Were Jensen simply a caretaker CEO, a vanilla Board appointment, I would say he should resign.
But that is not the case. He is the founder. A founder has a very different relationship to a company. He is its father and mother, and severing that relationship and transitioning to a CEO that does not have the same relationship is fraught with danger.
As a shareholder, for purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal.
Speaking strictly from a fiduciary duty point of view, it's in everyone's interest for Nvidia to sell as many chips as possible to as many customers as possible.
> As a shareholder, for purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal
The tragedy is resigning may avoid Jensen becoming the target of the Congress or even criminal prosecutors, now at the state level or down the line federally. (To say nothing of the coming shareholder, supplier and customer lawsuits.)
If this were just an affair, it would be nothing. If it were an affair with a customer, it could be excused with counseling. If it were an affair with a customer who turned out to be a Chinese spy, he might still be able to survive with a hiatus.
But he tried to cover it up. He lied, had Nvidia lie, had the U.S. quash investigations, and only came clean when his cronies in Congress lost. The corruption is where he loses me completely. This isn’t just a question for Nvidia shareholders.
> As a shareholder, for purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal.
He's 63 years old and by all reports has never even considered any sort of succession plan, which seems wildly irresponsible to me.
At the very least, even if he manages to keep his position after this event, this should be a wakeup call to NVIDIA shareholders that this is something he really needs to address and very soon. Nobody gets to do this forever.
Uber and many other companies got dramatically better once the founder left.
Huang generally presides over extremely risky and thin governance for one of the most important companies. A more humble and responsible person needs to replace him.
Yes, the best person to start a company is not necessarily the best person to helm a 4T dollar enterprise
In fact there are very good arguments that the skills needed to do one aren’t the same to do the other. Find the best person to lead today. This isn’t a video game hardware company any longer.
Is he also the nation's father and mother? Because the allegation is he put the nation's security at risk, not just the business. Or is the idea that once you found a company in some country that brings you great wealth, then you get to risk their security with impunity?
(To be clear, I am not taking a position on whether he should stay or go. I'm just pointing out your missing falls short of considering some very salient facts, and treats this like a generic founder scandal.)
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I don't play one on TV, in movies, or even in local avant-garde community theatre productions.
Treason is one of a few (if not the only) crimes defined in the Constitution by the framers.
It is offering aid and comfort to the enemy, or taking up arms against the US government.
China is a geopolitical rival, but you have to find a good definition for "enemy" in order to charge Huang, or anyone else, with treason. The best definition would likely be any country that the United States has declared war upon. Given that we have not done that with China, I don't think that you could convince a jury that he'd committed treason.
Lock him up. If he was enabling China in an arms race for the most powerful technology in human civilization, there isn't much worse treason than that.
He was corrupt. We have no evidence he committed treason, though if he was knowingly trying to advance China’s AI, against the will of Congress and in contravention of the law, he might have.
We need investigations. And we need him to stay in the country, possibly at home, while that happens. There are also a lot of powerful people who helped him cover up his crimes who will now call for forgiving him, possibly because what he did is worse than what we know.
I don't get it what does his personal life has to do with him running NVIDIA? Also despite what is being disseminated in the mainstream media, he lobbied to make China reliant on much older chips which were approved and puts America at a huge advantage, but narratives are being wildly twisted to sell that Jensen Huang acted dishonorably against this country.
There is a nasty smear campaign against Jensen Huang throughout social media, cheating on his wife is one thing, political maneuvering before we even learn of what the actual damage if any was done and kneecapping an enterprise while America has a lead over others in AI is sabotage.
> what does his personal life has to do with him running NVIDIA?
Jensen banged a customer and Chinese spy while advocating for lifting exports controls on China and corruptly quashing investigations into her firm [1].
He couldn’t have turned this into more of a public spectacle and concern if he tried. (Coming clean right after the Congress flipped didn’t help.)
He also wanted to lift export controls to China before he met her. It's unclear that she actually influenced anything in that direction. His bread would already have been buttered for selling to additional markets.
Selling to her data center in Malaysia, a Token Speak-easy as Mo called it, may be a bigger deal in actual effect.
This isn’t about his personal life. This affair led to compromised business decisions that affect global politics. And he covered it up for a full year.
It was not illegal to sell to Megaspeed. It should have been in my opinion (lets be real, Singapore=China in this context), but it was not. NVIDIA is obligated to comply with export controls and they did. Megaspeed wasn't black listed. The good business decision is to sell more chips not less.
That wouldn't have changed the fact that they legally sold Megaspeed chips though.
Megaspeed was not blacklisted. If Megaspeed did become export controlled and NVIDIA sold them chips then that's definitely a carless business decision. But lobbying the government not to blacklist a customer is not.
I don't see a compelling reason for NVIDIA to fire Huang. If stuff comes out and he was doing something fraudulent and evading export controls then I would agree that's a bad business decision. It puts NVIDIA at risk to say the least. And what NVIDIA and Huang did could even be bad for the country.
> wouldn't have changed the fact that they legally sold Megaspeed chips
It very well could have, apart from the corruption.
Congress wrote a law designating certain categories of companies illegal to sell chips to. Commerce was in charge of implementing it. If Nvidia fucked with Commerce, that could make the sales illegal even without a destination—the law the Congress wrote controls.
Singapore is not an export controlled country so they either need to be on the blacklist or be a Chinese company, of which they are neither.
>If Nvidia fucked with Commerce, that could make the sales illegal even without a destination—the law the Congress wrote controls.
This is not true. Congress did not export control Chinese companies and even if NVIDIA "fucked with Commerce" it would not retroactively make their sales illegal, because Commerce is the one setting the rules.
You have the relationship wrong with the 2018 export control law. Congress granted the power to the executive to set export controls. Congress didn't define specific companies nor broad categories of companies to export control.
>Congress has delegated to the executive branch some of its express constitutional authority to regulate foreign commerce by controlling exports.
> Singapore is not an export controlled country so they either need to be on the blacklist or be a Chinese company, of which they are neither
It is illegal to "export...when you have 'knowledge' at the time of export, reexport, or transfer (in-country) that the item is destined for a destination, end use, or type of end user" that is prohibited by law [1]. Using a middleman to evade export restrictions is not a get-out-of-jail card.
> Congress did not export control Chinese companies
Fair enough. The existing law does, however, prohibit the sorts of transfers Nvidia made to Megaspeed without a license, which Nvidia didn't obtain [2]. (And again, quashed investigations into.)
One possibility is lobbying Trump, who has pushed for easing export controls to China, against the advice of the national security professionals. There's that 15% revenue share that was negotiated around the same time Trump was informed about Megaspeed, Alice, and Jensen.
selling $7 billion of your company’s product to your affair partner - despite export restrictions - certainly seems directly related to how he runs NVIDIA.
Getting caught publicly making egregious unforced errors in judgment is hardly a smear campaign.
There is a very good chance he could* (if not a billionaire) go to prison for the rest of his life if he knowingly evaded sanctions and was involved in a conspiracy to do so.
He is already in jail.
He’s no longer a free man and never will be again.
He’s now the US Government’s bitch.
If they are confident he knowingly facilitated the transfer of restricted technology or sensitive information to Chinese interests they can charge him any time with treason and float having him publicly executed on livestream if they wanted to.
"Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
If he knowingly aided China, and personally profited, I think getting a 4.8b payday from those weapons-grade technology transfers is a pretty good indicator that he knowingly aided China, while keeping a relationship with a foreign adversary’s intelligence asset for over a year and in that time reportedly tried to influence the commander in chief to allow for more exports of weapons-grade technology to said foreign adversary. That’s textbook treason.
Aiding them in acquiring chips they then could use to hack the us energy grid in a confrontation, develop better missile capabilities to hit US warships in a conflict with Taiwan, etc., or simply develop better cybercrime capabilities, makes you an enemy of the State.
Also, you can’t get more compromised than Chinese intelligence having sextapes of you doing weird shit naked in your black jacket to one of their intelligence assets.
The US Government owning your ass for the rest of your miserable life in a golden cage is not very fun.
How’s life for Snowden in Russia, you think?
