Yes, one investigation begets others. Also, high profile witnesses come forward voluntarily once the screen is lifted on any unrelated investigation, but not typically before.
I honestly don't care about Jensen Huang. The C-suites get too much credit. Who are the engineers that proposed the gpgpu architecture, CUDA, or the addition of tensor cores?
Yeah. While we're rolling out the billionaire taxes, we should make sure the hard working engineers in the trenches get their fair share of Chinese spies too.
Workers of the world unite! Seize the means of (re)production!
Here it seems the dude was just lobbling molotov cocktails at his own house until people started to notice. The conspiracy, if there is one, is what other folks who knew beforehand got out of him before it was made public, not why everyone is now pointing out shit is on fire for him.
Are Patrick and John Collison terrible people? My impression is quite the opposite; they're smart, hard working, and care deeply about making the world a better place.
There's a Canadian billionaire who is famously always donating to hospitals and suchlike. He's had tens of thousands of employees for decades and I've never heard anyone say anything bad about him.
I know another billionaire in Vancouver who isn't known for donations. Actually most people don't know he's a billionaire. He is generous though; he just insists on being anonymous when he gives large amounts.
I suspect the issue is less "billionaires are horrible people" and more "the highest profile individuals from any group tend to be the narcissists".
I think it's clear that rhetorically you can't single out individuals without proof but at the same time it's also fair to say there is just a lack of information.
The argument that, for the most part, you need to extract from and exploit others to get to this level of wealth is relatively strong and has correlates with other negative behaviours I would say is the core issue at play here.
It's a useless reddit trope. As usual, humans are complex, and billionaires are no different. Look at Mark Cuban for example, he is trying to bring affordable medicines to common people in USA (I don't know the finer details). Or Jim Simons, who for all accounts did a decent bit of philanthropy and provided funding for academic research.
Yep. Maybe the other parties thought they had a special thing with him and now realize they're just another body? That makes people vindictive and willing to talk.
His security detail is also no longer worried about retribution and are likely complying with an internal investigation.
It's very likely his affairs were simply open secrets within the C suite.
Not even. Credibility is one thing. If people wanted to out him but were afraid, the time to be believed is now. The other is just that everyone is looking now and with all this attention more things come out.
Of course they do, but they don't usually deny it against the other party in the affair, they deny it to their boss, their wife, whoever they have a liability to, so it's a different situation entirely.
The affairs he had ( revealed so far at least ) weren't with junior people - they were also exec's so I don't think there is any suggestion of abuse of power here.
It's much more likely that some people knew and journalists went around asking people.
Powell didn't join Nvidia as exec though. She originally joined Nvidia in a business development role, before being promoted to her current role in 2017
That's long enough ago that it seems likely that Huang got to know her in her current role. But if the affair started earlier than 2017, there is the suggestion of abuse of power. Not with Powell as victim, but everyone else who hoped to get that role instead of her
Anything is possible. But in these scenarios I think it's wise to apply the following 2 principles.
1. Stick to the facts - speculation helps no-one.
2. Don't assume to fight on behalf of people you don't know.
For example there appears to be an assumption that his wife has been deeply wronged and she is the victim. This may well be the case. but it also might not be. That part of this story is a private matter for them and not helped by speculation and assumptions.
In fact I'd go further - you have in effect just accused Powell of being promoted by sleeping with the boss based entirely on speculation. Not sure that's helpful either.
Jensen named his wife and family as victims in his apology letter. I see no reason not to believe him. Under what circumstances might a person's spouse not be a victim of the person's extramarital affairs??
She might be a victim following the publicity. Or many other reasons, really. I am not saying she is, but in some relationships, what you’re allowed to do and what you’re allowed to let the world know are different things.
He might also feel he needed to do it for many reasons, some more self-serving than others.
I largely agree. At this stage we don't known enough to tell who is a victim here. We likely will never know for sure, nor do we have a right to demand to know
My speculation is purely for its explaining or predictive power on the question why all of this is coming out at once, and who's behind revealing all this. I favor the "conspiracy" version (someone wants him gone and exposes his real secrets in the most damaging way). But if we consider that this might all be organically triggered by the revelation of the spy affair we can't discount that the numerically largest group that feels wronged by his affairs might be employees that were disadvantaged whenever affair partners got special treatment
Shielding Powell from that implication is _why Huang has an obligation not to sleep with her._
Whether or not it’s the case, if the behavior is known to others in the company it also creates a hostile work environment for ambitious female employees who are not at Powell’s level but hope to reach it.
Regarding his wife, I agree. He and his wife are both smart capable people. They may have worked our certain relationship parameters that they are both fine with.
he's the most powerful CEO in the world; you don't even need actual abuse of power when it's impossible to avoid the appearance of abuse. I know that as a coworker of the executive sleeping with the CEO I would completely discount her skills & accomplishments, and his impartiality & judgement, and so would everyone else.
> they were also exec's so I don't think there is any suggestion of abuse of power here.
Everyone reports to the CEO, directly or indirectly, and in this case the CEO is also a founder. The appearance of abuse of power here is plain-as-day.
There's so much coping going on in the comments here it's mind-boggling. Sleeping with your subordinates is enough to get fired just about anywhere.
I'm not condoning it - just saying I don't think it's my place to feel aggrieved on behalf of somebody else based on what's public.
Also note that it's different from having an opinion about Jensen himself.
So it's perfectly possible for me to simultaneously think he has done something wrong ( for the reasons you mentioned ), but also not decide on X or Y were 'wronged'.
It doesn't matter if there was an actual abuse of power, or if they were completely consenting adults.
When anyone in the company is fucking the boss and get a raise or promotion, or a good project, everyone in the company who isn't fucking the boss now have a legitimate grievance to sue the company over - that they are being passed over for these things because they aren't fucking the boss.
It doesn't even have to be true. The sheer possibility that it is true is cyanide.
This is part of every sexual harassment training 101 that any manager has ever gone through. (If you haven't gone through it, your employer's opening itself up to a lot of liability...)
> It's very likely his affairs were simply open secrets within the C suite.
There's a lot of people who usually know.
People with power think their farts don't smell or that the rest are stupid and don't notice or some don't care that people know as long as they keep their moths shut, or they get careless over time -- but lots of people eventually know.
Early in my career I shared an office with the mistress of a General Manager, she was on good terms with everybody in the office (kind of odd she was placed in the same office with nerdy devs she had zero work contact with) -- but everybody else hated her guts, can't really rember their grievances.
Anyway I used to catch glimpses of phisical contact between them and the guy divorced and they married.
Relationships with colleagues were encouraged with some limitations, perhaps that's why they were so non-chalant about it (though the guy being married back home was kind of gross even for our european open minds).
In the '70s a new manager transferred in. Some of the old hands pointed out that his wife was his second wife and former secretary. Back then, people talked, but there was no outrage.
I guess OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs are failing expectations plus open weights models which Nvidia supports and Jensen been super vocal about them and confronting anodes and Altman about dangers of IA have something to do with what we are seeing
It’s not just misconduct claims. It’s the same reason why house parties have a tendency to go a bit too late and then suddenly empty out as soon as one person leaves. Or why at conferences you might wait an uncomfortable amount of time for someone to ask the first question, but after that there’s a queue.
In a nutshell, nobody wants to be the first.
(possibly obligatory disclaimer: I’m not saying this to minimize harassment and abuse claims. More the opposite: I worry that perceiving this phenomenon as something specific to harassment and abuse allegations can become a pretense for dismissing them out of hand.)
I assume the inverse is the same idea: most people don't want to take the last bite from a plate of snacks? Usually after it winds down for a while you get another wave of claims.
Correlation isn’t causation always. Once there’s a scandal, more people start digging, and the more they dig, the more they find. The news cycle continues rewarding more information, so you keep getting more.
This happens all the time with news stories and doesn't require conspiracy theories. Once an initial story breaks, other journalists investigate (if they weren't already). No doubt Nvidia started investigating internally and employees will have leaked the findings.
There isn't really even any point in this third story from the point of view of any "coordinated attack". He's already resigned.
A shell game. This is the distraction portion. Then comes the switch, the reveal and the swipe. Watch the market indicators. Nobody buying and selling shares in a trillion-dollar company cares one iota about extramarital affairs. Something else is happening.
They might not care about affairs, but they are probably interested in the possibility that Nvidia circumvented US export controls, is being covertly influenced by China, and so on
First person who gets it. It’s 2026, there is no moral panic here. Shareholders don’t care. It’s all completely fake and orchestrated as cover for some other purpose (To offload shares or otherwise).
Are you serious? He had multiple affairs is what's going on. Including one with a spy. And people who wouldn't be believed before are now coming forward.
There's probably some mildly interesting risk-balancing that happened behind the scenes because the intel community apparently knew mid-2026 and only spilled the beans now, but this is entirely of Jensen's own doing. He confessed.
He clearly is a top performer, though, managing four-plus relationships is a big job.
It's weird, right? You see the same thing in police investigations. Oh, they know some things early, then, later, release more information? We're not that dumb.
When a real scandal happens, everything we know or will ever know gets dropped all at once. Anything else and you know someone is pulling the strings. The question is who? My money is on the arrow of time.
A serial adulterer is revealed to have adulterated serially, and SV types are spilling oodles of ink attempting to justify loose morals and bad decision-making so long as it brought increased shareholder value.
I am reminded of the tv series "the shield". When it ends, our guy is asked "what all do you have to declare". I am paraphrasing.
Pretty sure the board asked the same question. Having finally been called to do their work, they can't just close the books without asking "what else do you have to declare" to both Jensen and at least all the direct reportees. And if there was a declaration, you can always find someone to leak it to the media.
Not saying that happened, just saying that it is likely such direct questions were asked and answered last few days.
It’s a common tactic to make sure the scandal stays on the front page and it’s untenable to try to stay on. Politicians do this all the time. Scandals happen constantly, it they’re saved for when they are most useful. Jensen is in politics, whether he realises it or not.
China may be behind it as an attempt to sabotage America’s economy. But I actually think more likely the Americans as Nvidia haven’t complied sufficiently.
I really feel for Jensen. He’s dedicated his life to Nvidia and really is heavily responsible for its success. It must be devastating to have to step away from it.
He admitted to an affair. An affair by definition is a bad thing.
You can be poly and sleep with multiple people with the consent of your partners and it’s not an affair.
An affair, being unfaithful, cheating, etc. are all terms used for someone who has breached the terms of their relationship. We don’t need to be slow to judge because he judged himself by using those terms.
You have no idea what the situation in his relationship was like at the time. You don’t know how his wife feels about it, you don’t even know if she knew about it. Be slow to judge.
His public apology included apologies to his wife and children for hurting them. It's reasonable to believe that he did in fact disrupt his family life.
Are you thinking somebody held a gun to his head and said sleep with this woman or I kill you? The guy consented to cheating, not just with a spy, but with people under his authority.
Accepting an $8 Billion deal from an exec at a company who was called out months ago for circumventing export controls on behalf of Chineses interests is a pretty damning circumstance.
Sleeping with that person and the other affairs are just icing on a shit cake.
No, but I think there is a financial motivation in coordinating the release of information to destroy him.
Reports that Lutnick and Trump knew about the spy situation for some time and allowed it to continue without informing Jensen goes a long way towards establishing a kind of coordination.
Once you start with the spy and national security angle, then you can get access to internal HR reports, and through these and media coordinating, a misrepresentation of the situation is doing the damage that was intended.
There is no public evidence that she was a spy, that Jensen revealed any secrets during the affair, or that Jensen was involved in any of the blackmarket dealings for GPUs. There is no evidence he exploited his power to have any affairs with anyone who works at nVidia either.
All thats left are two relationships he shouldnt have had with two nVidia employees and that is not criminal, or for many a reason to lose the company you basically created.
Meanwhile, its obvious that the commerce secretary worked with nVidia to slow roll the addition of shell companies where the blackmarket trades were happening. This is the most damning accusation, and if Jensens $25 million Trump ballroom donation was a payment to have them look the other way while nVidia knew they circumvented export controls, then that is a legitimate reason for him to resign. Because that is a series of criminal acts, and you know without a doubt that Lutnick, Trump and others were personally benefitting from this arrangement and is likely why they knew about the "spy" situation and did nothing.
But again, even this is just speculation and we wont know, maybe forever what really went on behind the scenes. Either way, it is a coordinated, well planned action to sort of drip a media narrative to get him out of the way.
It might just be that the one affair learned that she is not the only one and went public. Then the third one also learned that she is not the only one ...
It's not especially newsworthy that there are rumours a CEO is having an (apparently entirely consensual) affair with one of his employees. It becomes newsworthy if he's also been having an affair with a Chinese spy.
I don't think you can easily run "Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with [an] employee, according to two people familiar with the matter" unless it's clearly a matter of public interest, which it becomes when it's apparently more than one and on the heels of the other story.
Alleged spy. That totally unsubstantiated claim from anonymous sources could as easily be a financially or politically motivated smear as the truth. The way the whole thing has turned into a media circus makes me skeptical to take any of it at face value.
I think that the JD Vance camp after the 2026 mid-terms, needs a way to distinguish themselves from Rubio, who has largely been an administration favorite and the VP handles tasks typically delegated to the Secretary of State. Between this which is still forming, and Vance reportedly being vocal about not going to war in Iran, there will be a few distinguishing bullet points. I can't imagine insiders didn't know that the man from one of the world's top two multi-trillion dollar companies was having multiple affairs that could easily be used to blackmail him.
As others have said I think it's a measure for the opportunists in government and OpenAI and Anthropic to get rid of open weights and Chinese models. Jensen Huang was advocating open weights.
Maybe this time next year using models other than Claude and OpenAI will be illegal somehow with nvidia kernel level implementations to block vram usage to granted to unsigned providers or something.
Yea, tech/security work shouldn't be surprised by this. When a big hole is found in a piece of software it's really common for a few more to crop up simply because a lot of people are looking at it.
Do we as an industry really not have the ability to comprehend that 1) you shouldn't be sleeping with your employees and 2) that no matter how much value you generate, there will be people who find that sort of behavior morally repugnant and that it can ruin your career if you engage in it?
Even people who don't particularly care about the moral aspect (a) may find him untrustworthy (if he's lying in his personal life why would you trust what he tells you in your business dealings) (b) may consider it a weakness that can be exploited against your shared business interests (he could be bribed or blackmailed into dealings which don't benefit the company, or embroil the company in legal problems) or (c) lose faith in his judgement, if he's willing to get himself into such a mess.
It does look coordinated, but that doesn’t mean it was pre-arranged.
When you see bird flocks or fish schools moving in coordinated ways, they didn’t arrange all that in advance. They’re observing each other and reacting in real time. Quite a lot of coordinated movements develop this way, among people as well as other animals.
A person who forgets that this type of coordination is possible might end up spending their life endlessly looking for the man behind the curtain in every moment of coordination they come across.
I think people would be shocked to find out just how common "don't ask, don't tell" is among couples, especially among the rich, famous, and powerful. Everyone ganged up on Jada Smith until Will admitted he too sought outside "entanglements." Most couples who do this just hide it well enough, and it's only a problem when one of them is caught.
Not all, very likely not even most, of course, do this, and it's not always truly mutual or healthy, but surprise surprise, not every couple wants strict monogamy. They just don't want society to judge them for it.
And this is why I have a lot of sympathy for Lori Huang, regardless - she may have been ok with some degree of non-monogamy, but I bet she didn't want it on the front page of the New York Times.
We can't know if they had a talked open relationship. It's pretty common to hear about this kind of arrangements on high-level C-suite or government positions.
Life kinda works a bit differently when most of the time you’re not spending it with your significant other. Both parties have needs, so it becomes more likely to have such arrangements and talks.
Seems more like an Offre Pubique Internationale in this case.
But now what? Will he receive a job offer from India, South Africa or Russia? I assume that he is free to live to any place of the planet that he wants if is not appreciated in US anymore, so what will be the collateral effects here?.
My grandmother was using a similar saying long before that, translated approximately: "there's never just 1 mouse in the barn". I'd bet these expressions have been common across the world for centuries (maybe substitute for local rodent).
Warren buffet didn't invent it either it's an old saying. I vaguely recall it from an insecticide commercial when I was a child but they probably didn't invent it either.
Not surprising its use has exploded in recent days..
Possibly Nathan Calvin on Twitter in August: If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
It's much much older. As a kid growing up in NY in the 90s, I heard many times the version of this saying, "one cockroach on the floor means one hundred behind the wall."
Completely tangential but I always find it interesting how different expressions become attached to specific contexts in people's heads.
"This old house as got good bones" is the realtor 'slaps roof of car' meme that seems to have caught on during the 2010s and peaked during COVID. Now I hear people mindlessly propagating it whenever they talk about renovating/buying an old home.
I'm sure that we'll be hearing this ants in the kitchen of the house with good bones thing forever now.
Fable 5.2 couldn't access the full DMN text (nor can I), but suggests the article is about "local TV journalists reacting to a report on minority hiring" and "Sanders" is probably a reporter named Bob Ray Sanders, a reporter in the region (who was later inducted to the National Association of Black Journalists' Hall of Fame). What he actually said is sadly paywalled in the archives.
They are more similar to "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action" because they include explicit low numeric information
It makes sense for cockroaches, which make it their business to hide from you.
It's not even true for ants. If you find two ants in the kitchen, they were just there by coincidence. Ants aren't concerned with whether you can see them; if they're interested in something in your kitchen, they'll show up by the hundreds to take it away, and they'll be impossible to miss.
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."
-- Bertrand Russell, 1912
Point is, if you find two ants in the kitchen it's worth to investigate if there are more.
Blindly assuming there were more, like the original quote seems to suggest, will burn you sooner or later.
It's worthless anyway. A chicken who can see the future and act on it in any way that bothers the people around it is going to be killed, and better-domesticated chickens will be bred to replace it.
