to avoid accountability from that direction as well.
The double standard is that if you play capitalism well enough you are shielded from the consequences that others would face.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
Apparently I am able to, what was that?
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
Maybe that's the lesson he learned and why he _supposedly_ was making sure his GPUs were still getting to China. Because he knows that the alternative would lead to good Nvidia Chinese competitor later on
Why? He caused this. He chose to have affairs with a spy and a subordinate. Now he has to deal with the consequences.
based on the reporting about the second affair, it's possible his security has had to shut down similar witnesses in the past.
It does remain possible; he's a parasite and someone who's just had an affair. He wouldn't value the sympathy given, Neither himself or Nvidia would return the gesture.
They give null shit about you.
> He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
He chose to have the affair and as having my father do the same to my mother; you get no sympathy for cheating. Let them feel pretty terrible, maybe they will find what it's like to be human for a change.
Nothing more than a parasite in the corporate playground. His actions caught up with him; woes is me what will I ever do with so much money.
i wonder what will happen to nvidia's relationship with TMSC now.
But even then, the original Switch 1 homebrew relied on an oversight in NVIDIA's Tegra chip that blew open the whole platform due to the ability to execute unsigned code. The Switch 1 was actually pretty locked down. Nintendo worked hard on securing it properly, only for it to all be for naught due to their SoC vendor making a massive blunder.
I wish I could have seen what was said in the meetings between the two companies when the first Switch exploit was released, considering it was fully on NVIDIA.
This includes his family and the family of those involved in the affair. Many lives were turned upside down.
In 10 years he will have a new family and new friends and this will be a distant memory for him.
(I personally don’t care about Jensen. I just don’t think that “people don’t deserve sympathy because they are billionaires” makes any sense.)
The only people that should be wealth taxed is leeches like you that see how utterly corrupt the state is with how it handles tax dollars and wants to give it more money.
> Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Backs California Billionaire Tax Despite Potential $8B Bill
> "I don't mind paying taxes. The more you make, the more taxes you pay. I'm okay with that," Huang said
Then again, below is a 2024 article from the NY Times claiming Jensen was taking advantage of loopholes to save $8 billion on taxes. Actions speak louder than words so perhaps his more recent messaging about being in favor of higher taxes on himself was the result of a PR effort, given his rapidly increasing visibility.
However, I imagine that any good accountant would strongly recommend saving $8 billion on taxes like Jensen did before 2024. The article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/business/nvidia-jensen-hu...
Pretty sure all those nVidia employees over the years had a bigger hand in building it.
The idea that only one person matters is a plague on society
A relationship with a foreign agent
An inappropriate relationship with a subordinate
Two of these potentially have serious legal consequences.
This is a CYA move by the board as all this is becoming public.
They did ~$90B in revenue last quarter.
I sometimes can't imagine the avarice it takes to do things like this. Could you imagine having a $100 bill in your hand and going "Yea, I'll break the law and possibly destroy my life to steal $7.50"
Another way to put it is the difference between 75 MILLION and 7.5 BILLION is rounded to 7.4 BILLION.
The scale of numbers is huge and it is not just another 7.5 billion dollars.
Either through technical means, or simpler: by law for American providers. It's hard to believe the administration was not aware of Jensen's affiliations all this time. And time is pressing for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Only conjectures for now, time will tell
Makes you wonder what would happen if the US ever wanted to enforce "certified US AI" on its chips
Nvidia can certainly put up some guardrails that will sound impressive to the dinosaurs in Congress, but can it really stop China from using those GPUs anyway?
This is a simplification, but is this not in some way similar to how the Switch 1 has hacked due to a design flaw on Nvidia's Tegra chip?
In the same way, even if their GPUs get this protection, wouldn't a state actor figure out how to get around it?
lol had to read this several times due to all the negatives
finally got it - "I hope NVIDIA continue to allow inference..."
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
Tin foil hat take: I think Jensen's been sniped.
By whom?
Like what
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
Ask someone in Bangladesh who the fuck Harriet Tubman is.
I hope I am wrong but I am starting to think the US left is about to walk into a historical economic collapse that they are inevitably increasing the chances of by 'doing the right thing'.
I suspect you hypocritically have and will continue to benefit from his work that he started as their CEO 33 years ago.
I'll be sure to tell that to my kids while I put them to bed today.
I hope this kicks the legs out from under the "circular financing"[0] that has enabled slop to permeate seemingly everything good about computing.
A surgeon who saves a thousand lives doesn't get a pass for the one murder they commit.
If the person who eventually cures cancer also happens to be a rapist, do you remember their name with awe or pity?
The sort of Felicific Calculus practiced by the "Effective" Altruists is a tawdry trick designed to excuse despicable behaviour.
I honestly don't care. It's not a balance sheet to me.
What's your definition? People he sold a GPU to at extortionate markups?
Not a single inch of empathy for his wife and family, nor the misled investors and staff.
His affairs have been going on for months or years, so much so that various places knew about it, did nothing to stop it, and didn't leak it.
I think it's a fair question to ask "why is this all coming out together now?" Nobody seems to know. In the absence of any other explanation, suggesting "hit job" isn't absurd.