I doubt they will let him resign, he needs to travel and be their AI clown, and every time he comes back he will be a good dog and tell his masters everything he heard and seen from all those important people he has access to.
Who in their right mind is going to sit in the same room as Jensen Huang and be confident that whatever he hears or gets from you is not going to end up either in Beijing or Washington?
How do you continue doing business with Nvidia like this, if you for very good reasons, need to have zero trust in their CEOs confidentiality?
The outrage is mostly about people's hatred for the tech sector and it's leaders. Being friendly with Trump, absurdly rich, ai adjacent, etc. There is a perception of oligarchy, corruption, exploitation, stealing from the poor, etc.
It will be glorious watching the downfall for sure. This guy enabled the robbery of human civilization. He was doing his best to prevent local AI from taking off. Basically, he's an all around ruthless piece of shit, like most CEO's.
He wasn't just trying to get some honey on his stinger. He's much more nefarious than that.
> He was doing his best to prevent local AI from taking off.
I'm not so sure about that angle. Or like, that's a very specific direction. As CEO, his responsibility is to make a product that people will buy so the company gets money and can continue. If local AI had money, he would and should have gone towards that. Companies having money and contracts doesn't mean he went out of his way to ensure local AI doesn't happen as a personal beef against some... thing?
yes, yes. and then president ¡Ocasio! will enact a global moratorium on abominable intelligence, launch nukes at Yandex's data centers, and the world will return to the glorious ZIRP times when the hardworking folx in San Francisco could earn $500k a year for lovingly handcrafting artisanal webshit frameworks.
or maybe this artificial controversy will be forgotten long before the orange man leaves the office.
You're using the term outrage, I think others just see it for what it is, very stupid, very juvenile, very untrustworthy and this all makes him very compromised?
>You're using the term outrage, I think others just see it for what it is, very stupid, very juvenile, very untrustworthy
I'm using the term "outrage" to describe the public's reaction to his actions. You are using the terms "very stupid" etc. to describe his actions, right? I don't see any disagreement between us.
2) I do not agree outrage implies overreaction. Here is a local news article from 2 days ago about the outrage some racist gesture caused. Do you think they are implying the negative reaction to racist gestures is overblown? https://www.wtva.com/2026/11/09/ole-miss-students-doorbell-c...
You are splitting hairs. People feel strongly about what he did and what sort of punishment he should incur.
You can substitute in "People feel strongly about what he did and what sort of punishment he should incur" for the term "outrage" above and you will understand my meaning.
I don't live living in this no forgiveness court of public opinion society. Everyone makes mistakes CEOs are people too. Do you fire the intern to takes down prod? Only if he does it twice.
This is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. He didn’t fat finger a bad command. He had an intimate relationship with an adversarial intelligence asset that was also running a $4B smuggling operation moving his embargoed goods into a foreign adversary’s industry.
Yeah but if he didn't know about it then the thing he did wrong is just cheating on his wife. Megaspeed and any similar Singaporean company should be export controlled but they werent. Selling more chips isnt a mistake.
Well taking down prod is often a mistake, having an actual affair is calculated.
You can say it's "feelings" or whatever but the right thing to do would've been to be open with your wife and family about your feelings and then get a divorce and pursue the relationship...or not have the affair at all.
If he wanted the relationship that badly, not only should he have been open with his family, but he shouldn't have done so with a spy who probably has gigabytes of "kompromat" on him.
I don't blame anyone for making "mistakes", maybe even a moment of weakness or whatever, would be different, but from the article I read, seemed like an on going relationship.
The problem is, he is perceived as an untrustworthy liar who hides things and get away with them if he can.
Selling chips to China is in NVIDIA's interest; many China hawks in the US are skeptical of that.
It'll be so much more difficult for him now to advocate for his position that NVIDIA should be selling to China in front of people who are already skeptical.
I don't think he can stay, even if it's just for that reason.
Anyone have a good model of how much more GPU prices would go up (or down) in the world where he resigns vs not. My guess is they would go up even more with some much more ruthless CEO who'd wanna prove himself able to push up the stock price but I guess a counter argument is that there's only so much higher the prices can go so maybe it wouldn't be much different.
For better or worse, Jensen === NVIDIA. It’s hard to overstate the key-person risk here.
Without Jensen, the stock will tank. He has pulled NV from the brink of disaster many times, and also selected the critical investments which paid off and allowed AI to be born (CUDA), even before they made any sense whatsoever. How do you replace that kind of intuition without decreasing the potency of the company? Face it, he's the modern day Steve Jobs.
A company so big so reliant a single person is a risk either way, it's just a matter of when it gets resolved. It's the bus factor. See also what would happen to $3T in combined market value if Elon Musk were to have a stroke tomorrow.
The stuff they are selling aren't for consumer GPUs those have completely different supply chain economics and they are not coming down for reasons why everything else is elevated in prices
What people don't realize is this was a (successful? depends on you and how you force NVIDIA's hands) foreign intelligence operation to undermine the foundational fabric on top of which all of US Domestic AI is built.
Leave your personal hatred for job killing, soul sucking AI aside for a bit:
You cannot swap CEOs like you can swap a filesystem without having severe ripple effects. Even swapping one mature filesystem to another mature filesystem has deep consequences and can even lead you to losing data.
And this is a co-founder of the company. NVIDIA is where it is today because of him.
In every video I've seen of Jensen Huang, I've seen a genuine person who wants to do good. Yes, he caved in to basic instincts but that was because he was being actively pursued.
Whether that was a mistake is only for him and his wife to decide together. It's not our decision to make or sway. We will find out their decision soon enough.
If this affects his performance as a CEO, he has to resign.
However, make no mistake that this was an attack by a foreign government to the foundational fabric on top of which all of US Domestic AI is built.
Also take into account that the U.S was going to enter into a deep recession had it not been for Domestic AI - as much as we hate AI and curse it, banks are still operating, grocery stores are still open, welders and electricians still have jobs.
If you think we have it bad now, it's provably better than what would happen in a deep recession. The last one happened in 2008 so some of you here might not have been out of school yet, but it was very, very bad.
This is a trillion dollar stake corporate espionage. This is how cold war looks like.
Jensen beat the reform academy conditions as a boy.
Jensen beat the odds as a founder and CEO.
The chinese sent a female spy to make him look like a fool. Thats why all major governments use this tactic. It works on everyone, for some period of time, to some degree. Almost as if the public thinks "Why didn't he know ? Didn't she have a 'Hello I'm a Spy' sticker on at the meetup ?"
Now, The Economist aka 'the Rothchilds' aka 'the british billionaires' magazine is throwing him under the double decker for clicks.
The man has a track record of winning.
This is a speed bump, not a brick wall.
We're all apes, and he's the big monkey the little monkeys are attacking today.
I just listened to a new podcast from Kara Swisher and Hillary Clinton. In it, Kara also calls for his resignation, but interestingly Clinton never does (though she never directly contradicts Kara either). Instead Hillary talks about how during her time as Secretary of State there were lots of business people both big and small that were targets of foreign spies and that they would brief those individuals to give them a heads up (something that was reportedly not done for Jensen Huang).
It's insane to think people don't consider a successful state sponsored hack as a failing of the individual, but a spy compromising them is. It's clear that nations will go to extremes that people are unaccustomed to dealing with. Lots of people have affairs — feel free to call that a personal moral failing, but treating it as a business failing is outlandish considering how frequently it happens and how it rarely has any business impact.
EDIT: If an investigation shows he actually did break the law, then by all means skewer him at that point. Calling for his resignation before actual evidence of legal wrongdoing (other than personal moral failings) is just premature.
He can do something great again with his life. Just not while he’s spending the next year being investigated in multiple countries and going through family issues.
> Yes, and that was exactly the point of sending a prostitute to compromise him.
This is unnecessarily misogynistic silliness to add to your other bigotry. She's a forty-something woman and she evidently is actually CEO of a client company.
She may actually be an intelligence asset, and she may actually be manipulating him, but we don't have to resort to this tone.
