> "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.
Yeah it’s one of those things anyone can argue either way. To some, unless they find a Chinese spy school diploma with her name she won’t be “spy”. That’s just not how it works. There are various levels of involvement and recruitment. All the way down to being an unwitting cooperator (for all she knows, she is helping a business associate or friend in Singapore source GPUs) or something like that.
"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.
You are completely wrong here and I suspect the American voter will agree with me. Selling the greatest inventions of American ingenuity and know how directly to a rival is the type of historical shooting yourself in the foot that will be studied for centuries. America has essentially built the internet, the microprocessor, gave it free to the world, then did the same with all the technologies since and what has an American got to show for it exactly? I'd much rather give every teenager in the entire country a 5090 for free than allow a single one to be sold overseas. In the 90s the feds were throwing money at schools to build computer labs even in poor school districts and now we've kinda just stopped giving our kids the latest and greatest and instead force them to compete with the world for hardware. It is too late now but this has been a generational fumble that will be studied for a long long time. We've essentially given away all our advantage to a country that was a backwater when the Intel microprocessor was invented. Frankly embarrassing that it has come to this.
The 5090 – and every other Nvidia GPU – is manufactured in Taiwan and dependent on equipment made in the Netherlands and Germany. If America could build them in the USA without total dependence on the rest of the world your argument might stand.
Taiwan was a similar backwater when the intel microprocessor was invented, yet they’ve clearly done the hard yards to do what the “American voter” had no appetite for.
Yes that is the generational fumble I am talking about. None of that should have ever been allowed in the first place. And reality is proving my point. All this tech is going into every miltech drone now. We could have had a monopoly on that. Now American soldiers will be dodging drones powered by Nvidia GPUs.
You don't understand. The technical lead of ASML and TSMC does not exist because "Americans allowed it". What they can do no one else can do. Aka: you Americams couldn't do it. Maybe it is, that some things don't grow well in a milieu of disregulated cut-throat capitalism.
(I'm thinking more of ASML (dutch) in the Netherlands here, who build the machines at the heart of the fabs (most of the knowhow for building those sits with taiwans tsmc, also for the fabs they build in the states) than of TSMC, since I don't really have to much of a clue of whats the culture in taiwan is like. But I assune theres a more tight-knit social fabric then there is in the states.
Oh I understand very well and your comment is yet another example of the generational fumble I am talking about. It gives foreigners like you grand ideas about their part in the machine. Memory and chip fabs was considered a low margin business up until recently. We are not sleeping on this. Multiple new fabs are being built right now. We won't be making this mistake again.
The American voter can wish for anything, including wishing to get all the cheese from the moon. Wishing quite different from having the ability and infrastructure to actually do it, which nobody is stopping americans from doing already.
Free is an interesting word to mean, "sold for money". Also while the US government funded part of the initial internet, both of your examples are private citizens creating something you wish we later restricted. GPU's are graphics processors too, it was too late any when they became useful a sort of general purpose workload chip.
We actually could give every teen a 5090 for free right now, no blocking trade agreements required.
When I was a kid my school had a computer lab worth 200k in 1995 dollars. This was something very few kids had outside of the United States. None of them were locked down and we were encouraged to learn how to program them. Now we just throw some locked down $200 Chrome books at them and think that's gonna produce the next generation of tech innovation. In any case I wasn't talking about free as in commie.
My idea is that Trump threw Jensen under the bus to tank stock market because democrats won recently.
Trump followers are big on “Trump is good for stock market”. I think market already dipped when democrats won but now it is not a dip anymore, that’s quite a crash we have now.
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.
Allegedly you guys use the widest range of frequencies for vocalization which is advantageous in acquiring foreign languages.
And human speeches come in harmonics, so I think we must be all using those like different combinations of DTMF tones. Human cochlea is also like a ladder ADC, so it shouldn't be so weird that we use combinations of "pressure points" to encode data rather than relying on a single central frequency.
I didn't mean to say that "them Russians talk multiple concurrent conversations at once by using different bands over there", no, just that different languages use different ranges and combinations of frequencies.
This frequency range and Russian advantage thing used to be widely used as somewhat hallucinatory explanation as to why people from certain country(a neighbor to Russia btw) are so atrocious at English in both input and output, that, allegedly, the ranges just don't overlap that we hear nothing from them and they hear nothing from us. That's why the Russian language came to my mind immediately here.
This theory is a bit inconsistent with reality, though, as our speeches are often considered high pitched than English while the theory argues that we're on the lower side.
I think he was just, somewhat dramatically, referring to tones in Chinese and ы in Russian. Neither of which being what makes their respective languages particularly difficult.
> The non standard English chara ters really help articulate to the average person how it should sound. Clear as mud.
I don't really understand your complaint. If you want to know how something is pronounced, you'll have to learn how to read pronunciation information. If you want nothing but standard English, then it won't be possible to describe the pronunciation of most foreign words. (For example, no English syllable corresponds to Spanish no - the problems start very early if you try to go this route.)
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"
> Are you saying a CEO needs to disclose everyone they have sex with to the board?
If they work under you, yes? It's written into every business conduct policy I've ever seen?
It should be really obvious why entering into a sexual relationship with someone who reports to you without disclosing it to your manager is bad. The CEO reports to the board, so they disclose it to them.
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 you are the CEO of a publicly traded company you are essentially the property of the board. Not sure what’s hard to understand here. If you behave “non-robotically” in certain ways, you lose your job.
Shocking how many people think a board could do anything OTHER than firing him even for just what’s known today about fucking subordinates, never mind what the export control investigations find.
There's this thing called nuance my friend. Circumstances and expectations change dramatically when you're already dealing with a PR nightmare involving cheating. At that point, yes, the expectation is you're honest about other indiscretions.
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)?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
If she was a spy and wasn't flagged to him by the FBI, it's the FBI's fuck up. Are private citizens expected to run their own counter-intelligence agency? The spy thing is only problematic if he knew she was one and somehow didn't inform the FBI.
As for the extramarital thing, it's a private matter between him and his wife. Unless someone alleges there was any sexual harassment involved, but I have seen no claim that it is the case so far.
Should the U.S. government protect U.S. citizens being targeted by foreign governments? Or at least notify them of the spying? Individuals or even companies are in huge disadvantage facing active threats from nation states.
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?
_From the board's point of view_ 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.
Why do you mention weakness?
You can't blame anyone for "an affair" when you don't know the nature of the relationship with their spouse and the private agreement they may have.
Some people don't believe in exclusivity or monogamy, some people believe in a clear separation between love and sex, some marriages/partnership are over for years but partners have a tacit agreement to pretend for various reasons instead of divorcing, etc.
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?
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?
