> "We are all humans and can make mistakes. Jensen did so many good things and he needs a second chance,” wrote another.
I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
You can think he is amazing at many parts of this job, but at this point it is less of a mistake, and more a pattern of behavior that he knew was hugely risky and decided to cover up.
This is a terrible time for Nvidia employees. But the solution is not to invite the cause of the terrible time back in.
There is disagreement among US officials about the strength of the evidence that Alice Huang was recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), the Chinese equivalent of the CIA, to spy on Jensen Huang — and, by extension, on US policymakers.:
I think there's got to be more variety of differentiation between being an agent of national interest as a national of a nation and being a spy. It takes more than acting in America's interest for an American business person to be an "agent" or a "spy."
This isn't to discount the issues with NVIDIA and whether they knowingly participated in circumventing chip bans. Or conflict of interest issues. But running a business that benefits China as a Chinese national and making some reports to the nation just doesn't seem like "spy" to me any more than being part of the British East India company made a Brit a spy.
"A third category, one that would change everything, would arise only if the board’s investigation finds Huang knew about the intelligence connection. That would be “a whole other ball game,” as Bartlett said."
> The FBI has been investigating Huang’s affair for at least a year. But Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Thursday that there are still “no conclusions reached by the Department of Justice, or by me, or by [FBI] Director Patel around who she is or is not.
Just for context:
> In April 2023, Trump hired [Todd] Blanche to defend him for concealed hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and he led Trump's defense in the 2024 criminal trial. Blanche later defended Trump in cases involving federal classified documents and election obstruction. In November 2024, following his victory in the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump announced Blanche as his nominee for deputy attorney general. Blanche was confirmed by the Senate in March 2025.[1]
He defended Trump's White House media ban[2] and most recently threatened to prosecute Democrats planning oversight probes into the administration[3].
FBI Director Kash Patel, for anyone who doesn't already know, is a Trump loyalist who was a director of Trump Media & Technology Group and reportedly made over $500,000 from Trump's political campaign. It is literally insane that he is the director of anything in the government[4].
Bottom line: time will tell who Alice Huang really was, but given the reports that Trump was informed she might have been a spy a year ago and didn't act on it, you can't expect honesty from loyalists he put in law enforcement positions.
If there's any concern that his inaction was a mistake, you can expect all of the people he put in positions of power to do whatever it takes to defend him, and that includes fudge the truth about the intelligence they had on Alice Huang.
Not to mention the Commerce Department continually dragging their heels on Megaspeed being added to the export blacklist despite being requested to by US intelligence agencies.
The problem with this theory is that Trump is one of the people who comes out looking bad here, and now that his party has lost the legislative branch, he's very vulnerable. You can be sure the Democrats are going to investigate what he knew, and when. According to The New York Times reporting, one of the reasons Trump didn't take action was that he didn't want to disrupt Nvidia's chip sales.
Recall that, in exchange for the US lifting export restrictions, Trump negotiated an agreement with Nvidia to receive 25% of the revenue from certain chip sales[1].
Trump prioritizing money over national security is not at all surprising.
There was some speculation that Rubio was the one who leaked this, as he had prepared a memo about Alice Huang that was presented to the president in May.
The $7.5billion in alleged sales to china has removed a couple of trillion in value from the pension and investment funds of Americans this week, all for the infantile hubris and anti-competitive moves toward americas biggest trading partner. It needs to be clear that’s on Trump too, if it wasn’t already. Compromised or not, Jensen was right - sell them the chips and they won’t be forced to get them under the counter or develop their own.
> The $7.5billion in alleged sales to china has removed a couple of trillion in value from the pension and investment funds of Americans this week, all for the infantile hubris and anti-competitive moves toward americas biggest trading partner.
And how many trillions of dollars of wealth has been "removed" by American companies outsourcing their production to China over the past several decades, transferring their IP to Chinese entities through forced joint-ventures, outright IP theft, etc.?
By some estimates, the outright IP theft alone has caused $15 trillion in cumulative losses. According to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, whose figures are used by the FBI and the Office of the US Trade Representative, IP theft costs American businesses somewhere between $225 and $600 billion every year, and much of that theft is at the hands of China.
Companies like Facebook and Google aren't allowed in the Chinese market. Do you find that "anti-competitive"?
Nobody is playing fair here and the notion that we can all just trade with each other equanimously is naive. The world isn't that kind and simple.
EXACTLY! I'm not sure why more people aren't putting this together. Pretty clear the person he was talking about was Jensen and they were holding this over him for the past year to get what they wanted out of him, probably front-running to enrich themselves.
Indeed he did https://www.threads.com/@carnage4life/post/Dfhghgum6yq/video... and so he was going to put this person (guessing it's Jensen) in jail then had a call with him. So he admits that (Jensen) did something illegal, but we will let it slide....
>Trump was informed she might have been a spy a year ago and didn't act on it
You don't know that at all. It's not standard procedure to immediately publicly out possible spies. Lots of reasons why not to do that including not wanting to let adversaries know you know who their spies are or to use them to feed bad intel or for watching what the spy does.
This is what has been reported, and Trump didn't dispute it when asked by the press.
As for "standard procedure" and counter-intelligence, who knows? I'm not a member of the intelligence community. Are you?
The point of my comment is that, to many laypeople, Trump's inaction doesn't look good and that creates an optics issue for him. "Why would he let a Chinese spy who was potentially trying to use Huang to influence the president's US-China policy stay close to him?"
Given how the administration operates, you can expect Trump's lackeys to spin the truth (if not lie) to make his actions look more favorable to the public.
>Why would he let a Chinese spy who was potentially trying to use Huang to influence the president's US-China policy stay close to him
There's no evidence she influenced Jensen who influenced Trump who eased restrictions despite knowing she was a spy. Jensen has consistently been trying to relax restrictions for years, before they met, and others have made the same case Jensen has, that it's actually harmful to the US to restrict access and that a managed access strategy is better than a complete ban (and Trump said he would charge for it openly which I guess makes sense). She probably did what's called intelligence gathering. I personally don't have an opinion on the strategy.
Also, it's funny watching HN suddenly become hawkish on GPUs being shipped to China. Were you complaining about it back then or just now?
> There's no evidence she influenced Jensen who influenced Trump
There actually is, for both: 1. the chip sales to the supplier employing Alice (how many chip sales were to other suppliers in China?), and 2. a $25,000,000 payment Jensen made to donald's ballroom slush fund, which he tried to keep secret.
There is also evidence that donald kept this quiet and then demanded obedience and obeisance: he admitted it in an interview recently.
As for what HN (an inanimate website on which thousands of different, diverse-minded people from around the world post) 'does', I guess sometimes it's funny, sure.
Is there any evidence export laws were being violated and Jensen knew about it. If so did he act single handedly within Nvidia? I find the timing of all this very suspicious and feel like we are only being told a small part of the story.
Many of the allegations are as yet uncorroborated and unconfirmed. There are a large number of people who stand to benefit if Jensen is no longer leading NVIDIA (and advocating for open source AI development). Some of those who stand to benefit have a massive IPO next week. Some who stand to benefit are commenting on these HN threads.
There is no disagreement. Nobody has any evidence. Zero. Even Singapore and Taiwan have no evidence. The media admitted since day 1 that they had no evidence other than "anonymous intelligence officials said so", but chose to report it uncritically anyway. And the public chose to interpret allegations as facts (or, as your parent said, "likely" even though that's based on nothing but the lady being Chinese) anyway.
I've heard that many of the asian names that have "ng" in them derive from the same root: Hong, Hung, Huang, Ang, Ng, Ngo(?) etc... I feel like I'm missing a few. But yeah. You'll see a lot of names like this.
Just found this on wiki -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(name) :
"Ng (pronounced [ŋ̍]) is the simplified (tone-less) romanization of the Cantonese surnames 吳/吴 (Jyutping: Ng4, read in Mandarin as pinyin: Wú) and 伍 (Ng5, Mandarin Wǔ); and also of the Hokkien surnames 黃/黄 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂ɡ, Mandarin Huáng) and 阮 (Ńg, Mandarin Ruǎn).
The surname is often pronounced in English as /əŋ/ əng or /ɪŋ/ ing or /ɛŋ/ eng. It is sometimes romanized as Ang, Eng, Ing and Ong in the United States, and as Ung in Australia. In Cambodia, the corresponding surname is Oeng."
Clearly this list doesn't seem to indicate some of the names I listed, but I'm not sure if that's because it's an "example" list, or if some of the names are from different roots. Either way it was interesting to learn.
Chinese is just hard. They use features of human voice that aren't used for literal texts in English, or many other languages for that matter. It's said that cultural upstreams get more complex pronunciation and downstreams tends to drop features to simplify pronunciation and China was kind of one of biggest centers of cultures in ancient times.
Note that that isn't to say "English is a simplistic language", though, it's just that Chinese has complexities in parts that don't necessary overlap with all sorts of intricacies of actual US English. Mastering both would be hard.
But at least it's not like Russian, which apparently uses more and rarer frequency bands - think DTMF, but more than dual and language specific, some overlapping some not. And English is likewise not the simplest kind of all in there as well, at all, to be extra clear.
trump admin, whose officials quashed and suppressed investigations into this criminal enterprise with the alleged spy as far back as a year ago, is casting doubt on these claims? No shit huh?
Sourcing in that article is extremely thin. Basically it's just quoting Blanche and Trump (hardly neutral observers, the administration is implicated here!) and then citing the existence (but not communication to the journalist) of "officials" who hold the opinion. The CIA thing is hilarious because it says that they aren't convince (I'm not making this up) "according to a source".
This is a beat sweetening story. You write up what your sources want you to write in exchange for them giving you juicier stuff later. It says almost nothing about the certainty within the intelligence agencies.
It’s pretty apparent that nobody can run nvidia like he did though. Firing him so abruptly is the first circle of the drain. He’s spent years building connections and a supply chain in Taiwan and the rest of Asia while coordinating operations and design in America. So when I say there’s nobody who could replace him it really does seem like that because nobody else will have that background of business relationships. It shouldn’t be overlooked that he’s made huge numbers of people in Taiwan phenomenally wealthy, and they’re not likely to be amenable to someone new coming in and claiming his status, especially if that person has been involved with getting him fired.
I'm on the betting side that nvidia will perform about as well as it has been with or without him. This is a distraction that will have an impact, to be sure, but nvidia is in a hot field of very few competitors, even after 3 years of this AI craze. In an ecosystem like that i'd say inertia plays a bigger role.
Yeah I’m not saying the effects will be immediate. But it is certainly very jarring for absolutely everyone concerned. In the immediate future everything will continue as it is today, just once we’re 6-12-18-36 months down the line in a Jensen-free Nvidia the weakness could really start to show.
Usually a transition like this can be done well when a company has some mature product or service that prints money, like Apple or Microsoft or Google for example, and the company then needs a safe pair of hands to keep that machine running. It doesn’t seem like Nvidia is in exactly that kind of situation, it’s more like a red queen race that they’re the ones leading right now.
> I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
My understanding is, the thing that got him effectively fired, [0] is not the affairs themselves, it was not being candid with his board about the extent of the problem–he admitted to them the affair with Alice Huang, but didn't tell them about his other affairs (including at least one with a direct report) until after the board was made aware of them independently.
A board can put up with a CEO who cheats on his wife. It can't put up with a CEO who hides things from it.
[0] formally speaking he resigned, but it seems likely the board communicated to him "if you don't resign, we'll fire you"
Yes, if it puts the CEO or the company at jeopardy of blackmail or litigation.
As with security vetting interviews they don't necessarily care about the morality of the actions, just that they are wware and can prepare for the consequences.
There was a very simple choice the CEO could have made which would have avoided all this, anyway.
If a CEO is already involved in one public scandal, I think they are obliged to inform the board of any other potential scandals of the same kind.