The chicken had long outsourced its brain to its owners. It didn’t have to look for food or fend off enemies for generations. Its food was provided, its safety was ensured by the owner. Leaving the yard would have gotten the chicken eaten by a coyote or a stray dog.
Even the dog guarding the chickens didn’t enjoy a better fate. At the first sign of illness, its vet recommended a cost efficient putting to sleep.
Those only useful, become discarded at the end of usefulness. Those only valuable can get sold or harvested. That’s why you have to be loved. Because everyone else can just upgrade their tools.
If you find a tip of iceberg above the water, there is an iceberg under the water as well. Maybe ants analogy is better.
Jokes apart, the leaders usually require almost the same mindset of a savage sailor who is on a mission to plunder the riches from the far away lands. They break the rules to the extent possible and exhibit highest levels of survival skills. Sometimes that mindset spills into personal life.
Youtube currently has some memes about Huang. One
simple one (bit silly) was where his face was overlaid
on the Austin Powers with the fook mi and fook you or
yu; I actually liked the Austin Powers movie, but the
overlay with Huang there was .... well. Cringey ... and
quite silly. But still. It shows that people like poking
fun about that. That resonates more quickly than other
criticism. NVIDIA is always a meme. I guess they are happier
with Huang-likes-the-women meme than the "we drove up the
RAM prices and you can not do anything about it, you
slaves!" or "NVIDIA won't work on Linux", which is still
kind of true. At the least my NVIDIA card does not work
well, the firmware is never recognized. We really need to
get rid of these companies, but that's evidently not easy.
They are like a mafia sitting on top of everyone else and
parasitizing from there.
He had an affair with a customer - possibly a spy - who was pretty openly flouting US export control rules while getting the Treasury Secretary to run interference for him.
The affairs being the headline are doing a lot of work to keep focus off of the much more legally fraught issues which may be actual big boy crimes. He would have been in a pile of shit and being forced out regardless of how many employees he slept with.
He's obviously had affairs incl with employees etc. so the resignation would have to come either way. But there's such a thing as selective leaking to the press, for example initially claiming she's a spy and now after he's gone, wait maybe she's not a spy.
I don't know. Personally I find it hard to simply trust "my sources said", I usually require a little bit of hard evidence to be convinced. There could be many reasons someone gave up fighting.
Again, coming from a different society where media is full of lies, I am wondering if your journalists are really that much better.
There is an obvious pattern for these high level executive roles. They are all workaholics, they are not particularly loyal, they all have loose moral compasses, they don't have any clear line between work and their personal life, and they treat relationships like business arrangements.
This feels so common that I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family. One of the revelations about the Gates' lives was that Bill's promiscuity was apparently baked into their marriage agreement. At this level, your marriage might just be like a fixed mailing address for someone who has multiple homes.
Not to excuse this in any way. But these are the personalities of medieval lords and kings.
He would spend a week with a special friend every year (they'd hike together?), and this was in his marriage contract. That woman is now a VC. You can easily find out more if you google this.
Lots of wives would be okay with this! It isn’t a betrayal of trust, it’s not an open-ended arrangement with unknown scope and terrors, it’s plainly declared up front, it’s so infrequent that it has little to no risk of displacing the primary marriage relationship, it minimizes jealousy, it isn’t a side fling that could be stumbled across by accident in the everyday by the wife, it’s a controlled outlet for long-term desires, it’s not likely to cause financial distraction, dependency, or drain. And that’s just ninety seconds worth of solid good reasons :)
I think "lots" is vastly overstating it. Yes, there are women who would be ok with that, but in my experience they are greatly in the minority. Most women (and men to be fair) do not like if they don't have an exclusive claim on their spouse, even if it's being done in the open.
Sure, I would not lightly or unthinkingly be okay with a potential husband entering into such an arrangement, but I also wouldn’t consider anyone as a potential husband if I would never allow them it for their lack of communication groundwork or trustworthy straightforwardness. If I have so little faith in him coming home to me after a once a year camping trip that clearly never became more before me, then I have no business marrying him in the first place! Sure, I may or may not like it — this varies rather sharply based on how readily they can bear a few days of jealousy with grace and good cheer — but marriage is no more about avoiding “do not like” than it is about confirming to the handfasted stereotypes of American monogamy and cheating. One campaign trip a year is three nines of reliability with a scheduled maintenance window rather than unpredictable outages and months of undiscovered foreign key violations corrupting the relational store.
Take a lesson from tech: Three nines of uptime is quite sufficient to build something amazing and valuable to the right customers. We women (and anyone of any gender!) don’t have to implement Six Sigma to enter into a monogamous marriage marriage, but at least here in the U.S. we do care a great deal about proper outage notifications and root cause analyses and considering how to schedule and conduct future outages to minimize surprise harms. I would far rather target a couple of nines with a healthy process that doesn’t unduly harm the personnel involved than target six nines and live a dull life full of control-heavy, energy-draining grayness. Some people will just naturally hit 100% uptime without breaking a sweat; others will design and commit only to 99.0% but will do so with such grace and courtesy that an unexpected multi-month monogamy outage after years of impeccable courtesy and communication evokes compassion and patience and excitement for their return, rather than outrage and viciousness as defective coping mechanisms for their absence. (Come home soon, AO3.)
Thanks! It stemmed from a thought about how “always” is not 100.0% but more like 99% in human being things, and trying to convey that people operate at varying levels of ‘always’, which bridged sideways to six sigma monogamy. It’s going to be a fun analogy to work with for sure :)
There is something in it for the wife. The world is a bit more "House of Cards" than some people assume. Aside from the French and a few others, western cultures seem almost uniquely dishonest about the tacit assumption that successful men will have mistresses. This isn't a new thing. Warren Buffett was essentially married to two women most of his life and no one cared.
Many wives highly value the accrued status of being formally married to a high-status person. You can take half the money but the social status doesn't follow. No one cares about a billionaire divorcee with no status beyond a bank account.
I don't know about their specific arrangement, but in some relationships, having other partners is not only accepted, but actively used to reinforce the primary relationships.
If you accept your partner has those urges, you can either treat it antagonistically and have those urges become a problem in your relationship or you can absorb them into your relationship and have it be strengthened by them.
You either become the one being cheated on and weakened or the one in control with a relationship strong enough to not be threatened by some side action, which in turn makes you a rarer and more valuable mate.
Or as a less cynical take, there's also the phenomenom of compersion, the ability to feel joy from a partner's happiness with other people. If you truly care for somebody and want them to be as happy as possible, you might be willing to set your ego aside to create that experience. And of course, that sort of security is again very attractive and a rare trait in itself.
Don't assume how other people structure their relationships, don't project your values onto them. Not everyone sees things through the lens of ego, ownership and male dominance.
Not everyone has to live their life the way you see fit. I've given you an explanation of why some people structure their relationship that way, why are you reacting so defensively? Does what other adults consent to make you feel threatened? Why?
Because this is stupid. Idk where you are, but I can say that in the circles I'm in, and this spans multiple European countries, fucking around ends up in divorces when the other Partner finds out. I'm old enough to have kids and saw it and talked with other in those situations. You could be talking about some small subset of people and thats ok. But don't pretend this is somehow spread out. I saw multiple divorces, and only one where the wife staid and it was mostly because it was in the height of economic depression and she was stay at home mom. I don't care for internet points here and down votes. I would like to you to try to present your point to your wife or anybody in your circles and give me an answer.
Most relationships are as you describe. Many relationships aren't(I don't know the numbers, but I would guess somewhere between 1% to 10%, either of which I would qualify as many).
It's also extremely different to agree that some amount of extra-marital sex is OK, to being cheated on without being aware. The betrayal of trust is to me the main problem with cheaters.
>fucking around ends up in divorces when the other Partner finds out.
I don't think you've fully absorbed the point I've made. I agree with your sentence here - but I'd argue that it is a symptom of a societal construct that is counter to our biological reality which one can fix by making it so there's nothing to be found out. If you discuss rules and boundaries beforehand like emotionally mature adults, there's no element of betrayal or breach of trust.
> I would like to you to try to present your point to your wife.
I've been in my current relationship for close to two decades. Not a wife, because we like the idea of being with a person that chooses to be with one every day by their own volition, not by some legal contract rooted in patriarchal control.
While we're currently monogamous, we've went through several phases where we invited other partners into the fold, with the consent of everybody involved. Some of those were even longer-term, multi-year repeat encounters. At no point did it diminish my love for her or hers for me. To the contrary, it's made us appreciate each other more and shown us that our relationship is strong enough to prioritize each other's well-being over our jealous need for control.
> prioritize each other's well-being over our selfish egos
The desire to sleep around is obviously a desire to feed your own selfish ego.
This is where I have a problem when people try to defend this. If you’re honest that you like to sleep around and you found a partner that likes to sleep around, fine.
But the I have evolved beyond the quaint social mores of the unenlightened bit is silly.
Yeah, I edited because I realized it could come across more confrontational than I intended.
That being said, it is - whether we like it or not - an observed biological mechanism that humans, like a lot of other species, like to sleep around and that they are attracted to new sexual partners after being with the same one for a long time. [0]
Once we accept that, the question becomes one of management. Do we use our free will to override these urges to fit social norms better or or do we instead trust each other to uncouple the biology from the emotional bond? Different couples might come to different conclusions at different times, but they are both not without risks and both require thoughtful compromise and communication.
The superiority is not towards people in monogamous relationships - that's how ours is structured right now too! It is towards people that use language like "cuck", that implies somebody's worth is defined by their monogamy, language that brings all sorts of weird vibes of male ownership of female bodies and a lessening of men who do not subscribe to such views.
There's nothing wrong with either monogamy or ethical non-monogamy, just do what works for you and your partner and don't be a dick about it!
Ok we’re back to pitchforking (possible) open relationships now? You know very little about their dynamics. You lack information and frankly any justification to judge.
I'm not pitchforking the concept, if everyone involved is honest with each other.
However, the reality is the vast majority of people are not okay with open relationships. Call it 20% of relationships, which I think is generous. It's fishy that at the CEO level the percentage of these "open relationships" is close to 100%.
> I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family
But (unless "unknown" is doing a lot of work in your sentence) Huang literally said this in his letter to NVidia employees: "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you said. In the 2000-2015 timeframe, I really idolized a lot of these successful tech leaders - they seemed incredibly smart, hard-working, and talented (though also of course lucky). But over time I came to the realization that many of them just fundamentally think very differently than I do, and I view that other way of thinking with disgust. The main issue is it seems like nearly all of their relationships are transactional, and they have a lack of empathy and willingness to be ruthless that is simply anathema to me.
Jensen and Lori met in early 1980s or so when they were 17 and 19 years old respectively. Moreover they got married in 1985, 13 years before Nvidia was even founded. Quite different from Bill and Melinda hooking up after Microsoft don't you think ? Not to mention his apology.
People keep saying this like it makes it better... If I knew my partner was a serial philanderer it wouldn't make me feel great, even if said partner was worth billions.
A lot of marriages are purely for superficial image. Many people also fall out of love but stay together legally for various reasons.
Many ultra high net worth people are married purely for financial reasons. The wife gets whatever she wants but now they don't need to worry about losing control of their company, etc.
This is to say nothing of the biological differences either. Menopause hits some women extremely hard and libido is completely gone. Rather than divorce or mutually suffer, they open up the marriage.
There's this little part of me wondering if this was all known about for a long time, and the sudden release of information about all three women is coordinated for some nefarious business reason.
Jensen had the choice of coming clean like this, where half of Silicon Valley is rallying to his defence and he remains a multi-billionaire (and maybe saves his marriage), or having this exposed by the new Congress, at which point all manner of punitive countermeasures against Nvidia are on the table.
Currently, Energy & Commerce and Oversight & Investigations are asleep. Come January, they won't be.
Huang, like a lot of Silicon Valley, thought their guy would stay in power and protect them.
better question would be why is it coming out before trump's visit to China next week, let's not forget the first story was about Chinese spy, it's a bit of strange coincidence
there is possibility someone overplayed their cards and didn't think of possible consequences, OTOH maybe they wanted to kill two birds with one stone
Powerful men cheating is often normalized in their immediate environment. Jensen was seen with both women many times. It's the Chinese spy and export ban skirt angle that made it untenable.
Cf. the open secret nature around the entire Epstein cabal.
The affairs were probably open secrets to those high up for a while. Once Jensen's reputation passes a perceived point of no return, it makes sense for the other higher ups to leak everything they know to the media to shorten the duration of the scandal. The worst has happened, their action will not change, so no need to drag it out.
> and the sudden release of information about all three women is coordinated for some nefarious business reason.
This framing is plain silly because it ignores the sequence of events. NVidia conducted an investigation after Huang admitted to having an affair with someone the US Government believed to be a Chinese spy, and in any case NVidia sold billions worth of embargoed chips to that company (and now it seems we have some proof per another HN front page story that the latest leading Chinese open source models were trained on embargoed NVidia chips). So then the other 2 instances of infidelity came out in the course of the investigation - of course as they definitely should, otherwise it would be a really shitty investigation! And sure, it was known by at least some number of other NVidia employees that Huang had relationships with subordinates (at least according to reporting). But that doesn't change the fact that Huang's relationship with Alice Huang was not known (and in fact denied by Jensen Huang) before this all went down.
It's not like Huang's 3 paramours got together before the investigation started in some sort of nefarious plot.
With this kind of status and notoriety, so many eyes are on you, it's hard to keep this a secret from everyone, especially when it's happening in the workplace.
trump is visiting China next week and the first story was about mistress being Chinese spy, so it makes you wonder whether this benefits China, Trump or US interests (don't confuse the latter two, they are two completely different things), I don't think China would leak "Chinese spy" story unless they are playing some serious 4D chess, which leaves you with two main options
I always got the impression that it was somewhat of an open secret that most billionaires had soft harems of sorts, usually tacitly understood but never publicly addressed, and that the apparent outrage at affairs/scandals at this level is a sort of charade of allegiance to social norms to enforce the facade that standards of propriety apply even at the highest levels.
You’ve misread the room. Absolutely no one cares about the infidelity. One of the affairs has been public knowledge for months.
The outrage is about new reporting that one affair was with a potential Chinese asset, and the other affairs are more entertainment and/or evidence of bad leadership than anything else.
> JH is under suspicion of smuggling sanctioned military-related equipment to his country’s prime foreign adversary.
by "his country" you mean Taiwan/China or US? not sure ethnic Chinese born in Taiwan (China) holding Taiwanese/Chinese citizenship, see foreign adversaries as clearly as you see it
I think it's little bit more complicated for people with Chinese ethnicity (no matter whether from China or Taiwan) than you paint it, seems he had zero problems to have affair with mainland Chinese woman rather than Taiwanese (and he certainly knew she is not Singaporean unless he is very stupid), world ain't black and white as some US politicians trying to make it.
He's not being investigated for anything. The government did not even sanction the company and woman he was sleeping with, although there are allegations that she was selling GPU cycles to China, that's not him doing it.
I think this is all staged: media acts like average Joe cars, I doubt it. He obviously hurt the wrong ppl, the Chinese spy thing has too many red flags … they say “alleged” and the proceed talking for 25 minutes as if it’s true. Supposedly the secret service the CIA and who knows who else is looking at this for over a year, but they can’t decide which way is it… so yeah timing and all… the board of NVIDIA apparently is the only who cares with who he sleeps so much, but the other theory is that someone via blackmailing them? Anyway, they made their decision, now they have to live with the consequences.
In terms of facts we have someone who was effectively fired no apparent reason, in 48 hours. Scary.
It’s very simple: billionaires and politicians spend a lot of time trying to control our lives. This is often done through a moral lens: “you can’t do this thing because it’s immoral” where thing can range from making a personal medical decision, marrying the person you love, singing to children, playing on a sports team, or going to the bathroom.
So when one of these representatives of the elite turns out to be not quite so moral, we take special interest in pointing it out until the end of time. If Huang managed a department store you wouldn’t hear much about it.
It's a concern, but this concern has no place in business. What's happening in a marriage is not our problem. So yes, it's definitely more a north american thing (and I'm in a long term, married relationship, so you last sentence definitely shows how immature your views are).
"Yes, he has a long string of theft convictions, cheats at cards, and beats his wife, but I am totally surprised that he defrauded our company for millions of dollars..."
It is not a north american thing, it is a character thing.
You're substituting different actions. There's no reasonable justification for "beats his wife". "Sleeping with someone who isn't their wife" could have justifications - you don't know anything about their marriage.
I am pretty sure that "beating his wife" is criminal in most countries while "sleeping with someone that is not his wife" is not. That is material difference right there.
You words are doing a lot of work blurring the difference here.
1920 -- your definition of " not long ago" is very different from mine.
And about equating "remain on the books" to actually enforced law that is relevant in real life: sure, but I'm not going to waste my time convincing you otherwise.
I think you're drawing a bit of a straw-man fallacy there.
We're talking about current events - and hence current social norms and mores (although I do concede there's a spectrum there - and that American culture still does have a bit of Puritan culture embedded in it).
Slavery is illegal in most places in 20206 - but sure - it wasn't illegal 100 years ago.
Just like homosexuality was illegal some 50 years ago - but isn't illegal today (in most places).
But in 2026 - if Jensen Huang (or anybody else) has multiple consensual relationships with lots of adult women (or men) - that's their business. We might have our own personal views on whether we would have relationships with lots of women (or men) - but that's a different thing.
It's very much a North American thing - likely related to the Puritans sects that founded the colonies. I'm not saying it's good or bad - simply pointing out the obvious.
It's also this incredible dichotomy - American culture is filled wit hyper-sexualised imagery in fashion, movies, TV shows - yet they still have an incredible stigma about public discussions on sexuality, public breastfeeding, or people showing open same-sex affection.
Quite frankly, what Jensen Huang, or Elon Musk, or Miley Cyrus or Donald Trump, or Jerome Powell or anybody else chooses to do about their sex life behind closed doors is their problem. Unless they come to you for relationship advice - you probably also don't know half the story.