1. Got too well known to hide
2. Republicans just badly lost the midterms. There is a lot of info that the President and head of Department of Commerce also knew about all of this the entire time and did nothing. They won't be able to stop investigations, and they don't want to be seen as getting in the way of them.
If that's true, the bigger story is not just that Jensen did all this, but that the administration likely knew he was guilty of Espionage and actually helped facilitate it by knowing but not acting. That is a real possibility.
To clarify, there is a possibility that the President of the United States and members of his team knowingly concealed and aided Conspiracy and Espionage against the United States.
The Chinese government wants Chinese companies to buy Chinese chips.
I don't understand what compels people to make up scenarios to defend people who have come out and said the opposite.
The world as a whole is pretty conservative, people like to project the happily married couple image regardless of reality of the relationship.
He could have done a wrong thing. Or the affair could have been perfectly fine with his wife. Or the marriage could have been on the rocks for years, and they both agreed to not divorce, with all the drama and media attention, and just live their own lives.
But you know all this is true, or not true.
Yes?
But in this case, Huang himself explicitly mentioned the hurt that he caused his family. I don't think it gets much clearer than this.
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.
Even if his wife doesn't care it would be wise to keep this apology style, rather than try to go with cliche "its not as bad as it looks".
It could be argued much of that is performative. The most vocal group for this in America voted for someone who is well known to break oaths.
However let’s hold both thoughts at once, this was no hit job. Nvidia was forced to act quickly to mitigate business and legal risks. The eventual fallout they’ll face is still not fully known.
The idea his fall is related to his affair also seems more like an attempt to minimise the fact that NVIDIA have been covertly selling to China when they were not supposed to.
If you think that billionaire execs of highly strategic companies don’t have the CIA nonconsentually implanted in their colon you are extremely naive. He misstepped politically.
I’ve known a lot of execs, and I can probably count the ones that were highly successful and never cheated on their wives on one hand. The temptation comes with the territory, and the opportunities are endless and disarmingly charming. It takes a man of outstanding moral character to be unfailingly perfect under those circumstances, and unfortunately outstanding moral character is often not what gets you into the c-suite. It’s a lot like rockstars in the 70s, actually, but with more boring clothes.
So much hate for him, it is sad.
You can agree or disagree with his position on exporting to China being good/bad for nVidia or the US. But actively working closely with a company (Megaspeed) where, from a thousand miles away, it was clear that their primary goal was to get around and/or bend US export controls... that's a bad idea. Megaspeed was clearly working for the direct benefit of the Chinese government.
Add onto that having an extramarital affair with the representative of that company? Come on, it's extremely likely she's an agent of China, and if not it's a gigantic business risk.
Then, on top of that, you have to remember that he's married. A divorce results in half of his shares going to his wife, who would then have a grudge, probably not in the best interests of the comapny.
I’m sorry but this shows wildly inappropriate decision making. Say what you will about honeypots (I received specialized “warning” early in my career, but I recognize that is abnormal), but we all are forced through training every single year about how relationships at work, especially with imbalanced power dynamics, are inappropriate and should not take place.
I don’t care about the infidelity, but he represents the company at its pinnacle. He had to go.
Are you serious?
Jensen, if you are reading this and need support you can try looking into BetterHelp. You can even get 20% off using certain partner links. No one should have to go through the stress of loosing their job from Chineese spies alone and with BetterHelp you're just one click away from your very own personal therapist.
I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!
I mean yes, he shouldn't be hounded, but if he'd kept it in his pants, he could have avoided all this nastiness.
You don't get to cheat on your wife, company and country and get support lmao, what a strange things to say.
Some very harsh words being thrown around for Jensen’s very human failings. Try walking in his shoes, or at least having some degree of understanding and empathy.
> the f bombs
Are you 8?
Chances are I could just sell them and live for a year or ten off it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/17/leather-jacket-worn-by-nvidi...
Which illustrates the gap between his life's challenges and everyone else's nicely, IMO.
And you’re a bot so as if you’d know.
You're choosing to argue with strangers on the Internet while on said beach. Your life could be easier.
Huang is choosing to make his life easier by resigning, and has the resources to do the beach thing - at essentially infinite luxury - indefinitely.
Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!
> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY
I had only heard about a consensual relationship.
Parent is oblivious to this and has already made up their mind that these policies don't exist
> The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind.
> Even if it's consensual, what happens when she decides she wants to move on from the relationship?
Then they're no longer in a relationship and still have to follow HR/company policies.
>What about her peers that didn't receive promotions while she did?
Did they follow the company policy (e.g., hiring committee recusal) or not for the promotions?
>This is why these laws exist.
Did the company policies follow employment regulations when setting and enforcing their policy?
Anyway, not sure if that's the case here but it's hard to rule out entirely.
These policies are intentionally narrowed to workplace conflicts of interest. HR doesn't want to manage morality clauses or stuff outside the workplace.
Obviously it depends from case to case and there are certain lines that shouldn’t be crossed but otherwise consenting adults should be free to make their own decisions.
*that we know of
* My age, +/- 2 years.
* Comparable emotional and intellectual development.
* Same level of education.
* Earn within 10% of what I earn.
* Total net worth within 10% of mine.