For the obvious reason that you spend many hours of your week in the workplace, it becomes the place where you meet the most people in your life and that includes friends but also your potential love or sexual partners. As simple as that.
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.
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.
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
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.
The real crime was going against the narrative about doom, scarcity, and that only american corpos could protect us against the open weight models that are certainly compromized. That's what he's paying for.
No but seriously, i wonder who the next CEO will be, what song will they be signing then
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.
"likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws."
Well, USA is selling Russia a lot of "dual-use components", including Texas Instruments chips found in drones and nobody makes a lot of fuss about that, even though, in theory, there are imposed sanctions on Russia because it started a war, keeps pushing hybrid war against USA NATO allies.
So, selling graphic cards does not sound like a big deal, especially given the fact that China, likewise Russia, North Korea or Iran can purchase anything through the fake companies place in Ireland, the Netherlands or any other tax paradise where nobody ask too many questions.
This is easy peasy now, in the globalized economy, more, it was always easy peasy, even during the middle of cold war and CoCom times, communistic countries could buy anything they wanted, e.g. communistic Poland had a net of companies in Brazil through which is smuggled whatever it wanted to purchase.
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.
This whole thing makes it look like his mistake was not going to Epstein's Island and participate in a hypothetical Mutually Assured Incrimination pact.
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.
About MegaSpeed: They were NVidia largest customer in Southeast Asia (which includes Singapore), buying about 140,000 GPUs in the last 2-3 years. Then, then built data centers in Southeast Asia and rented the GPUs to Mainland Chinese companies. To be clear: From 2023-2025 (their peak), this business model was not prohibited by United States GPU export controls. However, that will probably change soon.
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.
You are ignoring all the actual crimes and are focusing on what jensen knew about his handler? She is his handler. The affair claims are meaningless and do not matter at all.
Nvidia was forcing US businesses to buy hardware they did not need which increased nvidia production, but drove up all hardware prices. The increased production enabled smuggling more gpus to china. It was a clear crime before jensen blamed his handler, and it's still a clear crime after jensen blamed his handler. Jensen forced businesses and consumers to pay billions more for hardware and it appears he did it to enable smuggling more gpus to china.
Jensen is a criminal. Likely, most of the CEOs that signed those deals to buy hardware they did not need are also criminals. Every business and consumer that paid more for hardware is a victim of nvidia, jensen, and the CEOs that signed crooked contracts with him.
The people making these deals that aided chinese smuggling and ripped off the entire US economy are the people making billions of dollars off these deals. They are all criminals. Put them in jail. You will be able to afford ram and a graphics card again.
If Sam can come back after he lied to the board and to Congress that he had no personal stake in openai, while steering business to companies[0] which he did secretly own and control, then Jensen can come back too.
[0] Openai Startup Fund
"This was also news to the board. What was this person talking about? OpenAI did launch a startup fund in 2021, which it said at the time would be “managed” by OpenAI, with investment from Microsoft and others. The fund had invested in the AI-driven legal startup Harvey and a handful of other companies. But what was this about returns not going to OpenAI shareholders? The board began to ask Altman about it, and over the course of months of going back and forth, eventually learned that Altman owned the fund personally, and had been raising money from LPs to fund it."
https://www.openaifiles.org/ceo-integrity
trump and his inner circle know about this for nearly a year. NYT reported on megaspeed diverting chips a year ago. let alone folk reportings from people like gamers nexus.
they already know nvidia is circumventing ITAR and were fine about it for about a year. you are not seeing the real question, which is: why now? what changed?
Taiwan is in serious trouble, because it looks like they exploited the US like israel does. China could take it right now and the US wouldn't do a thing to stop it.
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 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.
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...
I find it difficult to understand that character doesn't seem to matter anymore in this time and age. If a person cheats on his wife, do you not think he will cheat anywhere else? Do you believe that a person in power having an affair with an employee is ok?
I guess, once you have been subjected to the infinite horrible examples set by the current president of the USA, this seems like just another day at the office.
I prefer a world where character, integrity and honesty still matter.
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.
3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATI, and Cirrus were also in the right place at the right time, but there's a reason we're here talking about Nvidia and not them. How much was Jensen vs things out of his control though, few people will ever know.
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?
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.
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.
those departments are run by loyalists to the same guy Jensen gave $25M to for a ballroom, I would be very hesitant to believe their words on this
with the whitehouse rumored to be considering ousting lutnick around this, the story is about something other than affairs (which are the cards you hold until you want to make big moves)
You could make an argument that Jensen became super maga, and made all these donations after he hired a crisis PR firm out of nowhere a little over a year ago. And recent remarks from Trump about threatening the head of an AI company with jail time as well. They could easily have been extorting him.
He did get suspiciously political very quickly around that time. Im definately not convinced that this is a Red Vs Blue thing, I think there's plenty of people on Trumps team that are extreme China hawks.
Its hard to know for sure, but I dont think the lady was a spy. Atleast not until I see evidence.
We do this kind of mysoginist thing in the West when we see successful, well dressed Chinese women close to polticians, CEOs and label them spies, pawns of the CCP... Like Mitch McConnels wife gets this treatment frequently.
Even if she was funneling GPUs to China, which there's also no evidence for other than claims in the WSJ that lack any evidence. I dont think being a cunning business women makes someone a spy, nor does it make Jensen complicit.
Its as if we dont want to admit to ourselves that its possible for the Chinese to be successful, cunning and tactical like any other business person without it being a shadowy plot of the communsit party.
Its very weird, and it makes it super easy to manufacture consent around stories like this.
Even if the Chinese government instigated her funneling GPUs IMO it'd just make he a smuggler and not a spy. I don't know thatI particularly defend him, but reporting is very vague and short.
10$billion of GPUs are sitting on a dock in Hong Kong because CCP banned their import. China has a strict limit on how many Nvidia GPUs each firm can buy. China don't believe LLMs will lead to AGI/RSI and are betting that it's more valuable to become independent of Nvidia than to win the LLM race.
> 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.
But the destination government is not cool with it. CCP have strict limits on Nvidia imports to encourage their domestic GPU industry. There is 10$billion of nvidia GPUs sitting on a dock in Hong Kong rn because they are blocked from import.
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?
---
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 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.
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.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Nvidia is doing plenty of unethical anti-consumer and anti-competitive stuff. I'm not even sure least is accurate. But yeah, good to employees and pro open weight are positives
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?
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.
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.
Time for Satya Nadella to do what he did for Sam Altman?
It will be particularly interesting to see what happens if Tuesdays results come in very strong. But as others say, it's the issue around the knowledge of sales to China that's the insurmountable issue.
nvidias legendary run will end. you cant hire founders enthusiasm or care. they will replace him with a robot who will layer responsibility and insulate themselves and play earnings season. id hate to be a nvidia shareholder.