I can also say with almost biblical certainty that none of the aforementioned people have come to any HN-ers for relationship advice....
Yet the sheer level of public discourse about Jenson Huang's marriage is insane.
Now, the GPU and export controls - that's a different matter entirely - and I can see how that might be pertinent to business discussions, and I can see why analysts would be interested in that. But we have barely any information on that. Nobody seems to comment on that?
Also to use your language "it's a character thing" - I should point out that it wasn't too long ago that a male being affectionate with another male was a "character" thing - see Alan Turing? Or Oscar Wilde? Or Tchaikovsky?
Yet if you saw another man holding hands with another man - would you say "it's a character thing"?
Unless I knew them personally, it's none of my business - I'm certainly not going to walk up to a stranger and go "Oi mate, you can't be doing that, it's a character thing!" Likewise if I saw people in open or polyamorous relationships (which I hear are a thing) - unless they were my friends and had asked for my counsel or wisdom - I'll let them walk their own walk. It's not my place to judge them - stick, eye, plank and all that. And relationships are incredibly complex things, and we often don't know the half of it.
Suppose they were non-exclusive in their marriage. It’s not something you and I know (and it’s not our business unless they told us).
You don’t know if they’re, but you’re making a judgment. I don’t care what you think about it, it’s just disgusting to think someone’s sexual relationships are of your concern.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Western societies are more accepting of queer people now, on average. But the desire to judge people based on who they sleep with hasn’t gone anywhere. 30 years ago someone would say it’s of “social concern” or a CEO visits gay bathhouses.
Repeat after me: people’s sexual lives are not anyone’s business.
It doesn't require a very strange chain of reasoning. Lots of people would agree that:
- promising monogamy to someone who loves you, and then breaking that promise, is bad and provides negative evidence about your character
and
- if you're the leader of a very powerful entity, your character is relevant even to people who don't know you personally.
There's also just the fact that when someone is famous, and it emerges publicly that they've broken some norm, there's not really a fully neutral option available to us. We can condemn their behaviour (reinforcing the norm), defend it (weakening the norm), or ignore it (also somewhat weakening the norm, especially if we make a point of ignoring it and suggest that others are silly for caring).
I'm certainly not making a statement about Huang here, more of a general one, but generally speaking, when you're making judgements about infidelity as someone not part of that relationship you're working off very limited information, doubly so for a public figure that you don't know personally.
Obviously it's somewhat complicated when subordinates and Chinese spies are involved, and I'm not condoning infidelity, but IMO infidelity is a reason for a spouse to be justifiably outraged, not the public at large.
If somebody promises to be with one person and only one person and they violate such trust that causes me to doubt their integrity. Couple that with it not just being random women but a spy and people below him in the company (a clear me too situation) and I lose all trust in him.
Before you or somebody says they may have had an open relationship then why did he apologize for hurting his wife? Was he lying? If so, then he has betrayed our trust.
People are enjoying the drama because Joe Public love watching a train wreck when it’s rich guys being immoral. But I’m not sure people actually care about it.
However the Democrats definitely care about the illegal distribution and potential national security issue. Which is why the Chinese affair was only an issue after the midterms despite being known long before then.
Americans will also balk at sexual relations with a professional underling where it’s difficult to establish whether truly unconditional consent was given.
In my humble opinion the issue shouldn't be their perceived promiscuity, but their bad judgement in sleeping with a person from a client company (that might be affiliated with a country you can't export your products too), and colleagues that are not your peers.
For me, this is a lapse of judgement for the CEO and one of the founders of one of the biggest corporation's globally.
And perhaps creating a web of funding with clients that boosts the world economy to the point that other services may suffer, and that part of this web is selling a product illegally, and that when this comes to light questions will be asked, including how much of the web is funded illegally (maybe not much) and perhaps the new management will disentangle this web and the butterfly flaps it's wings.
I think there's a lot more shady stuff that's going to come out. The XBOX deal had a lot of intrigue. Especially now that we know the types of behaviors Bill, Jensen engaged in.
The outrage is a tool and there's always competition for power. "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion", because suspicion, whether it's based on genuine outrage or not, is a liability that will be explored.
I wonder if he followed a modern trend and was on TRT, it seems like a pattern for celebrity/powerful men of age these days: get on TRT, get in shape, cheat on your wife.
Alice Huang (the Chinese spy) and Kimberly Powell (the underling) are both married. We don't know the identity of the third woman yet, but I'd give it ~80% probability she's married as well.
The mental gymnastics people are doing here to save face for Huang.
I don’t care if it’s 100 employees at this point, the big topic here should be that he is not to be trusted. He quite literally has been spoon feeding China behind the US’s back. He deceived the entire country, he’s a con man.
The relationships are just an awful aside of what’s turning out to be a very bigger concern about national security.
Tbh i do not understand the drama … not the first ceo to had affairs and shady deals, It feels more like the powers at be want to cut down Nvidia support to open models via removing the guy at the top due his liability with hot Asian girls but come on. Palantir had worst ceo for instance and nobody raises an eyebrow to name one
Who the NVDA board wants answering questions in some inevitable hearings when the other side of all the money behind AI is trying to push for controls on Chinese models.
Edit: A little more context. Because it doesn't matter if Alice Huang is a Chinese spy. She's also held titles at Megaspeed, a Singapore based company that legitimately rents GPU time to Chinese model providers. The big money AI people would be pushing for more controls on that legit path also.
Exactly. If on the other hand he would have been visiting an island to have 'affairs' with under age girls or boys, then there would be no consequences. The US law must be respected.
When you see two ants in the kitchen there's likely many more.
Huang has been a great boss and steward of Nvidia, but ultimately falling for subordinates is grave enough, adding alleged Chinese spies, and allegations you sold Tencent billions of hardware through shady Singaporean companies for which the alleged spy worked etc and the board had no other options.
At this point it would be surprising if what we know is likely a small part and the Nvidia board saw enough very quickly to ask for his head.
There's no need to look. Jensen Huang might have been great for his shareholders, but he sure has been screwing the rest of us over hard.
He was responsible for hanging consumers out to dry by destroying the consumer PC market in chase of more profit. He is gambling with the world economy. He appears on interviews being a dick about all of this.
So I'd say this is very much in character for him.
I understand this is true in a strictly legal and financial sense. I hope you are simply pointing out a factual statement and not bootlicking for companies with business practices that make your own life worse?
>I understand this is true in a strictly legal and financial sense.
"Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business. Getting salty because a company decided to switch to a more profitable customer, while understandable, is also totally unreasonable. It's like getting mad at a band for selling $1000 concert tickets after they made it big. Doubly so when the product segment being affected is essentially a luxury product to begin with.
You're not really arguing anything here except that greed is expected, which is fair but not logical in the sense that, there is nothing about a business that says it has to operate this way, and no law that says being a fair and good entity in our community is necessarily going to bankrupt them. It's a choice leadership makes, for obvious and boring reasons, to fuck over the general community.
Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.
Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
The sad part is that we simply don't expect it anymore, because we no longer see businesses as part of our communities. Just as profit engines, with no other goal.
Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
>Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.
>Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
No, in both cases they'll just get scalped. If you're selling something for $1 that the market is willing to pay $10 for, the market will find a way to equalize this.
>Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
Give me a break. This might work if it's walmart replacing a dozen local shops with a giant big box store on the edge of town, but GPUs are already a niche luxury product. If there's one sector where it's justified for companies to make outsized profits on, it's this. Otherwise it's as out of touch as getting mad at Hermes for selling $10k hand bags.
Yes so thinking purely in corporate thoughts, the supply is the issue on concerts and GPUs. For supply constrained items like concert space, or theme parks, other countries where profit isn't the dominant motive will sell tickets via lotteries or first in, first serve, ID linked and no reselling.
For the GPU situation, consumer GPU supply is constrained because demand isn't being met. It's not being met (in my understanding) because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI. The solution would have been to create and supply two different verticals independently, and to open the ecosystem up for other manufacturers to help meet B2B supply. There is precedent for this going in different directions, but it was a choice nVidia made to squeeze the market for every penny. Extremely good business. Shareholders are stoked, a fantastic win for the stock market.
I can't worry about all things but since you bring hermes bags up, yes that is also a pretty clear sign of a perverse economy. Selling an at-cost $10 bag for $10,000 is pretty disappointing behaviour by the seller and the buyer. The seller does it because they can, and the buyer does it because they don't mind getting fleeced. The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
This is the world we live in, I get that, but it's no less disappointing to see the majority of people get ditched for the sake of the shareholders time and time again. If you feel that this isn't what's happening then I would be interested in that, otherwise we might just disagree on some base principles which is fine but probably not worth debating.
>For supply constrained items like concert space, or theme parks, other countries where profit isn't the dominant motive will sell tickets via lotteries or first in, first serve, ID linked and no reselling.
How are you going to enforce this for GPUs? Even if you somehow add the remote tracking systems that AI safety proponents have been asking for, you can still make a handy profit renting out your GPU to people who want to play gta6 or whatever.
>because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI
Maybe if you need CUDA specifically for AI workloads. For gaming AMD or intel is perfectly serviceable. It's not as good as a RTX 5090, but again that's like complaining you can only afford a LV bag rather than a Hermes (the embarrassment!)
>The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
Only if you're only interested in carrying stuff, but not if you're interested in status signaling. The same applies to some extent for concerts. How many people are going for the experience of nosebleed seats (or standing room), overpriced food, and other travel hassles, vs the social cachet of being to a limited concert?
> "Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business.
That is how immoral people run a business. But there are a great many businesses in this country run by people who (correctly) recognize that there are higher obligations than the law and making a profit. Treating your customers fairly, making good products, doing things in an ethical way... these are not optional to a well-adjusted person, even if not required by the law.
Continuing to serve your loyal customers even has benefits above and beyond the intangible. When the bubble pops (and it will pop), Nvidia's sales to AI customers will crater. When that day comes, they will come to regret chasing away all the customers who would still be giving them business if they had not been cast aside as "not profitable enough, sorry guys".
>That is how immoral people run a business. But there are a great many businesses in this country run by people who (correctly) recognize that there are higher obligations than the law and making a profit. Treating your customers fairly, making good products, doing things in an ethical way... these are not optional to a well-adjusted person, even if not required by the law.
Higher obligations like... letting sweaty PC gamers run GTA 6 at 4K? I'm only half joking with the characterization, but AI at least have a good story going for it, productivity gains, competition with china, etc. What does gaming have going for it? For a slightly less sympathitic example, imagine there's some water shortage and datacenters[1] bought up all the water rights, forcing golfers to play on brown golf courses. Are we really supposed to be mad at either the datacenters or the farmers that sold the water rights, because they weren't serving the "higher obligations" of golfers wanting green golf courses?
[1] yes, I know they don't actually use that much water.
>When the bubble pops (and it will pop), Nvidia's sales to AI customers will crater. When that day comes, they will come to regret chasing away all the customers who would still be giving them business if they had not been cast aside as "not profitable enough, sorry guys".
As much gamers would love this revenge fantasy to happen it's not going to happen. I wager there's approximately zero brand loyalty in the PC gaming market. If nvidia is going to lose customers, it's because they're behind technologically.
It was not advancing good story. If you listened to CEO it was advancing pretty horrifying story of obsoleting people and centralizing all power into their own hands.
A handful of monopolies or oligopolies dealing with each other and cutting the rest of the world out is a classic example of market failure. It's not supply and demand determining the right price, because that requires a fair and competitive market, something that market fundamentalists always overlook.
Whether the fabs may be maxed out or not doesn't mean anything outside of the handful of companies that secured a multi-year contract with the chip makers. How much some company charges for rented GPU capacity just shows us that GPU prices are exorbitantly high, not that the market is competitive nor fair. Acknowledging widely publicized multi-year contracts between the chip makers, hyperscalers, and AI labs isn't a "conspiracy."
I don't get this. What's up with all the overzealous AI proponents using aggressive deny, deflect, discredit tactics against any criticism of the world's most powerful companies acting against the public interest? What's in it for them?
He and NVIDIA should never have been in a position where they can single-handedly dictate where the world's GPU supplies go to. They should never have been able to form a circle jerk economy with a handful of hyperscalers and AI labs. They should never have been a chokepoint for the entire personal computing industry, which is being wiped out right now due to the artificial shortage of critical components.
The lack of regulation and/or enforcement has brought about this completely textbook case of market failure with damaging consequences for the broader industry and society as a whole. It was the responsibility of governments to prevent this exact situation.
But here we are. Jensen Huang and NVIDIA brought themselves to a situation where they are responsible. They should be held accountable for the negative externalities they cause.
Last I checked one can buy personal computers just fine at a moderate price increase.
You cannot buy flagship Nvidia consumer GPUs, and the next level down, the 5080, currently retails approximately at a 100% price increase.
Low VRAM GPUs such as the 5070 at 12GB are not affected much, retailing at 15% above MSRP.
Absent another massive expansion in AI demand due to new real applications, we are probably going to see affordable high-end consumer products in 2028.
Hardly the drama you make it sound like, and calling for regulation or legal consequences seems overblown to me.
He had very little say in the forces that "destroyed the PC market". When he co-founded NVidia, it wasn't to become a geopolitical power player - no one could have predicted that 3d accelerator cards for gaming on PCs would have that kind of impact. If anything, NVidia has made some questionable business moves to not abandon their initial market, such as trying to prevent crypto mining on the cheaper cards meant for gaming.
His successor, however, probably got in position deliberately seeking geopolitical power. They're going to be worse in every way (except cheating on their spouse with subordinates, they're probably not going to do that).
I click on these ant kitchen people expecting some new account with 3 karma, nope, old ass accounts with lots of karma. Humans and bots converging in functionality.
Out of curiosity and for the lack of a better thing to do with my time, I prompted both gpt and opus several times to write an HN comment about Jensen Huang's affairs to see if either of them would include the ants thingy. They didn't
I can't say for certain if I just didn't use the right model, but I also wouldn't be surprised if this is just people parroting each other to look smart. After all, people did it for decades before llms were a thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is it so bad? He founded one of history's most successful companies in one of the most exciting sectors on the planet and ran it for 33 years. He's 63.
The only thing that would actually be bad is if his wife left him, which we don't know is happening yet. Some women accept the "risk" (to put it tastelessly) of marrying a hundred-billionaire, and stick it out.
Depends on what he values, I don't think I'd be any happier with 150bn than maybe 100m, they're both large enough that I couldn't possibly see myself spending it. Not with this specific case, but I often see people saying/implying people must be happy because they're rich/founded a successful company/achieved something great/<insert desirable thing here>.
I guess people often think the things they imagine making themselves happy would make someone else who has that happy, and I just don't think that's the case that often. I don't think money buys happiness after a point, a certain amount gets rid of a lot of discomfort and stress and brings relief and security, a bit more can buy some happiness, after that it's just number go up.
For sure, he's probably deeply unhappy about his legacy. I just mean "this is how it could all end" implies something a little more dramatic than that. While money doesn't buy happiness after a certain amount, it does buy the satisfaction of supporting your future generations. And that's not even to mention what he built.
Exactly, a lot of people (especially those who have plenty of material wealth) focus much more on legacy. Here we're watching Jensen's legacy turn into that of an incompetent and possibly a traitor, on top of being morally bankrupt. That can't feel good. It will color everything he has ever said or done, I'm sure you can find plenty of his quotes that will now seem ridiculous.
Despite not being a full subscriber to the "death of the author" concept, I do think we tend to ironically lean a little too petty/unrelated in our criticisms of big names when we discover their sexual sins, and I think this is an example of that. Yes, I'm sure you could find some quotes in there that are hypocritical given his sexual conduct, but I can't find one on an initial review. I think sometimes this can kind of harm the legitimate criticism by association.
I say this as somebody who has never had any admiration for this guy (not because of a specific grievance, but because I don't follow tech leadership and am generally pessimistic about them).
You're 1) projecting that it is my opinion, and not my estimation of public opinion; and 2) seemingly unfamiliar with how most people think - "we" do not lean toward anything but laziness, and this is how lazy thought works.
That being said his early life is crazy enough that a movie could save him. Lazy thinking is fickle, after all.
Who was that comedian that said something along of "I'd rather be depressed in an Rolls Royce than in a Honda"... Money doesn't buy happiness, but it removes the worry of where you are going to sleep tonight.
In its day, Britain imprisoned Oscar Wilde and castrated the brilliant Alan Turing for homosexuality, driving him to his death. Now we look back on this in horror as an example of collective madness.
So how will we look back a couple of decades from now on the atmosphere of the 21st-century woke party committee, which, on the word of a spurned woman, fired the brilliant biologist David Sabatini and destroyed the visionary founder of a company over extramarital affairs?
I'm not sure if we should compare Jensen Huang and David Sabatini.
I have a feeling that if this was only related to affairs Jensen would not have quit his job. Musk has a reputation as a playboy and that does not seem to concern investors. The American people also happily voted an (alleged?) womanizer into the oval office.
Most likely Jensen/Nvidia has some skeletons in the closet and him leaving is mutually beneficial, to the company and to him as a person.
He has exposed his genitals to a flight attendant without her consent and then tried to bribe her to keep quiet about it by offering to buy her a horse.
Interesting to see that the sanctity of the marriage bed and allegations of espionage are now a "woke party committee" invention according to billionaire worshippers.
"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice."
- Thomas Sowell
What I love about this whole thing is how many different ways there are to offend one’s sensibilities.
There’s the obvious one of cheating on one’s spouse.
If you don’t find that immoral or just don’t think it’s that bad, there’s the massive ethical issue of having a sexual relationship with a subordinate. And if you don’t care about the ethics of it, it’s still a problem of it influencing business decisions.
And if none of that gets you, there’s the whole spy angle. National security is a pretty good reason to frown on this. And even if you don’t care about that, there’s the corporate espionage angle: how much info made its way to their Chinese competitors?
If not a single one of those makes you think maybe there’s some merit to his ouster, and you compare the situation to Alan Effin Turing, you’ve lost the plot.