* Muscular, so we're of comparable strength.
* Exact same cultural and ethnic background.
* No chronic diseases or disabilities, since I don't have any and that would be an unfair advantage.
* Read Hacker News just as pathologically frequently, so we both know when to short NVIDIA at approximately the same time.
[0] https://www.woodsrogers.com/insights/publications/this-valen...
Do you have stats on how common these are? Is it more popular in some non US country maybe?
Good idea about stats. Please share what you find.
1. The subordinate story broke yesterday. The stock dropped 12% (not 20) and recovered half.
2. But for the spy/export control subversion, do you think a CEO would be stepping down for banging a co-worker? LOL...
You could just as easily say she did sexual favors to get a leg-up over more qualified peers and get/maintain her position.
If anything, the fact he got fired seems to imply she has all the power in their relationship being outed. I haven't seen anyone calling for her head.
When did they discover the quid-pro-quo aspect of this particular relationship? The news is moving so fast that I must have missed that part.
People in these threads are pretending that 75% of the story doesn't exist and it's just about an affair... insane.
EDIT: Is this just X infecting HN? I don't go on X so I don't know what it's like.
What is known now is described a conflict of interest (which is bad already for a CEO). Whether it was a harassment - investigation should show.
Misbehavior without consequences seems to have become more noticeable in politics within the past ten years, with mainstream news outlets reporting on insider trading and potential bribes for favors. This ethos of power over accountability seems to be having a trickle down effect on general sentiment.
It's mindboggling that you describe an apparently completely consensual affair as "sexual harassment". That's absurd.
Also, I don't think there was an "extreme power imbalance". If anything, she had far more power over him than the other way around, since he had much more to lose and she could blackmail him with making the affair public or other allegations.
When I entered the workforce not so long ago most companies didn't even have policies against it. My university didn't make a policy about it until 2012. I know a very happily married couple who got married this way (a little earlier - perhaps around 2006 or 2007). I don't think they'd be happy if I referred to their behavior as "sexual harrasment".
I think it's a good policy and it's fair they enforce it, but equating it to sexual harassment is nonsense.
Extremely rare (winning such a lawsuit). Prior to these kinds of rules becoming the norm, how often did anyone win such a lawsuit? It's a rounding error close to 0.
There are plenty of publicized cases where one party openly stated she got promotions because of her affair with a senior. No lawsuits were even filed in the ones I know.
I'm in favor of such rules precisely because it's hard to win such a suit.
At the end of the day, I wouldn't bash everyone here too strongly when everyone who lined up early behind Hillary basically acted in the same way. (And yes, even though Bill did the act, Hillary lined up easily to defend him, much like the people you mention here)
To be fair though, a CEO having an affair with a subordinate should be seen with at least some suspicion...
The people saying you can’t trust women… are mostly coming from women.
Wild time if you are dating! Yes could mean No if later she decides she didn’t like something about it.
The irony is so sweet here.
Consider the case of Regina Santos-Aviles [1]. She committed suicide by setting herself on fire and had revealed that she'd been having an affair with her boss.
The power dynamics here are insane. Huang was the CEO and a billionaire. The legal liability that NVidia has or could have because of this is huge, particularly if they did nothing. Now there are big questions about who knew what when.
The reporting says somebody say them in a San Jose hotel and was basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment (I'm guessing; I don't know). Was that from NVidia or Huang personally? What NVidia staff, if any, authorized that?
If the board wants to really clean house they should authorize a thorough external investigation of that and any other possible affairs.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-gonzales-aide-affair-texts...
I've found HN to be pretty hostile to DOGE (whereas conversation is usually respectful even for fringe viewpoints; something special happened here).
I don't think you can assume much just by knowing somebody disliked them.
To spin it another way: if we ignore the rise of the faux-libertarian (you know, the more typical brand now, libertarian but all for a strong military and christian nationalism), I'd argue that the typical HN skews more old school small-l libertarian on the right wing spectrum. That's quite a bit different from the MAGA, christian nationalist, style of right wing politics that has been in vogue lately.
If you truly believe this, you're living in a bubble. Economically it might be pro free markets, but socially it's heavily "progressive" -- see any discussions about Omarchy, LGBTQ, Elon, or Trump.
Politics is about economics. All of the so-called "culture war" issues (eg LGBT rights, bodily autonomy, etc) don't make you left wing if you are still an avowed capitalist. The success of the Republican Party hinges on the success they've had in propagandizing culture war issues to avoid talking about economics. And the establishment Democrat Party is complicit because they have the exact same paymasters.
On this issue you see a ton of people in the comments saying "yeah but Jensen made so much money" as a reason why he shouldn't suffer the consequences. If making money has primacy in your decision making well... you're right wing, definitionally.
As other commenters have noted, every time Elon comes up there are a ton of HN defenders, despite him being a complete fascist (in technical terms, not a pejorative) and doing the Nazi salute on national TV (twice).
> Economically it might be pro free markets, ...
Well, first there's no such thing as "free markets". Second, you're basically saying "capitalism". As I said, right wing.
I think media, social and traditional, has really done a number on people’s perspectives. I’m not sure why ideology replaces self-awareness.