It appears this is about a lot more than just cheating on his wife. It’s likely going to get a lot worse before it gets better and any thinking that he’s coming back is incredibly naive.
This reminds me of the entire debate about "the artist and his art".-
He is a one-of-a-kind genius.-
PS. Do we at some point (and, I am addressing he cover-ups here, not the affairs) face the fact that many of the same qualities that make a successful CEO might be antisocial? (a point of course, much researched ...)
Beyond that (and I think this needs to be mentioned - not to condone him, but to examine this), there's an "elephant" in this room (buried, of course, underneath the many layers and magnitude of all this): Here's an atypical, bullied, almost-outcast type - who grew up under conditions, lets say, not leading to much interpersonal expression, particularly with the opposite sex ...
... who is now, literally, on top of the world. Something was going to give.-
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.
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.
He is simply untrustworthy now. He could not say or do anything related to China without suspicions about his motives. There is also quite a risk that Alice has taken compromising photos of him, which could be used to blackmail him.
He should have been more paranoid. That he wasn’t makes him unfit to be CEO of Nvidia.
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.
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.
as always in any organization there are absolute drones who have the everyday startegy of demonstration of loyalty, especially - like this case - when there is no reprecussion possible
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.
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."
This is like the list of 11 dems and jefferies that protected hegseth from impeachment. Putting your name on a list to defend a traitor is not a good idea.
to be fair the embargo on china is moronic. its going to lead to the rapid advancement of their chip making capacity effectively forcing the thing it was designed to stop.
This gentleman definitely needs some time off the spotlight. He did his job well, worked very hard for the company he built, and in doing so abandoned his personal life, his family. Mending this mess will take time, effort and focus. And - at least by a public statements - this is his top priority now.
Spare me the moral outrage, suddenly we care who CEOs sleep with?
And if the argument is “well he’s the CEO and should be exemplary to everyone else” let’s start holding every famous or otherwise influential person to the same standard then.
Otherwise if the argument is “he shagged an employee” and we want to start getting upset over inappropriate work relationships - if that’s the case then Powell also needs to fly.
She’s no damsel in distress needing saving from an all powerful CEO.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm pretty sure the line would be quite long. Dude is a billionaire and not exactly bad looking either. Quite intelligent, and well spoken. Care for what you wish cause you might just get it.
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.
2. I don't think "plenty" means majority, especially when it comes to married people, sure plenty of single coworkers or whatever other relationship are having affairs more likely than the married ones, but yes, if married person has affair it's most likely to have it with coworker for obvious reasons (seems studies say roughly 1/3 of all affairs are with coworker)
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 think it's interesting that these affairs came up without an ounce of blame. Shouldn't there be at least a whiff of coercion/#metoo if that had actually happened? Because it could also be the opposite: these employees threw themselves at the big boss for favours/brag rights. And there's also still the possibility that it was just harmless attraction for all involved (well, possibly not as harmless for the wife, but still, who knows).
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?
It's his personal life. As long as he didn't coerce anyone or otherwise cause harm, then there's no problem here. Why should corporate care about what he does when he isn't making them money? Why should anyone at all care? If anything, this is solely between him and his wife, and he didn't marry Nvidia.
Anyway, of anything it's the company that's losing out, not him. He's rich enough to relive a few more lives without ever working, and he's at retirement age. Meanwhile Nvidia now has to handle not having his leadership.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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 ...
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.
Trump/Elon -> Jensen -> the root of the AI industry.
Take out Jensen, install someone with an alternative alignment, now the power balance has shifted. Jensen was an ally, the person he is replaced with, possibly not so much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nonetheless, their exposure right now looks much less like a random event, than like something orchestrated by a "deep state" (who could be just a bunch of guys from his own company, discontent with his leadership, not necessarily people from intelligence agencies, political circles or rival companies, though that is also possible).
It is hard to believe that the coincidence in time with the results of the elections, and/or with the Anthropic IPO, is due to chance, especially because it appears that many people had known about his affairs for a very long time, without doing anything about it.
If anyone felt the moral compulsion to uncover him, they would have done that long ago.
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.
> "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.:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
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.
Yeah it’s one of those things anyone can argue either way. To some, unless they find a Chinese spy school diploma with her name she won’t be “spy”. That’s just not how it works. There are various levels of involvement and recruitment. All the way down to being an unwitting cooperator (for all she knows, she is helping a business associate or friend in Singapore source GPUs) or something like that.
Seems the label is unimportant.
HP never really recovered from the loss of Mark Hurd, so I can see the logic of this sentiment.
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.
People are questioning if the affairs being pressured now are a form of parallel construction:
US IC knows he knew, but cannot disclose the means at trial, so they’re doing this to remove him from NVidia.
This is the likeliest explanation. The reason might be another but this is clearly him being put aside without having to do it right.
Drats if only the weasely SEE EYE AYE didn’t force him to sleep with a (potential) foreign agent and then also sleep with a bunch of subordinates :(
Such cunning, making such a poor helpless man succumb to such obviously completely 100% fireable offenses.
> Drats if only the weasely SEE EYE AYE didn’t force him to sleep with a (potential) foreign agent
You know that AYE rhymes with EYE, right?
Yes but I couldn’t figure out a better way to write it. Any suggestions? “Eh” doesn’t sound right either.
I will admit, that does sound plausible.
Still, just sleeping with someone doesn't mean you share secrets with them.
I've slept with people I wouldn't even allow to look at my phone lol
> 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.
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-...
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.
Maybe his inaction was leverage? Could be that Jensen did something Trump didn’t like, so he pulled the trigger.
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.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/trump-nvidia-h200-china-ai-c...
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.
You are completely wrong here and I suspect the American voter will agree with me. Selling the greatest inventions of American ingenuity and know how directly to a rival is the type of historical shooting yourself in the foot that will be studied for centuries. America has essentially built the internet, the microprocessor, gave it free to the world, then did the same with all the technologies since and what has an American got to show for it exactly? I'd much rather give every teenager in the entire country a 5090 for free than allow a single one to be sold overseas. In the 90s the feds were throwing money at schools to build computer labs even in poor school districts and now we've kinda just stopped giving our kids the latest and greatest and instead force them to compete with the world for hardware. It is too late now but this has been a generational fumble that will be studied for a long long time. We've essentially given away all our advantage to a country that was a backwater when the Intel microprocessor was invented. Frankly embarrassing that it has come to this.
The 5090 – and every other Nvidia GPU – is manufactured in Taiwan and dependent on equipment made in the Netherlands and Germany. If America could build them in the USA without total dependence on the rest of the world your argument might stand.
