> NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
great way by China to break the market leader down.
even if there were denials or what ever the market has already pressured him to step down.
There's no one to replace Jensen
The AI war progresses
I think what he has done is wrong and should be grounds for termination from his position (and possibly more on a legal level – details still unfolding). However, I'm with you on this. I can't place it but it feels like there is something more to this story that hasn't come out yet.
I don't know why I feel this way. Something just feels off and I can't place it.
Because he cheated on his wife?? Or what am I missing? If that's the official reason, I don't buy it. I don't think those who can influence this decision give two shits about this type of morality. It's silly on its face. Obviously it's cover for some other agenda. I'm just surprised people buy this silly excuse instead of getting to the bottom of what is really happening.
Not sure about the people thinking he didn't do much wrong.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
If it was some middle manager who got fired for screwing a subordinate you'd see the typical "don't shit where you eat" comments.
My guess is people are upset because their stock is down 20% over the last month because of this drama.
I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.
My understanding is that NVidia's organisation is very flat and Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type. Moreover there was no succession plan. I get that having an affair with a spy is not great but isn't it risky to replace him now?
Imagine having to explain that line of reasoning to Congress in four months. "Yes, Senator, we know our CEO was facilitating chip smuggling to China while in a relationship with a Chinese spy, but we figured that it would just be too risky to replace him at this time."
I feel like "not having a succession plan" should be a fireable offence on its own.
Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".
Would anyone bat an eye for “one admitted affair”? It is the “spy, Chinese, export ban, a blonde” caught on. No evidence whatsoever on these. It is the imagination of if you have “two ANT in the kitchen…”
I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
It may well be that it's his private life and it doesn't have much to do with things, but it is a contributing factor. The skirting of export bans was the reagent, but the infidelity is the catalyst that is making it much bigger.
CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?
I've heard rumours that 20-40% of Nvidia's revenue was coming from sanctioned chips that make their way into Chinese data centres. If true, it's not small potatoes.
Elon Musk has an AI bot generating explicit images without consent, regardless of age, yet nobody's firing him.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
That is simply not true, Grok refuses to make explicit images, and with uploaded media it refuses to do even mildly enticing ones. *
* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
China was already "developing a fully domestic stack" either way.
So the only thing selling to them accomplishes is give Nvidia more margins. At the cost of boosting the Chinese AI sector - possibly to the point of parity.
China at the moment has the capability to do infrastructural rollouts far faster than US or Europe, but doesn't have the chips to stuff new datacenters with. So it's easy to see why China would want the chips. But it's not like Nvidia is having trouble selling their AI accelerators outside China - and they can't ramp up accelerator production on demand. More demand for accelerators would push the prices even higher, and that would reflect in the margins, but the benefits for Nvidia weren't even that large.
So it was a questionable push all around - even before the spy scandal.
China also used to posture with "we don't need Nvidia chips" in Q1 this year. But now, schemes to ship those chips anyway are being uncovered - in the wake of Jensen's ousting and in general. Some involve direct shipments, and others involve offshored datacenters being established by Chinese companies to supply compute to China. So we know this "we don't need" was always fake. Chinese government was saying "we don't need them chips" with one hand and devising ways of keeping the supply going with the other.
As though the Board had no idea of this, and are suddenly acting oh gosh this is the first we've heard of the phantom SG revenue! Time for Jensen to go. Nah, not buying it. Many of the board have been w JH since the early 1990s. This is because his reckless disregard for the company and his years-long relationship with a Chinese spy.
There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this. NVidia is too big and Huang is too wealthy. This administration in particular would never prosecute that. And, even if they did, a pardon is only $1-3 million anyway.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:
> 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 not. That's a strange statement to make, particularly the emphasis on "married". It seems that person is implying that if a married woman participated in the affair, it was due to coercion. A sexual harassment lawsuit would mainly be a liability in the court of public opinion.
> I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem
You really think Nvidia would let Huang go (without a replacement matching his skills, experience and knowledge in the field) because he cheated with an employee? It is the spy affair while Huang promoted an open export policy.
Plus thanks to Huang, Nvidia is now under investigation by federal agencies.
None of them care about a CEO cheating.
Also, being fired from the company you founded is a serious consequence.
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
Think of this current fracas like this: Americans have a strange penchant to define themselves by sexuality. So, they are easily distracted into a trance by their hormonal and prurient interests for extended periods.
A famous guy had an island and it was extrajudicially a place where alot of powerful people internationally could come to his island and interchange info and ideas and make deals and things could occur and he collected up all that kind of stuff, including arms deals and the sex stuff.