That means he can’t have any affairs with anyone who isn’t a billionaire without it turning into sexual harassment due to the imbalance in power?
> basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment
So depending on how big the payment the alleged victim might be pretty happy with the outcome?
I mean if the board believes that the actions of the CEO resulted in financial damage to the company it’s up to them to investigate and deal with it. I just don’t get the whole morality police angle as long as the affair was between consenting rational adults.
"Subordinate", get a grip!
Musk has done worse, yet nothing has really happened to him.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
1. The whole spy / compromising national security thing are as far as I know unproven.
2. Affairs by themselves, while not ethical, are fairly tame compare to other prominent tech figures like Musk.
If it comes out that he did indeed compromise national security knowingly, then that's a different matter of course.
I'm not even that bothered about those chips going to China. But, like a lot of other aspects that leave us wondering how big and how fragile an AI bubble exists, the fact that billions of dollars of Nvidia revenue is from a reportedly priority customer that isn't actually using the chips is the problem.
It’s important to not confuse your own feelings, usually born from jealousy and various ego related failings, with morality.
Particular notions or feelings of right and wrong that you may have because of prevailing norms in the particular era and location which you live or grew up in don’t necessarily have any bearing on what is moral or not.
There will be a lot of noise, it will be embarrassing, but I just can't imagine a situation where it significantly impacts their bottom line.
The bear case here is pretty much that you think AI is a bubble anyway, and this just accelerates it.
It would be hypocritical to both use DeepSeek and also be outraged at the (alleged) mechanisms through which China acquires GPUs.
But one of the wealthiest people on the planet gets fired, suffering zero personal hardship as a result, and everybody's up in arms. How could you do this! They all do this, how dare you single him out!
I think that there's a pervasive idea, especially in the tech/startup space, that making money is a moral good. Not merely that making money is compatible with being a good person, but that it makes you a good person, and the more you make the more good you are. Firing an ultra-rich person is therefore basically an affront to a saint. Never mind that it doesn't put them under any hardship, that they and their heirs will still be wealthier than any of us can even conceive of. It's morally wrong to do anything bad to such a good person.
Ezra Klein interviewed Jensen about 1.5 months ago and I had an off-putting feeling from it, and thought a lot of his answers were laughable. He sounded like he was obviously lying. A few days later, Klein interviewed Bill Gates and sort of anonymously brought up the arguments that Jensen made. You could see a visible disbelief of the arguments in Gates' face and posture, even saying "I almost can't believe you're asking that". (Not that Bill Gates is some paragon, but it wasn't close to a respectful disagreement.)
Maybe the veneer isn't there, but it's very hard to make the case that Apple has in any way failed following the loss of him. Cook was pretty mediocre, and it shows that when you have a strong ship sailing, you just need a "not total idiot" to keep it going.
If someone else that wasn't directly trained by Jobs for years was hired, i'd argue that the culture would start to falter because one thing slides somewhere, then another, then another an soon enough 'A players' don't want to sacrifice their core years at a company that isn't instilling the values they want to work under. Cook himself almost went down that path with his budding career at Compaq. His family thought he was nuts to leave the growing company for Apple of all places. They didn't see the values that Cook saw in Jobs.
I'm also reminded about the state of HP once the founders retired. My understanding is that John Young and Lewis Platt preserved the HP Way. However, Platt's successor, Carly Fiorina, moved the company far away from the HP Way, and HP hasn't been the same since.
This is a sad time for NVIDIA. I hope NVIDIA is blessed to get a Platt and not a Fiorina.
Apple was saved because it abandoned all its pre-1997 software and adopted NEXTSTEP, which Jobs created.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
And: the public only knows what's made it out. Who knows what else has come out in private.
Officials are corrupted? CEOs sleeping with other women including his subordinates? Snow is white? What's the deal? People at that level are basically playing politics, not laws.
However, the fact that someone decided to release all those information as PUBLIC, and followed that up with ANOTHER scandal, means that they are determined to get rid of them. As you said, it is indeed serious matter.
As the Chineses say: "Something weights as light as a quarter of pound if it's left alone, but can weight a thousand tons if put on the scale".
The problem is that you don't think it is a problem. It goes on because there are no consequences.
Maybe in '29 the Epstein perps will actually be prosecuted
If we (the common people) really want consequences, we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.
I'm with you on the first half, and see the second half changing. The fever may have broken in the US electorate.
Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".
well, yeah.
Given the report that the US gov knew about this for a while, it seems more likely that it's coming from the administration?
This breaking just before a meeting with Trump/Xi and just after the midterms show a changing wind in Washington is a hell of a coincidence—or not.
About their new interim CEO Colette Kress:
>'She starts her day talking with Israeli execs because Nvidia's major Israel operations (post-Mellanox acquisition, ~6k staff, ~18% of revenue via networking chips) are business-critical'
is a bit of a stretch, given the reporting, intel briefings, comments from members of congress after the briefings, etc...
Of course China always denies this, but the evidence for this behavior over thousands of cases is such that the burden of proof is on those who claim such a person was not a spy.