At the current rate of disclosure Huang is going to be revealed to have had an affair with every woman in the world by 2038. It’s vital that we build out infrastructure to support this if we don’t want to be left behind.
At least we’ve now passed the tipping point where the majority of affairs are domestic. Some country out there is going to achieve HSM (Huang Second Marriage) and it’s vital to future prosperity that we make sure it’s the US.
"Claude, build me a website that tracks with whom Jensen Huang had an affair yet! Register the domain hasjensenhuanghadanaffair.with and treat GETs on subdirectories as names for queries, like hasjensenhuanghadanaffair.with/JaneDoe should display whether he had an affair with Jane Doe."
the public discourse around this thing and the moralizing reminds me of the Norm Macdonald bit about Tiger Woods.
"What? I don't believe you! Are you telling me, are you trying to tell me that that guy , worth 6 billion, you're telling me that the world's greatest athlete over there, Tiger Woods -- you're telling me that that guy, that super handsome charismatic dude likes to lie down with ladies?
I think it's easy not to seek women but when they throw themselves at you that's a different story... Maybe if the risk of adultery is too high it's better to get a divorce and stay divorced.
in all seriousness though, what is going on? everything here feels well timed and coordinated. were the powers that be just waiting for US midterms to pass? is there any relationship to the anthropic IPO? my tin foil hat is going to be working overtime these next few days
I mean it’s just much more of a favorable political environment for the board to investigate Huang. And journalists know that if there’s smoke, there’s likely fire. So it seems like a pretty natural pile-on if anything.
It is kinda weird that Jensen decided to resign so quickly though. I would’ve expected a longer investigation period involving both the board and Congress.
Democrats take charge
IPO almost out the door
Bubble about to pop
What people (and nations) would be able to come out clean in front of their audiences from the fallout of the above if the catalyst was Huang having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, being interrogated by Warren, and the woke forcing him out of the company he built (whose interim CEO is female)
There’s a thread through all of that that props up a significant portion of Silicon Valley elite’s worldview…
Just my opinion here, spy is probably fine, coworker is big no no. If I got a spy to bang, after it's done I'll publicly praise her on Twitter to thank her for the good time (assuming it is, otherwise I will have give advice) and tag my wife too so we can actually try the tricks at home but this time with true love. If a female coworker enters a meeting room alone with me, I'll insist that she keep the door behind her open so everyone can supervise what we are doing.
It's kinda pity. Mr. Huang seemed a nicer guy than the other CEOs, less dicky, trying to be useful etc. But then maybe that's why the other CEOs act like they do, a way to filter out the less loyal members from the company board. If Mr. Huang survives this, maybe he should get rid of whoever supported his ousting from the board, wasting money to breed a coup always burdens earning potential.
I should've worded my post differently. Jensen had a fast rise as a household name and the attention that came with it. Before 2020 I doubt more than 2% of the population could've named the CEO of Nvidia.
To be known by 2% of US Population as a business leader is by all means a household name. What then happened is more like superstar status akin to Steve Jobs. You simply can't rise higher than that.
Sure, but jail time for bypassing the export ban can definitely make it harder to use the money. Then again, given his affiliation with the POTUS he probably won't get jail time.
To a certain point I don't really care about how many subordinates it ends up being (something tells me there are more), but it does make all of the grindset quotes CEOs like Huang barf up all the more laughable.
> “I work every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t work. And if I’m not working, I’m thinking about work.”
> “I wake up at 5am, and the moment I wake up, I start working… I’m asleep probably by 9:30pm.
A lot of people have said Nvidia are crazy to get rid of Huang, that he's a singular irreplaceable talent. What if, perhaps, he's not all he's made out to be?
He very clearly isn't fully dedicated to his work, given his multiple affairs with his employees. Someone that was _actually_ laser focused on their company would, you know, not sleep with employees.
I think this is a weird angle. A man's unfaithfulness might very well be correlated with failures in his responsibilities as a leader, but the simple idea of working hard doesn't seem like one of them. In fact, if I may say something a little eyebrow-raising, that particular quality might even be inversely correlated...
We can find so much to criticize without stretching.
He's bush league compared to Elon Musk who runs 6 companies simultaneously (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, Boring, xAI) yet finds time to father at least 14 kids with at least 4 different women!
Destroying 1 trillion in value and stealing the company from the immigrant who built it from nothing literally started on a napkin in Denny’s, actual American Dream level founding story is asinine over gossip and so far empty spy accusations.
Rule 1: don't sleep with employees. It's incredibly toxic to corporate culture.
This shouldn't need explaining to people who are so intelligent, and the fact that it does means we have serious work to do in this industry, particularly in SV.
He likes the ladies. I would not be surprised if a
plush teddy bear with his face will be for sale -
rumour has it the ladies would want such a teddy
bear with that Huang face. (Or whatever it is that
makes him appeal to the ladies, I would not know.)
Jensen must be realy good at negotiating pre fuctual agreements, which he did while bieng under constant observation, nvidia budgeted 4 million a year for his personal security, and he will travel and be surrounded by personal staff, and co workers almost 24 hr's a day.
So this was all out in the 'open', which some of the pics verrify. The real questions are, why now?, and will he take Elon up on the offer,'very honored to have him', work at spacex.
Good lord can Americans please be not so darn weird and prude around that topic. As long as it's consensual and legal, why do you all think it's even remotely acceptable to police what grown-up people get up to in their bed (or hotel) rooms.
Signed, a German (the country that Walmart, among other reasons, lost because they wrecked their public image trying to police relationships between employees)
At how many $billion of market value should a board just figure that it's a cost of doing business to hire retired spooks to keep track of the CEO's personal life, and ensure that he has a pipeline of well-paid, background-checked, NDA-signed mistresses available to divert his eyes from the employees and spies?
Parrots another article - even w ", Report Says" as the end of the headline.
The original article is from Reuters, partially written by this woman below whose history is all Washington stories then bam 4 articles on Nvidia and tech.
It all lining up perfectly with their quarterly earnings call does seem like a bit of a strange coincidence at the very least.
These are also not actually new developments, but years old. So they could have easily been stockpiled ahead of time, ready to deploy when opportune. Or maybe that's just standard when you're high profile enough? It's like accumulating and strategically burning 0 days. Or trading them for that matter.
Or at least the original report was like this. These newer ones are perfectly well explained by opportunism imo, if one is to believe that the anonymous sources really are company internal.
> lining up perfectly with their quarterly earnings call
Availability heuristic. A short seller was writing about Nvidia's China-disclosure problem in May. Huang's affair with Ms. Huang came out before Halloween. If one month before earnings is fair game, then you're going to have a lot of conspiracies to clean up.
It's a 3 week window each time each between announcement of meeting and actual meeting, not a month, and the May case does fall into it too. But I do get your point.
US elites get off on destroying people who do good for the country. This also benefits China so the Chinese government works with them to do this occasionally which they did in this case.
He’s no longer CEO which is what China wanted, but US elites can still destroy him even more and the people around him.
In a way, these multiple affairs helps him. "Hey I wasn't knowingly having an affair with a spy, I was just fucking every moving body and when you do that, one of them turned out to be a bad apple".
This seems like a coordinated hit, slowly releasing more and more information. What's really going on?
The better metaphor is "where there's smoke, there's fire."
Three different news orgs have reported the different affairs.
Yes, one investigation begets others. Also, high profile witnesses come forward voluntarily once the screen is lifted on any unrelated investigation, but not typically before.
I guess nobody cared about the guy who made the chips for video games .. but now he's the guy who runs AI. Much more enticing for news.
More importantly than video games versus AI, he's not the guy that runs the company that nearly all of America's economic growth is built upon.
I honestly don't care about Jensen Huang. The C-suites get too much credit. Who are the engineers that proposed the gpgpu architecture, CUDA, or the addition of tensor cores?
Yeah. While we're rolling out the billionaire taxes, we should make sure the hard working engineers in the trenches get their fair share of Chinese spies too.
Workers of the world unite! Seize the means of (re)production!
I mean, when AI is a potential weapon or national security issues, yea it makes a lot more sense that the news along with everyone else would care.
"where someone benefits from the fire, there's arson"
Here it seems the dude was just lobbling molotov cocktails at his own house until people started to notice. The conspiracy, if there is one, is what other folks who knew beforehand got out of him before it was made public, not why everyone is now pointing out shit is on fire for him.
Dont mess up with the intelligence community. He should have talked more to Jack Ma.
> What's really going on?
A lesson, apparently, for everyone asking "what the big deal is".
If ever you wanted to understand the meaning of the word "liability", here it is.
"Coordinated hits", as you put it, have as their prerequisite the creation of a "liability".
Journalism plus circumstances loosening tongues and reducing the downside of being truthful.
As the British police are fond of saying in cold case appeals: allegiances shift.
As it turns out, Huang was a fallible human being.
So is Musk. So were Gates and Bezos
Almost like being a billionaire requires being a terrible person willing to take advantage of others to get ridiculously too far ahead.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6688834/
> Almost like being a billionaire requires being a terrible person willing to take advantage of others to get ridiculously too far ahead.
Turns out that taxing their wealth is an intervention.
We need to do it if only for their own good to save them from the pressures that cause them to act increasingly antisocial.
Are Patrick and John Collison terrible people? My impression is quite the opposite; they're smart, hard working, and care deeply about making the world a better place.
There's a Canadian billionaire who is famously always donating to hospitals and suchlike. He's had tens of thousands of employees for decades and I've never heard anyone say anything bad about him.
I know another billionaire in Vancouver who isn't known for donations. Actually most people don't know he's a billionaire. He is generous though; he just insists on being anonymous when he gives large amounts.
I suspect the issue is less "billionaires are horrible people" and more "the highest profile individuals from any group tend to be the narcissists".
I think it's clear that rhetorically you can't single out individuals without proof but at the same time it's also fair to say there is just a lack of information.
The argument that, for the most part, you need to extract from and exploit others to get to this level of wealth is relatively strong and has correlates with other negative behaviours I would say is the core issue at play here.
It's a useless reddit trope. As usual, humans are complex, and billionaires are no different. Look at Mark Cuban for example, he is trying to bring affordable medicines to common people in USA (I don't know the finer details). Or Jim Simons, who for all accounts did a decent bit of philanthropy and provided funding for academic research.
It sounds like it’s a bad idea to have a single fallible human be “the face of the AI book powering the US economy” as the NYTimes is calling Jensen.
Better Jensen than Sam or Dario.
One affair always brings up other affairs out of the closet. Same rule goes for harassment and abuse claims.
That’s what is going on.
Yep. Maybe the other parties thought they had a special thing with him and now realize they're just another body? That makes people vindictive and willing to talk.
His security detail is also no longer worried about retribution and are likely complying with an internal investigation.
It's very likely his affairs were simply open secrets within the C suite.
Not even. Credibility is one thing. If people wanted to out him but were afraid, the time to be believed is now. The other is just that everyone is looking now and with all this attention more things come out.
> the time to be believed is now.
We're not talking about sexual violence or harassment though, it's not about “being believed”.
You think people don't deny consensual affairs, and especially consensual affairs with subordinates?
... what?
Of course they do, but they don't usually deny it against the other party in the affair, they deny it to their boss, their wife, whoever they have a liability to, so it's a different situation entirely.
Not sure what the relevance of that distinction is but… sure…
The affairs he had ( revealed so far at least ) weren't with junior people - they were also exec's so I don't think there is any suggestion of abuse of power here.
It's much more likely that some people knew and journalists went around asking people.
It's surprising how far tittle-tattle can travel.
Powell didn't join Nvidia as exec though. She originally joined Nvidia in a business development role, before being promoted to her current role in 2017
That's long enough ago that it seems likely that Huang got to know her in her current role. But if the affair started earlier than 2017, there is the suggestion of abuse of power. Not with Powell as victim, but everyone else who hoped to get that role instead of her
Anything is possible. But in these scenarios I think it's wise to apply the following 2 principles.
1. Stick to the facts - speculation helps no-one.
2. Don't assume to fight on behalf of people you don't know.
For example there appears to be an assumption that his wife has been deeply wronged and she is the victim. This may well be the case. but it also might not be. That part of this story is a private matter for them and not helped by speculation and assumptions.
In fact I'd go further - you have in effect just accused Powell of being promoted by sleeping with the boss based entirely on speculation. Not sure that's helpful either.
Jensen named his wife and family as victims in his apology letter. I see no reason not to believe him. Under what circumstances might a person's spouse not be a victim of the person's extramarital affairs??
If they knew and condoned it, for one. A public apology letter is a face-saving exercise and does not necessarily express the truth.
She might be a victim following the publicity. Or many other reasons, really. I am not saying she is, but in some relationships, what you’re allowed to do and what you’re allowed to let the world know are different things.
He might also feel he needed to do it for many reasons, some more self-serving than others.
I largely agree. At this stage we don't known enough to tell who is a victim here. We likely will never know for sure, nor do we have a right to demand to know
My speculation is purely for its explaining or predictive power on the question why all of this is coming out at once, and who's behind revealing all this. I favor the "conspiracy" version (someone wants him gone and exposes his real secrets in the most damaging way). But if we consider that this might all be organically triggered by the revelation of the spy affair we can't discount that the numerically largest group that feels wronged by his affairs might be employees that were disadvantaged whenever affair partners got special treatment
The affair partners don’t even have to actually get special treatment. The perception that it happened is enough.
Shielding Powell from that implication is _why Huang has an obligation not to sleep with her._
Whether or not it’s the case, if the behavior is known to others in the company it also creates a hostile work environment for ambitious female employees who are not at Powell’s level but hope to reach it.
Regarding his wife, I agree. He and his wife are both smart capable people. They may have worked our certain relationship parameters that they are both fine with.
he's the most powerful CEO in the world; you don't even need actual abuse of power when it's impossible to avoid the appearance of abuse. I know that as a coworker of the executive sleeping with the CEO I would completely discount her skills & accomplishments, and his impartiality & judgement, and so would everyone else.
> they were also exec's so I don't think there is any suggestion of abuse of power here.
Everyone reports to the CEO, directly or indirectly, and in this case the CEO is also a founder. The appearance of abuse of power here is plain-as-day.
There's so much coping going on in the comments here it's mind-boggling. Sleeping with your subordinates is enough to get fired just about anywhere.
I'm not condoning it - just saying I don't think it's my place to feel aggrieved on behalf of somebody else based on what's public.
Also note that it's different from having an opinion about Jensen himself.
So it's perfectly possible for me to simultaneously think he has done something wrong ( for the reasons you mentioned ), but also not decide on X or Y were 'wronged'.
Not the same thing.
It doesn't matter if there was an actual abuse of power, or if they were completely consenting adults.
When anyone in the company is fucking the boss and get a raise or promotion, or a good project, everyone in the company who isn't fucking the boss now have a legitimate grievance to sue the company over - that they are being passed over for these things because they aren't fucking the boss.
It doesn't even have to be true. The sheer possibility that it is true is cyanide.
This is part of every sexual harassment training 101 that any manager has ever gone through. (If you haven't gone through it, your employer's opening itself up to a lot of liability...)
> It's very likely his affairs were simply open secrets within the C suite.
There's a lot of people who usually know.
People with power think their farts don't smell or that the rest are stupid and don't notice or some don't care that people know as long as they keep their moths shut, or they get careless over time -- but lots of people eventually know.
Early in my career I shared an office with the mistress of a General Manager, she was on good terms with everybody in the office (kind of odd she was placed in the same office with nerdy devs she had zero work contact with) -- but everybody else hated her guts, can't really rember their grievances. Anyway I used to catch glimpses of phisical contact between them and the guy divorced and they married.
Relationships with colleagues were encouraged with some limitations, perhaps that's why they were so non-chalant about it (though the guy being married back home was kind of gross even for our european open minds).
In the '70s a new manager transferred in. Some of the old hands pointed out that his wife was his second wife and former secretary. Back then, people talked, but there was no outrage.
I guess OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs are failing expectations plus open weights models which Nvidia supports and Jensen been super vocal about them and confronting anodes and Altman about dangers of IA have something to do with what we are seeing
Reminds me of this classic bit: https://youtu.be/28CPgrWbu20
These are the affairs "he got right." Imagine all of the failed approaches.
It’s not just misconduct claims. It’s the same reason why house parties have a tendency to go a bit too late and then suddenly empty out as soon as one person leaves. Or why at conferences you might wait an uncomfortable amount of time for someone to ask the first question, but after that there’s a queue.
In a nutshell, nobody wants to be the first.
(possibly obligatory disclaimer: I’m not saying this to minimize harassment and abuse claims. More the opposite: I worry that perceiving this phenomenon as something specific to harassment and abuse allegations can become a pretense for dismissing them out of hand.)
I assume the inverse is the same idea: most people don't want to take the last bite from a plate of snacks? Usually after it winds down for a while you get another wave of claims.
Correlation isn’t causation always. Once there’s a scandal, more people start digging, and the more they dig, the more they find. The news cycle continues rewarding more information, so you keep getting more.
This happens all the time with news stories and doesn't require conspiracy theories. Once an initial story breaks, other journalists investigate (if they weren't already). No doubt Nvidia started investigating internally and employees will have leaked the findings.
There isn't really even any point in this third story from the point of view of any "coordinated attack". He's already resigned.
Of course not. The board is finding out all these things on the same timeline we are. They are surprised like Pikachu.
>> What's really going on?
A shell game. This is the distraction portion. Then comes the switch, the reveal and the swipe. Watch the market indicators. Nobody buying and selling shares in a trillion-dollar company cares one iota about extramarital affairs. Something else is happening.
They might not care about affairs, but they are probably interested in the possibility that Nvidia circumvented US export controls, is being covertly influenced by China, and so on
First person who gets it. It’s 2026, there is no moral panic here. Shareholders don’t care. It’s all completely fake and orchestrated as cover for some other purpose (To offload shares or otherwise).