But Americans are only right now aware of the sex stuff in what he collected up.
The sex stuff is essentially a distraction, the oily film on the deeper ocean of truth.
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
> They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
I know it's just speculation, but the fact that Nvidia hasn't tried to scapegoat some random compliance officer strongly suggests to me that Jensen did know, and that the board has seen the paper trail that proves it.
>If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
Sure, but the US gov itself lifted those controls soon. So they get this for bypassing controls that they lifted and found no use for anyway?
And does anybody really believe those exports, of the #1 most crucial supposedly restricted tech, wheren't covertly greenlit and scruitinized when they happened? Like, it caught anybody in government or nvidia or bodies checking these things as a surprise?
And why would they need some special honeypot for that? He was advocating for sales to china because they're good for nvdia's bottom line, way before he hooked up with that woman!
As for low level details, wouldn't be smarter, less visible to all, and more effective if they honeypotted some key technician instead? The CEO would be too visible in his moves, and too high position to know or care for the low level technical details, the kind that would be of interest to competitors.
More likely they know and were ok those things all along, but he's no longer useful, or his preferences doesn't work well with the new plans in the tech war with China, or they fear what would happen to Nvidia stock with Democrats in power having this compromising info to play up, and they got rid of him.
Being compromised kinda does seem like a reason to be fired. It seemed well known he was doing it since there are plenty of photos over a few years? So it’s more she was a honeypot.
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
America has not declared war formally since WW2, yet people have been indicted for treason. Open hostilities is the legal bar. See United States v. Greathouse
Biggest valuation ever will turn into biggest investor lawsuit ever. The music on the AI circular deals is about to be broken by a feminine spell. This has Lord of the Rings all over it...
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
Everybody should be against the export ban. It's laughable to claim that it is for "national security", it's blatant protectionism to cover US AI companies for the fact that they operate at monumental losses. Any country in the world should be allowed to buy the hardware they need to run AI, if they need it, and if the roles were reversed the US should also be allowed to buy tech from other countries. Graphic cards aren't nuclear bombs, and AI is a multi-use core technology every nation on earth should have access to. So far, China has made a far better impression in that respect than the US. At least they have published open weight models.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
Basically every technology is dual use, but still I basically agree, there is an incredible level of anti-China rhetoric in the US right now, not just on the right. The Chip export ban is incredibly tricky reason the outcomes of. For one thing, doesn’t it change the China Taiwan relationship?
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration—with the tacit permission of the current administration.
The problem now is the very public optics of that coming to light in the context of having an affair with a maybe spy.
> Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration
I want to add some nuance to this statement. There is a difference between:
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
Are they still in Trump's good graces? Sure, they gave him money before. But can they promise him more money again? He's pretty quick to dispose of people when they're inconvenient too.
I dont think its more soo about the ban as China itself has 'officially' blocked the chips that were being licensed as exportable. I think its more of the asks that were being made by the NATSec and Amodie aligned actors (see the pod he had with Dwarkesh ), to ho tighter and more aggressive. Basically Jensen was sort of the brake on the impulsive ideas getting thrown around on how to 'win' AI and create a moat against all latecomers.
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
Cheating on your wife may be despicable behavior, but it doesn’t warrant firing the founding CEO of one of the most important companies on earth, especially considering how much is at stake economically, including how reliant the U.S. economy has been on AI build out spending. On the other hand, cheating on your wife and endangering national security at the same time is a different story.
Maybe in today's day and age, but sleeping with your boss who is married was never a normal or okay thing in any part of the world as far as I recall, maybe it changed in the last few decades, but I've never known anyone to think any of this is normal.
Well, you say that, but the perception is he hasn't got sacked for circular financing, nor for the providing of sanctioned components (supposedly they went to third countries, not China, so legal). But he got sacked for two affairs.
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
Did your TV tell you that? I hope you realize that there is absolutely no proof of the import ban having been skirted. The FBI has been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed since 2024 and all they have is a few GPUs still being unboxed at their Malaysian data center.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
Musk controls 19.9% of voting power at Tesla, and more than 80% at SpaceX. Huang has about a 3.5% ownership stake in of Nvidia and that’s jointly controlled with his wife.
Musk's companies have low quality boards, which is by design to make it almost impossible to fire him and the legacy of that should serve as a cautionary tale
It's also possible that after the first affair news broke, the board asked him questions and he didn't disclose that there's a second affair too (and maybe more??). The board only realized that he'd not been truthful/fully forthcoming when the second affair news broke yesterday. That's when they decided to boot him. Because if there's more and more affairs going to keep breaking, that would be a complete media spectacle distracting from the company.