This does not imply that the Chinese people or even its government are "evil" or that we shouldn't do business with them. It's just something that everybody who deals with China needs to be aware of.
yet it was an open secret among those in the know, both the affairs and the export violations
One should never give up control it seems. Zuck is right.
If the company struggles without him and it's obvious they need his leadership, he'll be back. Morals be damned.
Now, back to the main point: your egregious comparison of a potential Huang-return to Jobs-return unfortunately still remains just as terrible.
Whether one deserves such ruination is a moral matter, and everyone is entitled to their own judgement, but it seems wrong to concentrate such power in a private for-profit entity. The entire basis of anti-fascist doctrine is infringement of individual liberties and modern societies, while mostly conditioned to be against government coercion are remarkably comfortable with corporate coercion, dressed up in the pretty language of compliance and organizational reputation. A company is an economic entity, not a moral entity. It is fine with being a moral entity when it comes to matters of its own reputation and operations, but conveniently becomes an economic entity when it is time for layoffs. Ultimately, it comes down to who has a bigger stick
The thing is an organization is not just a place where you work; it is a provider of economic security, livelihood, and dignity. This concentrates extraordinary power in your place of employment; you are to clock in 5 days a week for at least 8 hours a week; and then work in a highly locked down corporate machine, which you are not allowed to customize even though this is where you will spend the majority of your week in, and one has to ask the question to what extent a company owns your life.
I think that we must also identify the cultural contradiction here; where Hollywood and the like in a sense glorify promiscuity and depict wealth as flaunted with assets and women, as a cultural ideal, and then turn around and hound creatures who are products of such a culture.
Of course, in this case it is far more likely that Jensen was involved with some national security incident.
Very very few HW CEOs have even the slightest ability to appreciate the key strength of Nvidia which is ability to build hardware and then drive it with outstanding software.
Look at AMD. Great hardware but hamstrung by their software for 20 years.
Hardware is not enough.
Huawei just announced a fully domestic computer, Deepseek is rumored to be training v5 right now on entirely domestic Ascend chips.
I know eventually there will come out all the justifications for how this was to protect AGI, etc. But this move has also now tipped the scale beyond just the hardware bifurcation, but also the open vs. closed and commons vs. sovereign models. This isn't just chopping off your nose, this is America purposely gouging out it's eyes and removing it's ability to see down the road. Jensen Huang was the world's best shot and trying to keep a global AI world together, but one side has made their voice on that extremely loud and clear.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
I was under the impression he sold it to a Singapore company, or even any other companies. What those companies do with those GPU is not his fault.
This whole thing is just a sad story.
The same company they've audited the datacentres of, and saw dummy non-running servers within which had been stripped of their GPUs, and were 'fooled' that they were simply yet to be commissioned.
On 2nd point, even Hyperscalers have large stack of GPU sitting idle yet to be commissioned.
Yes US hyperscalers have plenty of hardware but are running out of 'warm shells' to put them into. It's not much of a problem in Southeast Asia.
He's the hero we needed but didn't deserve. If this thing didn't happen my guess is open models wouldn't exist and we would be deeper and darker into the whole AI boom
o7
Export controls have been skirted since the Bronze Age.
Sure on the merits, there’s enough for the board to ask him to resign.
But it’s his company. He built it from nothing. You have to start with that.
Felt like he knew what he was talking about, and spoke with real passion and vision.
Watching tech keynotes these days feels like the same boring marketing script on repeat.
I’ll miss that.
I lost faith when he was on Ezra Klein's show and said he doesn't think kids should learn math any more.
It's possible Tim Cook's phone is ringing right now.
It would be interesting if the story unfolded with Jensen going to TSMC [1] and Tim Cook taking over NVIDIA.
[1] https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-founder-morris-chang-...
I'm not saying this will happen, just mentioning that it would be interesting to see it happen.
But yeah, the "model" memes are completely offtopic. She's nearly 50.
Nah, this is about the indirect Chinese access to chips, and this whole cheating thing is a cover. He's confessing to a 'lesser' crime to save himself for the real threat of jail.
"We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said get ready to go to jail."
Wish the interviewer would have let him talk more instead of changing the subject.
He was sleeping with one of his customers—a huge conflict of interest. That alone is good grounds to get a CEO fired, but it only gets worse! Alice Huang, a Chinese national, was previously working for a CCP propaganda channel network with an impeccable acronym: CCTV. Her company was accused publicly and investigated by the government for suspected smuggling of sanctioned NVIDIA hardware into China. Now we learned he also had an affair with one of his direct reports — another diabolical conflict of interest, which alone could be good reason to oust the CEO and possibly the VP as well.
It's yet to be determined whether he disclosed secrets to the Chinese spy, or whether he at least privately admitted to the second affair (if not, that's even worse!)
It's not a single, horrendous mistake anymore but a pattern of disastrously poor judgement. Building an extraordinary company and technology shouldn't mean lack of accountability, and thankfully we found out today that even at the highest level it doesn't.
[0] https://fortune.com/2026/11/09/nvidia-board-probe-jensen-hua...
All the china stuff aside you cannot have a relationship with someone you made a business deal with
That’s like conflict of interest 101
Elon pretty good too in that regard taking companies from 0 to 1.