Also, we don't know exactly what Huang said to the board. Maybe, they didn't explicitly ask if there were any other affairs, and he didn't answer the question they didn't explicitly ask. Maybe, they did ask, and he lied and falsely said this was the only one.
do we really care that much about affairs? It's highly likely you are interacting with a bunch of people who are having affairs, its likely quite a few CEOs are, only difference is you don't know about it. As far as I can tell there is no terrible times happening other than the current news cycle having found a sensational news piece.
Some were allegedly with direct reports. One was allegeldy with an individual who posed a security risk. In each instance, there significant risk to the board, the company and shareholders.
He's obviously been very succesful in many elements of his role but this is very poor decision making. He could have just had affairs outside of work and been fine.
These weren't vulnerable people who had no capacity to make their own mature decisions and financial insecurity that trapped them into a situation. People who make it into these positions at a place like Nvidia are not idiots. I do think there are situations and approaches to getting into a relationship with someone who works for you that can be legitimately wrong, but it's highly unlikely that this is one of them outside of the fact he was married.
you are right, power dynamics only come into play on poor ppl. CEOs should be allowed have atleast single digit mistresses in the office who they promote beyond the poverty threshold to have an affair with them.
It's certainly a false equivalence to suggest that someone rich and smart, probably with alternative options and something to gain, is in a similarly vulnerable space as someone for whom losing their job means they're on the street by the end of the month.
I disagree with your argument as stated, as offering promotions in exchange for sexual isn’t uncommon, and many times isn’t really a choice.
But I also think this perspective isn’t really the point. Regardless of the abusive nature, it’s still a tremendous conflict of interest for an affair of this nature to occur. The direct report would have a huge amount of leverage over Huang to keep the affair secret for one thing.
I don’t know the nature of these particular affairs, but regardless of who is or isn’t vulnerable, it’s still wildly inappropriate, and shouldn’t be tolerated
How do you think executives that do work at this level meet people outside work?
The only people who understand this kind of job and what it takes are people in the same sort of area. And you’re prolly only meeting them in your own workplace.
At least if you’re boning someone from work you don’t have to watch everything you say the same way.
That's perfectly feasible and does not change the power dynamics at all.
I've seen people attracted to higher-ups ("coming on to them") in University and employment situations, and from outside looking in, the attraction could have been about the "power" the higher up was wielding (not necessarily using for bad; just the stature they had in the local society). TBH, people get attracted to people in power or with fame all the time (without actually knowing the person they are), so there is no reason it would be any different when there is a direct professional relationship.
Yes, this means it's tricky, and puts large demands on the "higher ups" — while they are similarly human with all their faults, it's still not necessarily the right thing to do — even, as a higher up, I'd struggle to differentiate if they are attracted to my "social standing" or to myself (if that can even be decoupled)?
I agree, but even so it’s all minor. A manager fucking his direct report(s) is extremely common. It’s all Pennies compared to the value Henson brings to the company.
The ONLY acceptable reason for a manager to be sleeping with someone who reports directly to him, or any other similar situation (e.g. a professor with a student in his class) is if a romantic relationship of long standing predates the power relationship. E.g. if a man's wife of ten years is assigned to report to him, there's no reason they should stop sleeping together. (I know one guy, the father of a friend of mine, who was promoted to an executive position in his company. That position came with a secretary, and his wife (who already worked for the company) was chosen to work as his secretary. This was the only case I know of where a boss was sleeping with his secretary, yet there were no ethical or moral problems with it).
But anything except a pre-existing relationship is fraught with peril: implied coercion and/or quid pro quos are just some of the problems that can exist. There are darn good reasons why that sort of thing is widely forbidden.
This should be obvious to everyone, but sometimes the obvious needs to be restated, apparently.
Right. And I'd add that even with a pre-existing relationship, you easily get into situations of favoritism. The case you describe is one of the few situations where it seems like everything could have been above board.
Yeah, most people only have one personal secretary, and in order to be able to show favoritism to one employee over another it would be necessary for them to be in similar positions. It would be remarkably silly to say "You're giving me the tough coding assignments instead of giving them to your secretary, you're blatantly favoring her" when the secretary was never hired for her coding skills.
Favoritism certainly can happen in other situations, of course. Heck, "the GM's girlfriend" is a (negative) trope in tabletop RPG groups for a reason, or spouses favoring each other in competitive board games. And those are situations where (usually) no money is involved, and it's just for fun. Add money to the situation and it can be a dangerous mix. If someone really must end up being a supervisor over his own spouse plus other people, best to have someone neutral double-checking his decisions. It's easy to be blind to one's own conflicts of interest.
Is it...? I feel like there's a lot more to unpack here. What if the thing a person fell in love with was that somebody just had more power (over them)?
I'd argue that people should fall in love on equal grounds, so the personality of a partner matters more than the perceived status of power.
This is obvious to someone who has internalized the norms of neoliberal capitalism and corporate policy. With a little critical thinking one can easily imagine philosophically that these forbidden transgressions are a kind of socially reproductive circular logic.
I've read your comment three times and I still don't know exactly what philosophical position you're staking out. What are you saying, exactly? I suspect I'm going to disagree with your position (I certainly disagree with what I think your position is), but before I start arguing against it, it would be nice to actually understand it.
Sleeping with your employee is bad because sleeping with your employee is bad. Same shit as "weed is bad because it's illegal, and weed is illegal because it's bad". For someone who doesn't (sleep with employee / smoke weed) the obvious action here is to criticize (sleeping with employee / smoking weed) because otherwise they're painted to be a bad person. Only a person who (sleeps with employees / smokes weed) would ever say otherwise, and those are bad people so their opinion isn't exactly valid in a civilized social discourse.
And I agree. You’re completely right it is totally fucking obvious beyond any reasonable doubt.
What you’re not seeing is that the infractions you describe are just drops in a bucket. This guy created billions of dollars and is responsible for the revolution in ML we see today. It is through his foresight that ML is even possible at the scale we see today. He changed the world. He is one of the core people sitting in the center of a global paradigm shift that will change our lives as we know it. You thought this ai stuff was just chat bots? Now it’s writing our software and dismantling academia piece by piece. It’s obvious what’s coming next.
What should be ALSO fucking obvious is that kind of change makes fucking a couple employees and some random honey pot from China basically NOTHING in comparison. It doesn’t fucking matter if there’s some unfairness or some kind of bullshit conflict of interest or favoritism in the company because that shit is MINOR.
You said sometimes obvious things need to be restated implying that it needs to be restated for me specifically. Let me fucking straight with you. YOU are the one fucking blind to the obvious. Wake up.
I guarantee you the board doesn’t give a fuck about any of this shit. They were just waiting for an opportune time to oust him. It was the same for bill clinton. God ousting him for favoritism when favoritism basically exists for almost every company out there? Seriously?
If you’re a board member and you’re making billions because of Jensens decisions as a ceo, are you gonna give two shits about favoritism or Jensen fucking some employees? Fuck no you wouldn’t.
Executives who have sex with direct reports are showing a blatant disregard for their company in favor of their own desire. People often get fired for this and they should.
>A manager having a relationship with a subordinate is unethical, but let's not call it outright rape, OK? There is a difference.
A manager fucking his subordinate is coercion at the very least due to the power imbalance.
This is not a consensual relationship for the same reason that sex with a "willing" person held at gunpoint isn't (even if there is no explicit verbal threat).
Whether it crosses a criminal threshold of sexual harassment or sexual assault , depends on the jurisdiction and circumstance.
In any case, it is not OK.
It is immaterial whether coercion of this sort is "not outright" rape.
Parent commenter's logic that justifies it because the CEO "has value" applies to "outright" rape as well.
If sexual harassment of a few employees is "pennies" compared to Jensen's value, so is "outright" rape.
What if someone falls in love with their boss? What if someone instigates a relationship with their boss because they want to get ahead? Is that rape too?
You cannot just assert that a relationship is non-consensual without knowing anything about the relationship concerned.
Relations between bosses and workers are likely against company rules. They are in many companies at least. So at least two affairs are against business guidelines and one with a CCP associate.
One affair, shame on him. Three affairs, and wanting him to stay as CEO shame on them.
The board probably knows more than us random commenters on the internet, but it seems to me his affair with Alice Huang pretty clearly clouded his judgement. NYT, Bloomberg, and Culper Research all reported that MegaSpeed was illegally diverting chips to China.
If the press knew about it, I'm sure Jensen did. More than enough reason to fire him.
What is the message sent if they don't fire him? It's ok to break company policy and sleep with your subordinates? It's ok to turn a blind eye to people breaking the law?
The Alice Huang relationship has been known about for a longer time, seemingly even by his family.
It more feels like someone wanted him gone. The second affair had to be leaked because after the first one it still appeared he still had a good chance of remaining CEO
Please observe the substantial difference between "an affair", "an affair with a spy who may or may not have been part of a plan to illegally sell billions of dollars of GPUs against export controls", and "an affair with one of your direct reports"
One of these things is a mostly private matter between you and your spouse. One of them involves congressional hearings and may land you and your company in serious deep poop. And one of them is widely recognized as an abuse of power in the workplace.
only if he knew right? otherwise he's just having an affair.... that the government knew about..... and didn't tell him.... because there's no evidence of anything untoward....
This is the part people discount. Any actual attempt to go after Jensen will run into the public reporting that the government was suspicious of the maybe spy’s relationship with Jensen, and it chose not to tell him about it. Jensen has ignorance handed to him on a silver platter.
to have the DOJ look the other way on a number of things, chip exports and a quashed investigation are the smoking guns
this is not about the affairs or spy, this is about the future of Ai and who gets to decide what that looks like, Jensen is a casualty in other peoples games
there are reports the whitehouse is considering ousting Lutnick over this, sounds like we have a lot more to learn about
I’d assume a possible endgame is a lot of the thousands of post economic Nvidia employees threaten to leave and go join whatever venture Jensen does next. That is what did in the OpenAI power game three years ago.
Everyone is subordinate to the CEO. That doesn't really make any sense. Unless it can be shown that it was coerced or led to favoritism. I admit it's a dangerous line to walk.
What everyone? You know it's possible for a CEO to have a romantic relationship with someone they don't have a business relationships with, right? Like say, his wife?
Yes we should care. He could of stepped down at any time.
Because Jensen chose to mix personal and business. Even having an affair with VP of Nvidia itself. If he couldn't even keep a vow and promise to wife and keep his family out of it. Why would you trust any person like this. This is his own fault.
The problem was not that he was having affairs. The problem wasn’t even that he got got by a spy.
The problem was that he was having affairs with employees who reported to him. That by itself is disqualifying, and then possibly he lied about the board to it?
Anyone who was passed up for promotion now has a credible lawsuit
- Avoid actual or potential conflicts between personal interests and their obligations to Nvidia.
- Remove themselves from decision-making when such conflicts arise.
- Contact Employment Legal when there is a perceived or actual conflict.
Do you know if these were followed or not? do you know he lied? It feels everything is "maybe this, maybe that" with no actual substance.
Reading through your acceptance of the scenario prior to knowing all of the details (he could be in front of a jury in the near future) I, personally, think it's a pretty flippant way to dismiss his actions. Rules are in place for a reason. As others have said Jensen showed extremely poor decision making capabilities in situations where he chose to take advantage. That appears to be fact. Beyond that all of the facts are not fully known... But to pretend like nothing happened and it's OK to "interpret" your way out of this. C'mon... Standards have really fucking flown the coop when you have random Internet personalities trying to defend a billionaire who couldn't keep his dick in his pants and likely broke national security interests because of that. FFS.
I just care about ACTUAL wrong doing. I don't care about the affairs, people have them at all levels from billionaires to paupers. I think action is only warranted once we move beyond "likely" "maybe" "could have" "possibly". C'mon, where's your standards of evidence flown to?
8 November after the first affair came out the board still had his back. Then the second affair came out and they kicked him out. What most likely happens is they asked him if there was more dirt and he probably said no. Then it turned that was a lie.