No idea how you got to that point. I think he has been profoundly negligent on a professional level, cheated on his wife, probably misled his board, may have been manipulated by a (willing or unwilling) agent of a foreign adversary, may have interfered with a government inquiry into her company, and should consider resigning. I just don't think it's necessary to use degrading words or bigoted language the way you are doing.
Same phenomenon with dictator worship, and authoritarianism in general. Organizations that structure all their operations around a single power figure seem to be the most effective, but we're ignoring all the downsides: single point of failure, lack of checks against poor (or illegal) decisions, and of course we're ignoring the countless failed organizations with the exact same structure.
more than that, they need to feel that they deserve their outsized wealth and impact, as compared to other people, due to their merit, as opposed to the vast luck, circumstances, and support from those under them
It’s been like this for as long as I can remember. The incessant corporate bootlicking is one of the reasons why HN is so widely derided elsewhere on the internet.
For a place called Hacker News there isn’t much Hacker spirit, irrespective of which definition of Hacker one uses.
The thing is pessimists make money, optimists make money, stupid idealists get slaughtered...
As a CEO, he kicks ass...
As a husband, public humiliation by memes and private humiliation by his family are in order...
How is a model minority infidelity with a woman who probably wasn't a spy, but was absolutely out to oust Lori Huang like Lauren Sanchez ousted Mackenzie Bezos worse than a felon convicted of accounting fraud put in charge of Cerebras? And don't even start on they should all be thrown out. We didn't throw out creepy, stalking, semi-assaulty womanizing Eric (piece of) Schmidt. Why don't we all just take a step back and acknowledge the model minority racism inherent in the outrage here.
Downvotes I'm sure, but I doubt anyone is going to spell out a case where JHH needs to go, but all systems normal with Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and everyone else on that page, some of whom are likely in the Epstein files which JHH isn't.
> How is a model minority infidelity with a woman who probably wasn't a spy, but was absolutely out to oust Lori Huang like Lauren Sanchez ousted Mackenzie Bezos worse than a felon convicted of accounting fraud put in charge of Cerebras?
It's not about the act itself. It's a data point about the man's character and judgment.
A man who cheats on his wife will cheat his investors, too.
The hypocritical American Puritan Ethic is why we are going to lose this AI war. Every accusation is a confession, no exceptions. I'm taking Mandarin lessons next year, how about you?
And you didn't answer the question, how is this any worse than any other tech CEO's imbroglios beyond the currently specious assertion she's a spy?
I enjoy China annually, the food is fantastic. But again, why aren't you demanding the resignation of all the other liars and cheaters? Could it be they're white? Heaven forbid we hold the president to higher standards than paying off a porn star to stay silent after he banged her while his wife was pregnant. You guys set the standard so shut the f*** up until you clean up your own house.
> I enjoy China annually, the food is fantastic. But again, why aren't you demanding the resignation of all the other liars and cheaters? Could it be they're white? Heaven forbid we hold the president to higher standards than paying off a porn star to stay silent after he banged her while his wife was pregnant. You guys set the standard so shut the f** up until you clean up your own house.
Wow, your comment is extremely distasteful, and not just for the blatant racism and foul language. The worst is actually that you assume that I support the current US president. You are clearly a demagogue who likes to believe the worst possible things about people who disagree with you. This seems to agree with your wholesale acceptance of lying and cheating. If China doesn't work out for you, you might find a position in a Republican administration.
For the record: I am not a racist. I demand resignation of all liars and cheaters, uniformly, including the current US president. I hope that in the future you will be able to behave politely in society.
No. You haven't even tries to show that Jensen is essential to Nvidia's success. You've just said "Nvidia stock is up, Jensen is CEO, QED." That's not persuasive.
Fact is that Nvidia's stock price is mostly due to factors outside of his control. Like most CEOs,he he could be replaced with a slice of buttered toast and the same result would be achieved. So why keep him around when he's already admitted to unethical behavior? A man who cheats on his wife will cheat his investors, too.
Dude, HN is literally the propaganda arm of an incubator program. Of course they like CEOs, creating CEOs is why they exist - and why this site used to be more interesting, before it turned into another Slashdot.
I was at an AI founders event in NYC and had an amazingly beautiful Slavic style woman throw herself at me and my buddy. Neither of us are the type that would have supermodel types interested in us based on looks alone. It was so damn obvious.
The public is not thinking "how did he not know she was a spy?"
The public is thinking "Why did he have an affair with a business partner? (who also happened to be a spy). That is a massive conflict of interest. Was he putting Nvidia's interests first, or his own?
I am not convinced that he needs to resign, but describing this as a speed bump is utterly delusional.
> Who hasn't had a momentary lapse of reason, especially when sex is involved ?
A lot of people. Let's say that only half the people who have an affair admit it on polls like that. That still means that the majority of men and women are faithful to their spouses.
It's not about the affair, it's about the failures in security and intelligence and rule of law. This story is about much more, we will see much more eventually.
> Who hasn't had a momentary lapse of reason, especially when sex is involved ?
Sorry, I thought CEOs were mighty Atlases standing astride above the world of ordinary men. Now you're saying that we shouldn't hold them to a higher standard of behavior?
If his judgment is this poor about infidelity, I can only assume his judgment is even worse in matters of significant complexity.
Ok, you get that the issue isn't that he "looks like a fool" for having an affair, right? If that's the worst thing he's done as a billionaire, he's relatively a saint.
The issue is that he may have just been caught effectively subverting US national security. Like, even in just the teaser paragraph, they spell that out:
>American officials think she is a Chinese spy, and that her Singaporean company is a front for smuggling the politically sensitive chips into China.
That's a very bad look. Way worse than just "looking like a fool".
Has there any proof of any actual subversion of national security?
I mean, sleeping with a spy is not the same as giving her any secrets or chips.
A third point is that, as an Nvidia investor, I don't really care what the US government considers a "national secret" or if china gets the secret too.
I care if this harm Nvidia's ability to generate revenue.
> A third point is that, as an Nvidia investor, I don't really care what the US government considers a "national secret" or if china gets the secret too.
Good for you. Hopefully, the NVidia board does care about actually following the law.
> Has there any proof of any actual subversion of national security?
Let's see what investigations by the board and congress uncover. It's only been days since the story broke. As a share holder, you may care that he has damaged Nvidia's reputation with the dealings (China & Trump) surrounding this.
That's spelt Rothschilds. It's a nice little conspiracy trope you're working there with the quotes around "the British billionaires" but you should probably just say "Jews" or "globalists" so everyone gets your point. Why waste time with euphemisms when you have something this novel to say?
Many people believe the time for letting the wealthy and elite do what ever they want without consequence should be over. See last week's election results
What we need is an investigation and transparency into the details. Why was Trump able to negotiate a 15% profit sharing deal with Jensen shortly after Trump was informed about this? How much did Jensen know about the export control violations?
A determination for either outcome is unwarranted without more information.
is there someone better suited to running nVidia than Jensen? If not, then it doesn't make much sense to fire him other than to provide nVidia for legal protection from lawsuits/charges against him (which firing him may or may not provide)
it would be different if he were some typical CEO that's hired in and been around for a few years, or if he were a founder 5-10 years in and great at starting a company but not suited to running it once very large (which founders often aren't)
Isn't it an open secret that Singapore is largely a front for smuggling GPUs into China? I think it's a they know we know they know situation where as long as the stock market goes up to the right, the right political donations get made, and they don't get too brazen about it - no one looks too closely.
This dude was signing boobs just a few months ago, thinking he was a rock star. Also, no doubt this isn't the first time he cheated on his wife, you never get caught the first time.
What an interesting Chinese operation. Undermine Nvidia, possibly force the CEO to resign, and lose half the company in a divorce. I'd say as far as China is concerned this was a successful intelligence operation.
and all they actually cared about is getting some good GPUs to bootstrap their already functional industrial technology sector.
Like, being paranoid about this is kinda dumb. This is pretty much just a sweet industrial play to bootstrap their technoogy sector. Something US corporations do in many different ways.
So is everyone already commenting their say about all this because we're all Economist subscribers here or are we reading the headline of the paywall and rolling with it?