Jensen is Taiwanese. Nvidia's chips are made in Taiwan, as are all the most advanced chips in the world -- including the chips in Apple and AMD products -- by TSMC. China wants to re-absorb Taiwan into itself, partially because they cannot match TSMC's geometries and they desperately need those geometries.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
Unlikely, but not implausible, and should have been reported directly to the FBI / CIA if that was ever implied. But, the whole affair business means he probably wouldn't have handled hearing something like that responsibly either, which is part of the problem.
Abuse of power in the case of the second affair to the extent it could've easily turned into a rape scandal and is a big reason why it is a big HR no-no, and in the first case, the affair not being public is exactly the kind of thing a honeypot wants in order to keep you quiet about the kinds of threats that may end up implied.
Either way, the dude is going to be getting investigated and will not be able to effectively lead NVIDIA in the course of what's coming.
So many HN folks defending Huang's actions as "just an affair" - what an epic reading comprehension fail. Yes there is an affair, and that's what grabbed the initial headlines. But just read a paragraph or two and you'll find the espionage story.
For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
Well the only thing super weird is the timeline - USA bans exports, China (very soon after) bans IMPORTS! And then there's a company which keeps doing trade under the nose of the potentially two most powerful nation-states and their secret service sources. This is super fishy, really I don't buy nobody knew nothing, only for a "lucky" journalist to figure out the whole thing...
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
Oh, it's not the repeated violations of sexual conduct with an employee, and a spy, and likely more? A CEO who is that dumb to risk his and the company trust isn't worth it. Look, a trillion already wiped out. When employees say "how dumb could he be", you know the board and major investors are saying that too.
dark ops may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
I am not sure I can agree. Perhaps this was the underlying reason. Perhaps others wanted to frame him and launched a media campaign. But from what I can see, at the
least on the surface, to me it looks as if he was fired for liking too many women at the same time, at the least one of which might be a possible spy. This may all be fake-reasons on top to cover underlying real causes, but to me right now it looks as if the girls cost him the job here.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Can you imagine if it were a female CEO fired for the same thing? Oh how the accusations of sexism and double standards and how she doesn't have to report to the board what she does with her body. The argument writes itself.
History will look back at this and see Jensen was right to do this.
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
What is inorganic? China banning GPUs ≠ China not wanting the GPUs. It is not unreasonable to imagine China not wanting to shake the sanctions boat, so offloading the crime into another country allows them to still have their cake and eat it too. They get to develop technology locally, they have undeniable regulations on the books that make them compliant within the expected framework of US-China trade, and then still get to have their MVPs rent restricted hardware from gray market dealers in Malaysia. 20% of NVIDIA's FY26 was channeled through this framework. The point of the system is what it does.
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
With a strict ban of chips to China, Chinese companies will not have enough compute. Without enough compute, they are not going to be able to release new open weight models.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
> ”it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.”
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
> the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
The first can be objectively and quickly ruled as violating company policy. The second has to go through a process -- did Jensen knowingly violate national security policy, and if so how significant was it?
I think, among other things, Nvidia’s board didn’t want to find out if a Congressional committee agreed about that.
Mr. Huang, you’ve admitted that you violated Nvidia’s policy on relations with subordinates. Why should we believe you were faithful to Nvidia’s policy of compliance with national security export controls?
oh come on, do people genuinely believe HR rules plays as a role here when it's regarding CEO, especially someone at the helm at the one of the most valued company?
Time and time we saw executives having affairs and dodging consequences. Elon Mask, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos. All faced much less severe consequences. Definitely not something blow over like this just after a few days it's being reported.
This is a coordinated attack on Jensen and it was very successful.
> The national-security cover-up is a far bigger deal.
Could be, but that requires time to investigate. Banging employee is different because the board would just have to ask Jensen if the reports are true.
Those are just your average CEOs. Jensen is the founder and CEO of NVDA for 30 years and has been seen as one of the backbone of this AI era. No one at this level ever faced this level of scrutiny and consequence.
Even Bill Clinton faced relatively minor consequences, considering presidents should be held to a higher moral standard
Did the investigation complete that quickly? I don't think he was fired a few days after an investigation was announced. He resigned in disgrace under pressure due to all of his choices combined.
I hope nobody in the presidential administration needs to resign because of their role in the largest scandal in US history but if so, that is what is best for the country.