So this probably isn't about the affairs but a breach of trust with the board.
Most people here can read. You clearly haven't taken any time to do that. You're just, clearly, more concerned you get your NVDA stock back to a comfy price.
To speed run most of what's out there spend a few minutes trying to understand the issue [0]. You think MegaSpeed is on the up and up? Doubtful.
Given Jensen is one of the two founders that still has stock (the other being Chris Malachowsky) I suppose there could be some room for interpretation.
Yes. I don't want someone with that lack of moral character leading multi-trillion dollar companies. You can forgive Jensen, maybe even some of the people Jensen harmed will forgive Jensen, but I separate individuals forgiving the man from letting him remain the public face of Nvidia. I wouldn't want to work for him at this point.
> its likely quite a few CEOs are, only difference is you don't know about it
I hope more CEOs get caught so they can be held accountable, too.
1 affair is a moment of weakness. 3 affairs (after assuring the board there is no more bad news) is a pattern of untrustworthy dishonesty which infects every fiber of his being.
So a German spy would have been ok? I don't get all of these rival nation thing when it comes to China. Do they want Americans to be poor? Who would they sell their stuff then?
Two of the people he had an affair with were his own employees, and the other one is allegedly a Chinese spy. You're really not sure why his personal life is on trial?
At least in many countries outside the US. There was this fun thing happening then Walmart tried to expand to Europe ... doing zero investigation about social norms before that. They tried to forbid their employees to have relationships. But the germans just said "To the heck, we don't let restrict our freedom by private entities". Over there there are thousands of marriages between e.g. a hospital Dr. med. and nurses. And all of them started as a relationship between a superior and one subordinate. From a german PoV this is entirely okay. What would not be okay is abusing the power of being a superior ... but that has to be backed with evidence first, otherwise it's just a sly accusation.
Don't people have personal freedom of expression in the US? Or can't they enforce their freedom against the powers of the employers or the lynch justice like moralizing of complete strangers?
If he was French, this would be an attaboy moment - without the spy allegations, he'd be cheered on. However... in such a puritanic country as US, I suspect it was the second disclosed affair that cost him his position.
After all, it changed the narrative from Huang being "someone who fell to nation-state honeytrapping" to a regular, equal-opportunity filanderer.
The idea is not my own - my wife read it to me from Instagram;
>If Jensen had sex with underaged girls with other billionaires on a secret island, all he would get would be his name being redacted from documents doxxing his victims.
This looks like some three letter agency dumping what they have on him, most likely as a punishment for not playing ball.
In these circumstances, I don't really feel like in addition to messing up his reputation and his famil(y/ies¹) and other punishments his going to have, there should be another punishment given to his company and employees.
Ofc, my knowledge of CEO level management or even advanced GPUs is limited and I welcome any critique to straighten up my limited views. Just wanted to point out hypocrisy and the tendency to throw out the baby with bathwater.
Funny how some people on Hacker News are super excited about open Chinese models trained on NVIDIA hardware, and then some others are so negative on the "rival nation". All the while it is increasingly likely that:
- there is no concrete evidence that Alice Huang was even a spy
- the whole thing was made up due to nothing but pure Sinophobia
Extramarital affairs are extremely common among these CEOs.
Jensen was dumb enough to have one with a Chinese spy, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he's one of the best CEOs of the modern era, and his work at Nvidia has been outstanding.
I agree. The habitual lack of discretion and long-view judgement that enables repeated affairs certainly doesn’t engender trust in running a company.
Even if, as others have suggested, the evidence against Alice Huang isn’t strong, there are still huge conflicts of interest and repeated lies in play. Let’s move on
makes no sense, he isn't some recent hire you need proxies like that to judge. He is the most successful ceo of all time, arguably, so I don't think hes short in trust to run Nvidia well.
NVIDIA is the crown jewel of the US at this point, the company powering all of AI, which has global geopolitical implications. Jensen is by all accounts the visionary and solid leader of the company. Weakening it because of an affair is batshit fucking crazy.
I agree its morally wrong, but that's really a personal issue for the family, it's not a crime. Sleeping with some employees is barely a problem IMO. And worst of all, when I look at the amount of corruption and immorality amonst say Musk, Zuckerberg, the Trump White House going after Jensen is crazy. Jensen is the billionaire who's happy to pay all his taxes and not interfere with politics or elections.
And besides all that, it seems the Trump admin KNEW about Alice Huang and Jensen's relationship for a year, Lutnick also knew, the intelligence agencies knew. Why is Jensen the only one going down for this? He is getting crucified because he's less Machiavellian than all the rest.
Because this isn't a moral issue, its a dirty political fight to entrench power within OpenAI & Anthropic. Without the Chinese companies getting chips, we would not have Deepseek or Kimi or any frontier-level open weight models. And if these guys succeed, we will all be locked into corporate paid models that spy on you and censor you for a long time.
People need to look at the bigger picture, this is about killing open-weight models and that may be good for a few US cos but it is terrible for the world.
Also, these women are all age-appropriate and none were minors. One would think that's the world's lowest bar and not even worth mentioning, but, well..
Yeah it’s ridiculous the absolute vile things the people on top of the government have been doing for years now - deaths of innocent citizens by ICE, deaths in Ukraine, rape and minor abuse, hundreds of millions in grift, preventable disease outbreaks due to anti-vax propaganda and the list goes on..
but everyone is outraged about some affairs - it’s a staged planned media operation. And most of the tech industry seems to tune out anything about politics because its “low brow” so they’re often clueless to the depths of depravity of this admin, but theyre jumping onboard the Jensen hate train.
Sorry, I don't follow. You think the people who are "outraged" by the affairs aren't also outraged by what the US admin is doing? I think most critics want all rich and powerful people to be accountable for their actions when they mess up, and they take the scalps they can get.
It's an out of proportion distraction and shows how the vast majority of normal people are ideologically beholden to technofeudalist ideas of social relations. It's really the perfect ragebait issue.
Jensen's not coming back anytime soon. You can disregard/diminish the affairs, and you can believe that the "spy" angle is overblown/wrong.
But Jensen Huang has admitted to a longstanding affair with the CEO of a company that appears to exist only to evade ITAR restrictions. It's just impossible to believe that Jensen did not know what MegaSpeed was doing. While by all appearances he facilitated and benefited from it personally.
And one can also believe that ITAR restrictions on GPU sales are dumb, but evading them still counts as selling sensitive weapons to the enemy, both legally and politically.
I wouldn’t discount the power of employees in this scenario. Many of them are millionaires and can afford to leave. If enough people threaten to do quit they can absolutely get whatever they want, including getting him back.
Nvidia is just a name without it’s talent.
This is the biggest issue to me. Affairs are a personal matter between his family and his wife. And when they involve subordinates, his company. But what is absolutely unacceptable is knowingly engaging in a continued relationship with a Chinese spy. He had to have known that Singapore confiscated her passport, and I'm sure he brought it up. There are very few reasons why a country would confiscate your passport.
Also, both the company she was "CEO" of and her path to that role are so shady that it's unbelievable that it even worked. Though it seems it did to a point.
Anyways, I think he knew; or at least suspected it and kept going.
Yeah, I agree the question seems to be a lot more about knowingly participating in circumventing ITAR than whether Alice Huang truly counts as a spy (which I find very unclear - maybe I define "spy" differently than most?).
It depends on him, i can see things breaking at NVDA enough to ask him to come back
Even employee action here is pretty powerful
If he wants to come back is a different thing, he can do anything he wants
He can start a competitor to NVDA and poach enough employees to build a product and is connected and rich enough to get manufacturing and supply chains going...
Bloomberg, NYT, and Culper Research all reported that MegaSpeed was illegally diverting chips to China. Hard to imagine that the press could know, but not Jensen.
I imagine there's a lot of mixed emotions at Nvidia. Jensen seemed to have a very likable persona about him and he truly was a great CEO of the company. I imagine many looked up to him and are left to make sense of the past week.
They've also taken a pretty big pay cut this week and potentially into the future.
It has some inertia, but without Huang the company will start to slide into oblivion. The thing they should be most worried about is his tactics for driving up prices and the company's stock price. That could start to haunt (and hurt) them pretty quickly.
I'm not sure about that. Granted, I know noting about his day to day impact on the operation of the company. But, assuming he has run a tight ship and he has hired a number of competent people below him, nVidia will stay relevant for a long time. AMD might rise and challenge their dominance on AI compute. However they're on a cash cow one way or the other for a number of years.
At least the more women that appears the less any single one of them can feel guilty of shareholder value destruction. At the beginning it was all on the shoulders of Alice, the poor girl, hundreds and hundreds of billions of guilt, now it must be on double digits already, way more manageable.
I see where they’re coming from. Is the CEO in the position to be an upstanding moral citizen and flawless in his person life or is his job to increase the size of the business and returns to shareholders? If it’s not actually damaging to the company’s reputation and it will lose value without him…
On the other hand the potential spy stuff and corruption is quite worrying.
Literally zero evidence for this but a NYT journalist claiming anonymous sources, with the same journalist having many scoops in the past where their source was executives at Anthropic.
The DOJ, The CIA and the FBI are all saying that these claims she was a spy are not convincing...
Its a very calculated political hitjob, when the spy allegations didn't hold up, and the megamond accusations were hearsay at best, all of a sudden they started dropoing new affairs. Its very scheduled/coordinated.
Also me saying this instantly gets downvoted. There's bots in this thread downvoting any mention of this.
What constitutes the reason for a political hit job? Seems to me that Trump likes Jensen quite a bit, and has quite a bit of influence over the DOJ etc. There is also a lot of economic reason why the administration would want as little disruption as possible.
> What constitutes the reason for a political hit job?
The timing is curious; the admin knew for at least a year and managed to keep a lid on it, and then congress flipped, meaning the oversight and intelligence committees would be chaired by people with a (D) in their name
> Seems to me that Trump likes Jensen quite a bit
Marco Rubio probably doesn't; which would explain why it was leaked to the press and not via a formal DoJ or Commerce Department investigation. If Rubio has presidential ambitions, now is probably the best time for this to come out and not after the Democratic party gets subpoena power, and difficult questions about the administrations inaction to go with it.
So your theory is that Trump allowed Nvidia to ignore Biden-era export controls, under the table? And now that that is likely to be exposed, they are pre-emptively leaking the story and taking on the case?
I've seen claims that it's anyone from Marco Rubio to Sam Altman, but I'm not really that sure what to think. There are a lot of players with our era's unique mix of idiocy and incompetence involved.
he's implying that anthropic employees want Jensen gone because he doesn't care about existential risk and such + he's pro open weight models and if he's getting cards to china he is propping up the models they like to whine about.
those departments are run by loyalists to the same guy Jensen gave $25M to for a ballroom, I would be very hesitant to believe their words on this
with the whitehouse rumored to be considering ousting lutnick around this, the story is about something other than affairs (which are the cards you hold until you want to make big moves)
You could make an argument that Jensen became super maga, and made all these donations after he hired a crisis PR firm out of nowhere a little over a year ago. And recent remarks from Trump about threatening the head of an AI company with jail time as well. They could easily have been extorting him.
He did get suspiciously political very quickly around that time. Im definately not convinced that this is a Red Vs Blue thing, I think there's plenty of people on Trumps team that are extreme China hawks.
Its hard to know for sure, but I dont think the lady was a spy. Atleast not until I see evidence.
We do this kind of mysoginist thing in the West when we see successful, well dressed Chinese women close to polticians, CEOs and label them spies, pawns of the CCP... Like Mitch McConnels wife gets this treatment frequently.
Even if she was funneling GPUs to China, which there's also no evidence for other than claims in the WSJ that lack any evidence. I dont think being a cunning business women makes someone a spy, nor does it make Jensen complicit.
Its as if we dont want to admit to ourselves that its possible for the Chinese to be successful, cunning and tactical like any other business person without it being a shadowy plot of the communsit party.