Or Jensen should spend his fortune sue the fuck out the natsec deep state types for yellow peril shenanigans trying to push him out the second Trump loses political power and undermining Nvidia fiscal position. Reality is there's still zero evidence she was spy, publicly posting Jensen fuckboi behavior on Chinese social media last few months. Or Chinese national talking to chinese gov =/= spy, just business usual everywhere unless customary US natsec China Initiative framing designed to discredit when no impropriety was done. AKA no reason Jensen did an illegal like supermicro... operated on the extreme edge of legality sure, i.e. letter of law which pisses off export control hawks that can't figure out how to draft tight laws, and getting consistently outplayed by Jensen. Hence coordinated media campaign framing generic public affair for sticking dick in 40 year old worse than 16 year old, because pedophiles can still be patriotic vs yellow fever, or something. Did Jensen fly too close to sun, sure, but ideally he'll live up to that leather jacket and start hitting back.
"Epstein" as a concept of the rich elites doing whatever they want and getting away with it, has expanded to people never involved in the child sex trafficking, it's the general "Epstein Class"
The corruption is wide spread and out in the open.
White tech founder cheats on his wife? He's just the butt of late-night TV jokes for a few weeks. (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs... the list goes on)
Non-white tech founder does the same? Fire him, NOW!
Meanwhile Zuck is the only founder that's still a respectable family man, and yet he's pilloried left and right.
Cheating isn’t the problem. Making sweetheart deals with her company against US interests is problem #1. Learning she was a spy and covering it up for a year is problem #2.
He should probably go to jail (after a fair trial, of course).
Even with the few public facts we have now, I don't know how a reasonable person could conclude that it isn't extremely likely that he knew all about the export control diversions that were going on. He would have to be an idiot not to, and he clearly isn't an idiot.
Of course there's no way a centibillionaire is going to do 20 days in jail, let alone 20 years (because we don't live in a society with an actually functioning rule of law), but resigning and disappearing from public life is getting off easy here.
Fortunately, that random law you pulled itself says there has to be beyond reasonable doubt conspiracy and malice intent. This doesn't seem to be the case seeing Jensen himself was caught offguard by the nature of his relationship.
The same legal system that protects you applies to everyone else billionaire or not.
> This doesn't seem to be the case seeing Jensen himself was caught offguard by the nature of his relationship.
There are two separate aspects to his relationship that are important:
1) Did he know she was a Chinese spy? Maybe not. I have no idea. It would certainly be hard to prove.
2) Did he know her company was diverting stock to the Chinese market? Almost certainly. He would have to be an actual moron to not realize this years ago, and he isn't a moron. I'd be shocked if after investigation that enough evidence didn't come to light to prove without a shadow of a doubt that he knew about the diversion the whole time.
#2 is where his real legal troubles lie. #1 is just the dramatic clickbait intrigue but not really what is likely to sink him.
The only way #1 is really important is in that it is drawing a lot of attention to looking into #2 (which was, by many reports, already a widely known open secret despite the illegality).
Were Jensen simply a caretaker CEO, a vanilla Board appointment, I would say he should resign.
But that is not the case. He is the founder. A founder has a very different relationship to a company. He is its father and mother, and severing that relationship and transitioning to a CEO that does not have the same relationship is fraught with danger.
As a shareholder, for purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal.
It's always about the money...
Speaking strictly from a fiduciary duty point of view, it's in everyone's interest for Nvidia to sell as many chips as possible to as many customers as possible.
Even if that includes inserting the chips where appropriate.
this entire thing is about money and economies...
> As a shareholder, for purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal
The tragedy is resigning may avoid Jensen becoming the target of the Congress or even criminal prosecutors, now at the state level or down the line federally. (To say nothing of the coming shareholder, supplier and customer lawsuits.)
If this were just an affair, it would be nothing. If it were an affair with a customer, it could be excused with counseling. If it were an affair with a customer who turned out to be a Chinese spy, he might still be able to survive with a hiatus.
But he tried to cover it up. He lied, had Nvidia lie, had the U.S. quash investigations, and only came clean when his cronies in Congress lost. The corruption is where he loses me completely. This isn’t just a question for Nvidia shareholders.
> As a shareholder, from purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal.
What’s good for your portfolio and what’s good for the long term health of the company are not always the same thing.
> As a shareholder, for purely self interested reasons, I would be very hesitant to call for his removal.
He's 63 years old and by all reports has never even considered any sort of succession plan, which seems wildly irresponsible to me.
At the very least, even if he manages to keep his position after this event, this should be a wakeup call to NVIDIA shareholders that this is something he really needs to address and very soon. Nobody gets to do this forever.
Uber and many other companies got dramatically better once the founder left.
Huang generally presides over extremely risky and thin governance for one of the most important companies. A more humble and responsible person needs to replace him.
Yes, the best person to start a company is not necessarily the best person to helm a 4T dollar enterprise
In fact there are very good arguments that the skills needed to do one aren’t the same to do the other. Find the best person to lead today. This isn’t a video game hardware company any longer.
> He is its father and mother
Is he also the nation's father and mother? Because the allegation is he put the nation's security at risk, not just the business. Or is the idea that once you found a company in some country that brings you great wealth, then you get to risk their security with impunity?
(To be clear, I am not taking a position on whether he should stay or go. I'm just pointing out your missing falls short of considering some very salient facts, and treats this like a generic founder scandal.)
As a shareholder, you don't think the CEO sleeping with a customer is a bad?
And he's gone... banged another woman who reported to him.
The cult of the founder is arguably the worst thing to come out of SV culture, and that's saying something.
If you create an environment where there are no consequences, you're inviting trouble for you as a shareholder.
If he can do this and not face serious consequences from the company, then he can do other things that are damaging, including to your bottom line.
Depending on what investigations find, it might not even matter.
It is a public company, not a private company. There’s evidence of what must be described as treason.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I don't play one on TV, in movies, or even in local avant-garde community theatre productions.
Treason is one of a few (if not the only) crimes defined in the Constitution by the framers.
It is offering aid and comfort to the enemy, or taking up arms against the US government.
China is a geopolitical rival, but you have to find a good definition for "enemy" in order to charge Huang, or anyone else, with treason. The best definition would likely be any country that the United States has declared war upon. Given that we have not done that with China, I don't think that you could convince a jury that he'd committed treason.
Espionage charges? Maybe.
How about the president of the United States himself calling China the enemy in exactly these words?
"These are not our friends. These are our enemies."
https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/20/the-situation-...
I think that is good enough for a judge.
Lock him up. If he was enabling China in an arms race for the most powerful technology in human civilization, there isn't much worse treason than that.
Lock him up.
> there isn't much worse treason than that
He was corrupt. We have no evidence he committed treason, though if he was knowingly trying to advance China’s AI, against the will of Congress and in contravention of the law, he might have.
We need investigations. And we need him to stay in the country, possibly at home, while that happens. There are also a lot of powerful people who helped him cover up his crimes who will now call for forgiving him, possibly because what he did is worse than what we know.
You might end up locking him up. Maybe he violated some sort of law, I'm not sure. That's what investigations are for.
I'm just reasonably sure that law wasn't the one against treason.
Wow, simping for a cheating CEO, "think of the shareholders if the founding father/mother gets forced out!". You're weird
I don't get it what does his personal life has to do with him running NVIDIA? Also despite what is being disseminated in the mainstream media, he lobbied to make China reliant on much older chips which were approved and puts America at a huge advantage, but narratives are being wildly twisted to sell that Jensen Huang acted dishonorably against this country.
There is a nasty smear campaign against Jensen Huang throughout social media, cheating on his wife is one thing, political maneuvering before we even learn of what the actual damage if any was done and kneecapping an enterprise while America has a lead over others in AI is sabotage.
> what does his personal life has to do with him running NVIDIA?
Jensen banged a customer and Chinese spy while advocating for lifting exports controls on China and corruptly quashing investigations into her firm [1].
He couldn’t have turned this into more of a public spectacle and concern if he tried. (Coming clean right after the Congress flipped didn’t help.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
He also wanted to lift export controls to China before he met her. It's unclear that she actually influenced anything in that direction. His bread would already have been buttered for selling to additional markets.