Meaning that the 9 people pushing him out add up to own 0.36% of Nvidia share, only 0.36%
This is betray of shareholder interest. The board doesn't own Nvidia, this is not their business, yet only they can vote. they just want to finish as soon as possible, and you get a mad result.
Shareholders voted on them in June:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026...
Just look at the stock price plunge after he resigns, and I think this is structural in loss of company value instead of temporary sentiment.
He IS the company's value.
I don't want to sound like a Jensen apologist, obviously huge missteps on his part, but he was quite a figure in shaping the last few years broad economic narrative. Good or bad, he was a force in shaping one of the largest investments ever. Does that shift without him? Does it shift really quick?
I would have preferred a slow fade into the sunset as a opposed to a dramatic exit. Yes, there would have always been a correction, but the bubble bursting explosively vs a more measured, slower correction will have different broader impacts and I just hope this doesn't push more towards the outcome that hurts a lot more.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
I suspect the real reason the board fired him is he's been lying to the board. It's not the indiscretion it's the lie that gets you.
If he was lying about his affairs with staff then maybe he's been lying to the board about following export controls and other things.
AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.
Every influential person, even middle managers, have a laundry list of “scandals” . The real question is why now and why him.
I think the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. That opens up NVidia to a lot of legal exposure.
The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Skirting export bans is an unknown. I honestly don't believe this administration would let anything bad happen there. Jensen Huang is simply too rich and NVidia too big.
Yeah, this is the most interesting part to me.
It points to the US government knowing about this, and holding onto it as compromat until the time was right to kick him out. But I don't even have a guess as to why this was viewed as the right time...
The affair with his subordinate brings this into question. The power dynamic makes consent extremely iffy. There is a reason it is not allowed.
Nvidia was/is such a fundamental cog in the american ai economy/ machine, what spies, what cheating are people obsessed about? Nvidia created the capital for its own success; read about it, think about it, be against it, be for it. The capital did not exist, they created it by neoclouds buying hardware which they wouldnt need for two years ahead by lender and vendor-backed financing; hardware, which would be replaced in another 2-4 years.
Will nVidia continue to provide the same backing to neo-clouds? Without nVidia backing are lenders willing to give more or less?
Forget about chinese openweight models, antropic or oai, I see this development as a huge spanner in the us ai economy, maybe the biggest blunder of the year, the biggest own goal if it came from within the us administration under or without guidance.
And finally: Jensen selling to the chinese iron. Okay, was he the only one, god amongst mortals, in the fricking room. Who the heck comes up with these shallow plots...
From the NYT live updates.
Ah well, I'm somewhat seeing parallels to the 2023 OpenAI drama, not sure if this is gonna be how things end quite yet.
No, the alternative is not to “not having affairs”. Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.
Except that we have evidence in this case: he literally admitted to the affair. I don't see any "spin."
But talk about ruining a legacy before it really took off. I don't really have sympathy. But this guy should have carried around a piece of paper with some short aphorisms to look at everyday to anchor him back to reality.
I remember Jensen saying he doesn’t have a contract with TSMC. The whole supply is based on a trusted relationship and handshake deals between the two CEOs. I wonder if that relationship is transferable to his successor.
The king’s crown tumbles. Stock is already down 10% this morning.
I wonder if this will be the catalyst for Nvidia losing the lead
(bad) jokes aside, it seems that the us gov probably dont believe enough on the affair case for gpus to appear in china and they got rid of the guy
i think this might be the end of an evolution era for nvidia.
This event = some stuff that happens in book 2/ movie part 3 Stuff
At least the Chinese spy story is more charitable than if they had found his name in Epstein files.
Waiting to see how market reacts, I am selling my shares.
Dear Jensen, time to start another company.
And if you believe in conspiracy theory, I guess anthropic is very happy.
Perhaps this may help explain why it's unethical to date a direct report to those HNers:
- It's unfair to the coworkers of the subordinate, because the affair can give the impression of influencing promotion, personnel and monetary decisions you make in favour of the subordinate.
- It places your direct report in a compromising position. Such a relationship is potentially coercive, because the direct report may fear reprisal, rendering any consent invalid. Many have commented that imputing coercion to any power imbalance leads to the absurd conclusion a rich person shouldn't date at all - however, this use of "slippery slope" doesn't offset your ethical duty as a leader. As the boss, you have to protect your employees, and placing them in this situation in the first place violates that commitment.
tl;dr you violate your duty of care, plain and simple, to everyone underneath you by doing this.
A pragmatic, ethical workplace policy is to instead date people not in your reporting chain. If that means you shouldn't date your employees as CEO, then that's responsible behaviour, not a chafing limitation.
---
Others have commented that Jensen's affair is plausibly fine because "we don't know his private affairs". Jensen has made an unambiguous statement about hurting his wife and family - if they were non-monogamous, Jensen has had the opportunity to disclose it. Absent that, you have to assume this was an illicit affair. Moreover, none of this changes the fact that having an affair with a direct report was entirely unethical.
Still others have attempted a whataboutism by asking why "other CEOs" haven't had this level of blowback for having an affair with a subordinate. Unfortunately, not every tragedy gets the same level of public reaction, for no other reason than timing, luck, or lack if engagement. We should be equally upset about all the other cases as a general rule, rather than relying on normalized apathy to lull us into complacence.