Its very weird, and it makes it super easy to manufacture consent around stories like this.
Even if the Chinese government instigated her funneling GPUs IMO it'd just make he a smuggler and not a spy. I don't know thatI particularly defend him, but reporting is very vague and short.
> Even if the Chinese government instigated her funneling GPUs IMO it'd just make he a smuggler and not a sp
It's not even smuggling either; if the destination government is cool with your imported product, you declare your import like every other legal import. Using 3rd party countries to go around export restrictions is a very old entry in the sanctions-busting playbook; I'd bet every single sanctioned country in the history of sanctions has done this in some shape or form if there existed at least one third country that traded with both sanctioner and sanctionee.
I do wonder, not knowing exactly how this came to light, exactly how it came to light. Not that the the actions, if true, aren't bad. But why and when it broke that is interesting.
Nvidia earnings are next week, and a number of these articles were dropping right after market close the last week. The timing looked intentional, as was the announcement this morning right before open that Huang was stepping down.
Someone is playing games here, it's just a question of who and what their ultimate goal is.
If the NYT destroys their reputation with this, you can be the first to tell us. Until then, what they report has some weight to it. I also think you're understating the amount of details that have been provided.
If people are downvoting you it's because you're spinning conspiracy theories around a topic that a lot of people have personal financial interests in.
The type of person who takes NYT reporting uncritically would not change their opinion if this is false. The NYT has been deeply embedded in the American state propaganda arm for a long time, remember WMDs in Iraq?
Deeply embedded meaning they have a deep network of sources, or deeply embedded meaning they are working in concert with American intelligence services?
The sort of quick rule I have for measuring credibility is "how much of a story is it when a reporter or outlet gets something meaningfully wrong?" For the NYT, it's a rather important story, like the Iraq WMDs you mentioned. Which, needless to say, was over 20 years ago.
> Deeply embedded meaning they have a deep network of sources, or deeply embedded meaning they are working in concert with American intelligence services?
¿Por qué no los dos? Access Journalism easily explains both. Journalists know where their bread is buttered - members of the "deep network of sources" may occasionally call in favors, or drop breadcrumbs leading journalists to a specific, preselected destinations.
A recent HN thread led me down the rabbit-hole that included an opionion of some (British) monarchy insider. They observed that the monarchy would sometimes leak a story to the press with specific framing, and then the article would include the usual "We have reached out to the royal family for comment" spiel, and yet the entire article is the comment by the royal family. On the other side of the Atlantic, it wasn't too long ago that JD Vance was outed as the unnamed source of a story that the Trump admin subsequently attempted to sue for on national security grounds.
How are they conspiracies...This is CNNs reporting. I hate how people can just label something a conspiracy to discredit it. I dont believe in conspiracies actually, everything I said is verifiably true. You are literally a character out of an Orwell novel. Think for yourself for once.
But the NYT laundered crimes against humanity and covered up the death of 30k children over the last three years. They published dozens of provably fabricated stories to do so. Sorry they dont have weight to their journalism, they are completely beholden to whatever special interest that benefits them.
Ana Swanson, the NYT journalist who broke this scoop on Jensen frequently uses Jack Clark an Anthropic founder as a source in her AI scoops.
Dont call me a conspiracy theorist, its extremely insulting.
Stop letting people think for you. There's little chance you verified any of the reporting of the NYT. Wild, we literally live in 1984, peoole do not think for themselves...
You have the internet you can verify things that journalists say, you can fact check people. Try it!
It's the very definition of a conspiracy. You are claiming that people conspired to perform a character assassination of Jensen Huang, while dropping hints of involvement of Anthropic, which especially on this forum invokes further conspiracy.
You're using the "conspiratorial they" (as I like to call it), that "they" failed with the spy allegations so started releasing information about affairs.
And then, to top it off, you play victim and say there are bots scanning the comments and automatically downvoting you.
This also only touches on the potential spy aspect. The largest part of the story is Nvidia seemingly intentionally breaking US trade laws over something that a significant part of the AI industry believes should be treated as dangerous as nuclear weapons.
Conspiracy theories don't have to be wrong or crazy, but what evidence do you have to so confidently claim that yours is correct?
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I've been following Nvidia for a long time. I've seen online discussions of the company become increasingly corrupted since 2020/2021. The only explanation that's held up for me is that money corrupts, and there are a lot of individual shareholders of Nvidia stock that feel a duty to try and protect their investment. I have no idea if that applies to you, but I'm saying it to give you an idea of the angle I'm reading these threads from. More recently, AI has provided new potential sources of corruption aside from investments. When I see you and the mass of other people in these threads that are presenting these ideas of a conspiracy to take down Jensen Huang for sinister reasons, well... my initial reaction is rather negative.
Down because people assumed that he would be sacked (or would be investigated or found guilty of espionage), recovered a bit after he's actually out because uncertainty is worse than a bad outcome. I think it would've recovered anyway if he didn't leave.
That doesn't help. Why wouldn't it be his job to conduct his life in a way where people avoid making such assumptions because those assumptions decrease returns to shareholders?
Not actually advocating this but as a thought experiment:
The shareholders could offer him a bonus/his position back in exchange for chemically castrating himself. In the context of private jets and crazy executive perks that supposedly give the company a slight edge, this actually doesn't seem that unreasonable. I'm sure the market could put a price on how much value it adds.
As a board director, you'd trust him to tell you the truth when he's completely fine lying to his wife, family, friends -- and you, to your face, leading you to defend him publicly putting your reputation and that of the whole board and company at risk, while he continues to lie to you about multiple secret affairs, including with two direct reports and a big (perhaps legally dubious and potentially dangerous) customer?
Forget the spy stuff. If your CEO is schtupping customers and employees, are you really going to trust him with running your company? If you, as a board member, don't draw the line at hiding the sausage in your customers and subordinates, where do you draw it? Drunken bar fights? Road rage incidents? Rape? Murder? All fine as long as it's his personal life? All fine if he's making the company money? I don't think that's how most BoDs for massive corporations operate.
Basically yes I would not care at all if he's lying to his wife or family or friends, that's his own personal life. It's not illegal to lie or cheat or bang your customers. Criminal behaviour is much worse and besides, you may as well get rid of them if they're going to jail anyway. If I was on the board I'd want the guy who's getting me rich, not a moral CEO or one you could have a beer with, or a nice guy. If the reputational damage of non-illegal activity (or even minor illegal activity - I wouldn't care if the CEO is doing drugs or speeding or whatever) is not going to damage the company as much as getting rid of him (which it wouldn't, who on earth is going to boycott a company for being run by a cheater?) then it just doesn't make sense to get rid of them.
I am not from the USA. So I would love some opinions.
- How certain are reports about spies in general? There has been reports lately, that I have seen, involving spies. For example the one in SF...
- Would it be wise to think that there are powerful people that want him out of the company? Because the affair is one thing, but there is an accusation that should be investigated, right?
- He has been too many years in the company... this is not the first personal issue we can judge him about. Why now?
Great work!
He is one of the exceptional visionary CEO who avoided mass layoffs and grew company with least immoral business decisions. Now it's time for employees to support him.
Just curious, for those saying it’s no big deal, is there a number of direct reports/ subordinates a CEO is having affairs with that would cause you to have concerns about a CEO? Right now it’s 2 known. What about 5? 10? 50? (Over decades).
What if the affair was with the executive of a customer who is also responsible for redirecting assets to a hostile nation state? Would this CEO be vulnerable to blackmail? Are you sure this is the only vulnerability he has?
Is it possible the board is now privy to details and information these employees may not know? Fiduciary duty does have a meaning.
Personally, I don't care how many people he cheats with as long as they're consenting adults. The only person hurt in this situation is the wife, which is not me.
The real problem here is that he was knowingly selling GPUs to a woman who was then selling them to China. This is where he would not be fulfilling his fiduciary duty as now the company will be coming under fire for export violations.
Honestly, if the roles are all execs and they're all decamillionaires, and the company is one of the fastest growing on earth, I don't really care as a shareholder.
What's the thesis? That their nepotism harms returns? Well clearly that is not true because now that it's not happening, the stock valuation is much lower.
It's only an ethics violation with a huge age and wealth difference.
I loved and admired Jensen. He and his team's vision, energy, positivity and ingenuity have kept other companies scrambling to catch up for decades - since 1993!
If the investigation finds he didn't divulge secrets or participate in moving chips to China I'd like to see him brought back by popular demand of his team, and also investors.
Hopefully Nvidia will survive and thrive. After all Apple sort of survived the passing of Steve Jobs, ..after a while.
Well when its all said and done Nvidia is Jensen and Jensen is Nvidia. With him gone Nvidia will get into the hands of pure bean counters that will probably kill support for things like nvidia shield and geforce now etc.
A lot of people became millionaires during his tenure, suppose it’s not surprising that brings a lot of loyalty. Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right move for the company though.
It is almost certainly the case that many of his defenders here and elsewhere have a meaningful financial incentive to defend him and hope for his return. The good news is that they're easy to spot, sycophants and boot-lickers for money almost always are.
the thing is we will need to forget about cheap chinese models for a while , but on the other hand this is a big push to Beijing's strategy to push for local AI chip development. Perhaps this will give us the cheap and abundant processors we ve been lacking.
i think some people are too allergic to idea of people sleeping with other people. not that this affected his performance at his position. its like some muslims getting upset that ceo or my company eats pork. its personal preference not something affecting business. French i heard are more tolerant of this.
He was pressured to leave because he engaged in sexual relationships with subordinates as well as customers, which is against corporate policy at basically every single company in America. He wasn't pressured to leave because he cheated on his wife or had sex with people in general.
It's not about him making some mistakes. If he is contrite and gets the help he and his family need him to get then he will find his way out of the mess. Whether his marriage survives is up to how he responds and how much patience his wife has. That's separate from what he's done professionally, which have different consequences. If you don't fire him you are basically telling him he's untouchable.
F yea! Bring him back. If not, walk out and sink the company.
This is looking more like a NYT hit job. Drop unsubstantiated anonymous allegations after the election. The board hires a left wing firm to do 'investigations'. The plan here for the anti-AI left to take control of AI at the source - Nvidia. It's time to fight back.
Final thought for the night from me: I do think it's odd how much NYT is headlining this. Their front page is entirely about him being ousted. While I think it is news, I wonder why it is such news. Do they earnestly think he has that much impact on nVidia's day to day operations? Do they earnestly think $4B of chips rented to China is that big an impact on US national security?
Or is it a way to get clicks and subscriptions, or a way to burn someone for a nefarious purpose? I don't know the answer, but this is the level of "conspiracy" that is plausible in my opinion.
The moat is thinning with everyone going directly to TSMC, but with Jensen you always feel like the next big thing could be captured by nvidia. Without him it seems the company can draw on its previous success for a few years until that moat is completely gone. Nobody is going to be able to make a call like baking CUDA for years while it has little returns.
I don't like him or Nvidia but you can't deny he was the CEO while they achieved exraordinary things. He is just very successful no matter which way you put it.
I don't just mean making money successful like polymarket etc. but he was the head of a company that created multiple huge technical achievements in past decades. He made huge bets on multiple things and the bets actually worked in the end.
And they will very likely replace him with a bunch of accountants. It is not hard to understand why someone would want to have him as a leader instead of an accountant.
Because no one else can fill the shoes. The best that the next CEO can do is either:
a) make improvements on what exists, and thus effectively stagnate in a moving hardware industry, or
b) cut staff (which Nvidia has only done twice in its history: 1996 (near-bankruptcy), and around 2008 (360 / 6.5%), right in the middle of ironing out the Tesla architecture).
The moment their CFO took over, they already announced layoffs.
Alexander the Great was an extraordinary warlord and a mediocre king. He died unexpectedly, and his empire collapsed immediately.