Selling to her data center in Malaysia, a Token Speak-easy as Mo called it, may be a bigger deal in actual effect.
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If he found a way to sell nukes to another country, knowing they would end up in German hands.
That may be what we have here.
That’s closer to Musk. (The analogy would be Lindbergh building planes for Britain designed to fall apart over Berlin.)
> I don't get it what does his personal life has to do with him running NVIDIA?
Is she purely a figure from his personal life, or might she have some connection to him running NVIDIA?
This isn’t about his personal life. This affair led to compromised business decisions that affect global politics. And he covered it up for a full year.
Which business decision was compromised?
The one where she was director of a Singapore datacenter company that is now suspected of circumventing US export restrictions to China.
Atrioc did an interesting video on the connections that are now coming to light https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql3qBe7rsVo
It was not illegal to sell to Megaspeed. It should have been in my opinion (lets be real, Singapore=China in this context), but it was not. NVIDIA is obligated to comply with export controls and they did. Megaspeed wasn't black listed. The good business decision is to sell more chips not less.
> was not illegal to sell to Megaspeed. It should have been
It was not explicitly illegal because Nvidia ensured it wouldn’t be [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
That wouldn't have changed the fact that they legally sold Megaspeed chips though.
Megaspeed was not blacklisted. If Megaspeed did become export controlled and NVIDIA sold them chips then that's definitely a carless business decision. But lobbying the government not to blacklist a customer is not.
I don't see a compelling reason for NVIDIA to fire Huang. If stuff comes out and he was doing something fraudulent and evading export controls then I would agree that's a bad business decision. It puts NVIDIA at risk to say the least. And what NVIDIA and Huang did could even be bad for the country.
> wouldn't have changed the fact that they legally sold Megaspeed chips
It very well could have, apart from the corruption.
Congress wrote a law designating certain categories of companies illegal to sell chips to. Commerce was in charge of implementing it. If Nvidia fucked with Commerce, that could make the sales illegal even without a destination—the law the Congress wrote controls.
Singapore is not an export controlled country so they either need to be on the blacklist or be a Chinese company, of which they are neither.
>If Nvidia fucked with Commerce, that could make the sales illegal even without a destination—the law the Congress wrote controls.
This is not true. Congress did not export control Chinese companies and even if NVIDIA "fucked with Commerce" it would not retroactively make their sales illegal, because Commerce is the one setting the rules.
You have the relationship wrong with the 2018 export control law. Congress granted the power to the executive to set export controls. Congress didn't define specific companies nor broad categories of companies to export control.
>Congress has delegated to the executive branch some of its express constitutional authority to regulate foreign commerce by controlling exports.
From The U.S. Export Control System and the Export Control Reform Act of 2018. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R46814/...
> Singapore is not an export controlled country so they either need to be on the blacklist or be a Chinese company, of which they are neither
It is illegal to "export...when you have 'knowledge' at the time of export, reexport, or transfer (in-country) that the item is destined for a destination, end use, or type of end user" that is prohibited by law [1]. Using a middleman to evade export restrictions is not a get-out-of-jail card.
> Congress did not export control Chinese companies
Fair enough. The existing law does, however, prohibit the sorts of transfers Nvidia made to Megaspeed without a license, which Nvidia didn't obtain [2]. (And again, quashed investigations into.)
[1] hhttps://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII...
[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/01/15/2026-00...
One possibility is lobbying Trump, who has pushed for easing export controls to China, against the advice of the national security professionals. There's that 15% revenue share that was negotiated around the same time Trump was informed about Megaspeed, Alice, and Jensen.
There is a lot more to this story
Right, a lot of the outrage is about potential corruption with the Trump admin.
Well now it’s out he fucked a subordinate to so. But like none of this is normal, we used to actually scrutinize people in power.
selling $7 billion of your company’s product to your affair partner - despite export restrictions - certainly seems directly related to how he runs NVIDIA.
Getting caught publicly making egregious unforced errors in judgment is hardly a smear campaign.
Hard to believe you don't see the issue with having an affair with a spy?
Eric Swalwell face liitle repercussions for having an affair with a Chinese spy while being on the house intelligence committee.
I'm not sure US law should reach into foreigners bedrooms (Or wherever they were doing it)
> not sure US law should reach into foreigners bedrooms
But it does, and it did at the time of Jensen’s alleged crimes.
If Nvidia keeps him it deserves what’s coming for it.
>There is a nasty smear campaign against Jensen Huang throughout social media
Plus at this point we know about nothing. Asking for him to resign is both insensitive and dumb.
There is a very good chance he could* (if not a billionaire) go to prison for the rest of his life if he knowingly evaded sanctions and was involved in a conspiracy to do so.
He is already in jail. He’s no longer a free man and never will be again.
He’s now the US Government’s bitch.
If they are confident he knowingly facilitated the transfer of restricted technology or sensitive information to Chinese interests they can charge him any time with treason and float having him publicly executed on livestream if they wanted to.
"Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
If he knowingly aided China, and personally profited, I think getting a 4.8b payday from those weapons-grade technology transfers is a pretty good indicator that he knowingly aided China, while keeping a relationship with a foreign adversary’s intelligence asset for over a year and in that time reportedly tried to influence the commander in chief to allow for more exports of weapons-grade technology to said foreign adversary. That’s textbook treason.
Aiding them in acquiring chips they then could use to hack the us energy grid in a confrontation, develop better missile capabilities to hit US warships in a conflict with Taiwan, etc., or simply develop better cybercrime capabilities, makes you an enemy of the State.
Also, you can’t get more compromised than Chinese intelligence having sextapes of you doing weird shit naked in your black jacket to one of their intelligence assets.
The US Government owning your ass for the rest of your miserable life in a golden cage is not very fun.
How’s life for Snowden in Russia, you think?
I doubt they will let him resign, he needs to travel and be their AI clown, and every time he comes back he will be a good dog and tell his masters everything he heard and seen from all those important people he has access to.
Who in their right mind is going to sit in the same room as Jensen Huang and be confident that whatever he hears or gets from you is not going to end up either in Beijing or Washington?
How do you continue doing business with Nvidia like this, if you for very good reasons, need to have zero trust in their CEOs confidentiality?
The outrage is mostly about people's hatred for the tech sector and it's leaders. Being friendly with Trump, absurdly rich, ai adjacent, etc. There is a perception of oligarchy, corruption, exploitation, stealing from the poor, etc.
It will be glorious watching the downfall for sure. This guy enabled the robbery of human civilization. He was doing his best to prevent local AI from taking off. Basically, he's an all around ruthless piece of shit, like most CEO's.
He wasn't just trying to get some honey on his stinger. He's much more nefarious than that.
> He was doing his best to prevent local AI from taking off.
I'm not so sure about that angle. Or like, that's a very specific direction. As CEO, his responsibility is to make a product that people will buy so the company gets money and can continue. If local AI had money, he would and should have gone towards that. Companies having money and contracts doesn't mean he went out of his way to ensure local AI doesn't happen as a personal beef against some... thing?
yes, yes. and then president ¡Ocasio! will enact a global moratorium on abominable intelligence, launch nukes at Yandex's data centers, and the world will return to the glorious ZIRP times when the hardworking folx in San Francisco could earn $500k a year for lovingly handcrafting artisanal webshit frameworks.
or maybe this artificial controversy will be forgotten long before the orange man leaves the office.
You're using the term outrage, I think others just see it for what it is, very stupid, very juvenile, very untrustworthy and this all makes him very compromised?
>You're using the term outrage, I think others just see it for what it is, very stupid, very juvenile, very untrustworthy
I'm using the term "outrage" to describe the public's reaction to his actions. You are using the terms "very stupid" etc. to describe his actions, right? I don't see any disagreement between us.
The term outrage tends to colloquially imply overreaction.
1) That doesn't clarify his comparison
2) I do not agree outrage implies overreaction. Here is a local news article from 2 days ago about the outrage some racist gesture caused. Do you think they are implying the negative reaction to racist gestures is overblown? https://www.wtva.com/2026/11/09/ole-miss-students-doorbell-c...
I truly don't think "the public" are outraged, just probably amused, and mostly think it's a scummy thing to do to your wife and family?