Taiwan was a similar backwater when the intel microprocessor was invented, yet they’ve clearly done the hard yards to do what the “American voter” had no appetite for.
Yes that is the generational fumble I am talking about. None of that should have ever been allowed in the first place. And reality is proving my point. All this tech is going into every miltech drone now. We could have had a monopoly on that. Now American soldiers will be dodging drones powered by Nvidia GPUs.
Not in America they’re not. Maybe try not stomping all over the rest of the world and the drones won’t be a problem.
You don't understand. The technical lead of ASML and TSMC does not exist because "Americans allowed it". What they can do no one else can do. Aka: you Americams couldn't do it. Maybe it is, that some things don't grow well in a milieu of disregulated cut-throat capitalism.
(I'm thinking more of ASML (dutch) in the Netherlands here, who build the machines at the heart of the fabs (most of the knowhow for building those sits with taiwans tsmc, also for the fabs they build in the states) than of TSMC, since I don't really have to much of a clue of whats the culture in taiwan is like. But I assune theres a more tight-knit social fabric then there is in the states.
Oh I understand very well and your comment is yet another example of the generational fumble I am talking about. It gives foreigners like you grand ideas about their part in the machine. Memory and chip fabs was considered a low margin business up until recently. We are not sleeping on this. Multiple new fabs are being built right now. We won't be making this mistake again.
The American voter can wish for anything, including wishing to get all the cheese from the moon. Wishing quite different from having the ability and infrastructure to actually do it, which nobody is stopping americans from doing already.
Free is an interesting word to mean, "sold for money". Also while the US government funded part of the initial internet, both of your examples are private citizens creating something you wish we later restricted. GPU's are graphics processors too, it was too late any when they became useful a sort of general purpose workload chip.
We actually could give every teen a 5090 for free right now, no blocking trade agreements required.
When I was a kid my school had a computer lab worth 200k in 1995 dollars. This was something very few kids had outside of the United States. None of them were locked down and we were encouraged to learn how to program them. Now we just throw some locked down $200 Chrome books at them and think that's gonna produce the next generation of tech innovation. In any case I wasn't talking about free as in commie.
My idea is that Trump threw Jensen under the bus to tank stock market because democrats won recently.
Trump followers are big on “Trump is good for stock market”. I think market already dipped when democrats won but now it is not a dip anymore, that’s quite a crash we have now.
Trump claimed to blackmail an AI executive in his 60 Minutes interview.
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.
The president has filed reports for then selling nvidia shares.
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....
But trump wouldn't be able to keep it a secret.
he's say something about it "hes a disgusting man, sold out nvidia and for what?" or something even less coherent
>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.
> likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws
this is what the parent is saying is the problem. How is her not being spy change that?
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.
Yes, it's all just one massive conspiracy and Jensen Huang is the victim.
And what's with all the people who think complex investigations get completed in days?
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 only just learned that Alice Huang happens to share a family name (at least, its romanized spelling) with Jensen.
Along with another 35 million people. Huang is one of the most common surnames in Chinese (and Vietnamese and Korean).
> at least, its romanized spelling
Almost certainly the same last name (黃/黄, huang2). It's also sometimes romanized as Wong (though some Wongs are 王, wang2).
Wong/Ng is more south China
Chinese in the US who aren't recent immigrants tend to come from south China.
You mean like John Smith and Jane Smith? About as common.
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.
The non standard English chara ters really help articulate to the average person how it should sound. Clear as mud.
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.
>But at least it's not like Russian, which apparently uses more and rarer frequency bands - think DTMF
As a russian I need some explanation here.
Allegedly you guys use the widest range of frequencies for vocalization which is advantageous in acquiring foreign languages.
And human speeches come in harmonics, so I think we must be all using those like different combinations of DTMF tones. Human cochlea is also like a ladder ADC, so it shouldn't be so weird that we use combinations of "pressure points" to encode data rather than relying on a single central frequency.
I didn't mean to say that "them Russians talk multiple concurrent conversations at once by using different bands over there", no, just that different languages use different ranges and combinations of frequencies.
This frequency range and Russian advantage thing used to be widely used as somewhat hallucinatory explanation as to why people from certain country(a neighbor to Russia btw) are so atrocious at English in both input and output, that, allegedly, the ranges just don't overlap that we hear nothing from them and they hear nothing from us. That's why the Russian language came to my mind immediately here.
This theory is a bit inconsistent with reality, though, as our speeches are often considered high pitched than English while the theory argues that we're on the lower side.
I think he was just, somewhat dramatically, referring to tones in Chinese and ы in Russian. Neither of which being what makes their respective languages particularly difficult.
> The non standard English chara ters really help articulate to the average person how it should sound. Clear as mud.
I don't really understand your complaint. If you want to know how something is pronounced, you'll have to learn how to read pronunciation information. If you want nothing but standard English, then it won't be possible to describe the pronunciation of most foreign words. (For example, no English syllable corresponds to Spanish no - the problems start very early if you try to go this route.)
Are you looking for information, or not?
The spy bit is a nice sideshow, they were a customer.
If I was caught shagging a customer, it would be curtains for me.
Is it against the law to shag hot spy james bond style?
No. It’s about prohibited business dealings (chip exports) that probably wouldn’t have happened without the affair with Alice Huang.
Jensen’s dismissal as CEO could still be because of the affairs, especially the one with an Nvidia VP.
Officials in the government whose executive Huang gave $25 million to?
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-jensen-huang-spy-claim-nvidia...
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?
Why would any of Trumps family disagree with Trump's observation that Jensen is an honourable American ?
I'll wait for the Congressional hearings before trusting Trump's lackeys not to blow smoke up everyone's ass.
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.
Yes, inertia created by him will carry Nvidia for awhile, and then slowly, cracks will show up.
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"
Are you saying a CEO needs to disclose everyone they have sex with to the board? Why? What other personal things are they expected to disclose?
> Are you saying a CEO needs to disclose everyone they have sex with to the board?
If they work under you, yes? It's written into every business conduct policy I've ever seen?
It should be really obvious why entering into a sexual relationship with someone who reports to you without disclosing it to your manager is bad. The CEO reports to the board, so they disclose it to them.
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.
The level of delusion this displays is shocking even for hacker news normal user base who thinks humans are all robots.
If you are the CEO of a publicly traded company you are essentially the property of the board. Not sure what’s hard to understand here. If you behave “non-robotically” in certain ways, you lose your job.
Shocking how many people think a board could do anything OTHER than firing him even for just what’s known today about fucking subordinates, never mind what the export control investigations find.
If the relationship was with a client and two subordinates employees. Kinda, it’s like a big HR issue. But just don’t do it in the first place.
In a US$4 trillion company, yes, disclose everything.