Eh, i think he's acting as a heatshield for Nvidia, his affairs are irrelevant, but the Chinese sales could put both Nvidia as a company and him as CEO in jail... this allows them both to pretends it's a 'personal issue' and get away with it.
That bit with Dwarkesh was very prophetic in hindsight.
May God have mercy on us all.
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
Handy thing for Trump to keep in his back pocket to distract Democrats attention if they won the midterms.
Jack Clark Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic / head of the Anthropic Institute is the nyt and @AnaSwanson "source" he is the one coordinating a coup against Jensen.
[macrumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/12/johny-srouji-eyed-as-po...)
Think they take this stance when it's time to hand out yearly bonuses?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
The real question we must ask is if a current $30k consumer GPU that initially sold for $2.7k is just as inflated as the 'AI' holdings revenue predictions.
The smart money will wait till the legal mess starts, as the dead cat bounce in the panic sell off is probable as people try to buy the dip. ymmv =3
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
The AI labs do not want any of that and there is one that certainly has never released an open weight model.
You can take a good guess on the sort of people that are also associated with that AI lab.
This proves that not selling to China was a good idea, and throws into question every narrative pointing otherwise. It also should make it evident that yes, China is most certainly spreading propaganda regarding these points, there's just no way it's not happening.
Conspiracy reaction: Something is going on here... obviously not due to sleeping with a spy...
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
We don't know his relationship with his wife, what their stands on cheating even stands.
You can argue its an image issue, but thats a problem of the press and marketing and not that he might have cheated.
His wife is an adult and is for sure not poor, so its not a situation were she has to stay with him.
I do believe it either has to do with the whole spy story or he did something he really shouldn't have.
I said that the missteps was having sex with subordinates and chinese spies.
Now start connecting the dots with Nvidia being one of the major advocates for relaxing exports to China and selling billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies that the chinese spy represented and you understand why the board finds him a liability.
"Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that."
Fair though you didn't say cheating, but it undermined (at least by reading it) the main argument you brought up later regarding chinese spies
Suspect by payment from ... TenCent? AFAIK. Her company got money from Tencent and after every longer meeting with Jensen, someone from Tencent flew in and had a meeting with her. At least that is what I remember hearing.
Was Alice's company supposed to be the only company getting Nvidia chips (which they deny doing anyway). Or one of many and Chinese companies did it with many different others?
If many, why is her relationship specifically important or special from that aspect?
Again, I can understand snooping for confidential early information from him. But "she got with him so that this single company gets chips"?
We're just gonna keep shoving the illegal GPU trade with China under the rug I guess.
But yes, the fact that Nvidia advocated for relaxing exports to China and that he sold billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies is now obviously under major scrutiny.
I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.
The jury is still out on this, re the circular financing mess with AI
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
One Blue Tsunami, and now all the oligarchs are suddenly turning progressive and transitioning! Trump was right all along. This is exactly what he was trying to warn us about.
Think of all the mistresses who will now have to accept and adapt to their oligarch lover's new gender -- Jensen has at least two that we know of, but when you see two ants in the kitchen, you know there are a lot more. I can't wait to see the wig Bezos picks out.
What is, however had, more interesting is that many of his statements did not age well. Now, mind you - I still think it is his private life at the end of the day; one can reason about foreign spies, but then the same question can be asked about Trump and his strange addiction to Putin. As well as how Jen-Hsun was so obedient to a mainland-China female, when the other Taiwanese are scared of being possibly invaded and subsequently killed by dictator Xi, just as dictator Putin commits to his own personal genocide against Ukrainians right now.
But, with regards to statements, I distinctly remember Jen-Hsun berating the british as incompetent economists. I watched that on a shorts on youtube; can not find it right now (google search AND youtube search sucks to no ends now). Well - he may be right that the UK suffers huge economic problems, but boy, this has not aged well. People will poke fun at his love of women potentially being spies while berating the british as being too incompetent in economics. Perhaps he was too incompetent in his own love life?
There will be an endless walk of shame for Jensen that would constantly drag the price of the company down, because this is the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to fly out of the gate in January and put the fear of god into the other billionaire oligarchs again. Punish one with extreme measures the others will fall in line, because at the end of the day they are all pussys.
Remember Elon wanted to do cagefighting with Zuckerberg. Those two losers had every excuse ready not to fight in the end. They didn’t even touch gloves for a single sparring. Manly men. All they can do is tough talk.
Plus the voters will see at least one party is doing something against blatant billionaire corruption, with corruption being the third most important topic in the elections.
There needs to be made an example of what happens to you if you start selling weapons-grade technology to the enemies of the United States for personal profit, and then think you are above the law.
This is not over for Jensen. And also not over for Nvidia, so the only sane thing to do is get as much distance between the "rogue" CEO and the company. Same for the White House, let’s see how often we see Jensen and Trump still together.
They are going to throw him under the bus and say he had the opportunity and the access and the power to do this without anyone else noticing, especially as he was sexually manipulating managers that directly report to him on important corporate issues.
They will make it look as though it’s all Jensen’s fault because otherwise they stop being a trillion-dollar company.