People can think something is a bad decision without having to be outraged, or have others claim they are outraged?
You are splitting hairs. People feel strongly about what he did and what sort of punishment he should incur.
You can substitute in "People feel strongly about what he did and what sort of punishment he should incur" for the term "outrage" above and you will understand my meaning.
You carry on, I'm only here to watch the astroturfing.
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Very well argued piece covering all the angles of pro/against I’ve seen here on HN and elsewhere.
All the roads lead to he must resign or be fired.
How is Huang resigning best for NVIDIA?
Read the article and find out?
cant and I'm asking the person who said everything points to firing him.
any non-paywall copy to share?
Mildly amusingly, an LLM running on Nvidia hardware will gladly help you avoid paying the Economist.
I'm glad my "Summarize HN thread and submit to Economist" prompt is working.
He's been a fantastic CEO, but no one can survive this level of distraction, negative attention, and bad judgement. Who could replace him? AMD CEO?
I don't live living in this no forgiveness court of public opinion society. Everyone makes mistakes CEOs are people too. Do you fire the intern to takes down prod? Only if he does it twice.
This is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. He didn’t fat finger a bad command. He had an intimate relationship with an adversarial intelligence asset that was also running a $4B smuggling operation moving his embargoed goods into a foreign adversary’s industry.
Yeah but if he didn't know about it then the thing he did wrong is just cheating on his wife. Megaspeed and any similar Singaporean company should be export controlled but they werent. Selling more chips isnt a mistake.
So? how would his removal help nvidia?
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Yes, I fully agree.
We have to stop expecting top CEOs to be perfect, required to have spotless reputation.
Jensen is relatable. I've seen him drinking a beer or two. Signing the chest of a fan.
Trillion-dollar companies CEOs use toilet paper too!
Every hero is also a heel. Why do we have to require that top CEOs have to be the full white of the Ying Yang, without the black dot? Why? Why?
> Why do we have to require that top CEOs have to be the full white of the Ying Yang, without the black dot?
What?
Also, don’t sleep with your customers and foreign spies and don’t corruptly quash federal investigations isn’t a black dot.
Can you think of how what Huang did is different than an intern causing an outage?
Well taking down prod is often a mistake, having an actual affair is calculated.
You can say it's "feelings" or whatever but the right thing to do would've been to be open with your wife and family about your feelings and then get a divorce and pursue the relationship...or not have the affair at all.
If he wanted the relationship that badly, not only should he have been open with his family, but he shouldn't have done so with a spy who probably has gigabytes of "kompromat" on him.
I don't blame anyone for making "mistakes", maybe even a moment of weakness or whatever, would be different, but from the article I read, seemed like an on going relationship.
The problem is, he is perceived as an untrustworthy liar who hides things and get away with them if he can.
Are you suggesting that being fired is something that should only happen to animals?
Selling chips to China is in NVIDIA's interest; many China hawks in the US are skeptical of that.
It'll be so much more difficult for him now to advocate for his position that NVIDIA should be selling to China in front of people who are already skeptical.
I don't think he can stay, even if it's just for that reason.
Anyone have a good model of how much more GPU prices would go up (or down) in the world where he resigns vs not. My guess is they would go up even more with some much more ruthless CEO who'd wanna prove himself able to push up the stock price but I guess a counter argument is that there's only so much higher the prices can go so maybe it wouldn't be much different.
For better or worse, Jensen === NVIDIA. It’s hard to overstate the key-person risk here.
Without Jensen, the stock will tank. He has pulled NV from the brink of disaster many times, and also selected the critical investments which paid off and allowed AI to be born (CUDA), even before they made any sense whatsoever. How do you replace that kind of intuition without decreasing the potency of the company? Face it, he's the modern day Steve Jobs.
A company so big so reliant a single person is a risk either way, it's just a matter of when it gets resolved. It's the bus factor. See also what would happen to $3T in combined market value if Elon Musk were to have a stroke tomorrow.
Entire NVIDIA is, of which Huang is a serially dependent part of
It’s a failure of succession planning and leadership. That Nvidia shareholders didn’t correctly address this risk isn’t America’s problem.
They will plummet if it turns out a large proportion of them have been sold to China and this route is now closed.
The stuff they are selling aren't for consumer GPUs those have completely different supply chain economics and they are not coming down for reasons why everything else is elevated in prices
The Economist used to be an impartial, accurate, and respectful publication. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly politicized and biased.
What people don't realize is this was a (successful? depends on you and how you force NVIDIA's hands) foreign intelligence operation to undermine the foundational fabric on top of which all of US Domestic AI is built.
Leave your personal hatred for job killing, soul sucking AI aside for a bit:
You cannot swap CEOs like you can swap a filesystem without having severe ripple effects. Even swapping one mature filesystem to another mature filesystem has deep consequences and can even lead you to losing data.
And this is a co-founder of the company. NVIDIA is where it is today because of him.
In every video I've seen of Jensen Huang, I've seen a genuine person who wants to do good. Yes, he caved in to basic instincts but that was because he was being actively pursued.
Whether that was a mistake is only for him and his wife to decide together. It's not our decision to make or sway. We will find out their decision soon enough.
If this affects his performance as a CEO, he has to resign.
However, make no mistake that this was an attack by a foreign government to the foundational fabric on top of which all of US Domestic AI is built.
Also take into account that the U.S was going to enter into a deep recession had it not been for Domestic AI - as much as we hate AI and curse it, banks are still operating, grocery stores are still open, welders and electricians still have jobs.
If you think we have it bad now, it's provably better than what would happen in a deep recession. The last one happened in 2008 so some of you here might not have been out of school yet, but it was very, very bad.
This is a trillion dollar stake corporate espionage. This is how cold war looks like.
Jensen beat the reform academy conditions as a boy.
Jensen beat the odds as a founder and CEO.
The chinese sent a female spy to make him look like a fool. Thats why all major governments use this tactic. It works on everyone, for some period of time, to some degree. Almost as if the public thinks "Why didn't he know ? Didn't she have a 'Hello I'm a Spy' sticker on at the meetup ?"
Now, The Economist aka 'the Rothchilds' aka 'the british billionaires' magazine is throwing him under the double decker for clicks.
The man has a track record of winning.
This is a speed bump, not a brick wall.
We're all apes, and he's the big monkey the little monkeys are attacking today.
Just shake it, shake it off.
I just listened to a new podcast from Kara Swisher and Hillary Clinton. In it, Kara also calls for his resignation, but interestingly Clinton never does (though she never directly contradicts Kara either). Instead Hillary talks about how during her time as Secretary of State there were lots of business people both big and small that were targets of foreign spies and that they would brief those individuals to give them a heads up (something that was reportedly not done for Jensen Huang).
It's insane to think people don't consider a successful state sponsored hack as a failing of the individual, but a spy compromising them is. It's clear that nations will go to extremes that people are unaccustomed to dealing with. Lots of people have affairs — feel free to call that a personal moral failing, but treating it as a business failing is outlandish considering how frequently it happens and how it rarely has any business impact.
EDIT: If an investigation shows he actually did break the law, then by all means skewer him at that point. Calling for his resignation before actual evidence of legal wrongdoing (other than personal moral failings) is just premature.
> Lots of people have affairs
Most people don’t have their buddies in the White House quash the investigations into their lover’s firm [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
Hillary knows about all the foreign psyops, because she runs them herself.
You'll just never hear her speak of it from that perspective, because, it makes her look like the Dr. Evil parody she is.
I think maybe you need to log off a bit more often.
The Secretary of State
https://www.state.gov/secretary/
Read the job description.
I was referring to your tone.
(She also hasn't been secretary of state for nearly 14 years, you know.)
This seems to be boiling down to:
1. Hillary took a random walk through life, and ended up Secretary of State.
or
2. It fit her personality perfectly. She was the woman for the job.
You'll figure it out eventually, as my tone isn't a factor.
> The man has a track record of winning
The article calls for resignation. Not execution.
He can do something great again with his life. Just not while he’s spending the next year being investigated in multiple countries and going through family issues.