There's this thing called nuance my friend. Circumstances and expectations change dramatically when you're already dealing with a PR nightmare involving cheating. At that point, yes, the expectation is you're honest about other indiscretions.
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.
> formally speaking he resigned...
In corporate America, that means he was fired. Nobody who "resigns" under such circumstances actually does so voluntarily.
Fired by a board that doesn't like Nvidia's ties to the administration.
Conspiracy nutters at it again.
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.
These weren't only affairs.
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.
Tip: if you bring this perspective to a CEO role in a publicly traded company, you too will be fired.
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.
If they make over half a million total comp, all good right?
I like how nobody seems to consider the possibility that the employee(s) involved came on to him.
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)?
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
The board backed him after the Alice Huang news. They emergency "voluntarily resigned" him after news of the second affair broke.
It is pretty clear he lied to the board after the first news broke and that is why he was sacked.
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.
There were no company policies against fraternization.
Perhaps true, but someone who will lie to the person closest to them won’t hesitate for a second to screw over other people in their orbit.
Are you all out of your mind?
I’m sure there are people around me who steal from their employer or abuse their children and I don’t know it.
Does that make theft and child abuse ok too?
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.
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.
perhaps that $25M ballroom donation was part of a package deal
This is completely nonsensical. You somehow think Jensen donated to the ballroom to not be given defensive security briefings?
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.
Says something about the morals and ethics of people that would do this - $>humanity, every time for them!
> only if he knew right
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?
He probably knew about two of them being his workplace subordinates.
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.
You're almost there!
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?
Yeah, so a CEO shouldn't sleep with literally anyone who works at their company
Funnily enough, all of these things are avoidable if you just don't go around having affairs in the first place.
>likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws
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.
> Who are these ppl.
Temporarily embarrassed serial philanderers.
Check their bio, they may be French.
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
> 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.
And even more so, anyone who was dismissed for an inappropriate relationship, if he's brought back.
So NVIDIA rules are...
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.
[0] https://youtu.be/SOwUWPtXQ9I
so, personal attacks rather than evidence? I'm sure there's a fallacy that covers this...
If people could keep their dicks in their pants, we would be over as a species.
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?
I will be glib/shitposty about this...
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.
No, the problem was that he was a willing participant in a conspiracy to illegally sell Nvidia Blackwell chips to the Chinese.
the affairs are a distraction from the corruption
> do we really care that much about affairs?
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.
me too
If she was a spy and wasn't flagged to him by the FBI, it's the FBI's fuck up. Are private citizens expected to run their own counter-intelligence agency? The spy thing is only problematic if he knew she was one and somehow didn't inform the FBI.
As for the extramarital thing, it's a private matter between him and his wife. Unless someone alleges there was any sexual harassment involved, but I have seen no claim that it is the case so far.
lol insane take. Unless the FBI informs me, every single hot single lady in my area that wants to fuck me is legit.
The president of the US is a womanizing misogynist pig on his third marriage at best. Rapist at worst.
I don’t think an affair or ten matters in the US.
Multiple American CEOs have been fired for having sex with direct reports.
Most CEOs are hired and are not founders.
This is deflection and has zero to do with NVIDIA.
Trump isn’t a CEO accountable to a board of directors.
See the difference?
Having consensual affairs is orthogonal to being a proficient company executive.
If anything, it's the spy aspect that would qualify as gross negligence, but affairs themselves are his personal issues to sort out.
How could he be aware she was a spy? The point of a spy is to not be obviously a spy.
Should the U.S. government protect U.S. citizens being targeted by foreign governments? Or at least notify them of the spying? Individuals or even companies are in huge disadvantage facing active threats from nation states.
Not sure why his personal life is on trial, its his life, not his job performance
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?
It's largely "on trial" in the public sphere because of his role in society
public figures get more public scrutiny
selling chips in ways that bypass us law was certainly a job related activity, one that will be hard to feign ignorance on
Why is having one affair better than three?
Why care at all about the private life of a CEO?
Editing my post for clarity
_From the board's point of view_ 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.
Nothing he said could ever be believed again.
Why do you mention weakness? You can't blame anyone for "an affair" when you don't know the nature of the relationship with their spouse and the private agreement they may have.
Some people don't believe in exclusivity or monogamy, some people believe in a clear separation between love and sex, some marriages/partnership are over for years but partners have a tacit agreement to pretend for various reasons instead of divorcing, etc.
Are you privy of their life?
Edited my post for clarity. From the board's point of view.
So we all agree the board is the problem in this case - or rather the governance structure.
AFAIK an affair is something that goes on for a while.
A one-night stand might qualify better as a "moment of weakness", but that’s not what we’re talking about.
I was describing from the hypothetical position of the board not my own.
The board backed him after the first affair was made public but shit canned him after the 2nd.
This indicates that 1 is okay but more than 1 is bad to answer the GPs question.
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?
Don’t really see what this has to do with selling and making gpus. If I were a shareholder I would want him to stay.
> It is allegedly 3 and counting
... 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.
This.
For the obvious reason that you spend many hours of your week in the workplace, it becomes the place where you meet the most people in your life and that includes friends but also your potential love or sexual partners. As simple as that.
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.
Yea, but was she really? Why do you believe that? The NYT has it out for Nvidia and AI in general.
> 3 [affairs] and counting
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.
It's not a likely spy. Jensen flew too close to the sun and pissed off an ant-China faction in the WH.
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
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.
1: sorry for that joke to those whom it offends.
Yeah, firing him before we know what if any information he 'leaked' to the agent is ehh. What's who he screws got to do with his job?
The real crime was going against the narrative about doom, scarcity, and that only american corpos could protect us against the open weight models that are certainly compromized. That's what he's paying for.
No but seriously, i wonder who the next CEO will be, what song will they be signing then
>rival nation
erm, open borders, sweaty
The affairs are completely irrelevant. There was only one mistake: the Chinese one.
Is proof relevant?
Unfortunately, we only know what has been reported, not what the board knows. It was their decision.
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.
Why does one or three affairs have any bearing. Who’s counting?
I mean, anyone deciding on whether they want someone leading a multi-zillion dollar project probably.
"likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws."
Well, USA is selling Russia a lot of "dual-use components", including Texas Instruments chips found in drones and nobody makes a lot of fuss about that, even though, in theory, there are imposed sanctions on Russia because it started a war, keeps pushing hybrid war against USA NATO allies.
So, selling graphic cards does not sound like a big deal, especially given the fact that China, likewise Russia, North Korea or Iran can purchase anything through the fake companies place in Ireland, the Netherlands or any other tax paradise where nobody ask too many questions.