A financial casus belli, real or manufactured.
Are you serious? He had multiple affairs is what's going on. Including one with a spy. And people who wouldn't be believed before are now coming forward.
There's probably some mildly interesting risk-balancing that happened behind the scenes because the intel community apparently knew mid-2026 and only spilled the beans now, but this is entirely of Jensen's own doing. He confessed.
He clearly is a top performer, though, managing four-plus relationships is a big job.
> mid-2026
mid-2025*
But no one has provided any proof whatsoever the first mistress was actually a spy.
It's weird, right? You see the same thing in police investigations. Oh, they know some things early, then, later, release more information? We're not that dumb.
When a real scandal happens, everything we know or will ever know gets dropped all at once. Anything else and you know someone is pulling the strings. The question is who? My money is on the arrow of time.
Entrapment, they (FBI, whatever) knew about the "spy" and yet didn't go like ... "Hey Jensen, we gotta tell you something..." Pathetic.
just to diversify this subthread a little, i actually do see the perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50476972
tbf, these side affairs i think are more just people piling on
journalists pumping their sources
A serial adulterer is revealed to have adulterated serially, and SV types are spilling oodles of ink attempting to justify loose morals and bad decision-making so long as it brought increased shareholder value.
I am reminded of the tv series "the shield". When it ends, our guy is asked "what all do you have to declare". I am paraphrasing.
Pretty sure the board asked the same question. Having finally been called to do their work, they can't just close the books without asking "what else do you have to declare" to both Jensen and at least all the direct reportees. And if there was a declaration, you can always find someone to leak it to the media.
Not saying that happened, just saying that it is likely such direct questions were asked and answered last few days.
Buy low, sell high
he's getting investigated? are you under a rock
> What's really going on?
him sleeping around, hth
Bless the fellow HN folks.
It’s a common tactic to make sure the scandal stays on the front page and it’s untenable to try to stay on. Politicians do this all the time. Scandals happen constantly, it they’re saved for when they are most useful. Jensen is in politics, whether he realises it or not.
China may be behind it as an attempt to sabotage America’s economy. But I actually think more likely the Americans as Nvidia haven’t complied sufficiently.
I really feel for Jensen. He’s dedicated his life to Nvidia and really is heavily responsible for its success. It must be devastating to have to step away from it.
Poor guy forced into all those affairs.
No one knows the circumstances. No one can see into a relationship. Be slow to judge.
He admitted to an affair. An affair by definition is a bad thing.
You can be poly and sleep with multiple people with the consent of your partners and it’s not an affair.
An affair, being unfaithful, cheating, etc. are all terms used for someone who has breached the terms of their relationship. We don’t need to be slow to judge because he judged himself by using those terms.
You have no idea what the situation in his relationship was like at the time. You don’t know how his wife feels about it, you don’t even know if she knew about it. Be slow to judge.
His public apology included apologies to his wife and children for hurting them. It's reasonable to believe that he did in fact disrupt his family life.
Holy crow are NVDA paying you to shill this hard in the comments?
He admitted he was unfaithful to his wife. I’m using his own, public, judgement
You are either Jensen or hold significant amount of the stock.
Are you thinking somebody held a gun to his head and said sleep with this woman or I kill you? The guy consented to cheating, not just with a spy, but with people under his authority.
Accepting an $8 Billion deal from an exec at a company who was called out months ago for circumventing export controls on behalf of Chineses interests is a pretty damning circumstance.
Sleeping with that person and the other affairs are just icing on a shit cake.
it's one of those "tell me you've never been in a relationship without telling me"
Wall Street and the powers that be want total control over AI and the companies involved in it
You think "Wall Street and the powers that be" forced Nvidia's CEO to have affair(s)?
No, but I think there is a financial motivation in coordinating the release of information to destroy him.
Reports that Lutnick and Trump knew about the spy situation for some time and allowed it to continue without informing Jensen goes a long way towards establishing a kind of coordination.
Once you start with the spy and national security angle, then you can get access to internal HR reports, and through these and media coordinating, a misrepresentation of the situation is doing the damage that was intended.
There is no public evidence that she was a spy, that Jensen revealed any secrets during the affair, or that Jensen was involved in any of the blackmarket dealings for GPUs. There is no evidence he exploited his power to have any affairs with anyone who works at nVidia either.
All thats left are two relationships he shouldnt have had with two nVidia employees and that is not criminal, or for many a reason to lose the company you basically created.
Meanwhile, its obvious that the commerce secretary worked with nVidia to slow roll the addition of shell companies where the blackmarket trades were happening. This is the most damning accusation, and if Jensens $25 million Trump ballroom donation was a payment to have them look the other way while nVidia knew they circumvented export controls, then that is a legitimate reason for him to resign. Because that is a series of criminal acts, and you know without a doubt that Lutnick, Trump and others were personally benefitting from this arrangement and is likely why they knew about the "spy" situation and did nothing.
But again, even this is just speculation and we wont know, maybe forever what really went on behind the scenes. Either way, it is a coordinated, well planned action to sort of drip a media narrative to get him out of the way.
> What's really going on?
Jensen was not on the Epstein list. That omission is now coming back to haunt him.
It might just be that the one affair learned that she is not the only one and went public. Then the third one also learned that she is not the only one ...
wait until you hear he uses ATI chips at home
It's not especially newsworthy that there are rumours a CEO is having an (apparently entirely consensual) affair with one of his employees. It becomes newsworthy if he's also been having an affair with a Chinese spy.
I don't think you can easily run "Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with [an] employee, according to two people familiar with the matter" unless it's clearly a matter of public interest, which it becomes when it's apparently more than one and on the heels of the other story.
Alleged spy. That totally unsubstantiated claim from anonymous sources could as easily be a financially or politically motivated smear as the truth. The way the whole thing has turned into a media circus makes me skeptical to take any of it at face value.
I think that the JD Vance camp after the 2026 mid-terms, needs a way to distinguish themselves from Rubio, who has largely been an administration favorite and the VP handles tasks typically delegated to the Secretary of State. Between this which is still forming, and Vance reportedly being vocal about not going to war in Iran, there will be a few distinguishing bullet points. I can't imagine insiders didn't know that the man from one of the world's top two multi-trillion dollar companies was having multiple affairs that could easily be used to blackmail him.
what?
As others have said I think it's a measure for the opportunists in government and OpenAI and Anthropic to get rid of open weights and Chinese models. Jensen Huang was advocating open weights.
Maybe this time next year using models other than Claude and OpenAI will be illegal somehow with nvidia kernel level implementations to block vram usage to granted to unsigned providers or something.
Then lens of scrutiny is what keeps the story rolling.
Media focus works in waves.
Yea, tech/security work shouldn't be surprised by this. When a big hole is found in a piece of software it's really common for a few more to crop up simply because a lot of people are looking at it.
"A coordinated hit"
Do we as an industry really not have the ability to comprehend that 1) you shouldn't be sleeping with your employees and 2) that no matter how much value you generate, there will be people who find that sort of behavior morally repugnant and that it can ruin your career if you engage in it?
Even people who don't particularly care about the moral aspect (a) may find him untrustworthy (if he's lying in his personal life why would you trust what he tells you in your business dealings) (b) may consider it a weakness that can be exploited against your shared business interests (he could be bribed or blackmailed into dealings which don't benefit the company, or embroil the company in legal problems) or (c) lose faith in his judgement, if he's willing to get himself into such a mess.
or maybe a spotlight that encourages more investigation, i.e. smoke => fire? Isn't that more likely than some sort of vast conspiracy?
Yeah IDK maybe sleeping with a Chinese Spy and then circumventing US Export bans might be a bad thing. Maybe just don't do that.
Agree. Jensen definitely orchestrated a coordinated hit on multiple employees.
It does look coordinated, but that doesn’t mean it was pre-arranged.
When you see bird flocks or fish schools moving in coordinated ways, they didn’t arrange all that in advance. They’re observing each other and reacting in real time. Quite a lot of coordinated movements develop this way, among people as well as other animals.
A person who forgets that this type of coordination is possible might end up spending their life endlessly looking for the man behind the curtain in every moment of coordination they come across.
feel bad for his wife man, has to be rough to keep seeing this
I wouldn't be surprised if she's known for years, if not decades. If she wants out she always has the Melinda Gates option.
I think people would be shocked to find out just how common "don't ask, don't tell" is among couples, especially among the rich, famous, and powerful. Everyone ganged up on Jada Smith until Will admitted he too sought outside "entanglements." Most couples who do this just hide it well enough, and it's only a problem when one of them is caught.
Not all, very likely not even most, of course, do this, and it's not always truly mutual or healthy, but surprise surprise, not every couple wants strict monogamy. They just don't want society to judge them for it.
And this is why I have a lot of sympathy for Lori Huang, regardless - she may have been ok with some degree of non-monogamy, but I bet she didn't want it on the front page of the New York Times.
That's what I'm thinking as well. It's something while it's private, and it's a whole other thing when it's now out in the open like this.
We can't know if they had a talked open relationship. It's pretty common to hear about this kind of arrangements on high-level C-suite or government positions.
>It's pretty common to hear about this kind of arrangements on high-level C-suite or government positions.
How do you know?
It's projection.
Power and sex often go together. Countless examples.
Life kinda works a bit differently when most of the time you’re not spending it with your significant other. Both parties have needs, so it becomes more likely to have such arrangements and talks.
> We can't know if they had a talked open relationship.
These make me think otherwise:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/im-a-piece-of-sh---jensen-huangs-l...
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
There’s also an expectation of the public, so the paragraph to his family could be show.
Just like in some circles you have to be religious no matter what.
Even if they had an open relationship, which is possible but unlikely, this is still beyond humiliating.
If you find two ants in the kitchen, there are more than two ants in the kitchen.
> If you find two ants in the kitchen, there are more than two ants in the kitchen.
And Jensen Huang may have had an improper relationship with at least one of them.
That's a sensitive place to get bitten.
Yes - take it out of the kitchen.
If the ant in your kitchen IPOs the same day you are evicted from your kitchen, the spies in your kitchen are not Chinese.
ANThropic IPO pun? in this economy?
Can't spell Anthropic without IPO.
Offering Publique Initiale
*Offre Publique Initiale
Seems more like an Offre Pubique Internationale in this case.
But now what? Will he receive a job offer from India, South Africa or Russia? I assume that he is free to live to any place of the planet that he wants if is not appreciated in US anymore, so what will be the collateral effects here?.
Pardon my Frenchlish
Well that’s sure some backwards thinking
listening to the verge?
It's true of kitchen-ant comments as well: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
We have to figure out where this comes from! It's so recent: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828285 references https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535 - that's the earliest I've seen so far. Others?
Edit: thanks ChatGPT: https://barrypopik.com/blog/there_is_never_one_cockroach_bus...
Proverb #232 of https://www.asau.ru/files/pdf/2759983.pdf says it's attested from 1991:
232 There is never just one cockroach. (1991)
Variant: There is never just one cockroach in the kitchen
Ants are nicer though.
Warren Buffet said the cockroach variant in his 1989 investor letter.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html
"In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen."
My grandmother was using a similar saying long before that, translated approximately: "there's never just 1 mouse in the barn". I'd bet these expressions have been common across the world for centuries (maybe substitute for local rodent).
Warren buffet didn't invent it either it's an old saying. I vaguely recall it from an insecticide commercial when I was a child but they probably didn't invent it either.
Not surprising its use has exploded in recent days..
"Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out."
Horsehair worms. Ugh.
Possibly Nathan Calvin on Twitter in August: If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
August 5th about Open AI:
https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
September 4th.. still about Open AI:
https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2095854095139537064
November 11th.. Alex Lawsen on Twitter, referencing Nathan's post (above):
https://x.com/lxrjl/status/2120640689620861335
It's much much older. As a kid growing up in NY in the 90s, I heard many times the version of this saying, "one cockroach on the floor means one hundred behind the wall."
That's different, though. The point of the ant thing is sometimes things just happen, but if they happen twice, that's a very different matter.
These sayings also causes needless panic over non-infesting cockroaches like ectobius pallidus that commonly wander inside by accident.
I suspect you are right for the current flush. I know I heard it via Zvi's SubStack, but that was probably in a quote of Nathan Calvin.
Completely tangential but I always find it interesting how different expressions become attached to specific contexts in people's heads.
"This old house as got good bones" is the realtor 'slaps roof of car' meme that seems to have caught on during the 2010s and peaked during COVID. Now I hear people mindlessly propagating it whenever they talk about renovating/buying an old home.
I'm sure that we'll be hearing this ants in the kitchen of the house with good bones thing forever now.
I heard this in ‘93 when I bought a house. Also: I’m worried about the gophers in the back yard. (Taking my focus off more important concerns)
A 1985 Dallas Morning News article attributes the heuristic to "Sanders", as cited in a 2003 mailing list (https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2003-Septe...).
Fable 5.2 couldn't access the full DMN text (nor can I), but suggests the article is about "local TV journalists reacting to a report on minority hiring" and "Sanders" is probably a reporter named Bob Ray Sanders, a reporter in the region (who was later inducted to the National Association of Black Journalists' Hall of Fame). What he actually said is sadly paywalled in the archives.
This is my favorite HN comment of 2026. Thanks dang.
Aren't these similar to "when it rains, it pours" or "adding insult to injury" or "Troubles don't come alone, they like to arrive in groups"?
https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/9uu7wp/troubles...
They are more similar to "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action" because they include explicit low numeric information
It makes sense for cockroaches, which make it their business to hide from you.
It's not even true for ants. If you find two ants in the kitchen, they were just there by coincidence. Ants aren't concerned with whether you can see them; if they're interested in something in your kitchen, they'll show up by the hundreds to take it away, and they'll be impossible to miss.
Viral memetics didn’t disappear just because we got bots pushing narratives.
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."
-- Bertrand Russell, 1912
Point is, if you find two ants in the kitchen it's worth to investigate if there are more. Blindly assuming there were more, like the original quote seems to suggest, will burn you sooner or later.
> would have been useful to the chicken
As someone who's had to suffer through a lot of data visualization, unless the chicken is able to act on this insight, it's probably worthless.
It's worthless anyway. A chicken who can see the future and act on it in any way that bothers the people around it is going to be killed, and better-domesticated chickens will be bred to replace it.
Well, I think that chicken would be quite happy dealing with the ants for you.
Russell didn't make the dashboard for the chicken. The chicken is a data point.
The chicken had long outsourced its brain to its owners. It didn’t have to look for food or fend off enemies for generations. Its food was provided, its safety was ensured by the owner. Leaving the yard would have gotten the chicken eaten by a coyote or a stray dog.
Even the dog guarding the chickens didn’t enjoy a better fate. At the first sign of illness, its vet recommended a cost efficient putting to sleep.
Those only useful, become discarded at the end of usefulness. Those only valuable can get sold or harvested. That’s why you have to be loved. Because everyone else can just upgrade their tools.
Induction is stupid.
But so is comparing humans to chickens or ants.
If you find a tip of iceberg above the water, there is an iceberg under the water as well. Maybe ants analogy is better.
Jokes apart, the leaders usually require almost the same mindset of a savage sailor who is on a mission to plunder the riches from the far away lands. They break the rules to the extent possible and exhibit highest levels of survival skills. Sometimes that mindset spills into personal life.
> If you find someone who has never seen office affairs before then you are talking a sexless unemployed person
- Lao Tzu
Youtube currently has some memes about Huang. One simple one (bit silly) was where his face was overlaid on the Austin Powers with the fook mi and fook you or yu; I actually liked the Austin Powers movie, but the overlay with Huang there was .... well. Cringey ... and quite silly. But still. It shows that people like poking fun about that. That resonates more quickly than other criticism. NVIDIA is always a meme. I guess they are happier with Huang-likes-the-women meme than the "we drove up the RAM prices and you can not do anything about it, you slaves!" or "NVIDIA won't work on Linux", which is still kind of true. At the least my NVIDIA card does not work well, the firmware is never recognized. We really need to get rid of these companies, but that's evidently not easy.
They are like a mafia sitting on top of everyone else and parasitizing from there.
It's true for one ant as well, though.
I find it interesting that people can jump to their judgement assuming "sources" are true. Do you really trust everything they say?
Right? There's now sources saying that the 'spy' is not actually proven to be a spy after all[1]. So it all seems very shady.
1 - https://edition.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-i...
I wonder what are the sources' motivations. "I know that my colleague had an affair with the CEO, it's my duty to report it to the NYT".
Would he suddenly resign if they weren’t?
He had an affair with a customer - possibly a spy - who was pretty openly flouting US export control rules while getting the Treasury Secretary to run interference for him.
The affairs being the headline are doing a lot of work to keep focus off of the much more legally fraught issues which may be actual big boy crimes. He would have been in a pile of shit and being forced out regardless of how many employees he slept with.
How do you think journalism works? They just make sources up and then suddenly the CEO resigns without a fight?
He's obviously had affairs incl with employees etc. so the resignation would have to come either way. But there's such a thing as selective leaking to the press, for example initially claiming she's a spy and now after he's gone, wait maybe she's not a spy.
Ummm, this story is about him sleeping with a second employee. Nothing has changed with the fact that he had an affair with a Chinese spy.
I don't know. Personally I find it hard to simply trust "my sources said", I usually require a little bit of hard evidence to be convinced. There could be many reasons someone gave up fighting.
Again, coming from a different society where media is full of lies, I am wondering if your journalists are really that much better.
There is an obvious pattern for these high level executive roles. They are all workaholics, they are not particularly loyal, they all have loose moral compasses, they don't have any clear line between work and their personal life, and they treat relationships like business arrangements.
This feels so common that I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family. One of the revelations about the Gates' lives was that Bill's promiscuity was apparently baked into their marriage agreement. At this level, your marriage might just be like a fixed mailing address for someone who has multiple homes.
Not to excuse this in any way. But these are the personalities of medieval lords and kings.
> One of the revelations about the Gates' lives was that Bill's promiscuity was apparently baked into their marriage agreement.