Fuck no. Jensen did no such thing. He actually hasn’t been charged with a single crime. You’re outright hallucinating here.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
This comment yesterday [1] indicated that Megaspeed was not on the blocked entity list, but that NVidia voluntarily hasn't sold to them since June 2025.
If it were just about the export ban, then why leak the affairs? US intelligence (which serves US corporate power only) has decided to put this guy out to pasture by any means necessary. That's the reason for this faux moral outrage. They want to make sure there's no chance he makes it out the other side.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
Allows the influence of selection of next CEO that is more aligned with long term Chinese goals. Or punishment for not going along with the plan.
Im not much for conspiracy theories, but if you think about it, in the state that US is in, there is absolutely zero chance US will do anything retaliatory to China if they do spy shit on US soil. China is basically free to play spy games. My guess is that they have their fingers in Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, SpaceX, and AMD, and probably other agents within NVIDIA in high places.
Their game is basically rearrange the pieces so eventually China becomes the world number one superpower, while keeping the status quo as much as possible
Is this remotely believable, that one CEO can surreptitiously work around both the government and his own company to sell restricted goods at volume? If this were real you'd have to lobotomize the entire management structure, because there are a lot of people that would know and know better and that they'd face jail time. And maybe merge it with some other company quickly so it doesn't completely collapse because of the immediate mass firings to try and sway prosecutions toward individuals and not the destroy the entire entity.
I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.
NVIDIA's latest chips were also on an export ban for several Middle Eastern countries ("security" theater). That's about the time the UAE's sovereign fund invested a large sum in Cerebras. They were still able to get the chips by way of Kuwait, which is a friendly Middle Eastern state.
Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.
Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!
It is legal for Chinese companies to buy US neocloud time. These toothless restrictions were poorly constructed and unenforceable law. The extent to which nvda was supposed to self police is unclear. I find it hard to believe any binding evidence of direct sales will be found.
Let's cut the crap, it's a coup because he is in favor of the open-weight ecosystem and doesn't want to restrict models at the firmware level. Anthropic is in large part behind this.
>I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Nov 8 : Jensen issues apology. NVIDIA allows him to use nvidia.com for this
Nov 8 : The Board of Directors publicly backs him up with a "vote of confidence" by stating: *"no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that "The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team."* -- from https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-nvidia-board-of-directors
Nov 11 : 2nd affair gets exposed in the news
Nov 11 evening : emergency meeting of Board of Directors is called to fire Jensen Huang
Before Nov 11, it looked like NVIDIA might try to ride out the storm and keep Jensen at the helm especially if they saw that the China accusations and evidence wasn't strong enough to be a problem. Again, it was totally unnecessary for the board to publicly back him up if they had plans to get rid of him because of China allegations. However, the Board of Directors emergency Nov 11 meeting is inconsistent with the Nov 8 statement affirming Jensen's leadership.
Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.
Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
I have seen a weird number of posts/responses trying to say "this isn't because he had an affair" and like, I guess it's not, it's that he had multiple affairs that have confounding effects on the business (with subordinates, with people who got chips to China).
So no, it's not literally about his sex life, but pretending like that doesn't factor into the whole things seems like a very strange point for people to keep making. It may not be that 90% of the cause is "he had sex out of his marriage" but it's also not 0% (it surely doesn't make him a "good leader(tm)" if he's having sex with subordinates)
Sex with spy of country actively tariffed and greatest active threat to US. Billions in tariff bypass. That puts you in jail for decades territory. People magazine cares about who he is banging. Legal and possible company nationalization care about bypassing tariffs.
Selling chips to China is pretty easily provable. Who cares what pussy he is diddling, it matters that such a large company might have their assets seized due to such blatant shenanigans.
Tariffs are for imported goods, and export tariffs are unconstitutional in the United States. The monetary value of whatever transaction in question here is completely irrelevant.
This is an export security violation. Still criminal, but not tax evasion or anything like it, and the monetary value holds no legal relevance - the number of articles themselves does.
Many times, a board will maintain that they have full confidence in a CEO right up until they actually fire him. Their non-binding vote of confidence means nothing. Just as one example:
- July 25: Amid the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP publicly stated that Hayward had the board's full support.
- July 27: BP formally announced that Hayward would step down as CEO, with Robert Dudley replacing him.
Similar situations with Bob Chapek, Travis Kalanick, the Boeing CEO in 2019 when all those crashes were happening, Carol Bartz, Bob Diamond...
Indeed. The world operates on trust. Once trust breaks down, there's no choice but to deal with it directly if you want to remain effective. Unfortunately for Jensen Huang, that meant NVIDIA choosing to not have a leader they can no longer trust.