Just not while he’s spending the next year being investigated in multiple countries and going through family issues.
Yes, and that was exactly the point of sending a prostitute to compromise him.
Destabalise the enemy.
When did he become 'the enemy' ? When Joe Biden crippled GPU perf on imports to China, and China decided to make their own instead.
You don't just make your own GPU. You ruin the guys that wouldn't share theirs.
This is all just politics on the world stage, at the olympic level.
> Yes, and that was exactly the point of sending a prostitute to compromise him.
This is unnecessarily misogynistic silliness to add to your other bigotry. She's a forty-something woman and she evidently is actually CEO of a client company.
She may actually be an intelligence asset, and she may actually be manipulating him, but we don't have to resort to this tone.
It was an accurate use of the word 'prostitute.'
1. A person considered as having compromised principles for personal gain.
2. A woman giver to indiscriminate lewdness; a strumpet; a harlot.
And now we know the difference between inference and implication.
Or, she is the executive of a tech firm who finds herself variously compelled to act on behalf of the nation she works for.
Not every intelligence asset is willing and you don't know the above with any certainty.
So theres no scandal here then.
I agree completely.
No idea how you got to that point. I think he has been profoundly negligent on a professional level, cheated on his wife, probably misled his board, may have been manipulated by a (willing or unwilling) agent of a foreign adversary, may have interfered with a government inquiry into her company, and should consider resigning. I just don't think it's necessary to use degrading words or bigoted language the way you are doing.
By that pair of standards, Jensen is a prostitute.
The CEO worship on this website is bizarre
Same phenomenon with dictator worship, and authoritarianism in general. Organizations that structure all their operations around a single power figure seem to be the most effective, but we're ignoring all the downsides: single point of failure, lack of checks against poor (or illegal) decisions, and of course we're ignoring the countless failed organizations with the exact same structure.
Tech CEOs are just the modern day cult leaders.
A framing I have recently encountered is "The Tyranny of Merit"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
> A framing I have recently encountered is "The Tyranny of Merit"
I'm sure the CEOs would love for us to believe that they are in their position because of merit.
more than that, they need to feel that they deserve their outsized wealth and impact, as compared to other people, due to their merit, as opposed to the vast luck, circumstances, and support from those under them
It’s been like this for as long as I can remember. The incessant corporate bootlicking is one of the reasons why HN is so widely derided elsewhere on the internet.
For a place called Hacker News there isn’t much Hacker spirit, irrespective of which definition of Hacker one uses.
YC is full of temporarily embarassed tech billionaries by definition.
The thing is pessimists make money, optimists make money, stupid idealists get slaughtered...
As a CEO, he kicks ass...
As a husband, public humiliation by memes and private humiliation by his family are in order...
How is a model minority infidelity with a woman who probably wasn't a spy, but was absolutely out to oust Lori Huang like Lauren Sanchez ousted Mackenzie Bezos worse than a felon convicted of accounting fraud put in charge of Cerebras? And don't even start on they should all be thrown out. We didn't throw out creepy, stalking, semi-assaulty womanizing Eric (piece of) Schmidt. Why don't we all just take a step back and acknowledge the model minority racism inherent in the outrage here.
Downvotes I'm sure, but I doubt anyone is going to spell out a case where JHH needs to go, but all systems normal with Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and everyone else on that page, some of whom are likely in the Epstein files which JHH isn't.
Harper Valley PTA hypocrisy to the moon here.
> How is a model minority infidelity with a woman who probably wasn't a spy, but was absolutely out to oust Lori Huang like Lauren Sanchez ousted Mackenzie Bezos worse than a felon convicted of accounting fraud put in charge of Cerebras?
It's not about the act itself. It's a data point about the man's character and judgment.
A man who cheats on his wife will cheat his investors, too.
The hypocritical American Puritan Ethic is why we are going to lose this AI war. Every accusation is a confession, no exceptions. I'm taking Mandarin lessons next year, how about you?
And you didn't answer the question, how is this any worse than any other tech CEO's imbroglios beyond the currently specious assertion she's a spy?
If condemnation of lying and cheating is "Puritanical" to you, then you deserve what you get. Enjoy China.
I enjoy China annually, the food is fantastic. But again, why aren't you demanding the resignation of all the other liars and cheaters? Could it be they're white? Heaven forbid we hold the president to higher standards than paying off a porn star to stay silent after he banged her while his wife was pregnant. You guys set the standard so shut the f*** up until you clean up your own house.
> I enjoy China annually, the food is fantastic. But again, why aren't you demanding the resignation of all the other liars and cheaters? Could it be they're white? Heaven forbid we hold the president to higher standards than paying off a porn star to stay silent after he banged her while his wife was pregnant. You guys set the standard so shut the f** up until you clean up your own house.
Wow, your comment is extremely distasteful, and not just for the blatant racism and foul language. The worst is actually that you assume that I support the current US president. You are clearly a demagogue who likes to believe the worst possible things about people who disagree with you. This seems to agree with your wholesale acceptance of lying and cheating. If China doesn't work out for you, you might find a position in a Republican administration.
For the record: I am not a racist. I demand resignation of all liars and cheaters, uniformly, including the current US president. I hope that in the future you will be able to behave politely in society.
Polite society? What's that?
How's that demanding resignation of all liars and cheaters working out for you?
Investors smell entirely different than prostitutes, for the record.
You have lived an interesting life if you have the experience to smell the difference. I salute you!
Im doing the math, not dusting a golden calf.
The public thinks the spy affair is a scandal, but the governments that can really hang the man see it as a round of chess.
Boards of directors and investors, we know where they vote, typically where they are legally obligated to, financial interests of shareholders.
And thats where we are right now, british billionaires magazine wants him fired. That doesn't exactly ruin his life, just being fired.
He'll survive this. Enjoy the show.
> Im doing the math, not dusting a golden calf.
No. You haven't even tries to show that Jensen is essential to Nvidia's success. You've just said "Nvidia stock is up, Jensen is CEO, QED." That's not persuasive.
Fact is that Nvidia's stock price is mostly due to factors outside of his control. Like most CEOs,he he could be replaced with a slice of buttered toast and the same result would be achieved. So why keep him around when he's already admitted to unethical behavior? A man who cheats on his wife will cheat his investors, too.
No. You haven't even tries to show that Jensen is essential to Nvidia's success.
No, I haven't, because my post was about Jensen THE MAN, and I don't own stock in Nvidia. I'm kinda pissed at Nvidia.
Lets hope Jensen gets fired, and starts Nvidia^2, so Nvidia has real competition.
Interesting times.
Dude, HN is literally the propaganda arm of an incubator program. Of course they like CEOs, creating CEOs is why they exist - and why this site used to be more interesting, before it turned into another Slashdot.
cool it with the antisemitic remarks
I was at an AI founders event in NYC and had an amazingly beautiful Slavic style woman throw herself at me and my buddy. Neither of us are the type that would have supermodel types interested in us based on looks alone. It was so damn obvious.
The public is not thinking "how did he not know she was a spy?"
The public is thinking "Why did he have an affair with a business partner? (who also happened to be a spy). That is a massive conflict of interest. Was he putting Nvidia's interests first, or his own?
I am not convinced that he needs to resign, but describing this as a speed bump is utterly delusional.
20% of men and 13% of women, in marriages, reported having affairs at least once, and thats only the people who told on themselves.
Who hasn't had a momentary lapse of reason, especially when sex is involved ?
The billionaire class who could hang him understand all this.
His status in life is up for a vote. What do you think is happening ?
Status is a moving target.
Status is a popularity contest.
Status is not your identity.
He is going to keep being Jensen Huang.
> Who hasn't had a momentary lapse of reason, especially when sex is involved ?
A lot of people. Let's say that only half the people who have an affair admit it on polls like that. That still means that the majority of men and women are faithful to their spouses.
The majority of men and women aren't attacking Jensen Huang.
We're talking about the billionaire class.
You can't convince me Elon Musk cares who Jensen is sleeping with, except in the context of money and power.
This is not about sex. Its about money and power.
Compromising the marriage is about 'shame.'
They want Jensen Huang to feel shame, to cloud his judgement.