Are there details on this? Yes, I do like the sordid gossip.
He would spend a week with a special friend every year (they'd hike together?), and this was in his marriage contract. That woman is now a VC. You can easily find out more if you google this.
And his wife was okay with this? wtf ..
Billions, remember?
He didn't have billions at the start of his marriage.
> At the time of their marriage in 1994, Bill Gates’s fortune was worth approximately $9.35 billion.
https://www.wsfamilylaw.com/the-multibillion-dollar-gates-di...
> Gates became the world's then-youngest billionaire in 1987, at age 31.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
If you had tried sourcing your claim, you would know it was wrong.
Lots of wives would be okay with this! It isn’t a betrayal of trust, it’s not an open-ended arrangement with unknown scope and terrors, it’s plainly declared up front, it’s so infrequent that it has little to no risk of displacing the primary marriage relationship, it minimizes jealousy, it isn’t a side fling that could be stumbled across by accident in the everyday by the wife, it’s a controlled outlet for long-term desires, it’s not likely to cause financial distraction, dependency, or drain. And that’s just ninety seconds worth of solid good reasons :)
> Lots of wives would be okay with this!
I think "lots" is vastly overstating it. Yes, there are women who would be ok with that, but in my experience they are greatly in the minority. Most women (and men to be fair) do not like if they don't have an exclusive claim on their spouse, even if it's being done in the open.
There's billions of women in the world. A small minority can still be lots.
> but in my experience they are greatly in the minority.
That’s just because you’re poor.
> Most women (and men to be fair) do not like if they don't have an exclusive claim on their spouse, even if it's being done in the open.
That’s because it is frowned upon to declare something like this publicly.
Sure, I would not lightly or unthinkingly be okay with a potential husband entering into such an arrangement, but I also wouldn’t consider anyone as a potential husband if I would never allow them it for their lack of communication groundwork or trustworthy straightforwardness. If I have so little faith in him coming home to me after a once a year camping trip that clearly never became more before me, then I have no business marrying him in the first place! Sure, I may or may not like it — this varies rather sharply based on how readily they can bear a few days of jealousy with grace and good cheer — but marriage is no more about avoiding “do not like” than it is about confirming to the handfasted stereotypes of American monogamy and cheating. One campaign trip a year is three nines of reliability with a scheduled maintenance window rather than unpredictable outages and months of undiscovered foreign key violations corrupting the relational store.
Take a lesson from tech: Three nines of uptime is quite sufficient to build something amazing and valuable to the right customers. We women (and anyone of any gender!) don’t have to implement Six Sigma to enter into a monogamous marriage marriage, but at least here in the U.S. we do care a great deal about proper outage notifications and root cause analyses and considering how to schedule and conduct future outages to minimize surprise harms. I would far rather target a couple of nines with a healthy process that doesn’t unduly harm the personnel involved than target six nines and live a dull life full of control-heavy, energy-draining grayness. Some people will just naturally hit 100% uptime without breaking a sweat; others will design and commit only to 99.0% but will do so with such grace and courtesy that an unexpected multi-month monogamy outage after years of impeccable courtesy and communication evokes compassion and patience and excitement for their return, rather than outrage and viciousness as defective coping mechanisms for their absence. (Come home soon, AO3.)
Fantastic writing, despite the context you really took me by surprise with the uptime analogy.
Thanks! It stemmed from a thought about how “always” is not 100.0% but more like 99% in human being things, and trying to convey that people operate at varying levels of ‘always’, which bridged sideways to six sigma monogamy. It’s going to be a fun analogy to work with for sure :)
*conforming, *camping (sigh)
If the man is a billionaire, you're wrong--lots of women would be okay with that.
I can explain it.
There is something in it for the wife. The world is a bit more "House of Cards" than some people assume. Aside from the French and a few others, western cultures seem almost uniquely dishonest about the tacit assumption that successful men will have mistresses. This isn't a new thing. Warren Buffett was essentially married to two women most of his life and no one cared.
Many wives highly value the accrued status of being formally married to a high-status person. You can take half the money but the social status doesn't follow. No one cares about a billionaire divorcee with no status beyond a bank account.
She should have an equal provision about her special friend. Or a personal trainer.
I don't know about their specific arrangement, but in some relationships, having other partners is not only accepted, but actively used to reinforce the primary relationships.
If you accept your partner has those urges, you can either treat it antagonistically and have those urges become a problem in your relationship or you can absorb them into your relationship and have it be strengthened by them.
You either become the one being cheated on and weakened or the one in control with a relationship strong enough to not be threatened by some side action, which in turn makes you a rarer and more valuable mate.
Or as a less cynical take, there's also the phenomenom of compersion, the ability to feel joy from a partner's happiness with other people. If you truly care for somebody and want them to be as happy as possible, you might be willing to set your ego aside to create that experience. And of course, that sort of security is again very attractive and a rare trait in itself.
what kind of answer is this. i bet you would not like (if you had) your wife going around and fucking other people except if you where a cuck.
Don't assume how other people structure their relationships, don't project your values onto them. Not everyone sees things through the lens of ego, ownership and male dominance.
Not everyone has to live their life the way you see fit. I've given you an explanation of why some people structure their relationship that way, why are you reacting so defensively? Does what other adults consent to make you feel threatened? Why?
Because this is stupid. Idk where you are, but I can say that in the circles I'm in, and this spans multiple European countries, fucking around ends up in divorces when the other Partner finds out. I'm old enough to have kids and saw it and talked with other in those situations. You could be talking about some small subset of people and thats ok. But don't pretend this is somehow spread out. I saw multiple divorces, and only one where the wife staid and it was mostly because it was in the height of economic depression and she was stay at home mom. I don't care for internet points here and down votes. I would like to you to try to present your point to your wife or anybody in your circles and give me an answer.
Most relationships are as you describe. Many relationships aren't(I don't know the numbers, but I would guess somewhere between 1% to 10%, either of which I would qualify as many).
It's also extremely different to agree that some amount of extra-marital sex is OK, to being cheated on without being aware. The betrayal of trust is to me the main problem with cheaters.
>fucking around ends up in divorces when the other Partner finds out.
I don't think you've fully absorbed the point I've made. I agree with your sentence here - but I'd argue that it is a symptom of a societal construct that is counter to our biological reality which one can fix by making it so there's nothing to be found out. If you discuss rules and boundaries beforehand like emotionally mature adults, there's no element of betrayal or breach of trust.
> I would like to you to try to present your point to your wife.
I've been in my current relationship for close to two decades. Not a wife, because we like the idea of being with a person that chooses to be with one every day by their own volition, not by some legal contract rooted in patriarchal control.
While we're currently monogamous, we've went through several phases where we invited other partners into the fold, with the consent of everybody involved. Some of those were even longer-term, multi-year repeat encounters. At no point did it diminish my love for her or hers for me. To the contrary, it's made us appreciate each other more and shown us that our relationship is strong enough to prioritize each other's well-being over our jealous need for control.
> prioritize each other's well-being over our selfish egos
The desire to sleep around is obviously a desire to feed your own selfish ego.
This is where I have a problem when people try to defend this. If you’re honest that you like to sleep around and you found a partner that likes to sleep around, fine.
But the I have evolved beyond the quaint social mores of the unenlightened bit is silly.
Yeah, I edited because I realized it could come across more confrontational than I intended.
That being said, it is - whether we like it or not - an observed biological mechanism that humans, like a lot of other species, like to sleep around and that they are attracted to new sexual partners after being with the same one for a long time. [0]
Once we accept that, the question becomes one of management. Do we use our free will to override these urges to fit social norms better or or do we instead trust each other to uncouple the biology from the emotional bond? Different couples might come to different conclusions at different times, but they are both not without risks and both require thoughtful compromise and communication.
The superiority is not towards people in monogamous relationships - that's how ours is structured right now too! It is towards people that use language like "cuck", that implies somebody's worth is defined by their monogamy, language that brings all sorts of weird vibes of male ownership of female bodies and a lessening of men who do not subscribe to such views.
There's nothing wrong with either monogamy or ethical non-monogamy, just do what works for you and your partner and don't be a dick about it!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidge_effect
> If you accept
Why not? They’re both grownups with brains to think for themselves.
I remember reading about an email he sent to the "special friend". It definitely felt like she wasn't okay with this.
Ok we’re back to pitchforking (possible) open relationships now? You know very little about their dynamics. You lack information and frankly any justification to judge.
I'm not pitchforking the concept, if everyone involved is honest with each other.
However, the reality is the vast majority of people are not okay with open relationships. Call it 20% of relationships, which I think is generous. It's fishy that at the CEO level the percentage of these "open relationships" is close to 100%.
So what's the problem if the consenting adult is okay with their partner having a consensual relationship with another adult?
You've lost me here.
They didn't have a marriage contract (prenup) but it looks like the weekend agreement was real. It might be verbal.
> I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family
But (unless "unknown" is doing a lot of work in your sentence) Huang literally said this in his letter to NVidia employees: "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you said. In the 2000-2015 timeframe, I really idolized a lot of these successful tech leaders - they seemed incredibly smart, hard-working, and talented (though also of course lucky). But over time I came to the realization that many of them just fundamentally think very differently than I do, and I view that other way of thinking with disgust. The main issue is it seems like nearly all of their relationships are transactional, and they have a lack of empathy and willingness to be ruthless that is simply anathema to me.
Jensen and Lori met in early 1980s or so when they were 17 and 19 years old respectively. Moreover they got married in 1985, 13 years before Nvidia was even founded. Quite different from Bill and Melinda hooking up after Microsoft don't you think ? Not to mention his apology.
Is this common at the board level of major companies and uncommon to get out? Or is this really uncommon.
It's as common as days of the week that end in the letter Y.
It is common at any level of any company
I feel like it would be more common at the board level. More money, more power, more travel, more opportunities.
It's also common for plumbers. Nobody is saying it's moral but I don't like morality policing on principle
TIL: True monogamy only appears in 3-5% of mammals in the animal kingdom.
I'm sure his wife feels reassured by that statistic.
I'm sure she knew.
People keep saying this like it makes it better... If I knew my partner was a serial philanderer it wouldn't make me feel great, even if said partner was worth billions.
A lot of marriages are purely for superficial image. Many people also fall out of love but stay together legally for various reasons.
Many ultra high net worth people are married purely for financial reasons. The wife gets whatever she wants but now they don't need to worry about losing control of their company, etc.
This is to say nothing of the biological differences either. Menopause hits some women extremely hard and libido is completely gone. Rather than divorce or mutually suffer, they open up the marriage.
And a lot of people feel VERY betrayed by cheating. Including when they suspected and now have confirmation. Including rich ones.
There is this new narrative on HN where wifes don't care about cheating, but in general, they do a lot.
> I'm sure she knew.
These two links make me think otherwise:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/im-a-piece-of-sh---jensen-huangs-l...
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
There's this little part of me wondering if this was all known about for a long time, and the sudden release of information about all three women is coordinated for some nefarious business reason.
Whitehouse knew it months ago… why is it coming out after election? Not sure how it would have impacted it beforehand.
Maybe a way to dump stocks without everyone screaming insider trading.
> why is it coming out after election?
Jensen had the choice of coming clean like this, where half of Silicon Valley is rallying to his defence and he remains a multi-billionaire (and maybe saves his marriage), or having this exposed by the new Congress, at which point all manner of punitive countermeasures against Nvidia are on the table.
Currently, Energy & Commerce and Oversight & Investigations are asleep. Come January, they won't be.
Huang, like a lot of Silicon Valley, thought their guy would stay in power and protect them.
better question would be why is it coming out before trump's visit to China next week, let's not forget the first story was about Chinese spy, it's a bit of strange coincidence
there is possibility someone overplayed their cards and didn't think of possible consequences, OTOH maybe they wanted to kill two birds with one stone
Powerful men cheating is often normalized in their immediate environment. Jensen was seen with both women many times. It's the Chinese spy and export ban skirt angle that made it untenable.
Cf. the open secret nature around the entire Epstein cabal.
The affairs were probably open secrets to those high up for a while. Once Jensen's reputation passes a perceived point of no return, it makes sense for the other higher ups to leak everything they know to the media to shorten the duration of the scandal. The worst has happened, their action will not change, so no need to drag it out.
> and the sudden release of information about all three women is coordinated for some nefarious business reason.
This framing is plain silly because it ignores the sequence of events. NVidia conducted an investigation after Huang admitted to having an affair with someone the US Government believed to be a Chinese spy, and in any case NVidia sold billions worth of embargoed chips to that company (and now it seems we have some proof per another HN front page story that the latest leading Chinese open source models were trained on embargoed NVidia chips). So then the other 2 instances of infidelity came out in the course of the investigation - of course as they definitely should, otherwise it would be a really shitty investigation! And sure, it was known by at least some number of other NVidia employees that Huang had relationships with subordinates (at least according to reporting). But that doesn't change the fact that Huang's relationship with Alice Huang was not known (and in fact denied by Jensen Huang) before this all went down.
It's not like Huang's 3 paramours got together before the investigation started in some sort of nefarious plot.
Well it's alleged one of them was in some sort of nefarious plot.
With this kind of status and notoriety, so many eyes are on you, it's hard to keep this a secret from everyone, especially when it's happening in the workplace.
trump is visiting China next week and the first story was about mistress being Chinese spy, so it makes you wonder whether this benefits China, Trump or US interests (don't confuse the latter two, they are two completely different things), I don't think China would leak "Chinese spy" story unless they are playing some serious 4D chess, which leaves you with two main options
I always got the impression that it was somewhat of an open secret that most billionaires had soft harems of sorts, usually tacitly understood but never publicly addressed, and that the apparent outrage at affairs/scandals at this level is a sort of charade of allegiance to social norms to enforce the facade that standards of propriety apply even at the highest levels.
You’ve misread the room. Absolutely no one cares about the infidelity. One of the affairs has been public knowledge for months.
The outrage is about new reporting that one affair was with a potential Chinese asset, and the other affairs are more entertainment and/or evidence of bad leadership than anything else.
many people seem to care about the infidelity
Only in the sense of how they can use it to further their own personal gain: clickbait, ragebait, pushing agendas, buying cheap stock, etc.
The actual infidelity they really do not care about.
To be honest, I think Jensen's wife herself probably knew about it and just didn't care either. A don't ask, don't tell scenario.
Which is odd, considering that JH is under suspicion of smuggling sanctioned military-related equipment to his country’s prime foreign adversary.
Two things can both be bad.
> JH is under suspicion of smuggling sanctioned military-related equipment to his country’s prime foreign adversary.
by "his country" you mean Taiwan/China or US? not sure ethnic Chinese born in Taiwan (China) holding Taiwanese/Chinese citizenship, see foreign adversaries as clearly as you see it
Taiwan is opposed to mainland China at least as much as the US. Sure they are closer, but mainland China is also threatening to annex Taiwan.
I think it's little bit more complicated for people with Chinese ethnicity (no matter whether from China or Taiwan) than you paint it, seems he had zero problems to have affair with mainland Chinese woman rather than Taiwanese (and he certainly knew she is not Singaporean unless he is very stupid), world ain't black and white as some US politicians trying to make it.
It's very complicated, I just tried my best in a few words.
No he is not!
Where do you people get this tabloid stuff?
He's not being investigated for anything. The government did not even sanction the company and woman he was sleeping with, although there are allegations that she was selling GPU cycles to China, that's not him doing it.
Which baffles me. Is it an American thing? Religious? I generally don’t care about people’s private lives.
I think this is all staged: media acts like average Joe cars, I doubt it. He obviously hurt the wrong ppl, the Chinese spy thing has too many red flags … they say “alleged” and the proceed talking for 25 minutes as if it’s true. Supposedly the secret service the CIA and who knows who else is looking at this for over a year, but they can’t decide which way is it… so yeah timing and all… the board of NVIDIA apparently is the only who cares with who he sleeps so much, but the other theory is that someone via blackmailing them? Anyway, they made their decision, now they have to live with the consequences.
In terms of facts we have someone who was effectively fired no apparent reason, in 48 hours. Scary.
It’s very simple: billionaires and politicians spend a lot of time trying to control our lives. This is often done through a moral lens: “you can’t do this thing because it’s immoral” where thing can range from making a personal medical decision, marrying the person you love, singing to children, playing on a sports team, or going to the bathroom.
So when one of these representatives of the elite turns out to be not quite so moral, we take special interest in pointing it out until the end of time. If Huang managed a department store you wouldn’t hear much about it.
"Is it an American thing?"
It's 'baffling' that someone would think that this is not a social concern.
It transcends cultures and faiths.
We can understand surely that some care less, but the only people who can't understand why this is bad have never been in a relationship.
It's a concern, but this concern has no place in business. What's happening in a marriage is not our problem. So yes, it's definitely more a north american thing (and I'm in a long term, married relationship, so you last sentence definitely shows how immature your views are).
"Yes, he has a long string of theft convictions, cheats at cards, and beats his wife, but I am totally surprised that he defrauded our company for millions of dollars..."
It is not a north american thing, it is a character thing.
You're substituting different actions. There's no reasonable justification for "beats his wife". "Sleeping with someone who isn't their wife" could have justifications - you don't know anything about their marriage.
I am pretty sure that "beating his wife" is criminal in most countries while "sleeping with someone that is not his wife" is not. That is material difference right there.
You words are doing a lot of work blurring the difference here.
It’s not that long ago when the legalities would have been reversed. I don’t think that’s a very good guide.
Citation needed.
"The practice of wife beating was legally acceptable throughout most of history. In fact, it was not made illegal in every state until 1920." https://www.thefreelibrary.com/No-drop%20prosecution%20of%20...
"It is an open question whether adultery continues to be viable as criminal law even though it remains on the books in 24 states and territories." https://web.archive.org/web/20170503222839/http://www.nytime...
If you'd like to know more, Wikipedia has many cites for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultery_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence#History
1920 -- your definition of " not long ago" is very different from mine.