Securing succession is a huge part of leadership in any organization that is supposed to outlast its leader. Because unexpected things can happen at any time, a leader must keep the organization in a shape, where a plausible successor can take over and continue leading it successfully. If no such successors exist, the leader has not done their job properly.
> If no such successors exist, the leader has not done their job properly.
This presupposes that there are successors that can fill the roles. Even after curation, what's left will very rarely match what's required, doubly so with tech-centric companies. The CFO now in charge is the perfect example of this.
A regression to the mean more often than not happens as a result.
They're losing money. It's always money. Denting the company they work for or invest in is a surefire way to get the money-grubbers to raise their hands. These are the people who care more about their personal stake in Nvidia than they do Nvidia as a whole. Good candidates for sacking.
Why would you take an RSU from a company that "licenses" hardware they design from the ground up to lock you out of doing what you want with it? You're rewarding the parasite. Don't reward parasites.
At the point you've accepted RSUs you're already working for the company. If you hate your employer enough to turn down a significant portion of your total comp package, you really need to question how you got in that position.
That's a pretty subtle and uncommon critique of Nvidia. Reminds me of this YouTube comment I saw on a Valve video once where someone made a huge post about how half life: alyx isn't a real videogame you can own because it isn't available as a physical disc.
Like you aren't technically wrong but, idk, are you expecting anyone to agree?
The forces at work answer your question. Why would someone take RSUs from Nvidia? Obviously because that means they're getting hired at Nvidia which is one of the highest valued companies in the world, and the RSUs represent a lot of more money on top of your high salary and permanent resume clout.
In Taiwan, Nvidia and tsmc are the two highest salary payers in the country. It's frankly funny to think of a Taiwanese engineer hesitating at a Nvidia offer letter because of niche FOSS/right to repair/IP liberation ideological qualms when the alternative is sweatshopping it at some no name chip industry side company that pays 30k/year at the high end.
There's truth to the comments both salawat and you are making. The market forces and incentives are undeniably strong. It can also be true at the same time that vendor lock-in like this is also undesirable.
Infidelity, possibly violating US law, and Nvidia’s own HR policies that open the company up to huge liability is okay because you took a look at a photo of his wife? Really?
I really hope you take some time to reevaluate this extremely misogynist take.
Maybe, but I can say without a doubt my reaction would be the same regardless of who the CEO is or the company. I think the only thing that matters for a CEO is business acumen, not moral character (and I'm personally moral af, often to a fault it feels like).
Notably real business acumen precludes lawbreaking, but until there is concrete evidence, I won't simply rely on the court of public opinion.
It does seem instinctual; but plenty of people are able to override genetics with idealism.
"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
One can have multiple relationships and still be a good person and a good leader. We don't know what kind of arrangement he and his wife had before the public drama.
I have full empathy for Jensen here. But 3 affairs, and one with an alleged Spy is something that cannot be "forgiven" at his level. It's national security! How can someone be so deluded as to petition with company's best interests? It's a PR and security disaster.
I wish the employees well but there's blood in the water and the sharks are circling. NVIDIA is one hell of a whalefall and there's lots of hungry scavengers out there.
> They worry the company will eventually suffer without its founder at the helm and say that the board must bring him back. “Nvidia is Nvidia because of Jensen,” the employee tells WIRED.
Assuming these remarks are representative of employee sentiment more broadly, if you’ve been running a company for decades and yet your employees don’t feel like your beneficent ethos is obviously reflected in every single other person in leadership, that suggests to me a completely different sort of managerial failure.
No one should be seen as fungible, and this is not to disparage the clear connections so many people feel with the guy. But if people feel like any group is being held together by a single strongman, that person has failed to do their job of actually infusing the essence of the culture into everyone around them. But I guess that’s what modern corporate leadership tends to looks like: a cult of one personality.
Our society is obsessed with sex and that's why there's always so much fuss about it. If we only did it once a year like most animals the world would be a lot quieter place.
A lot animals have a mating season, where females are only fertile and receptive to sex during ovulation--an estrous cycle. Humans, along with a few other mammals (other primates, some bats, elephant shrews, and spiny mice) are unusual in that we have a menstrual cycle instead of an estrous cycle. Sexual desire isn't connected to a estrous cycle.
> He may be a thief, he may be a robber of temples, he may he the very chief man in every sort of vice and criminality; but he is a gallant general and a fortunate one, and he must be preserved for the critical emergencies of the republic.
Fine words, but you know what happened, right? The second pleading against Verres which you're quoting from was never delivered. The bastard was utterly guilty:
> [Verres and his defender Hortensius tried to delay the trial until a more sympathetic judge was available, but Cicero] opened his case with a short and blistering speech. He listed all of Verres crimes during his time as governor of Sicily and showed evidence that Verres had amassed 40 million sesterces in that time. The effect of the first brief speech was so overwhelming that on August 13 Hortensius abandoned the defence as hopeless, and recommended his client leave the country. The following day, Verres was found guilty and fined three million sesterces.
Assuming you're working in big tech, plenty of your coworkers are already having affairs. Those tech conferences, offsites, etc. are filled with married people hooking up.
I think it's odd the amount of flak this guy took for relationships with adult women, while those involved with Epstein remain mosly undisturbed. If the AI bubble bursts soon, I wonder if people will try to blame Huang's extramarital affairs for it, instead of the rampant misallocation of resources.
These weren’t random women. They were both involved in his business. One was an employee. You can never be say confidently that an employee consented. It’s the nature of the power dynamic. That’s why this is so serious.
I don’t know if billionaire pedophiles raping trafficked teenagers is a better power dynamic than affairs with consenting adults that you employ.
What do I know, I’ve never done either? I would say that the pedophiles are a more serious power dynamic issue, but you are entitled to pick the other side of the issue, I guess.
If Jenson used his power to pressure them to consent then there is an issue. The board should ask them rather than speculate. If the issue is that no one can consent if there is an imbalance of power, then most heterosexual relationships are a problem just from sexual dimorphism, because implications.
It isn't so much the morality of it. CEOs as a group aren't known for excessive scruples. It's the piss-poor judgment he exhibited. Even if everything was consensual, this is a blatant violation of corporate standards and inevitably diminishes his reputation and therefore his effectiveness at his job. He's not only borked his own career, he's lost a ton of money for everyone connected with Nvidia. The question really is, why was he so stupid to think that he wouldn't get caught or that it wouldn't matter?
Are they petitioning to bring back the Chinese spy too or is it just Jensen? Whatever international espionage the man wishes to dabble in in his own private time should be his own damn business. Are they willing to take them on as a job lot? Questions need to be answered
I 1000% agree that he should come back. Yes he is a terrible jerk for what he did to his family, but he has been an enormous help to ai and the technology is potentially life changing. With him leading we might get closer to AGI. I wrote a blog post about it https://blog.jtoy.net/jensen-huang-should-have-fought-for-ag...
Getting whiplash from which side of the issues people are angry about on the current administration's party on either social or economic/geopolitical impacts, and this other matter with Jensen and his sexual affairs vs. the economic/geopolitical issues of NVIDIA exports since this was with a Chinese spy.
Confused on whether people are actually upset about both or even understand the issue, or are just upset about one thing while using the other as ammunition.
It's one of those news stories that ends up being a good Rorschach test. There are a lot of different possible angles and takes, which means someone's opinion ends up saying something about themselves.
Yeah... What I meant with this was I'm hearing the anger and outrage in the responses to this story, and then I'm surprised to hear at the very end of someone's tirade that their objection seems to be solely about the sexual affair, and not everything else about this. It almost feels like satire.
At the end of the day he hasn't been accused of harassment. The two employees he banged didn't complain that he pressured them into banging him. It is still wrong to bang your employees, and there should be penalties for that. But can't he be punished in a way that doesn't also punish the industry, the economy and US competitiveness?
He isn't being punished for "banging" anyone he's being punished because it hurts "US competitiveness" to send chips to China via the export smuggling operation that spy he was "banging" operates. It would not surprise anyone to found out he broke several federal laws. That's the point, no one actually cares about his sex life.
The guy was smuggling material deemed by US law to have export controls for national security reasons to the very country "US competitiveness" has been hyperventilating about for over a decade now. Resigning is the least of his concerns he will have to worry about being prosecuted for years to come.
“In facilities across the region, Megaspeed rents Nvidia chips to Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, an arrangement that does not violate current US export control regulations.”
If Alibaba is allowed to remotely access Nvidia hardware physically located in Singapore, what purpose does the export control serve?
Also, it has not been established that any export control laws have been violated.
assuming the offshore GPU use is ok, the main issues are that the buyer companies' addresses turned out to be empty locations (shell companies?), and megaspeed's supposed "data center" was just a warehouse stacked with boxed GPUs on pallets.
this "data center" was one of those locations that Alibaba was supposed to remotely use, assuming the terms were that they had to. the implication is that this "data center" was fake and that GPUs were physically routed to China still.
It seems Nvidia's board which had every reason to try to keep him has not reached your conclusion.
Do you simply take them to be fools?
Instead of playing lawyer with you it's quite obviously reasonable to assume the board recognizes his actions open up a Pandora's box of severe legal liability. And quite frankly, I'm not really impressed by your pedestrian analysis of export law. If it was that clear cut he would still be there, and the modus operandi of the Chinese spy wouldn't even make any sense.
For your analysis to have any credibility Nvidia would have to disregard its own self interest. Is that really how you think the world works?
Yes, and the US government should investigate that and make a determination as to whether export control laws were violated and how serious the violation was. That hasn't happened yet.
The US was investigating it and Nvidia (aka Jensen) name-dropped a Trump appointee to get it to go away. That alone is resignation-worthy in any political era in our lifetimes before Trump.
> Yes, and the US government should investigate that
Well, there is also a problem in that the US government agencies tasked with investigating such things are currently very compromised.
Todd Blanche, the Attorney General/head of DOJ, constantly says that his job is to protect the Trump administration. And Trump is linked to this whole story in various ways.
So there will be no fair investigation for the foreseeable future, other than potential congressional oversight hearings next year after the Democrats take control of Congress.
Yes they should, but this does not preclude the board and the public from concluding based on the available information that his judgement in this area seemed extremely poor, even if it may not end up illegal. It sure doesn't look like a situation where people are surprised that Alice Huang was a spy ...
Jensen should start a new company and hire them. California's ban on non-competes is one of the few good laws it has and made Silicon Valley what it is. Time for another traitorous eight.
That company would suck because it wouldn't own any NVidia patents nor the copyright to their software and it wouldn't have the contractual relationship with TSMC that NVidia has. Nor their customers.
Even with patents, copyrights, etc as mentioned in a sibling comment, it would be interesting what he could do if he had a fresh start. There might have been ideas that challenged the existing business that he could be free to pursue.
He'd have no shortage of talent and funding to embark on such a venture.
The big question is once the dust settles (including a possible divorce), he'll still have billions of dollars and need a reason to get out of bed. Being that he's a famous workaholic, I imagine he will try something new after he's done licking his wounds.
Are these Chinese employees? If it's true Huang betrayed America for China it would make sense why they wouldn't be as upset. I doubt the employees have as full of a story like the board does so they may not know the extent of his misdeeds.
I am amazed to see how easy it is for some people to forget (or rather not acknowledge) that almost no one gives two flying f’s about what happens to the billionaire spouses, his (pretty sure) millionnaire colleagues he slept with, and that spy (all of them alleged, right?) – or anyone esle he would have sex with. Well, maybe a bit of jealousy (mostly for the billions because that’s what seems to have done the trick). We are in it for the entertainment of it all. But then you’d come across comments trying too hard to sound philosophical and “deep”. I mean ffs, this is one of most basic and banal human urges.
Apparently it's not popular on HN to call this behavior out. There's a lot of toxic comments trying to justify it by saying it's okay because he's rich and generated lots of wealth for the economy. I'm guessing they're the same people that were confused why the MeToo movement was a thing.
Theres zero evidence that this lady was a spy, zero evidence for any of the claims.