This is easy peasy now, in the globalized economy, more, it was always easy peasy, even during the middle of cold war and CoCom times, communistic countries could buy anything they wanted, e.g. communistic Poland had a net of companies in Brazil through which is smuggled whatever it wanted to purchase.
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.
Hang on, do you believe this is a logical argument?
This whole thing makes it look like his mistake was not going to Epstein's Island and participate in a hypothetical Mutually Assured Incrimination pact.
You have proof of this? Any eye witnesses ? This is all hearsay bro
Jensen has admitted it, in his letter to the employees
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.
To be clear, ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) does not apply to GPUs. You can see the full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...
Instead, Export Administration Regulations (EAR) applies to exports of technology (software and hardware). Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...
About MegaSpeed: They were NVidia largest customer in Southeast Asia (which includes Singapore), buying about 140,000 GPUs in the last 2-3 years. Then, then built data centers in Southeast Asia and rented the GPUs to Mainland Chinese companies. To be clear: From 2023-2025 (their peak), this business model was not prohibited by United States GPU export controls. However, that will probably change soon.
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.
where is the evidence that she is a spy
You are ignoring all the actual crimes and are focusing on what jensen knew about his handler? She is his handler. The affair claims are meaningless and do not matter at all.
Nvidia was forcing US businesses to buy hardware they did not need which increased nvidia production, but drove up all hardware prices. The increased production enabled smuggling more gpus to china. It was a clear crime before jensen blamed his handler, and it's still a clear crime after jensen blamed his handler. Jensen forced businesses and consumers to pay billions more for hardware and it appears he did it to enable smuggling more gpus to china.
Jensen is a criminal. Likely, most of the CEOs that signed those deals to buy hardware they did not need are also criminals. Every business and consumer that paid more for hardware is a victim of nvidia, jensen, and the CEOs that signed crooked contracts with him.
The people making these deals that aided chinese smuggling and ripped off the entire US economy are the people making billions of dollars off these deals. They are all criminals. Put them in jail. You will be able to afford ram and a graphics card again.
I mean they took the passport because they were worried about her being a smuggler and it getting them on the wrong side of the US, right?
If Sam can come back after he lied to the board and to Congress that he had no personal stake in openai, while steering business to companies[0] which he did secretly own and control, then Jensen can come back too.
[0] Openai Startup Fund "This was also news to the board. What was this person talking about? OpenAI did launch a startup fund in 2021, which it said at the time would be “managed” by OpenAI, with investment from Microsoft and others. The fund had invested in the AI-driven legal startup Harvey and a handful of other companies. But what was this about returns not going to OpenAI shareholders? The board began to ask Altman about it, and over the course of months of going back and forth, eventually learned that Altman owned the fund personally, and had been raising money from LPs to fund it." https://www.openaifiles.org/ceo-integrity
trump and his inner circle know about this for nearly a year. NYT reported on megaspeed diverting chips a year ago. let alone folk reportings from people like gamers nexus.
they already know nvidia is circumventing ITAR and were fine about it for about a year. you are not seeing the real question, which is: why now? what changed?
The IC and the asian public have known since 2024, apparently, when it was broadcast on Taiwan news.
Taiwan is in serious trouble, because it looks like they exploited the US like israel does. China could take it right now and the US wouldn't do a thing to stop it.
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 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.
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?).
> Jensen's not coming back anytime soon.
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
I find it difficult to understand that character doesn't seem to matter anymore in this time and age. If a person cheats on his wife, do you not think he will cheat anywhere else? Do you believe that a person in power having an affair with an employee is ok?
I guess, once you have been subjected to the infinite horrible examples set by the current president of the USA, this seems like just another day at the office.
I prefer a world where character, integrity and honesty still matter.
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.
I guess many nVidia employees feel they'll be soon out of a job without him at the helm. Most don't care about his extramarital affairs.
it's so funny how everyone has their own variation of the NVIDIA spelling, and almost breaks their fingers while typing the name. Why not nVIdiA.
The `nVidia` spelling has been used quite often in the past, eg https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2009/09/28/microsoft-nvi...
I don't think nvidia will go down. But their RSUs are taking a big hit
Now I am waiting for Microsoft to enter the drama like they did with OpenAI
It doesn’t mean going down. A new CEO would likely start a round of layoffs to bring in new personal favourites and no employee would like that
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.
Huang didn’t invent llm, he merely benefits from it because he was at the right place at the right time.
He didn’t do anything incredible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418749
3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATI, and Cirrus were also in the right place at the right time, but there's a reason we're here talking about Nvidia and not them. How much was Jensen vs things out of his control though, few people will ever know.
It'd be spicier if it's AMD giving Jensen leadership of its GPU efforts there, and automatically hiring anyone at Nvidia who wants to jump ship.
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.
> Now I am waiting for Microsoft to enter the drama like they did with OpenAI
Just as soon as they get their systems back up!
The first stage is denial.
Mixed with a little Upton Sinclair's "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Well, at least two people liked him.
Three*
https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...
Finally, a Polymarket bet I can get behind!
https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-jensen-huang-affairs-w...
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.
> At the beginning it was all on the shoulders of Alice, the poor girl, hundreds and hundreds of billions of guilt
Is this sarcasm? I genuinely can't tell.
At least one. Honeypots aren't in it for that.
I think that was the joke, since there were three affairs, two of them being employees.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe Musk needs someone else to take the hit for meddling in the US.
those departments are run by loyalists to the same guy Jensen gave $25M to for a ballroom, I would be very hesitant to believe their words on this
with the whitehouse rumored to be considering ousting lutnick around this, the story is about something other than affairs (which are the cards you hold until you want to make big moves)
Trump and Xi meeting next week
You could make an argument that Jensen became super maga, and made all these donations after he hired a crisis PR firm out of nowhere a little over a year ago. And recent remarks from Trump about threatening the head of an AI company with jail time as well. They could easily have been extorting him.
He did get suspiciously political very quickly around that time. Im definately not convinced that this is a Red Vs Blue thing, I think there's plenty of people on Trumps team that are extreme China hawks.
Its hard to know for sure, but I dont think the lady was a spy. Atleast not until I see evidence.
We do this kind of mysoginist thing in the West when we see successful, well dressed Chinese women close to polticians, CEOs and label them spies, pawns of the CCP... Like Mitch McConnels wife gets this treatment frequently.
Even if she was funneling GPUs to China, which there's also no evidence for other than claims in the WSJ that lack any evidence. I dont think being a cunning business women makes someone a spy, nor does it make Jensen complicit.
Its as if we dont want to admit to ourselves that its possible for the Chinese to be successful, cunning and tactical like any other business person without it being a shadowy plot of the communsit party.
Its very weird, and it makes it super easy to manufacture consent around stories like this.