And about equating "remain on the books" to actually enforced law that is relevant in real life: sure, but I'm not going to waste my time convincing you otherwise.
I think you're drawing a bit of a straw-man fallacy there.
We're talking about current events - and hence current social norms and mores (although I do concede there's a spectrum there - and that American culture still does have a bit of Puritan culture embedded in it).
Slavery is illegal in most places in 20206 - but sure - it wasn't illegal 100 years ago.
Just like homosexuality was illegal some 50 years ago - but isn't illegal today (in most places).
But in 2026 - if Jensen Huang (or anybody else) has multiple consensual relationships with lots of adult women (or men) - that's their business. We might have our own personal views on whether we would have relationships with lots of women (or men) - but that's a different thing.
This isn't the Handmaid's Tale.
It’s an absurd argument but I’m not surprised someone would say something like that.
It's very much a North American thing - likely related to the Puritans sects that founded the colonies. I'm not saying it's good or bad - simply pointing out the obvious.
It's also this incredible dichotomy - American culture is filled wit hyper-sexualised imagery in fashion, movies, TV shows - yet they still have an incredible stigma about public discussions on sexuality, public breastfeeding, or people showing open same-sex affection.
Quite frankly, what Jensen Huang, or Elon Musk, or Miley Cyrus or Donald Trump, or Jerome Powell or anybody else chooses to do about their sex life behind closed doors is their problem. Unless they come to you for relationship advice - you probably also don't know half the story.
I can also say with almost biblical certainty that none of the aforementioned people have come to any HN-ers for relationship advice....
Yet the sheer level of public discourse about Jenson Huang's marriage is insane.
Now, the GPU and export controls - that's a different matter entirely - and I can see how that might be pertinent to business discussions, and I can see why analysts would be interested in that. But we have barely any information on that. Nobody seems to comment on that?
Also to use your language "it's a character thing" - I should point out that it wasn't too long ago that a male being affectionate with another male was a "character" thing - see Alan Turing? Or Oscar Wilde? Or Tchaikovsky?
Yet if you saw another man holding hands with another man - would you say "it's a character thing"?
Unless I knew them personally, it's none of my business - I'm certainly not going to walk up to a stranger and go "Oi mate, you can't be doing that, it's a character thing!" Likewise if I saw people in open or polyamorous relationships (which I hear are a thing) - unless they were my friends and had asked for my counsel or wisdom - I'll let them walk their own walk. It's not my place to judge them - stick, eye, plank and all that. And relationships are incredibly complex things, and we often don't know the half of it.
Suppose they were non-exclusive in their marriage. It’s not something you and I know (and it’s not our business unless they told us).
You don’t know if they’re, but you’re making a judgment. I don’t care what you think about it, it’s just disgusting to think someone’s sexual relationships are of your concern.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Western societies are more accepting of queer people now, on average. But the desire to judge people based on who they sleep with hasn’t gone anywhere. 30 years ago someone would say it’s of “social concern” or a CEO visits gay bathhouses.
Repeat after me: people’s sexual lives are not anyone’s business.
It doesn't require a very strange chain of reasoning. Lots of people would agree that:
- promising monogamy to someone who loves you, and then breaking that promise, is bad and provides negative evidence about your character
and
- if you're the leader of a very powerful entity, your character is relevant even to people who don't know you personally.
There's also just the fact that when someone is famous, and it emerges publicly that they've broken some norm, there's not really a fully neutral option available to us. We can condemn their behaviour (reinforcing the norm), defend it (weakening the norm), or ignore it (also somewhat weakening the norm, especially if we make a point of ignoring it and suggest that others are silly for caring).
I'm certainly not making a statement about Huang here, more of a general one, but generally speaking, when you're making judgements about infidelity as someone not part of that relationship you're working off very limited information, doubly so for a public figure that you don't know personally.
Obviously it's somewhat complicated when subordinates and Chinese spies are involved, and I'm not condoning infidelity, but IMO infidelity is a reason for a spouse to be justifiably outraged, not the public at large.
If somebody promises to be with one person and only one person and they violate such trust that causes me to doubt their integrity. Couple that with it not just being random women but a spy and people below him in the company (a clear me too situation) and I lose all trust in him.
Before you or somebody says they may have had an open relationship then why did he apologize for hurting his wife? Was he lying? If so, then he has betrayed our trust.
People are enjoying the drama because Joe Public love watching a train wreck when it’s rich guys being immoral. But I’m not sure people actually care about it.
However the Democrats definitely care about the illegal distribution and potential national security issue. Which is why the Chinese affair was only an issue after the midterms despite being known long before then.
Assuming what we perceive about the society from the sources we see theses days as the reality, is rather naive/dangerous.
Americans will also balk at sexual relations with a professional underling where it’s difficult to establish whether truly unconditional consent was given.
Closer but you have to read in between the lines :)
> One of the affairs has been public knowledge for months.
Which one? I think you're exaggerating. There may have been unconfirmed rumours and gossip in some circles but that's about it.
People care about the infidelity somewhat.
The 'asset' thing what drew scrutiny, its not why he is being fired.
In my humble opinion the issue shouldn't be their perceived promiscuity, but their bad judgement in sleeping with a person from a client company (that might be affiliated with a country you can't export your products too), and colleagues that are not your peers.
For me, this is a lapse of judgement for the CEO and one of the founders of one of the biggest corporation's globally.
And perhaps creating a web of funding with clients that boosts the world economy to the point that other services may suffer, and that part of this web is selling a product illegally, and that when this comes to light questions will be asked, including how much of the web is funded illegally (maybe not much) and perhaps the new management will disentangle this web and the butterfly flaps it's wings.
Recession?
> this is a lapse of judgement for the CEO
I think there's a lot more shady stuff that's going to come out. The XBOX deal had a lot of intrigue. Especially now that we know the types of behaviors Bill, Jensen engaged in.
The outrage is a tool and there's always competition for power. "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion", because suspicion, whether it's based on genuine outrage or not, is a liability that will be explored.
Most of them don't. Some of them go through wives.
Elon gets a pass because he's normalized his behaviour and he can't be ousted, which I think is a bad double standard.
When staff is involved it's going to matter but conflict of interest does not necessarily mean wrongdoing.
I even he prerfers humans over AI....
I wonder if he followed a modern trend and was on TRT, it seems like a pattern for celebrity/powerful men of age these days: get on TRT, get in shape, cheat on your wife.
Do you suppose Sheryl Sandberg was also trying trt?
You don’t need TRT to get in shape.
Indeed:
- Very few people actually need TRT;
- If you take TRT without needing to, you're falling into a dependency trap;
- If you do need TRT and take it, not everything is roses and rainbows.
"I want a man with a short shirt, and a Huang jacket"
----
I hope that the people he had affairs with are treated ok and not retaliated against or hounded by the world news media.
Why?
uuuuh because they're people?
And jenson isn't people? Affair implies consent from both parties right?
Annoying whataboutism. No one mentioned anything other than hoping the media doesn't hound these women.
Affairs between peers might imply consent.
They weren't naive waifs. They knew what the deal was and who the dealer was.
"Naïf" is the word you're looking for.
Plus, at least one of them was married.
Alice Huang (the Chinese spy) and Kimberly Powell (the underling) are both married. We don't know the identity of the third woman yet, but I'd give it ~80% probability she's married as well.
"if you see two ants, its usually not just two ants"
FYI I'm flagging all ant comments from now on.
woww
The mental gymnastics people are doing here to save face for Huang.
I don’t care if it’s 100 employees at this point, the big topic here should be that he is not to be trusted. He quite literally has been spoon feeding China behind the US’s back. He deceived the entire country, he’s a con man.
The relationships are just an awful aside of what’s turning out to be a very bigger concern about national security.
He is the King of GPU.
Honestly, I couldn't care less if there were hundreds more.
Tbh i do not understand the drama … not the first ceo to had affairs and shady deals, It feels more like the powers at be want to cut down Nvidia support to open models via removing the guy at the top due his liability with hot Asian girls but come on. Palantir had worst ceo for instance and nobody raises an eyebrow to name one
Political pressure given stuff like https://unemploymentlabs.com/checkpoint-forensics
Who the NVDA board wants answering questions in some inevitable hearings when the other side of all the money behind AI is trying to push for controls on Chinese models.
Edit: A little more context. Because it doesn't matter if Alice Huang is a Chinese spy. She's also held titles at Megaspeed, a Singapore based company that legitimately rents GPU time to Chinese model providers. The big money AI people would be pushing for more controls on that legit path also.
Yeah I have so much scandal fatigue, this is pretty D-tier.
The problem is not that he had affairs in general, but that he had affairs with subordinates. That is not allowed by the company rules and US law.
Exactly. If on the other hand he would have been visiting an island to have 'affairs' with under age girls or boys, then there would be no consequences. The US law must be respected.
Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.
...for an affair?
Having two affairs is definitely not a coincidence.
"If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two"
When you see two ants in the kitchen there's likely many more.
Huang has been a great boss and steward of Nvidia, but ultimately falling for subordinates is grave enough, adding alleged Chinese spies, and allegations you sold Tencent billions of hardware through shady Singaporean companies for which the alleged spy worked etc and the board had no other options.
At this point it would be surprising if what we know is likely a small part and the Nvidia board saw enough very quickly to ask for his head.
There's no need to look. Jensen Huang might have been great for his shareholders, but he sure has been screwing the rest of us over hard.
He was responsible for hanging consumers out to dry by destroying the consumer PC market in chase of more profit. He is gambling with the world economy. He appears on interviews being a dick about all of this.
So I'd say this is very much in character for him.
He (and nVidia) have no responsibility to consumers. They have a responsibility to their largest customers and to their shareholders.
I understand this is true in a strictly legal and financial sense. I hope you are simply pointing out a factual statement and not bootlicking for companies with business practices that make your own life worse?
>I understand this is true in a strictly legal and financial sense.
"Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business. Getting salty because a company decided to switch to a more profitable customer, while understandable, is also totally unreasonable. It's like getting mad at a band for selling $1000 concert tickets after they made it big. Doubly so when the product segment being affected is essentially a luxury product to begin with.
You're not really arguing anything here except that greed is expected, which is fair but not logical in the sense that, there is nothing about a business that says it has to operate this way, and no law that says being a fair and good entity in our community is necessarily going to bankrupt them. It's a choice leadership makes, for obvious and boring reasons, to fuck over the general community.
Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.
Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
The sad part is that we simply don't expect it anymore, because we no longer see businesses as part of our communities. Just as profit engines, with no other goal.
Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
>Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.
>Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
No, in both cases they'll just get scalped. If you're selling something for $1 that the market is willing to pay $10 for, the market will find a way to equalize this.
>Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
Give me a break. This might work if it's walmart replacing a dozen local shops with a giant big box store on the edge of town, but GPUs are already a niche luxury product. If there's one sector where it's justified for companies to make outsized profits on, it's this. Otherwise it's as out of touch as getting mad at Hermes for selling $10k hand bags.
Yes so thinking purely in corporate thoughts, the supply is the issue on concerts and GPUs. For supply constrained items like concert space, or theme parks, other countries where profit isn't the dominant motive will sell tickets via lotteries or first in, first serve, ID linked and no reselling.
For the GPU situation, consumer GPU supply is constrained because demand isn't being met. It's not being met (in my understanding) because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI. The solution would have been to create and supply two different verticals independently, and to open the ecosystem up for other manufacturers to help meet B2B supply. There is precedent for this going in different directions, but it was a choice nVidia made to squeeze the market for every penny. Extremely good business. Shareholders are stoked, a fantastic win for the stock market.
I can't worry about all things but since you bring hermes bags up, yes that is also a pretty clear sign of a perverse economy. Selling an at-cost $10 bag for $10,000 is pretty disappointing behaviour by the seller and the buyer. The seller does it because they can, and the buyer does it because they don't mind getting fleeced. The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
This is the world we live in, I get that, but it's no less disappointing to see the majority of people get ditched for the sake of the shareholders time and time again. If you feel that this isn't what's happening then I would be interested in that, otherwise we might just disagree on some base principles which is fine but probably not worth debating.
>For supply constrained items like concert space, or theme parks, other countries where profit isn't the dominant motive will sell tickets via lotteries or first in, first serve, ID linked and no reselling.
How are you going to enforce this for GPUs? Even if you somehow add the remote tracking systems that AI safety proponents have been asking for, you can still make a handy profit renting out your GPU to people who want to play gta6 or whatever.
>because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI
Maybe if you need CUDA specifically for AI workloads. For gaming AMD or intel is perfectly serviceable. It's not as good as a RTX 5090, but again that's like complaining you can only afford a LV bag rather than a Hermes (the embarrassment!)
>The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
Only if you're only interested in carrying stuff, but not if you're interested in status signaling. The same applies to some extent for concerts. How many people are going for the experience of nosebleed seats (or standing room), overpriced food, and other travel hassles, vs the social cachet of being to a limited concert?
> "Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business.
That is how immoral people run a business. But there are a great many businesses in this country run by people who (correctly) recognize that there are higher obligations than the law and making a profit. Treating your customers fairly, making good products, doing things in an ethical way... these are not optional to a well-adjusted person, even if not required by the law.
Continuing to serve your loyal customers even has benefits above and beyond the intangible. When the bubble pops (and it will pop), Nvidia's sales to AI customers will crater. When that day comes, they will come to regret chasing away all the customers who would still be giving them business if they had not been cast aside as "not profitable enough, sorry guys".
>That is how immoral people run a business. But there are a great many businesses in this country run by people who (correctly) recognize that there are higher obligations than the law and making a profit. Treating your customers fairly, making good products, doing things in an ethical way... these are not optional to a well-adjusted person, even if not required by the law.
Higher obligations like... letting sweaty PC gamers run GTA 6 at 4K? I'm only half joking with the characterization, but AI at least have a good story going for it, productivity gains, competition with china, etc. What does gaming have going for it? For a slightly less sympathitic example, imagine there's some water shortage and datacenters[1] bought up all the water rights, forcing golfers to play on brown golf courses. Are we really supposed to be mad at either the datacenters or the farmers that sold the water rights, because they weren't serving the "higher obligations" of golfers wanting green golf courses?
[1] yes, I know they don't actually use that much water.
>When the bubble pops (and it will pop), Nvidia's sales to AI customers will crater. When that day comes, they will come to regret chasing away all the customers who would still be giving them business if they had not been cast aside as "not profitable enough, sorry guys".
As much gamers would love this revenge fantasy to happen it's not going to happen. I wager there's approximately zero brand loyalty in the PC gaming market. If nvidia is going to lose customers, it's because they're behind technologically.
> but AI at least have a good story going for it,
It was not advancing good story. If you listened to CEO it was advancing pretty horrifying story of obsoleting people and centralizing all power into their own hands.
I think he's trying to help people understand that "He was responsible for hanging consumers out to dry" is some sort of wishful thinking.
Demand has far exceeded supply, and so consumers are priced out.
This is no different than how most developing countries have been priced out of top GPUs since the dawn of computing.
It sucks, but to pin the blame on someone for not selling you a GPU at below market rates is... not fruitful.
A handful of monopolies or oligopolies dealing with each other and cutting the rest of the world out is a classic example of market failure. It's not supply and demand determining the right price, because that requires a fair and competitive market, something that market fundamentalists always overlook.
The fabs are maxed out.
LLM providers document making 38 USD/hour/card. https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer/blob/main/doc%2Finf...
Where is the conspiracy?
Whether the fabs may be maxed out or not doesn't mean anything outside of the handful of companies that secured a multi-year contract with the chip makers. How much some company charges for rented GPU capacity just shows us that GPU prices are exorbitantly high, not that the market is competitive nor fair. Acknowledging widely publicized multi-year contracts between the chip makers, hyperscalers, and AI labs isn't a "conspiracy."
I don't get this. What's up with all the overzealous AI proponents using aggressive deny, deflect, discredit tactics against any criticism of the world's most powerful companies acting against the public interest? What's in it for them?
He and NVIDIA should never have been in a position where they can single-handedly dictate where the world's GPU supplies go to. They should never have been able to form a circle jerk economy with a handful of hyperscalers and AI labs. They should never have been a chokepoint for the entire personal computing industry, which is being wiped out right now due to the artificial shortage of critical components.
The lack of regulation and/or enforcement has brought about this completely textbook case of market failure with damaging consequences for the broader industry and society as a whole. It was the responsibility of governments to prevent this exact situation.
But here we are. Jensen Huang and NVIDIA brought themselves to a situation where they are responsible. They should be held accountable for the negative externalities they cause.
Last I checked one can buy personal computers just fine at a moderate price increase.
You cannot buy flagship Nvidia consumer GPUs, and the next level down, the 5080, currently retails approximately at a 100% price increase.
Low VRAM GPUs such as the 5070 at 12GB are not affected much, retailing at 15% above MSRP.
Absent another massive expansion in AI demand due to new real applications, we are probably going to see affordable high-end consumer products in 2028.
Hardly the drama you make it sound like, and calling for regulation or legal consequences seems overblown to me.
He had very little say in the forces that "destroyed the PC market". When he co-founded NVidia, it wasn't to become a geopolitical power player - no one could have predicted that 3d accelerator cards for gaming on PCs would have that kind of impact. If anything, NVidia has made some questionable business moves to not abandon their initial market, such as trying to prevent crypto mining on the cheaper cards meant for gaming.
His successor, however, probably got in position deliberately seeking geopolitical power. They're going to be worse in every way (except cheating on their spouse with subordinates, they're probably not going to do that).
All the irrelevant ant kitchen posts really drives home the dead internet theory.
It shouldn't be surprise we are seeing so many of these posts surface.
After all, when you see two ants in the kitchen..
I click on these ant kitchen people expecting some new account with 3 karma, nope, old ass accounts with lots of karma. Humans and bots converging in functionality.