I dont even like Jensen but this is ridiculous. We need more media literacy in this country, we can't just hop on whatever narrative the NYT, WSJ and CNN push onto us.
This whole thing is clearly a political hit job on behalf of the AI lab lobby. Wild everyone fell for this garbage.
They literally trickled out leaks about random affairs, this was highky coordinated and hard to tell who was exactly responsible. But the journalist at the NYT responsible for these initial leaks has tons of past scoops with sources at the highest levels of Anthropic.
Edit: This got downvoted literally instantly. This is a new account and my karma instantly went to zero... Bots much.
I downvoted you because your comment just amounts to an unprovable appeal to conspiracy. The deep state didn't make him have multiple affairs, it was his own poor decision making.
It is an opinion. None of us were there. Maybe he did have an affair, maybe he did not. You are just assuming that the part that you believe, is the part that is true.
The leaks all coming out simultaneously after being slept on for a year, and then Jensen resigning quickly rather than putting up a fight means there's something going on behind the scenes. Its common sense, not a conspiracy theory.
I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
You can think he is amazing at many parts of this job, but at this point it is less of a mistake, and more a pattern of behavior that he knew was hugely risky and decided to cover up.
This is a terrible time for Nvidia employees. But the solution is not to invite the cause of the terrible time back in.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
This isn't to discount the issues with NVIDIA and whether they knowingly participated in circumventing chip bans. Or conflict of interest issues. But running a business that benefits China as a Chinese national and making some reports to the nation just doesn't seem like "spy" to me any more than being part of the British East India company made a Brit a spy.
https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/mark-h...
However, if Jensen Huang was made aware of the potential for espionage, then his position is far more precarious.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/09/the-race-is-on-to-sue-nvid...
"A third category, one that would change everything, would arise only if the board’s investigation finds Huang knew about the intelligence connection. That would be “a whole other ball game,” as Bartlett said."
I have signed on to the Rosen class action.
US IC knows he knew, but cannot disclose the means at trial, so they’re doing this to remove him from NVidia.
Just for context:
> In April 2023, Trump hired [Todd] Blanche to defend him for concealed hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and he led Trump's defense in the 2024 criminal trial. Blanche later defended Trump in cases involving federal classified documents and election obstruction. In November 2024, following his victory in the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump announced Blanche as his nominee for deputy attorney general. Blanche was confirmed by the Senate in March 2025.[1]
He defended Trump's White House media ban[2] and most recently threatened to prosecute Democrats planning oversight probes into the administration[3].
FBI Director Kash Patel, for anyone who doesn't already know, is a Trump loyalist who was a director of Trump Media & Technology Group and reportedly made over $500,000 from Trump's political campaign. It is literally insane that he is the director of anything in the government[4].
Bottom line: time will tell who Alice Huang really was, but given the reports that Trump was informed she might have been a spy a year ago and didn't act on it, you can't expect honesty from loyalists he put in law enforcement positions.
If there's any concern that his inaction was a mistake, you can expect all of the people he put in positions of power to do whatever it takes to defend him, and that includes fudge the truth about the intelligence they had on Alice Huang.
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/27/todd-blanche...
[3] https://www.ms.now/news/todd-blanche-threat-prosecution-demo...
[4] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/the-fbis-controversial-...
Recall that, in exchange for the US lifting export restrictions, Trump negotiated an agreement with Nvidia to receive 25% of the revenue from certain chip sales[1].
Trump prioritizing money over national security is not at all surprising.
There was some speculation that Rubio was the one who leaked this, as he had prepared a memo about Alice Huang that was presented to the president in May.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/trump-nvidia-h200-china-ai-c...
And how many trillions of dollars of wealth has been "removed" by American companies outsourcing their production to China over the past several decades, transferring their IP to Chinese entities through forced joint-ventures, outright IP theft, etc.?
By some estimates, the outright IP theft alone has caused $15 trillion in cumulative losses. According to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, whose figures are used by the FBI and the Office of the US Trade Representative, IP theft costs American businesses somewhere between $225 and $600 billion every year, and much of that theft is at the hands of China.
Companies like Facebook and Google aren't allowed in the Chinese market. Do you find that "anti-competitive"?
Nobody is playing fair here and the notion that we can all just trade with each other equanimously is naive. The world isn't that kind and simple.
You don't know that at all. It's not standard procedure to immediately publicly out possible spies. Lots of reasons why not to do that including not wanting to let adversaries know you know who their spies are or to use them to feed bad intel or for watching what the spy does.
As for "standard procedure" and counter-intelligence, who knows? I'm not a member of the intelligence community. Are you?
The point of my comment is that, to many laypeople, Trump's inaction doesn't look good and that creates an optics issue for him. "Why would he let a Chinese spy who was potentially trying to use Huang to influence the president's US-China policy stay close to him?"
Given how the administration operates, you can expect Trump's lackeys to spin the truth (if not lie) to make his actions look more favorable to the public.
There's no evidence she influenced Jensen who influenced Trump who eased restrictions despite knowing she was a spy. Jensen has consistently been trying to relax restrictions for years, before they met, and others have made the same case Jensen has, that it's actually harmful to the US to restrict access and that a managed access strategy is better than a complete ban (and Trump said he would charge for it openly which I guess makes sense). She probably did what's called intelligence gathering. I personally don't have an opinion on the strategy.
Also, it's funny watching HN suddenly become hawkish on GPUs being shipped to China. Were you complaining about it back then or just now?
There actually is, for both: 1. the chip sales to the supplier employing Alice (how many chip sales were to other suppliers in China?), and 2. a $25,000,000 payment Jensen made to donald's ballroom slush fund, which he tried to keep secret.
There is also evidence that donald kept this quiet and then demanded obedience and obeisance: he admitted it in an interview recently.
As for what HN (an inanimate website on which thousands of different, diverse-minded people from around the world post) 'does', I guess sometimes it's funny, sure.
this is what the parent is saying is the problem. How is her not being spy change that?
And what's with all the people who think complex investigations get completed in days?
Almost certainly the same last name (黃/黄, huang2). It's also sometimes romanized as Wong (though some Wongs are 王, wang2).
Just found this on wiki -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(name) : "Ng (pronounced [ŋ̍]) is the simplified (tone-less) romanization of the Cantonese surnames 吳/吴 (Jyutping: Ng4, read in Mandarin as pinyin: Wú) and 伍 (Ng5, Mandarin Wǔ); and also of the Hokkien surnames 黃/黄 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂ɡ, Mandarin Huáng) and 阮 (Ńg, Mandarin Ruǎn).
The surname is often pronounced in English as /əŋ/ əng or /ɪŋ/ ing or /ɛŋ/ eng. It is sometimes romanized as Ang, Eng, Ing and Ong in the United States, and as Ung in Australia. In Cambodia, the corresponding surname is Oeng."
Clearly this list doesn't seem to indicate some of the names I listed, but I'm not sure if that's because it's an "example" list, or if some of the names are from different roots. Either way it was interesting to learn.
Note that that isn't to say "English is a simplistic language", though, it's just that Chinese has complexities in parts that don't necessary overlap with all sorts of intricacies of actual US English. Mastering both would be hard.
But at least it's not like Russian, which apparently uses more and rarer frequency bands - think DTMF, but more than dual and language specific, some overlapping some not. And English is likewise not the simplest kind of all in there as well, at all, to be extra clear.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-jensen-huang-spy-claim-nvidia...
This is a beat sweetening story. You write up what your sources want you to write in exchange for them giving you juicier stuff later. It says almost nothing about the certainty within the intelligence agencies.
Usually a transition like this can be done well when a company has some mature product or service that prints money, like Apple or Microsoft or Google for example, and the company then needs a safe pair of hands to keep that machine running. It doesn’t seem like Nvidia is in exactly that kind of situation, it’s more like a red queen race that they’re the ones leading right now.
My understanding is, the thing that got him effectively fired, [0] is not the affairs themselves, it was not being candid with his board about the extent of the problem–he admitted to them the affair with Alice Huang, but didn't tell them about his other affairs (including at least one with a direct report) until after the board was made aware of them independently.
A board can put up with a CEO who cheats on his wife. It can't put up with a CEO who hides things from it.
[0] formally speaking he resigned, but it seems likely the board communicated to him "if you don't resign, we'll fire you"
As with security vetting interviews they don't necessarily care about the morality of the actions, just that they are wware and can prepare for the consequences.
There was a very simple choice the CEO could have made which would have avoided all this, anyway.
Also, we don't know exactly what Huang said to the board. Maybe, they didn't explicitly ask if there were any other affairs, and he didn't answer the question they didn't explicitly ask. Maybe, they did ask, and he lied and falsely said this was the only one.
In corporate America, that means he was fired. Nobody who "resigns" under such circumstances actually does so voluntarily.
Some were allegedly with direct reports. One was allegeldy with an individual who posed a security risk. In each instance, there significant risk to the board, the company and shareholders.
He's obviously been very succesful in many elements of his role but this is very poor decision making. He could have just had affairs outside of work and been fine.
But I also think this perspective isn’t really the point. Regardless of the abusive nature, it’s still a tremendous conflict of interest for an affair of this nature to occur. The direct report would have a huge amount of leverage over Huang to keep the affair secret for one thing.
I don’t know the nature of these particular affairs, but regardless of who is or isn’t vulnerable, it’s still wildly inappropriate, and shouldn’t be tolerated
The only people who understand this kind of job and what it takes are people in the same sort of area. And you’re prolly only meeting them in your own workplace.
At least if you’re boning someone from work you don’t have to watch everything you say the same way.
I've seen people attracted to higher-ups ("coming on to them") in University and employment situations, and from outside looking in, the attraction could have been about the "power" the higher up was wielding (not necessarily using for bad; just the stature they had in the local society). TBH, people get attracted to people in power or with fame all the time (without actually knowing the person they are), so there is no reason it would be any different when there is a direct professional relationship.
Yes, this means it's tricky, and puts large demands on the "higher ups" — while they are similarly human with all their faults, it's still not necessarily the right thing to do — even, as a higher up, I'd struggle to differentiate if they are attracted to my "social standing" or to myself (if that can even be decoupled)?
But anything except a pre-existing relationship is fraught with peril: implied coercion and/or quid pro quos are just some of the problems that can exist. There are darn good reasons why that sort of thing is widely forbidden.
This should be obvious to everyone, but sometimes the obvious needs to be restated, apparently.
Favoritism certainly can happen in other situations, of course. Heck, "the GM's girlfriend" is a (negative) trope in tabletop RPG groups for a reason, or spouses favoring each other in competitive board games. And those are situations where (usually) no money is involved, and it's just for fun. Add money to the situation and it can be a dangerous mix. If someone really must end up being a supervisor over his own spouse plus other people, best to have someone neutral double-checking his decisions. It's easy to be blind to one's own conflicts of interest.
Surely there are cases around the world where an employee and his/her boss fell in love, married and that was the end of it.
Is it...? I feel like there's a lot more to unpack here. What if the thing a person fell in love with was that somebody just had more power (over them)?
I'd argue that people should fall in love on equal grounds, so the personality of a partner matters more than the perceived status of power.
What you’re not seeing is that the infractions you describe are just drops in a bucket. This guy created billions of dollars and is responsible for the revolution in ML we see today. It is through his foresight that ML is even possible at the scale we see today. He changed the world. He is one of the core people sitting in the center of a global paradigm shift that will change our lives as we know it. You thought this ai stuff was just chat bots? Now it’s writing our software and dismantling academia piece by piece. It’s obvious what’s coming next.
What should be ALSO fucking obvious is that kind of change makes fucking a couple employees and some random honey pot from China basically NOTHING in comparison. It doesn’t fucking matter if there’s some unfairness or some kind of bullshit conflict of interest or favoritism in the company because that shit is MINOR.
You said sometimes obvious things need to be restated implying that it needs to be restated for me specifically. Let me fucking straight with you. YOU are the one fucking blind to the obvious. Wake up.