Even if the Chinese government instigated her funneling GPUs IMO it'd just make he a smuggler and not a spy. I don't know thatI particularly defend him, but reporting is very vague and short.
10$billion of GPUs are sitting on a dock in Hong Kong because CCP banned their import. China has a strict limit on how many Nvidia GPUs each firm can buy. China don't believe LLMs will lead to AGI/RSI and are betting that it's more valuable to become independent of Nvidia than to win the LLM race.
> 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.
But the destination government is not cool with it. CCP have strict limits on Nvidia imports to encourage their domestic GPU industry. There is 10$billion of nvidia GPUs sitting on a dock in Hong Kong rn because they are blocked from import.
Yes, but that's what smuggling is.
did you make this account just to defend Jensen?
Never let the truth get in the way of a good narrative.
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.
my best guess is NatSec folks, perhaps BigAi too
there are very differing opinions among the presidents cabinet, re: Ai, chips, open weights and certainly some real china hawks in the NatSec bureaus
Your post is now over an hour old and still has positive votes.
So much for the bot downvoting theory
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.
We'll see what the truth ends up being with time.
> 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.
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!
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?
---
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.
Comments in this post became pathetic and comic at the same time.
> This is not a conspiracy theory
> [proceeds to explain carefully organized plot between Anthropic, Rubio and Bessent]
————————
> This is not smuggling
> [proceeds to explain that if destination country is cool with imports then it’s ok to send goods via 3rd country]
————————
> She was not a spy
> [explains what she did and what spies do, same thing]
I assure you there are not just bots downvoting you.
How do you square this view with the share price going down on the news, so he was literally not doing his job per your definition of the job?
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.
Ethics aside, chemical castration does not necessarily work.Biologically yes but behaviourally...
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.
Hard agree - if you ever tell a child that Santa exists while he doesn't, immediate execution by a firing squad. Lying should never be tolerated.
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.
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.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Nvidia is doing plenty of unethical anti-consumer and anti-competitive stuff. I'm not even sure least is accurate. But yeah, good to employees and pro open weight are positives
> with least immoral business decisions
Other than some possible treason with an adversarial country, yes pretty clean record.
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?
Thanks!
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.
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.
No, I would never trust a CEO with 5, 10 or 50 affairs because I just won't trust the French /s
Time for Satya Nadella to do what he did for Sam Altman?
It will be particularly interesting to see what happens if Tuesdays results come in very strong. But as others say, it's the issue around the knowledge of sales to China that's the insurmountable issue.
Nvidia will eventually turn into Intel if board settles on CFO being permanent CEO
nvidias legendary run will end. you cant hire founders enthusiasm or care. they will replace him with a robot who will layer responsibility and insulate themselves and play earnings season. id hate to be a nvidia shareholder.
> id hate to be a nvidia shareholder
shareholders will be okay. I bet Microsoft, Google or Apple shareholders have been pretty content with their CEOs. It's the customers who suffered.
It appears this is about a lot more than just cheating on his wife. It’s likely going to get a lot worse before it gets better and any thinking that he’s coming back is incredibly naive.
why are people concerned about his personal life then his competency that his own workers and industry vouches for?
who benefits from neutering nvidia like this?
This reminds me of the entire debate about "the artist and his art".-
He is a one-of-a-kind genius.-
PS. Do we at some point (and, I am addressing he cover-ups here, not the affairs) face the fact that many of the same qualities that make a successful CEO might be antisocial? (a point of course, much researched ...)
Beyond that (and I think this needs to be mentioned - not to condone him, but to examine this), there's an "elephant" in this room (buried, of course, underneath the many layers and magnitude of all this): Here's an atypical, bullied, almost-outcast type - who grew up under conditions, lets say, not leading to much interpersonal expression, particularly with the opposite sex ...
... who is now, literally, on top of the world. Something was going to give.-
This is not about employees. The board is in CYA mode.
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.
Maybe I'm too cynical but that is exactly what I too thought what the cause of this was.
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.
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.
Will he make another company from the ground up? :)
He is simply untrustworthy now. He could not say or do anything related to China without suspicions about his motives. There is also quite a risk that Alice has taken compromising photos of him, which could be used to blackmail him.
He should have been more paranoid. That he wasn’t makes him unfit to be CEO of Nvidia.
The motives of the ex NVIDIA CEO on China seem quite clear to me. What's not clear to you?
Are enough of their employees able to just skip out with millions in stock if they're not happy about this that the board might feel forced to listen?
I can see many to follow with him if he ever joins a new company
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.
The problem is the whole story hasn’t come out.
https://archive.is/2UlmY
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.
> employees petition to bring back jensen huang
as always in any organization there are absolute drones who have the everyday startegy of demonstration of loyalty, especially - like this case - when there is no reprecussion possible
I despise them
racists' discussion
This video maybe explains the reason ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pnq4m6PLjM
Nvidia is nothing without its founder.
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.
"If you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it."
Or maybe "leather jacket"
I've seen an influx of bring him back on reddit and other areas. It has a bot vibe to it.
My main takeaway is how HNers seem to decide what they want to believe, then work backwards from it to form a justification
You could have the exact same situation with a different company/CEO and the HN comments would be completely different
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.
You have only been exposed to HN. All human beings are wired like this.
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."
Is this a criticism?
This is just how people work.
This is like the list of 11 dems and jefferies that protected hegseth from impeachment. Putting your name on a list to defend a traitor is not a good idea.
Now we know who to investigate more.
If you think this is about an affair, you don't understand what’s actually going on.
Coming back? He should be tried for treason.
to be fair the embargo on china is moronic. its going to lead to the rapid advancement of their chip making capacity effectively forcing the thing it was designed to stop.
Does Jensen want back?
This gentleman definitely needs some time off the spotlight. He did his job well, worked very hard for the company he built, and in doing so abandoned his personal life, his family. Mending this mess will take time, effort and focus. And - at least by a public statements - this is his top priority now.
"Daddy went home with his real family, boys.."
Money is more important than morals, national security, or good governance for many at Nvidia. That's reassuring.
Can NVIDIA have a Sam Altman moment?
If Sam Altman could do it, maybe Jensen Huang can pull it off too.
That would be awesome PR move. The valuation of the company would be up again.
Spare me the moral outrage, suddenly we care who CEOs sleep with?
And if the argument is “well he’s the CEO and should be exemplary to everyone else” let’s start holding every famous or otherwise influential person to the same standard then.
Otherwise if the argument is “he shagged an employee” and we want to start getting upset over inappropriate work relationships - if that’s the case then Powell also needs to fly.
She’s no damsel in distress needing saving from an all powerful CEO.
Cui bono?
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.
Sure, but how does this relate to the post?