Out of curiosity and for the lack of a better thing to do with my time, I prompted both gpt and opus several times to write an HN comment about Jensen Huang's affairs to see if either of them would include the ants thingy. They didn't
I can't say for certain if I just didn't use the right model, but I also wouldn't be surprised if this is just people parroting each other to look smart. After all, people did it for decades before llms were a thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
it's a cool analogy.
The interesting thing about those posts is that once you see two of them in a thread, you know there are going to be more than two.
It's a good analogy.
There's an entire class of analogies and idioms that match this scenario, so how come only the exact same "ant" one is the one everyone uses?
It's either artificial or just classic meme effects, but then the question becomes, where did you pick this up from?
Did you see it on twitter?
I read it here on hn and just repeated it, cuz it made sense.
I would if he went to bed everything realizing this is how it could all end?
Is it so bad? He founded one of history's most successful companies in one of the most exciting sectors on the planet and ran it for 33 years. He's 63.
The only thing that would actually be bad is if his wife left him, which we don't know is happening yet. Some women accept the "risk" (to put it tastelessly) of marrying a hundred-billionaire, and stick it out.
Depends on what he values, I don't think I'd be any happier with 150bn than maybe 100m, they're both large enough that I couldn't possibly see myself spending it. Not with this specific case, but I often see people saying/implying people must be happy because they're rich/founded a successful company/achieved something great/<insert desirable thing here>.
I guess people often think the things they imagine making themselves happy would make someone else who has that happy, and I just don't think that's the case that often. I don't think money buys happiness after a point, a certain amount gets rid of a lot of discomfort and stress and brings relief and security, a bit more can buy some happiness, after that it's just number go up.
For sure, he's probably deeply unhappy about his legacy. I just mean "this is how it could all end" implies something a little more dramatic than that. While money doesn't buy happiness after a certain amount, it does buy the satisfaction of supporting your future generations. And that's not even to mention what he built.
Exactly, a lot of people (especially those who have plenty of material wealth) focus much more on legacy. Here we're watching Jensen's legacy turn into that of an incompetent and possibly a traitor, on top of being morally bankrupt. That can't feel good. It will color everything he has ever said or done, I'm sure you can find plenty of his quotes that will now seem ridiculous.
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/jensen-huang-quotes
Despite not being a full subscriber to the "death of the author" concept, I do think we tend to ironically lean a little too petty/unrelated in our criticisms of big names when we discover their sexual sins, and I think this is an example of that. Yes, I'm sure you could find some quotes in there that are hypocritical given his sexual conduct, but I can't find one on an initial review. I think sometimes this can kind of harm the legitimate criticism by association.
I say this as somebody who has never had any admiration for this guy (not because of a specific grievance, but because I don't follow tech leadership and am generally pessimistic about them).
You're 1) projecting that it is my opinion, and not my estimation of public opinion; and 2) seemingly unfamiliar with how most people think - "we" do not lean toward anything but laziness, and this is how lazy thought works.
That being said his early life is crazy enough that a movie could save him. Lazy thinking is fickle, after all.
He's an engineer. He spent his life building engineering marvels, and creating tools to help others build engineering marvels.
He's also spent his life building a large, very influential company.
Could it be that those are the things he values?
Who was that comedian that said something along of "I'd rather be depressed in an Rolls Royce than in a Honda"... Money doesn't buy happiness, but it removes the worry of where you are going to sleep tonight.
> The only thing that would actually be bad
Would be investigation ending in jail time.
She didn't marry a hundred-billionaire. They met as students at Oregon State. :(
In its day, Britain imprisoned Oscar Wilde and castrated the brilliant Alan Turing for homosexuality, driving him to his death. Now we look back on this in horror as an example of collective madness.
So how will we look back a couple of decades from now on the atmosphere of the 21st-century woke party committee, which, on the word of a spurned woman, fired the brilliant biologist David Sabatini and destroyed the visionary founder of a company over extramarital affairs?
I'm not sure if we should compare Jensen Huang and David Sabatini.
I have a feeling that if this was only related to affairs Jensen would not have quit his job. Musk has a reputation as a playboy and that does not seem to concern investors. The American people also happily voted an (alleged?) womanizer into the oval office.
Most likely Jensen/Nvidia has some skeletons in the closet and him leaving is mutually beneficial, to the company and to him as a person.
> Musk has a reputation as a playboy
He has exposed his genitals to a flight attendant without her consent and then tried to bribe her to keep quiet about it by offering to buy her a horse.
Let's not, uh, mince words here.
Interesting to see that the sanctity of the marriage bed and allegations of espionage are now a "woke party committee" invention according to billionaire worshippers.
"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell
Social justice is systemic compassion, not envy. Either Sowell missed the mark, or it's taken out of context.
What I love about this whole thing is how many different ways there are to offend one’s sensibilities.
There’s the obvious one of cheating on one’s spouse.
If you don’t find that immoral or just don’t think it’s that bad, there’s the massive ethical issue of having a sexual relationship with a subordinate. And if you don’t care about the ethics of it, it’s still a problem of it influencing business decisions.
And if none of that gets you, there’s the whole spy angle. National security is a pretty good reason to frown on this. And even if you don’t care about that, there’s the corporate espionage angle: how much info made its way to their Chinese competitors?
If not a single one of those makes you think maybe there’s some merit to his ouster, and you compare the situation to Alan Effin Turing, you’ve lost the plot.
A sexual relationship with a subordinate, and a sexual relationship with a customer. Both of which could influence your business decisions.
At the current rate of disclosure Huang is going to be revealed to have had an affair with every woman in the world by 2038. It’s vital that we build out infrastructure to support this if we don’t want to be left behind.
At least we’ve now passed the tipping point where the majority of affairs are domestic. Some country out there is going to achieve HSM (Huang Second Marriage) and it’s vital to future prosperity that we make sure it’s the US.
"Claude, build me a website that tracks with whom Jensen Huang had an affair yet! Register the domain hasjensenhuanghadanaffair.with and treat GETs on subdirectories as names for queries, like hasjensenhuanghadanaffair.with/JaneDoe should display whether he had an affair with Jane Doe."
https://xkcd.com/605/
sigh, another 2038 problem to solve.
That is it...I am buying a leather jacket!
Buy a brown one
I will buy 3 Brown and 1 Blue
You also need employees.
and revenue. don't forget the revenue.
And profit
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
and seemingly ants in your kitchen
Maybe aging to 60+ won't be that bad? Thank you Jensen for showing younger men there is hope.
Step 1: Be a famous Billionaire CEO.
I don't who the 3rd affair will be with, but the 4th one will be with sticks and stones
:)
Rubber sticks
the public discourse around this thing and the moralizing reminds me of the Norm Macdonald bit about Tiger Woods.
"What? I don't believe you! Are you telling me, are you trying to tell me that that guy , worth 6 billion, you're telling me that the world's greatest athlete over there, Tiger Woods -- you're telling me that that guy, that super handsome charismatic dude likes to lie down with ladies?
I DON'T BUY IT!"
One affair is a scandal.
Two affairs is a pattern.
Three affairs is just funny.
One relationship per GPU core.
Bill Gates had a similar pattern
He had 3, had to look it up.
There are memes about... running SLI <wink wink nudge nudge>
And frankly at this point, where nothing surprises you anymore we should probably just enjoy some stupid pictures with captions
One affair is a tragedy, one+ is a statistic. Or whatever Georgian man said.
Amateur. Tiger Woods had at least 9 extramarital affairs.
I think it's easy not to seek women but when they throw themselves at you that's a different story... Maybe if the risk of adultery is too high it's better to get a divorce and stay divorced.
stop it!! he's already dead!!
in all seriousness though, what is going on? everything here feels well timed and coordinated. were the powers that be just waiting for US midterms to pass? is there any relationship to the anthropic IPO? my tin foil hat is going to be working overtime these next few days
Plenty of benign explanations without needing tinfoil
- The affair(s) were so badly hidden that they became obvious once one was exposed
- High profile CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world means a lot of eyes
- something akin to the Streisand effect keeps things in the news cycle
Yeah, hundreds of reporters suddenly being interested in the story after the initial news broke shines a lot more lights on things.
The initial story about the spy dropped on October 29th, before the midterms.
At that point it was probably just a matter of time until the rest came out.
I mean it’s just much more of a favorable political environment for the board to investigate Huang. And journalists know that if there’s smoke, there’s likely fire. So it seems like a pretty natural pile-on if anything.
It is kinda weird that Jensen decided to resign so quickly though. I would’ve expected a longer investigation period involving both the board and Congress.
Democrats take charge IPO almost out the door Bubble about to pop
What people (and nations) would be able to come out clean in front of their audiences from the fallout of the above if the catalyst was Huang having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, being interrogated by Warren, and the woke forcing him out of the company he built (whose interim CEO is female)
There’s a thread through all of that that props up a significant portion of Silicon Valley elite’s worldview…
Parallel execution in action
Need a power of 2 now
He is the CEO of GPU company. Parallelism is in the DNA
Man! Mr. Huang is B.U.S.Y., even at work lol
Just my opinion here, spy is probably fine, coworker is big no no. If I got a spy to bang, after it's done I'll publicly praise her on Twitter to thank her for the good time (assuming it is, otherwise I will have give advice) and tag my wife too so we can actually try the tricks at home but this time with true love. If a female coworker enters a meeting room alone with me, I'll insist that she keep the door behind her open so everyone can supervise what we are doing.
It's kinda pity. Mr. Huang seemed a nicer guy than the other CEOs, less dicky, trying to be useful etc. But then maybe that's why the other CEOs act like they do, a way to filter out the less loyal members from the company board. If Mr. Huang survives this, maybe he should get rid of whoever supported his ousting from the board, wasting money to breed a coup always burdens earning potential.
Jensen has had a heck of a ride, fastest rise and fall we've seen in a while. Looks like he didn't handle the attention very well.
Fast fall, yes, but his rise has been years in the making.
Decades actually!
I should've worded my post differently. Jensen had a fast rise as a household name and the attention that came with it. Before 2020 I doubt more than 2% of the population could've named the CEO of Nvidia.
To be known by 2% of US Population as a business leader is by all means a household name. What then happened is more like superstar status akin to Steve Jobs. You simply can't rise higher than that.
Seems like the joke went over your head.
I'm not sure what joke you're seeing, but if you're referring to my post, it wasn't intentional!
I thought attention is all you need.
Having a cushion of $145B he won't be hurt from the fall.
California is a community property state. Lori is about to take control of her half of that in 3, 2, 1...
I would be so devastated to only have 122.5 billion dollars... but you know what, if someone wants to give me 5 million, I'll settle for it.
Right now I would be happy to have 145k to split.
Sure, but jail time for bypassing the export ban can definitely make it harder to use the money. Then again, given his affiliation with the POTUS he probably won't get jail time.
Wasn't exactly a fast rise. Nvidia has been growing pretty steadily for decades.
[insert joke about three rides that we know of here]
To a certain point I don't really care about how many subordinates it ends up being (something tells me there are more), but it does make all of the grindset quotes CEOs like Huang barf up all the more laughable.
> “I work every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t work. And if I’m not working, I’m thinking about work.”
> “I wake up at 5am, and the moment I wake up, I start working… I’m asleep probably by 9:30pm.
https://www.startuparchive.org/p/jensen-huang-there-s-hard-w...
A lot of people have said Nvidia are crazy to get rid of Huang, that he's a singular irreplaceable talent. What if, perhaps, he's not all he's made out to be?
His affairs are clearly reprehensible, but what does this have to do with how hard he works?
He very clearly isn't fully dedicated to his work, given his multiple affairs with his employees. Someone that was _actually_ laser focused on their company would, you know, not sleep with employees.
I think this is a weird angle. A man's unfaithfulness might very well be correlated with failures in his responsibilities as a leader, but the simple idea of working hard doesn't seem like one of them. In fact, if I may say something a little eyebrow-raising, that particular quality might even be inversely correlated...
We can find so much to criticize without stretching.
You’re describing an impotent, not committed person.
He has time for at least four romantic relationships.
He's bush league compared to Elon Musk who runs 6 companies simultaneously (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, Boring, xAI) yet finds time to father at least 14 kids with at least 4 different women!
Isn't his usual relationship with those women "here's some sperm, have at it"?
Almost Genghis Khan level... a few more and conquer at least half of the solar system, then we talk. Loser!
Jensen: “You're not talking to someone who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me.”
I don’t understand the moral panic over this. A man of his wealth can easily support more than one family.
> His affairs are clearly reprehensible
They’re not. He can fuck half of the company, for all I care, as long as it is all consensual and not enforced by power dynamics.
> enforced by power dynamics
Maybe he should only be allowed to fuck to fuck ATI C-levels or something? Or maybe Bill Gates?
Obviously. He should be able to fuck only older women too, but not too old, because that would be taking advantage of an old and vulnerable woman.
What? I'm just referring to the idea that cheating on your wife is bad. I never implied that he abused his power to coerce these women.
Unfortunatley for him I think his troubles are just starting. Heading towards a presidential pardon is strong possibility.
Might be quicker to start asking which Nvidia employees he didn't sleep with.
I can't believe Jensen Huang popped the AI bubble with his d*ck...
Man, the McCarthyist notes in the comments are pure comedy
Who cares.
It is so American to interlink personal affairs with business.
Amount of jensen affairs doubles every 24 hours.
This guy could get married and divorced like 8 times, lose 50% of his assets, and still be a billionaire.
most "our democracy" / "juice" op ever
this will backfire so hard to the bolshevoke crowd
Destroying 1 trillion in value and stealing the company from the immigrant who built it from nothing literally started on a napkin in Denny’s, actual American Dream level founding story is asinine over gossip and so far empty spy accusations.
Rule 1: don't sleep with employees. It's incredibly toxic to corporate culture.
This shouldn't need explaining to people who are so intelligent, and the fact that it does means we have serious work to do in this industry, particularly in SV.
He likes the ladies. I would not be surprised if a plush teddy bear with his face will be for sale - rumour has it the ladies would want such a teddy bear with that Huang face. (Or whatever it is that makes him appeal to the ladies, I would not know.)
To be fair Huang also said he doesn’t know his own address maybe he doesn’t know too who his wife is.
Jensen must be realy good at negotiating pre fuctual agreements, which he did while bieng under constant observation, nvidia budgeted 4 million a year for his personal security, and he will travel and be surrounded by personal staff, and co workers almost 24 hr's a day. So this was all out in the 'open', which some of the pics verrify. The real questions are, why now?, and will he take Elon up on the offer,'very honored to have him', work at spacex.
One cannot even have sex with a lady nowadays without being CEO of a multi billion company.
Who gives a damn who he is having an r-ship with. It's 2026.
Are they all spies or why is this important?
Imagine a country that twice elected a rapist pedophile for a president clutching their pearls over a CEO that steps out on his wife.
It's a convenient distraction I guess.
Try harder
Good lord can Americans please be not so darn weird and prude around that topic. As long as it's consensual and legal, why do you all think it's even remotely acceptable to police what grown-up people get up to in their bed (or hotel) rooms.
Signed, a German (the country that Walmart, among other reasons, lost because they wrecked their public image trying to police relationships between employees)
Your Swiss neighbors also disapprove of the CEO of the company sleeping with a direct subordinate: https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1931092/nestle-ce...
And sleeping with a customer makes internal compliance and controls officers angry.
At how many $billion of market value should a board just figure that it's a cost of doing business to hire retired spooks to keep track of the CEO's personal life, and ensure that he has a pipeline of well-paid, background-checked, NDA-signed mistresses available to divert his eyes from the employees and spies?
Parrots another article - even w ", Report Says" as the end of the headline.
The original article is from Reuters, partially written by this woman below whose history is all Washington stories then bam 4 articles on Nvidia and tech.
https://www.reuters.com/authors/alexandra-alper/
Appears to be manipulated news (which we're used to), story is real but should be seen through that lens - why?
It all lining up perfectly with their quarterly earnings call does seem like a bit of a strange coincidence at the very least.
These are also not actually new developments, but years old. So they could have easily been stockpiled ahead of time, ready to deploy when opportune. Or maybe that's just standard when you're high profile enough? It's like accumulating and strategically burning 0 days. Or trading them for that matter.
Or at least the original report was like this. These newer ones are perfectly well explained by opportunism imo, if one is to believe that the anonymous sources really are company internal.
> lining up perfectly with their quarterly earnings call
Availability heuristic. A short seller was writing about Nvidia's China-disclosure problem in May. Huang's affair with Ms. Huang came out before Halloween. If one month before earnings is fair game, then you're going to have a lot of conspiracies to clean up.
It's a 3 week window each time each between announcement of meeting and actual meeting, not a month, and the May case does fall into it too. But I do get your point.
(This must have originally been posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50473868 - we've since merged the threads.)
Look, what happens between a billionaire CEO, three consenting adults, and a Singaporean shell company is a personal matter that should not concern us
- Hacker News
You would do the same thing in his position!
- Also Hacker News
People love to self-report by announcing what "everyone" would do in different situations.
Are you claiming these additional women were involved in the Singaporean shell company issue?
Let me help you out here: You are motivated by envy and animus and these other things are rationalizations.
Nothing puts piss in the pants of HN posters more than a rich guy not escaping accountability.
It's like shaking a chicken coop.
Now that he is the former CEO, why does it matter and why is the news cycle still hyper fixated on him?
US elites get off on destroying people who do good for the country. This also benefits China so the Chinese government works with them to do this occasionally which they did in this case.
He’s no longer CEO which is what China wanted, but US elites can still destroy him even more and the people around him.
There are three "I"s in NVIDIA (latin)
So we are now a gossip platform?
I mean he's the boss of a GPU company, no surprise he's having affairs in parallel.
In a way, these multiple affairs helps him. "Hey I wasn't knowingly having an affair with a spy, I was just fucking every moving body and when you do that, one of them turned out to be a bad apple".
typical psychopath "our democracy" or "juice" op ever.
This will backfire so hard I can only laugh.
These AI slop chinese soap-operas are so good...