It’s a fitting end for Jensen Huang.
He gets taken down by the holy trifecta of power, money and politics he valued above his own marriage or what this whole mess would do to his kids.
He even lied in his public apology because he still was confident the other affair with his married manager would never surface because he truly believes he is smarter than anyone else.
What a loser. 140B deep pockets and still a loser.
Money is only paper. All that counts is family.
Threw away his life’s work, his marriage and every last drop of respect for him as a man, father and husband his kids could ever have for pocket change and some ass.
And a lot of other shady things around nvidia, half of it we probably will never know about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...
The cheating is just a bit of humiliation, the damning part is the knowingly circumvention of export controls.
And that was only with a subordinate, not a subordinate AND with a foreign spy (alleged). Reports say China got billions in chips imported thanks to this operation.
Politicians also drop like flies. The only person impervious to consequences has been Trump. None of his supporters care that he's the devil.
The news made it sound like she was a sophisticated person using him as a simpleton, but if anything he was using her to move his products against sanctions.
But I imagine the billions of dollars in illicit sales is considered a bigger issue.
Colette Kress has brain of Marisa Mayer who destroyed Yahoo. A woke clown to lead technology company? No vision, no skills, no understanding of technology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50467465
CurbStomper7 27 minutes ago [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition
Nvidia just put a woman in charge. Time to short the stock.
I think if you could know the truth, 75% of CEOs in the US probably cheat on their wives. They are not hired to be faithful to their wives, they are hired to increase the stock prices of their companies.
Like sure, if you're a good Christian, it's not good behavior, but ultimately, it's just having sex with someone. I want the guy to make me money and build a great company, I don't care who he has sex with.
This isn't just a case of some extramarital sex.
Cheating with your direct report leaves you open to blackmail.
Cheating with your fucking customer leaves you open to a whole bunch more trouble.
Could 75% of CEOs in the US help foreign intelligence assets to evade export controls and not face consequences?
And who's "we"? You and Grok? Because Grok said no. You've lost half your government before issuing your first decree.
You've managed to make MechaHitler the voice of reason in this conversation.
Posting a link to a Grok answer you now say is incorrect, and presenting it as your "investigation," is even more on you.
Were you counting on everyone else not reading the conversation either? Because nothing in it establishes your alleged conspiracy.
Did you skip straight from asking a dubious untrustworthy racist chatbot a question to issuing pompous decrees without stopping to read the response?
If you're going to play that game, at least post an unread conversation with a more reputable model.
Edit with some more feedback:
Oh come on, stop sealioning. You know exectly what's wrong with Grok and Elon Musk yourself, and you did long before you started this conversation thread.
Using a better model is pointless if you don't bother to even read its response to see if it agrees with you.
You knew full well what you were doing, don't be coy and pretend you just came out from under a rock and know nothing when you're trolling a conversation about Jensen Huang resigning as CEO of NVIDIA.
If you're really that naïve, then you have no standing or credibility to issue pompous proclamations like "We do not consider any of the recent reporting to be newsworthy or material." Repeatedly using the royal "We" makes you sound like a narcissistic charlatan.
The open question YOU still have to answer before anyone can believe it's worth taking you seriously and having a conversation with you is: Did you skip straight from asking a dubious untrustworthy racist chatbot a question to issuing pompous decrees without stopping to read the response?
Your sealioning and trolling are transparently obvious, so you don't get to skip questions other people ask you by asking more questions to derail and avoid answering questions you were asked first.
If you don't even bother to read your own chatbot's response, then why should anyone here expect you to engage with what they post? You haven't replied to any of the other user's responses to your idiotic post, and you're certainly not engaging with my response, just deflecting.
I don't know why I feel this way. Something just feels off and I can't place it.
This is clearly retaliation for not falling into line
These things can be handled in many different ways. In this case they are being used to achieve the goal of replacing Jensen because he wouldn't play their doom games.
Google execs had affairs, I think Sergey Brin had an affair with an employee, again nothing happened.
And w.r.t. Brin vs. Huang, Rosenberg was a comparatively much lower ranked employee that didn't have a stratospheric career. I think Huang would have survived Kimberly only, but she was just the cherry on the top.
Now, post-midterm, Trump's political power has waned considerably, so the knives came out.
This will be particularly evident if the GPUs to China aspect turns out to be true in addition to the affair. It's not really a surprise that someone who might view themselves above the vows they took to their life partner might also view themselves above their other legal and moral obligations. (Like, in this case, following export laws.)
Beyond all that, it's also not unreasonable to expect our leaders to lead by example. The affair with the spy was setting a bad example. The affair with a subordinate was setting a bad example. You're right that a part of that's about sex, but it's equally much about personal judgement, risk exposure, what it means to lead, and the organization you aim to create. So I wouldn't be so quick to diminish it as being solely about "other peoples sex life".
(Yes, I get that I don't know if they had an open marriage or similar. Even if they did, there's still a lot of this that's reprehensible. And we don't know they did.)
This man lied to the entire US economy and cheated multiple times. Stop excusing his conduct.
These people have homes in places not only where prostitution is legal but much worse - and are rarely with their "family".