I guarantee you the board doesn’t give a fuck about any of this shit. They were just waiting for an opportune time to oust him. It was the same for bill clinton. God ousting him for favoritism when favoritism basically exists for almost every company out there? Seriously?
If you’re a board member and you’re making billions because of Jensens decisions as a ceo, are you gonna give two shits about favoritism or Jensen fucking some employees? Fuck no you wouldn’t.
No, the engineers he employed did. They will continue to do so after his departure.
There are only two options, either A) to pretend that it doesn't happen, or B) to acknowledge that it does.
The idea that corporate policy could ever control what goes on people's bedrooms is of course absurd, that's just option A.
The board can’t trust Huang if he lies repeatedly and breaks company code of conduct.
A lot of it is just silently ignored if found out.
It is not remotely common, and is grounds for firing at every single job I've ever held.
You misspelled "penis".
> A manager fucking his direct report(s) is extremely common
Let's just legalize rape by "valuable" people, it's fiiiiine
Y'know, this is why people don't like techbros. It's shit like this.
EDIT: I hope the downvoters understand they are proving my point.
A manager having a relationship with a subordinate is unethical, but let's not call it outright rape, OK? There is a difference.
A manager fucking his subordinate is coercion at the very least due to the power imbalance.
This is not a consensual relationship for the same reason that sex with a "willing" person held at gunpoint isn't (even if there is no explicit verbal threat).
Whether it crosses a criminal threshold of sexual harassment or sexual assault , depends on the jurisdiction and circumstance.
In any case, it is not OK.
It is immaterial whether coercion of this sort is "not outright" rape.
Parent commenter's logic that justifies it because the CEO "has value" applies to "outright" rape as well.
If sexual harassment of a few employees is "pennies" compared to Jensen's value, so is "outright" rape.
This is what I have issue with.
You cannot just assert that a relationship is non-consensual without knowing anything about the relationship concerned.
One affair, shame on him. Three affairs, and wanting him to stay as CEO shame on them.
If the press knew about it, I'm sure Jensen did. More than enough reason to fire him.
What is the message sent if they don't fire him? It's ok to break company policy and sleep with your subordinates? It's ok to turn a blind eye to people breaking the law?
It more feels like someone wanted him gone. The second affair had to be leaked because after the first one it still appeared he still had a good chance of remaining CEO
It is pretty clear he lied to the board after the first news broke and that is why he was sacked.
One of these things is a mostly private matter between you and your spouse. One of them involves congressional hearings and may land you and your company in serious deep poop. And one of them is widely recognized as an abuse of power in the workplace.
this is not about the affairs or spy, this is about the future of Ai and who gets to decide what that looks like, Jensen is a casualty in other peoples games
there are reports the whitehouse is considering ousting Lutnick over this, sounds like we have a lot more to learn about
How can he not know he was sleeping with a customer and a direct report?
> he's just having an affair
Interesting use of the word "an" and "just."
> that the government knew about
Because of an investigation into illegal smuggling.
> and didn't tell him
Is that a judgement of whether he's a good steward of a multi-trillion dollar monopoly?
> because there's no evidence of anything untoward
Right, because the current administration only acts upon evidence and definitely not self-enrichment and cronyism.
Wow, how can every single word be such complete bs?
Because Jensen chose to mix personal and business. Even having an affair with VP of Nvidia itself. If he couldn't even keep a vow and promise to wife and keep his family out of it. Why would you trust any person like this. This is his own fault.
this is clearly not just an affair. Why are you reducing it to that despite that line in parent comment. you obviously read that.
I see this "just a innocent affair" on twitter. Whats going on. Who are these ppl.
The problem was that he was having affairs with employees who reported to him. That by itself is disqualifying, and then possibly he lied about the board to it?
Anyone who was passed up for promotion now has a credible lawsuit
Do the numbers. Let's say 5 people sue and are awarded 10 million each. Or even 50 million each.
So this probably isn't about the affairs but a breach of trust with the board.
To speed run most of what's out there spend a few minutes trying to understand the issue [0]. You think MegaSpeed is on the up and up? Doubtful.
[0] https://youtu.be/SOwUWPtXQ9I
But sure, tell me again that everyone needs to have perfect control over all their most powerful urges to keep their jobs?
Guess you’re not fat, never fucked anyone you shouldn’t have, and definitely never drank more you should have at any point?
Given Jensen is one of the two founders that still has stock (the other being Chris Malachowsky) I suppose there could be some room for interpretation.
Yes. I don't want someone with that lack of moral character leading multi-trillion dollar companies. You can forgive Jensen, maybe even some of the people Jensen harmed will forgive Jensen, but I separate individuals forgiving the man from letting him remain the public face of Nvidia. I wouldn't want to work for him at this point.
> its likely quite a few CEOs are, only difference is you don't know about it
I hope more CEOs get caught so they can be held accountable, too.
Why care at all about the private life of a CEO?
Nothing he said could ever be believed again.
A one-night stand might qualify better as a "moment of weakness", but that’s not what we’re talking about.
I don’t think an affair or ten matters in the US.
public figures get more public scrutiny
... than this still is stricly a private thing.
At least in many countries outside the US. There was this fun thing happening then Walmart tried to expand to Europe ... doing zero investigation about social norms before that. They tried to forbid their employees to have relationships. But the germans just said "To the heck, we don't let restrict our freedom by private entities". Over there there are thousands of marriages between e.g. a hospital Dr. med. and nurses. And all of them started as a relationship between a superior and one subordinate. From a german PoV this is entirely okay. What would not be okay is abusing the power of being a superior ... but that has to be backed with evidence first, otherwise it's just a sly accusation.
Don't people have personal freedom of expression in the US? Or can't they enforce their freedom against the powers of the employers or the lynch justice like moralizing of complete strangers?
Always puzzles me.
If he was French, this would be an attaboy moment - without the spy allegations, he'd be cheered on. However... in such a puritanic country as US, I suspect it was the second disclosed affair that cost him his position.
After all, it changed the narrative from Huang being "someone who fell to nation-state honeytrapping" to a regular, equal-opportunity filanderer.
This looks like some three letter agency dumping what they have on him, most likely as a punishment for not playing ball.
In these circumstances, I don't really feel like in addition to messing up his reputation and his famil(y/ies¹) and other punishments his going to have, there should be another punishment given to his company and employees.
Ofc, my knowledge of CEO level management or even advanced GPUs is limited and I welcome any critique to straighten up my limited views. Just wanted to point out hypocrisy and the tendency to throw out the baby with bathwater.
1: sorry for that joke to those whom it offends.
- there is no concrete evidence that Alice Huang was even a spy
- the whole thing was made up due to nothing but pure Sinophobia
erm, open borders, sweaty
Jensen was dumb enough to have one with a Chinese spy, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he's one of the best CEOs of the modern era, and his work at Nvidia has been outstanding.
Even if, as others have suggested, the evidence against Alice Huang isn’t strong, there are still huge conflicts of interest and repeated lies in play. Let’s move on
I agree its morally wrong, but that's really a personal issue for the family, it's not a crime. Sleeping with some employees is barely a problem IMO. And worst of all, when I look at the amount of corruption and immorality amonst say Musk, Zuckerberg, the Trump White House going after Jensen is crazy. Jensen is the billionaire who's happy to pay all his taxes and not interfere with politics or elections.
And besides all that, it seems the Trump admin KNEW about Alice Huang and Jensen's relationship for a year, Lutnick also knew, the intelligence agencies knew. Why is Jensen the only one going down for this? He is getting crucified because he's less Machiavellian than all the rest.
Because this isn't a moral issue, its a dirty political fight to entrench power within OpenAI & Anthropic. Without the Chinese companies getting chips, we would not have Deepseek or Kimi or any frontier-level open weight models. And if these guys succeed, we will all be locked into corporate paid models that spy on you and censor you for a long time.
People need to look at the bigger picture, this is about killing open-weight models and that may be good for a few US cos but it is terrible for the world.
but everyone is outraged about some affairs - it’s a staged planned media operation. And most of the tech industry seems to tune out anything about politics because its “low brow” so they’re often clueless to the depths of depravity of this admin, but theyre jumping onboard the Jensen hate train.
Edit: HN is so much fun to have a conversation on these days. AI psychosis and clankers. o_O
But Jensen Huang has admitted to a longstanding affair with the CEO of a company that appears to exist only to evade ITAR restrictions. It's just impossible to believe that Jensen did not know what MegaSpeed was doing. While by all appearances he facilitated and benefited from it personally.
And one can also believe that ITAR restrictions on GPU sales are dumb, but evading them still counts as selling sensitive weapons to the enemy, both legally and politically.
Also, both the company she was "CEO" of and her path to that role are so shady that it's unbelievable that it even worked. Though it seems it did to a point.
Anyways, I think he knew; or at least suspected it and kept going.
It depends on him, i can see things breaking at NVDA enough to ask him to come back
Even employee action here is pretty powerful
If he wants to come back is a different thing, he can do anything he wants
He can start a competitor to NVDA and poach enough employees to build a product and is connected and rich enough to get manufacturing and supply chains going...
Or he might just want to enjoy his life
They've also taken a pretty big pay cut this week and potentially into the future.
Now I am waiting for Microsoft to enter the drama like they did with OpenAI
Unfortunately Jensen's 3.8% of $NVDA and/or golden handcuffs won't let him do this; but what I'd give to live in that universe.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...
https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-jensen-huang-affairs-w...
Is this sarcasm? I genuinely can't tell.
On the other hand the potential spy stuff and corruption is quite worrying.
The DOJ, The CIA and the FBI are all saying that these claims she was a spy are not convincing...
Its a very calculated political hitjob, when the spy allegations didn't hold up, and the megamond accusations were hearsay at best, all of a sudden they started dropoing new affairs. Its very scheduled/coordinated.
Also me saying this instantly gets downvoted. There's bots in this thread downvoting any mention of this.
The timing is curious; the admin knew for at least a year and managed to keep a lid on it, and then congress flipped, meaning the oversight and intelligence committees would be chaired by people with a (D) in their name
> Seems to me that Trump likes Jensen quite a bit
Marco Rubio probably doesn't; which would explain why it was leaked to the press and not via a formal DoJ or Commerce Department investigation. If Rubio has presidential ambitions, now is probably the best time for this to come out and not after the Democratic party gets subpoena power, and difficult questions about the administrations inaction to go with it.
with the whitehouse rumored to be considering ousting lutnick around this, the story is about something other than affairs (which are the cards you hold until you want to make big moves)
Trump and Xi meeting next week
He did get suspiciously political very quickly around that time. Im definately not convinced that this is a Red Vs Blue thing, I think there's plenty of people on Trumps team that are extreme China hawks.
Its hard to know for sure, but I dont think the lady was a spy. Atleast not until I see evidence.
We do this kind of mysoginist thing in the West when we see successful, well dressed Chinese women close to polticians, CEOs and label them spies, pawns of the CCP... Like Mitch McConnels wife gets this treatment frequently.
Even if she was funneling GPUs to China, which there's also no evidence for other than claims in the WSJ that lack any evidence. I dont think being a cunning business women makes someone a spy, nor does it make Jensen complicit.
Its as if we dont want to admit to ourselves that its possible for the Chinese to be successful, cunning and tactical like any other business person without it being a shadowy plot of the communsit party.
Its very weird, and it makes it super easy to manufacture consent around stories like this.
It's not even smuggling either; if the destination government is cool with your imported product, you declare your import like every other legal import. Using 3rd party countries to go around export restrictions is a very old entry in the sanctions-busting playbook; I'd bet every single sanctioned country in the history of sanctions has done this in some shape or form if there existed at least one third country that traded with both sanctioner and sanctionee.
This is the most obvious coordinated hitjob and people went straight to flooding the TL with memes about how it was true and funny.
Like we're actually cooked, theres like a 1k people max in our society that determine how people think.
