The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.

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.

"you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance."

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?

yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.

i understand infidelity, i don't understand who would care on the job. also, not french :)

Yep that's an even better point. Though I would say there's a distinction between socially-unacceptable and untrustworthy. Being forthcoming both limits surprise (per your point) and mitigates the trust component of deviance.

> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?

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.

One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.

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.

Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.

It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.

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.

> Why?

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.

Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.

I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, they were well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, they agreed to them with their words, in fact. With us it was very simple, provided you're not a bigot, what you do on your own time is not our concern. However, what you do within our business is our concern. If you have intimate relations with anyone inside our company, even if consensual, you're no longer on our leadership team. Then, their actions did not match those words, when that is true, trust is gone. In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect their actions and words to match, and there are people who we know that isn't the case, and on some siding scale, we accept it (I didn't say acceptable). For example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). Groups typically have criteria/standards, if they change that, it may change the group to varying degrees, and that may be ok or not ok, depending on the group. I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?

*Everything on a spectrum.

Was she working at Google at that time and reporting directly to Eric Schmidt?

For one, Schmidt left Google in 2011. Cultural acceptance of fucking subordinates has changed a lot since then.

Or because the current stock value is highly inflated and the bubble is starting to pop.