Because the employees desires to get Huang back directly contradict the interests of the other parties who want to gain control
They all had sex with him, didn't they?
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.
The fuss about the sex seems to be a smokescreen for his smuggling of GPUs into China. That's why this is such a big deal.
What animals are you talking about?
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.
> world would be a lot quieter place
Yes because humans would go extinct if we had sex only once a year. Reproduction would become a rare occurrence beyond 15.
I guess any news is better than losing almost 20% in a month and being hundreds of billions in debt.
> 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.
Asking for a friend, has Jensen also got an private island ?
some corporate drones are absolutely fanatical. or maybe they are just worried about impending drop in value due to stock turbulence.
nVidia employees being honey potted by Jensen...
They should also make a list of employees willing to sleep with CEO, for the good of he company of course. Lets keep it in the family.
I'm pretty sure the line would be quite long. Dude is a billionaire and not exactly bad looking either. Quite intelligent, and well spoken. Care for what you wish cause you might just get it.
so basically employees signing this petition are OK with infidelity, I probably wouldn't want to be partner of these petitioners
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.
1. I don't think this is exclusive to big tech
2. I don't think "plenty" means majority, especially when it comes to married people, sure plenty of single coworkers or whatever other relationship are having affairs more likely than the married ones, but yes, if married person has affair it's most likely to have it with coworker for obvious reasons (seems studies say roughly 1/3 of all affairs are with coworker)
It is famously male dominated place. An offsite may have some gay action going on, but most are not into that.
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 think it's interesting that these affairs came up without an ounce of blame. Shouldn't there be at least a whiff of coercion/#metoo if that had actually happened? Because it could also be the opposite: these employees threw themselves at the big boss for favours/brag rights. And there's also still the possibility that it was just harmless attraction for all involved (well, possibly not as harmless for the wife, but still, who knows).
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 would be a convenient "accountability sink" to free them from having to examine the structural causes.
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?
It's his personal life. As long as he didn't coerce anyone or otherwise cause harm, then there's no problem here. Why should corporate care about what he does when he isn't making them money? Why should anyone at all care? If anything, this is solely between him and his wife, and he didn't marry Nvidia.
Anyway, of anything it's the company that's losing out, not him. He's rich enough to relive a few more lives without ever working, and he's at retirement age. Meanwhile Nvidia now has to handle not having his leadership.
Imagine the world where the Epstein creeps and the Jensen creep could be held accountable for their actions.
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.
>I'm sure we've all had the opportunity
Not to derail your point, but, huh?
Speak for yourself. Most of us uggos never had the opportunity.
Is this becoming 2026’s OpenAI attempted coup moment? Is a mass talent exodus plausible? If it is I didn’t have that on my bingo card for 2026.
This seems delusional of the employees. Kneejerk impulsive reaction.
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 have full empathy for Jensen
He's not a victim
"He's a philanderer, but he's OUR philanderer"
> 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.
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)
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:
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.
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
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.
Good heavens, I cannot understand that first sentence despite reading it thrice.
Sorry, rephrased it.
Some people are just happy to see Jensen and NVIDIA suffer.
Its not the only way to support his ousting. But its one way.
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...
It makes sense. They're probably having to deal with higher level bosses proposing them all the time so it's just the cultural norm at the company.
Why? Seriously why would you take part in this? This shows bad judgement.
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.
His ability to make huge bets and stick with them was very impressive. Unfortunately his risk taking in personal measures wasn't so good.
> Seriously why would you take part in this?
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.
> Because no one else can fill the shoes.
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.
The top reply in that thread is someone saying that there are no layoffs. Who to believe?
Now, regarding Nvidia specifically? Never the CFO / interim CEO.
Unfortunately, greed often makes people willing to look the other way.
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.
Money. Nvidia hands out a lot of RSUs. I’m guessing that a lot of these employees just watched their retirement take a 30% hit.
It’s easy to say you don’t have a price when no one is offering to buy you.
If anybody has 100% of their retirement in Nvidia stock, then quite frankly they're idiots and doing it wrong. This is basic financial common sense.
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.
> Why would you take an RSU
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.
Obviously to 'shoot your shot' and see if he is up for yet another affair with the entire group. Why should he stop now?
Why do people support Trump or Clinton? Cheating just isn't a big deal for most people who aren't being cheated on.
I saw the picture of his actual wife so i pardon him and i don't support gpu sanctions so what's the problem?
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.
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?
Can you grow up?
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.
The US export control is meaningless in this instance. See here:
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.
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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/megaspeed-nvidia-china-ties/
> Also, it has not been established that any export control laws have been violated.
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.
Jensen stepping down won't stop the US investigation.
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?
> It seems Nvidia's board which had every reason to try to keep him has not reached your conclusion.
How would you know this?
The average HN commenter is unfortunately about as smart as a bag of rocks now. It’s been trending down for years
The problem is the sketchy sales to China, not the mistresses (or at least not the non spy ones).
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 ...
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.
Trump/Elon -> Jensen -> the root of the AI industry.
Take out Jensen, install someone with an alternative alignment, now the power balance has shifted. Jensen was an ally, the person he is replaced with, possibly not so much.
> anti-AI left
Jesus, everything is party politics in the US, ain’t it? Enough of your brain rot.
Given how much time Jensen spent with Elon/Trump, there are more than enough factions that want to break that friend group up.
Was he sleeping with all of them?
He's one of the greatest CEO of all time.
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.
Funny you should mention TSMC. Jensen said Nvidia has no written contract with TSMC; instead he has a personal agreement with the TSMC CEO.
The comeback arc would be epic, after a certain point, Huang may have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
You mean like how Anthropic fell flat without openai trade secrets.
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.
> after _he's_ done licking his wounds.
buddy, i have some news for you
Alternatively, he could do a family swaperoo with Lisa Su at AMD. /s
Ridiculous, why people are standing for a cheater and not for the victim?
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.
Dude. What fucking victim. They're all adults, it was all consensual.
First time hearing that cheating is "consensual".
His wife will be fine if she decides to leave. Who wouldn't with $75bn. I'm so sorry for her.
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.
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.
Jensen resigned.
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.
He is obviously guilty for his own affairs.
Nonetheless, their exposure right now looks much less like a random event, than like something orchestrated by a "deep state" (who could be just a bunch of guys from his own company, discontent with his leadership, not necessarily people from intelligence agencies, political circles or rival companies, though that is also possible).
It is hard to believe that the coincidence in time with the results of the elections, and/or with the Anthropic IPO, is due to chance, especially because it appears that many people had known about his affairs for a very long time, without doing anything about it.
If anyone felt the moral compulsion to uncover him, they would have done that long ago.
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.
Now I understand why bad people end up in power.