Someone is playing games here, it's just a question of who and what their ultimate goal is.
there are very differing opinions among the presidents cabinet, re: Ai, chips, open weights and certainly some real china hawks in the NatSec bureaus
If people are downvoting you it's because you're spinning conspiracy theories around a topic that a lot of people have personal financial interests in.
The sort of quick rule I have for measuring credibility is "how much of a story is it when a reporter or outlet gets something meaningfully wrong?" For the NYT, it's a rather important story, like the Iraq WMDs you mentioned. Which, needless to say, was over 20 years ago.
We'll see what the truth ends up being with time.
¿Por qué no los dos? Access Journalism easily explains both. Journalists know where their bread is buttered - members of the "deep network of sources" may occasionally call in favors, or drop breadcrumbs leading journalists to a specific, preselected destinations.
A recent HN thread led me down the rabbit-hole that included an opionion of some (British) monarchy insider. They observed that the monarchy would sometimes leak a story to the press with specific framing, and then the article would include the usual "We have reached out to the royal family for comment" spiel, and yet the entire article is the comment by the royal family. On the other side of the Atlantic, it wasn't too long ago that JD Vance was outed as the unnamed source of a story that the Trump admin subsequently attempted to sue for on national security grounds.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
Not really relevant,
But the NYT laundered crimes against humanity and covered up the death of 30k children over the last three years. They published dozens of provably fabricated stories to do so. Sorry they dont have weight to their journalism, they are completely beholden to whatever special interest that benefits them.
Ana Swanson, the NYT journalist who broke this scoop on Jensen frequently uses Jack Clark an Anthropic founder as a source in her AI scoops.
Dont call me a conspiracy theorist, its extremely insulting.
Stop letting people think for you. There's little chance you verified any of the reporting of the NYT. Wild, we literally live in 1984, peoole do not think for themselves...
You have the internet you can verify things that journalists say, you can fact check people. Try it!
You're using the "conspiratorial they" (as I like to call it), that "they" failed with the spy allegations so started releasing information about affairs.
And then, to top it off, you play victim and say there are bots scanning the comments and automatically downvoting you.
This also only touches on the potential spy aspect. The largest part of the story is Nvidia seemingly intentionally breaking US trade laws over something that a significant part of the AI industry believes should be treated as dangerous as nuclear weapons.
Conspiracy theories don't have to be wrong or crazy, but what evidence do you have to so confidently claim that yours is correct?
---
I've been following Nvidia for a long time. I've seen online discussions of the company become increasingly corrupted since 2020/2021. The only explanation that's held up for me is that money corrupts, and there are a lot of individual shareholders of Nvidia stock that feel a duty to try and protect their investment. I have no idea if that applies to you, but I'm saying it to give you an idea of the angle I'm reading these threads from. More recently, AI has provided new potential sources of corruption aside from investments. When I see you and the mass of other people in these threads that are presenting these ideas of a conspiracy to take down Jensen Huang for sinister reasons, well... my initial reaction is rather negative.
So much for the bot downvoting theory
Forget the spy stuff. If your CEO is schtupping customers and employees, are you really going to trust him with running your company? If you, as a board member, don't draw the line at hiding the sausage in your customers and subordinates, where do you draw it? Drunken bar fights? Road rage incidents? Rape? Murder? All fine as long as it's his personal life? All fine if he's making the company money? I don't think that's how most BoDs for massive corporations operate.
- How certain are reports about spies in general? There has been reports lately, that I have seen, involving spies. For example the one in SF... - Would it be wise to think that there are powerful people that want him out of the company? Because the affair is one thing, but there is an accusation that should be investigated, right? - He has been too many years in the company... this is not the first personal issue we can judge him about. Why now?
Thanks!
Other than some possible treason with an adversarial country, yes pretty clean record.
What if the affair was with the executive of a customer who is also responsible for redirecting assets to a hostile nation state? Would this CEO be vulnerable to blackmail? Are you sure this is the only vulnerability he has?
Is it possible the board is now privy to details and information these employees may not know? Fiduciary duty does have a meaning.
The real problem here is that he was knowingly selling GPUs to a woman who was then selling them to China. This is where he would not be fulfilling his fiduciary duty as now the company will be coming under fire for export violations.
What's the thesis? That their nepotism harms returns? Well clearly that is not true because now that it's not happening, the stock valuation is much lower.
It's only an ethics violation with a huge age and wealth difference.
If the investigation finds he didn't divulge secrets or participate in moving chips to China I'd like to see him brought back by popular demand of his team, and also investors.
Hopefully Nvidia will survive and thrive. After all Apple sort of survived the passing of Steve Jobs, ..after a while.
who benefits from neutering nvidia like this?
This is looking more like a NYT hit job. Drop unsubstantiated anonymous allegations after the election. The board hires a left wing firm to do 'investigations'. The plan here for the anti-AI left to take control of AI at the source - Nvidia. It's time to fight back.
Or is it a way to get clicks and subscriptions, or a way to burn someone for a nefarious purpose? I don't know the answer, but this is the level of "conspiracy" that is plausible in my opinion.
Jesus, everything is party politics in the US, ain’t it? Enough of your brain rot.
I don't just mean making money successful like polymarket etc. but he was the head of a company that created multiple huge technical achievements in past decades. He made huge bets on multiple things and the bets actually worked in the end.
And they will very likely replace him with a bunch of accountants. It is not hard to understand why someone would want to have him as a leader instead of an accountant.
Because no one else can fill the shoes. The best that the next CEO can do is either:
a) make improvements on what exists, and thus effectively stagnate in a moving hardware industry, or
b) cut staff (which Nvidia has only done twice in its history: 1996 (near-bankruptcy), and around 2008 (360 / 6.5%), right in the middle of ironing out the Tesla architecture).
The moment their CFO took over, they already announced layoffs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BayAreaTalk/comments/1xu5wzy/nvidia...
The CFO is almost never one that makes unique product decisions.
Alexander the Great was an extraordinary warlord and a mediocre king. He died unexpectedly, and his empire collapsed immediately.
Securing succession is a huge part of leadership in any organization that is supposed to outlast its leader. Because unexpected things can happen at any time, a leader must keep the organization in a shape, where a plausible successor can take over and continue leading it successfully. If no such successors exist, the leader has not done their job properly.
This presupposes that there are successors that can fill the roles. Even after curation, what's left will very rarely match what's required, doubly so with tech-centric companies. The CFO now in charge is the perfect example of this.
A regression to the mean more often than not happens as a result.
It’s easy to say you don’t have a price when no one is offering to buy you.
At the point you've accepted RSUs you're already working for the company. If you hate your employer enough to turn down a significant portion of your total comp package, you really need to question how you got in that position.
Like you aren't technically wrong but, idk, are you expecting anyone to agree?
The forces at work answer your question. Why would someone take RSUs from Nvidia? Obviously because that means they're getting hired at Nvidia which is one of the highest valued companies in the world, and the RSUs represent a lot of more money on top of your high salary and permanent resume clout.
In Taiwan, Nvidia and tsmc are the two highest salary payers in the country. It's frankly funny to think of a Taiwanese engineer hesitating at a Nvidia offer letter because of niche FOSS/right to repair/IP liberation ideological qualms when the alternative is sweatshopping it at some no name chip industry side company that pays 30k/year at the high end.
I really hope you take some time to reevaluate this extremely misogynist take.
You could have the exact same situation with a different company/CEO and the HN comments would be completely different
Notably real business acumen precludes lawbreaking, but until there is concrete evidence, I won't simply rely on the court of public opinion.
"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
This is just how people work.
Assuming these remarks are representative of employee sentiment more broadly, if you’ve been running a company for decades and yet your employees don’t feel like your beneficent ethos is obviously reflected in every single other person in leadership, that suggests to me a completely different sort of managerial failure.
No one should be seen as fungible, and this is not to disparage the clear connections so many people feel with the guy. But if people feel like any group is being held together by a single strongman, that person has failed to do their job of actually infusing the essence of the culture into everyone around them. But I guess that’s what modern corporate leadership tends to looks like: a cult of one personality.
Yes because humans would go extinct if we had sex only once a year. Reproduction would become a rare occurrence beyond 15.
Cicero, Against Verres 2.5.4 (tr. Yonge, 1903), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
(strawmanning a hypothetical defence of the person he was accusing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Verres#Trial_and_exile
> [Verres and his defender Hortensius tried to delay the trial until a more sympathetic judge was available, but Cicero] opened his case with a short and blistering speech. He listed all of Verres crimes during his time as governor of Sicily and showed evidence that Verres had amassed 40 million sesterces in that time. The effect of the first brief speech was so overwhelming that on August 13 Hortensius abandoned the defence as hopeless, and recommended his client leave the country. The following day, Verres was found guilty and fined three million sesterces.
What do I know, I’ve never done either? I would say that the pedophiles are a more serious power dynamic issue, but you are entitled to pick the other side of the issue, I guess.
Don't fuck subordinates. He did this in his company and a partner company. I'm sure we've all had the opportunity- just don't.
Not to derail your point, but, huh?
Confused on whether people are actually upset about both or even understand the issue, or are just upset about one thing while using the other as ammunition.
Its not the only way to support his ousting. But its one way.
He isn't being punished for "banging" anyone he's being punished because it hurts "US competitiveness" to send chips to China via the export smuggling operation that spy he was "banging" operates. It would not surprise anyone to found out he broke several federal laws. That's the point, no one actually cares about his sex life.
The guy was smuggling material deemed by US law to have export controls for national security reasons to the very country "US competitiveness" has been hyperventilating about for over a decade now. Resigning is the least of his concerns he will have to worry about being prosecuted for years to come.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/beyond-the-spy-sc...
“In facilities across the region, Megaspeed rents Nvidia chips to Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, an arrangement that does not violate current US export control regulations.”
If Alibaba is allowed to remotely access Nvidia hardware physically located in Singapore, what purpose does the export control serve?
Also, it has not been established that any export control laws have been violated.
this "data center" was one of those locations that Alibaba was supposed to remotely use, assuming the terms were that they had to. the implication is that this "data center" was fake and that GPUs were physically routed to China still.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/megaspeed-nvidia-china-ties/
The board and Jensen himself probably don't want to test that in court, so they preemptively step down so the prosecutors would rather not pursue.
Do you simply take them to be fools?
Instead of playing lawyer with you it's quite obviously reasonable to assume the board recognizes his actions open up a Pandora's box of severe legal liability. And quite frankly, I'm not really impressed by your pedestrian analysis of export law. If it was that clear cut he would still be there, and the modus operandi of the Chinese spy wouldn't even make any sense.
For your analysis to have any credibility Nvidia would have to disregard its own self interest. Is that really how you think the world works?
How would you know this?
Well, there is also a problem in that the US government agencies tasked with investigating such things are currently very compromised.
Todd Blanche, the Attorney General/head of DOJ, constantly says that his job is to protect the Trump administration. And Trump is linked to this whole story in various ways.
So there will be no fair investigation for the foreseeable future, other than potential congressional oversight hearings next year after the Democrats take control of Congress.
He'd have no shortage of talent and funding to embark on such a venture.
The big question is once the dust settles (including a possible divorce), he'll still have billions of dollars and need a reason to get out of bed. Being that he's a famous workaholic, I imagine he will try something new after he's done licking his wounds.
buddy, i have some news for you
I dont even like Jensen but this is ridiculous. We need more media literacy in this country, we can't just hop on whatever narrative the NYT, WSJ and CNN push onto us.
This whole thing is clearly a political hit job on behalf of the AI lab lobby. Wild everyone fell for this garbage.
They literally trickled out leaks about random affairs, this was highky coordinated and hard to tell who was exactly responsible. But the journalist at the NYT responsible for these initial leaks has tons of past scoops with sources at the highest levels of Anthropic.
Edit: This got downvoted literally instantly. This is a new account and my karma instantly went to zero... Bots much.