I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.
I’d love if that were true. But actually what the world operates on in selfish money grabbing.
Nobody trusted Trump yet he had the loyalty of all the tech giants because they needed him to make money.
In the case of Haung, the cost of having him as COE simply became greater than the risk to the business of him leaving. Trust had nothing to do with the equation.
There was a comment yesterday that suggested this was either a Chinese intelligence to destroy NVidia, or CIA operation to get Nvidia under control of a friendly puppet. [1]
My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it. From all appearances, NVidia was playing ball with the Trump administration. He was a frequent ally of President Trump, Trump supposedly knew about this information for the last year and sat on it, and even the CIA leaks that started it stressed how much Huang had praised the Trump administration. Reportedly they had already voluntarily stopped exports to MegaSpeed [2] as of June 2025. China, however, has a lot more to gain from his departure. It's going to harm NVidia very severely: reportedly he's very hands-on, "the conductor that makes a very complex operation work", and as a founder the whole knowledge pyramid that the company is based upon rests with him. If they want their domestic hardware industry to surpass NVidia, the easiest way to do that is to take out NVidia leadership.
I suspect that he was compromised by both the CIA and CCP, and with tensions rising between them, eventually found a situation where they each wanted him to do different things, and he couldn't satisfy both. Likely the CIA got wind that the CCP was going to move with their leverage, and published to stave that off. This also has the nice side benefit for U.S. power of letting the other side know the extent to which the CIA knows what you're doing, and showing that even the CEO of the richest company on earth is not immune to U.S laws. But it's still a net negative to U.S. power to have Huang out as CEO of NVidia, simply because it's such a net negative to NVidia. This is only a desirable outcome if he's going to be ousted anyway, or if he is otherwise compromised to become a Chinese puppet.
I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes. First affair, okay, it could be an indiscretion that happened in the past, cut ties and do damage control. But if there's a second (and third and fourth and many others?) affair and everybody knows about it, it becomes impossible for Huang to lead the company because everybody has so much leverage on him.
> My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it.
No they don't. They just lost access to Nvidia chips that they still rely on (even if not said out in the open). Alibaba's stock tanked on the news for example.
> I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes.
The role was to get the agenda off spying and export (the things you'd go to jail for)
They would prefer their companies buy local, as it will advance their local semiconductor infrastructure.
However, these companies would prefer Nvidia if they are allowed. All the advances in the past few years are due to advanced chips being restricted, so they had to step up.
It's interesting, the second comment I linked to was about the divide between Model Hawks vs. Hardware Hawks within the state department, and this comment thread is a great example of that.
Some people believe that the key moat for AI is the model, and under this model (hah) torpedoing NVidia would be bad for China and good for the U.S. because they won't have access to cutting-edge NVidia hardware for model-training. Other people believe the key moat for AI is the hardware, and under this model torpedoing NVidia would be good for China because it'd allow Chinese hardware makers to catch up and bad for the U.S. because it destroys our key competitive advantage.
Interesting that a policy decision depends so heavily on a question of fact, but that isn't unique to this issue. (I suspect that left and right would agree on abortion if they could agree on whether personhood begins at conception or birth, but they don't, so). There's also an element of time preferences here too: it's likely that model training is dominant now, but hardware will be dominant when you project out a few years, and so both factions could be right but on different timescales.
> Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
Exactly my read as well. "If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two."
My understanding is that the legal protections for the board of directors can quickly evaporate if they know about such lies and do not take actions. This is a major point of contention in the Oxford LLC bankruptcy proceedings per my understanding after the founder was found to have been persuing several kinds of fraud.
After they caught him in a lie, they may not have been able to not fire him.
They can't legally not fire him. But they can legally re-hire him after firing him. So ironically the ONLY way he can continue at nVidia is by being fired - we just have to wait a few days and there will be an Altman-like resurrection.
I have a feeling this one falls in the same category as "sweet summer child", which, while technically as old as the hills, only hit critical mass after game of thrones popularised it
I couldn't find any examples of this in a full-text book search, but I did find, from 1942:
> In the course of an experimental way, down in the depths of a science building, a beaker full of fermented sugar is left on a shelf. Sometime later one of the experimenters returned to the scene ... to find two cockroaches in the beaker, one of which had a family of about a dozen—the other had drowned itself in rum. AND WHO WOULDN'T IN THE FACE OF SUCH OVERWHELMING RESPONSIBILITIES.