He grew up in a Baptist environment. He knows how to defend against the weapon of shame.
It's not about the affair, it's about the failures in security and intelligence and rule of law. This story is about much more, we will see much more eventually.
> Who hasn't had a momentary lapse of reason, especially when sex is involved ?
Sorry, I thought CEOs were mighty Atlases standing astride above the world of ordinary men. Now you're saying that we shouldn't hold them to a higher standard of behavior?
If his judgment is this poor about infidelity, I can only assume his judgment is even worse in matters of significant complexity.
he's compromised. who knows what leverage this might lead to. cheerio
Ok, you get that the issue isn't that he "looks like a fool" for having an affair, right? If that's the worst thing he's done as a billionaire, he's relatively a saint.
The issue is that he may have just been caught effectively subverting US national security. Like, even in just the teaser paragraph, they spell that out:
>American officials think she is a Chinese spy, and that her Singaporean company is a front for smuggling the politically sensitive chips into China.
That's a very bad look. Way worse than just "looking like a fool".
Has there any proof of any actual subversion of national security? I mean, sleeping with a spy is not the same as giving her any secrets or chips.
A third point is that, as an Nvidia investor, I don't really care what the US government considers a "national secret" or if china gets the secret too. I care if this harm Nvidia's ability to generate revenue.
> A third point is that, as an Nvidia investor, I don't really care what the US government considers a "national secret" or if china gets the secret too.
Good for you. Hopefully, the NVidia board does care about actually following the law.
> Has there any proof of any actual subversion of national security?
Let's see what investigations by the board and congress uncover. It's only been days since the story broke. As a share holder, you may care that he has damaged Nvidia's reputation with the dealings (China & Trump) surrounding this.
The law doesn’t apply to the woman and her company, on account of being limited to the USA.
The law also doesn’t apply to an American billionaire, on account of being a billionaire.
So really, nothing wrong happened here.
That's spelt Rothschilds. It's a nice little conspiracy trope you're working there with the quotes around "the British billionaires" but you should probably just say "Jews" or "globalists" so everyone gets your point. Why waste time with euphemisms when you have something this novel to say?
It was a quote from Vladimir Lenin.
Its on wikipedia.
The magazine earning a reputation has nothing to do with me.
:|
Many people believe the time for letting the wealthy and elite do what ever they want without consequence should be over. See last week's election results
What we need is an investigation and transparency into the details. Why was Trump able to negotiate a 15% profit sharing deal with Jensen shortly after Trump was informed about this? How much did Jensen know about the export control violations?
A determination for either outcome is unwarranted without more information.
is there someone better suited to running nVidia than Jensen? If not, then it doesn't make much sense to fire him other than to provide nVidia for legal protection from lawsuits/charges against him (which firing him may or may not provide)
it would be different if he were some typical CEO that's hired in and been around for a few years, or if he were a founder 5-10 years in and great at starting a company but not suited to running it once very large (which founders often aren't)
[dead]
Shouldn't NVIDIA be labeled as a national security threat, like Anthropic? The juxtaposition in treatment really highlights the corruption.
Dam is an Asian merchant not allowed to have a mistress or two..
Isn't it an open secret that Singapore is largely a front for smuggling GPUs into China? I think it's a they know we know they know situation where as long as the stock market goes up to the right, the right political donations get made, and they don't get too brazen about it - no one looks too closely.
This dude was signing boobs just a few months ago, thinking he was a rock star. Also, no doubt this isn't the first time he cheated on his wife, you never get caught the first time.
And… news just dropped that I was right about this comment.
What an interesting Chinese operation. Undermine Nvidia, possibly force the CEO to resign, and lose half the company in a divorce. I'd say as far as China is concerned this was a successful intelligence operation.
There was an entertaining suggestion on Twitter that the story of Lou Pai might be relevant.
Pai was CEO of a couple of Enron subsidiaries who had an affair with a stripper.
His wife divorced him, and he was forced by court to unload $250m in Enron stock just before the price crashed.
He was never charged with criminal insider trading, but he did agree to pay just over $31m in a civil suit.
He also married the stripper.
and all they actually cared about is getting some good GPUs to bootstrap their already functional industrial technology sector.
Like, being paranoid about this is kinda dumb. This is pretty much just a sweet industrial play to bootstrap their technoogy sector. Something US corporations do in many different ways.
So is everyone already commenting their say about all this because we're all Economist subscribers here or are we reading the headline of the paywall and rolling with it?
does he get a golden parachute if he resigns?
Or Jensen should spend his fortune sue the fuck out the natsec deep state types for yellow peril shenanigans trying to push him out the second Trump loses political power and undermining Nvidia fiscal position. Reality is there's still zero evidence she was spy, publicly posting Jensen fuckboi behavior on Chinese social media last few months. Or Chinese national talking to chinese gov =/= spy, just business usual everywhere unless customary US natsec China Initiative framing designed to discredit when no impropriety was done. AKA no reason Jensen did an illegal like supermicro... operated on the extreme edge of legality sure, i.e. letter of law which pisses off export control hawks that can't figure out how to draft tight laws, and getting consistently outplayed by Jensen. Hence coordinated media campaign framing generic public affair for sticking dick in 40 year old worse than 16 year old, because pedophiles can still be patriotic vs yellow fever, or something. Did Jensen fly too close to sun, sure, but ideally he'll live up to that leather jacket and start hitting back.
Then all Epstein involved need to resign, they have done way worse, just saying. Cheers Jensen, you rock.
Normal people already agree that everyone involved with Epstein should resign. What does that have to do with Huang?
"Epstein" as a concept of the rich elites doing whatever they want and getting away with it, has expanded to people never involved in the child sex trafficking, it's the general "Epstein Class"
The corruption is wide spread and out in the open.
>normal people
This is called co-opting. No, normal people do not necessarily agree with you.
I can do it too: Normal people agree that, if crimes were committed, they should be in prison. It is not solved by simply resigning.
White tech founder cheats on his wife? He's just the butt of late-night TV jokes for a few weeks. (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs... the list goes on)
Non-white tech founder does the same? Fire him, NOW!
Meanwhile Zuck is the only founder that's still a respectable family man, and yet he's pilloried left and right.
You are an idiot. Nobody cares that he cheated.
Cheating isn’t the problem. Making sweetheart deals with her company against US interests is problem #1. Learning she was a spy and covering it up for a year is problem #2.
LOL. He just hasn't been caught yet.
No one gets punished for crimes. You get punished for getting caught.
> Jensen Huang Must Resign
He should probably go to jail (after a fair trial, of course).
Even with the few public facts we have now, I don't know how a reasonable person could conclude that it isn't extremely likely that he knew all about the export control diversions that were going on. He would have to be an idiot not to, and he clearly isn't an idiot.
That points to him being complicit in very serious (20 year sentence) crimes. https://www.bis.gov/enforcement/penalties
Of course there's no way a centibillionaire is going to do 20 days in jail, let alone 20 years (because we don't live in a society with an actually functioning rule of law), but resigning and disappearing from public life is getting off easy here.
I agree with you. The reporting around this makes it sound like he got tricked. He’s been against the export controls from day one.
Fortunately, that random law you pulled itself says there has to be beyond reasonable doubt conspiracy and malice intent. This doesn't seem to be the case seeing Jensen himself was caught offguard by the nature of his relationship.
The same legal system that protects you applies to everyone else billionaire or not.
> This doesn't seem to be the case seeing Jensen himself was caught offguard by the nature of his relationship.
There are two separate aspects to his relationship that are important:
1) Did he know she was a Chinese spy? Maybe not. I have no idea. It would certainly be hard to prove.
2) Did he know her company was diverting stock to the Chinese market? Almost certainly. He would have to be an actual moron to not realize this years ago, and he isn't a moron. I'd be shocked if after investigation that enough evidence didn't come to light to prove without a shadow of a doubt that he knew about the diversion the whole time.
#2 is where his real legal troubles lie. #1 is just the dramatic clickbait intrigue but not really what is likely to sink him.
The only way #1 is really important is in that it is drawing a lot of attention to looking into #2 (which was, by many reports, already a widely known open secret despite the illegality).