I don't think this has anything to do with trust. It's absurd not to trust Huang as the best possible CEO for the company that he brought from zero to 5 trillion dollars in value. It's about being afraid of public opinion, and especially fear of being blamed for not taking the expected decision.
I think you missed the point. An average person may hold their alcohol and operate, but we don't approve cops being drunk on the job.
Huang betrayed 38 years of trust his wife put into him and recently betrayed the Board by lying to them. That's already admitted, no ifs or buts. He clearly had reasons, as he is a sane person. His reasons were romantic engagement with (alleged) spy. Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job. The Board needs to do bunch of "what ifs" in such situation, including paranoid ones, such as "what if this woman had such access to NVIDIA tech stack that each cheap is infused with some form of Chinese virus". We simply don't know how far this goes, but this firing certainly shows much further than just a consequence of a romantic fling.
Also worth noting that in the event his wife doesn't stand by him, this immediately becomes the second largest divorce settlement in history (behind only Bill and Melinda Gates). That's not the kind of headlines the PR department is love with either.
He produced a one-in-a-zillion success, and he certainly did it the hard way -- he was apparently unusually hands on. The word "genius" gets thrown around a lot, but I think it's apt.
But.
He put together a string of frankly insane mistakes that are now endangering that 5 trillion dollar company from both the inside and outside. There's no chance in hell that they're going to go from $5T back to 0, but you are not understanding the trouble they're in.
Internally, boinking your direct reports (who also happened to have a string of recent promotions) is incredibly ruinous to a company's internal culture, destroying notions of internal meritocracy. How would you feel if all your hard work was apparently not as important as putting out for the CEO? Do you think that would make you eager to do your best work for that CEO? And that's even before thinking about the insane legal liability.
Externally, he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed to simultaneously mess with national security and, it seems, circumvent export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. nVidia is in some extremely serious shit, and will have the government breathing down their necks between now and the end of time.
Next to the Nvidia chief was a woman named Huang Le, or Alice Huang, an executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed, which was poised to buy $2 billion of Nvidia A.I. technology over the next year.
Though Ms. Huang and Megaspeed are little-known players in the A.I. industry, their association with Nvidia and its chief executive has recently become a preoccupation in Washington.
Commerce Department officials have been investigating whether Megaspeed, which has close ties to Chinese tech firms, is helping companies in China sidestep American export restrictions, according to more than a half dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an examination that is not public.
The inquiry, which is active, calls into question how closely Nvidia is tracking where its A.I. chips end up and highlights the possibility of American export laws easily being sidestepped. Megaspeed is also facing scrutiny from Singaporean police, who told The New York Times in a statement that they are investigating the company for breaching local laws, without elaborating further.
It's absurd to suggest that Nvidia would need to secretly ship a handful of chips to some sketchy actor when Nvidia chips have a a mile a line long for sales.
Jensen can sell his inventory 10x over. You have to have buying power just to get a hold of them.
Anything is possible but it would be extra stupid for one of the smartest people in the world to risk everything for literally no reason at all.
Fair enough - but there are zero specific allegations against him in terms of national security.
His mistress was talking to the Chines government - literally as all people over there are compelled to do - and - was hustling Nvidia chips - as thousands of people are doing.
The idea that Nvidia would knowingly help people do something bad would require some material evidence before it could be a headline.
> It's absurd to suggest that Nvidia would need to secretly ship a handful of chips to some sketchy actor when Nvidia chips have a a mile a line long for sales.
Consider the opposite possibility - that they were doing this and this this might prove that the "mile long line" for sales is in fact not as long as it looks from the outside.
How are you puzzled that people point out the radical hypocrisy?
Musk is 'below the bar'.
Jensen is 'just at the bar' for this maybe slightly above.
I'm not condoning, I'm contextualizing.
He didn't do anything wrong or illegal (that we know of), other than breach of trust with his wife.
This media around this is crazy and slanderous.
All of the press is screaming about 'affair with spy and possibly secrets' , which is very unfair.
She's not a 'spy' - she's a hustler looking to make money by reselling GPUs, and she's 'talking to the Chinese government' as literally they are all compelled to do.
Are Jensen and Elon 'spies' because they talk to the State Dept. and US Gov all the time about goings on in China?
In an ideal world - we would have to contend with Jensen's actions, but I'm doubtful he'd be nerfed for personal foibles, which are not material or public concern.
Assuming that he did not hand over key secrets or information, which I highly doubt and which there are no specific allegations, this is a media / meme wave, completely out of context.
The only saving grace in this, is that the Nvidia board may be friendly to him, in which case, maybe they 'know something' that is not public, and this is the 'nice way out' but even then I'm doubtful.
That's true but only slightly true - and the evidence is that rappers can get away with absolutely horrific behaviour that other musicians cannot 'because the culture'. Kaney just set records for his concerts after releasing 'Hail Hitler' album for gosh sakes.
Elon has normalized his bad behaviour and he controls the board - there's no 'smoke that can make a fire' around him as long as the companies are doing ok. He also aggressively threatens people and very few will speak out against him.
There might be a tinge of racism with the 'honey pot' stuff, and 'chinese spy' has hints of orientalism as well. The headlines are really leaning in to the 'Asian Sex Spy' stuff which is terrible. And I've see posts with rich guys and their Asian wives - not nice.
Fair point, but I don't think it's only partially the case.
He's clearly not the best CEO for the company if his leadership has opened them up to a tonne of liability. The thing with Powell is problematic enough on its own, and yet it looks like a misdemeanor compared to the fact that he was sleeping with a Chinese spy and potentially knowingly sold chips to China in the face of a US-government-imposed ban. I just don't see why this is so hard. The best guy for the job is the one who doesn't risk the company and investor's money by overstepping into the geopolitical arena because he wants to poke some strange.
Given that a third woman (another coworker) has just been alleged, I'd say that Jensen was the best fit in a few other ways too. I'd be furious if I were an investor.
Furious investor here. Lol. But I'm just as furious with Huang as with the board for firing him.
But it seems especially goofy because it appears it's only about the non-Chinese affairs, since the timeline suggests he was in the clear until the second one came out.
Does anyone here think that sleeping with a billionaire CEO is something that these successful, executive-level women were actually coerced into? That's the fear run-of-the-mill "boss sleeping with subordinates" harassment suits are (usually justifiably) about. That the subordinate was either pressured into the arrangement in the first place, or that she at some point would have wished to stop, but would credibly fear retaliation and thus be coerced to continue.
I'm trying to imagine concretely what that could have possibly been like. Somehow I don't think he could be that desperate to be with a specific woman who didn't want him, that he would threaten an executive to get her into bed, nor to be so obsessed with keeping the affair going that he would even think of threatening revenge against someone who, by definition, obviously had the ability to ruin his life just by opening her mouth. The women held all the power over him, as evidenced by the fact that they just used that power to end his career.
It's not about whether or not they were coerced, it's about the complications that it brings to the table. Has anyone he was sleeping with been promoted? Did the fact that they were sleeping with him compromise the validity of that process? Is he vulnerable to current or previous sexual partners (coercion goes both ways)? Is he vulnerable to people who weren't sleeping with him but knew about his affairs?
Remember, this a guy who shepherds a multitrillion dollar company. He needs to be able to demonstrate good judgement, and that generally means not screwing the crew, or Chinese spies.
Lawyer here - I actually would bet this is not the case. Whether he came clean or not, the 2nd affair with a subordinate is basically always a firing offense under the sexual harassment and/or code of conduct policy, whether you are a CEO or not.
The lies may be part of it, but if you didn't fire them for the COC/SH violation, you would be in for near infinite liability because it ends up as evidence that the culture from the top was tolerant of violations, etc. THis is not conjecture, it's what has basically always happened in the legal realm when companies try to work around it.
Knowingly allowing ongoing misconduct or consciously ignoring resulting harm is considered bad faith
Protecting the CEO for the directors’ own interest is considered a loyalty problem.
Both of these things would make them personally liable in a shareholder derivative lawsuit.
California permits personal liability for directors perpetrating harassment and prohibits aiding or abetting prohibited conduct.
That's the directors.
Company wise - actions by the CEO are generally imputable directly to the company. This leads to potential hostile-environment claims even by employees who never had a relationship with the CEO, and those claims have been particularly cognizable in California.
Non-termination is also likely to lead to punitive damages, because it will be seen as "malice" or "reckless indifference".
Value wise - sexual harassment verdicts - depends who sued, but probably <150 million to start, long term cost maybe a billion very worst case.
Shareholder derivative lawsuits (where directors are personally liable if they end up with a finding of bad faith) - insanely more - hundreds of millions to billions.
I once owned an LP by Dr. John where he sang "Woman is the root of all evil. Money is bad but it's legal" :-)
He of course didn't mean women per se are evil, but that "affairs" with them are. Just his opinion.
Too much money is bad for most people, it corrupts their morality. But money is legal. It doesn't get you fired. You will have many friends because of it. You can get away with a lot of things with high-priced lawyers.
Isn’t musk a clear counterexample here? He has had numerous liaisons with subordinates. Yet I haven’t seen either SpaceX or Tesla (who actually could) move to fire him.
Or is he the exception?
It's entirely up to company policy. Nvidia had no policy barring personal relationships among employees. When it's a direct report it creates some risk that staffers will claim coercion or favoritism. For many companies, that risk is too high to allow, but I've worked for publicly traded companies where that sort of thing happened openly.
Some people get to have affairs with subordinates, others don't. It's a question of if they have the support of the people pulling the levers or not as to whether it's considered acceptable. Universal rules are for little people, once beyond a certain position they are merely tools for selectively shutting out opposition.
Google was a clusterfuck (literally?) of people boning other people they shouldn't have been.
It's not really a counterexample, though, because most of the people in question are no longer there, and lost their jobs over their affairs. As far as I've heard, Sundar is pretty clean, almost robotic, and has a low-profile personal life. He is the polar opposite in that regard of Sergey (who was a walking HR violation) and Eric (whose NDA-bound mistresses are legendary across Silicon Valley). Much of the reason why they have stepped back from operating roles and fucked off to being class-B shareholders only is because their personal lives are a liability to a major company operating in the environment that Google does today.
DannyBee is undoubtedly well aware of that, having been a lawyer for Google during the time period when this went down.
Yes, I was aware of DannyBee's history, which is why I chose that example.
Sundar always looked to me like he used Andy Rubin's similar habits to finally push him out of the door, and then institutionalized using accusations of this nature as a weapon against everyone below. Obviously Sergey escaped by virtue of ascending to a higher level.
> the 2nd affair with a subordinate is basically always a firing offense under the sexual harassment and/or code of conduct policy, whether you are a CEO or not.
In my company, it's explicitly not forbidden, but the relationship has to be disclosed to HR early on (source: yearly training). That being said, I'm not sure what HR is going to do with the information.
Not fire you. It gives them the ability to fire the others who aren’t forthcoming.
I suppose this way they can warn you to date people who are not direct reports… which hopefully you are not doing. Or offer you options (being transferred).
HR will use the information to ensure the two are not subordinate to one another. Example: A is dating B at the same company. HR will make sure that A is not subordinate to B and vice versa. This will reduce conflict of interest.
At all of the companies where I have worked, the rule was only about direct subordinates. That means you can date your boss two levels above! If practice, if you started dating your immediate supervisor, HR would just change your supervisor. Literally, this has been explained to me multiple times during HR onboarding.
That said, Kimberly Powell (former Vice President of Healthcare at Nvidia), reported directly to Jensen Huang. That is a big no-no, probably enough to be demoted and/or fired, especially as CEO.
Disclosing your secret affair to HR would be a hilarious move...
HR of course has no particular duty to out him to Mrs Huang. However, on the other hand, anyone with access to this personnel record, so long as the affair remains undiscovered, has an extremely inappropriate piece of kompromat against the CEO of a trillion dollar company. Maybe that's a small list of people but it seems like a terrible amount of power, to the point I don't think I'd be comfortable with anyone having this piece of information in their heads, let alone on a "consensual relationship disclosure form" Docusign.
Generally I don't most handbooks have affair with a customer as being an offense. Arguably, that is just good business. On the other hand, having an affair with a vendor would be a problem.
Interesting observation, but leather jackets stopped functioning in that way decades ago. Fonzie made leather jackets safe for normies and totally white bread boring; we're no longer in the "On the Waterfront" or "Blackboard Jungle" era.
But sure, I'm willing to concede that for Huang the leather jacket might have signalled a mid-life crisis of some sort. All the more reason to beware of putting those types of guys in power, because they're always going to be the most susceptible to getting completely fished.
The fact that someone's sex life would factor into the decision at all is so backwards.
First, polyamory has been gaining popularity. But a lot of poly people I've met keep that strictly secret, because their friends and family wouldn't understand and would judge them harshly.
Second, the problem isn't that he slept with someone other than his wife (we don't know what kind of agreements they have in place, and ENM is a thing in 2026). It's that he slept with a subordinate. And that's a real problem due to the power differential that exists between him and his employees.
So it's not the second affair per se, but bad judgement. Dating at companies should only happen parallel in the hierarchy, not up or down.
What I'm pushing back on is the notion that someone should be judged simply for fucking someone who isn't his wife. There's a reason people keep ENM agreements a secret, due to the judgmental attitude from the public at large.
Hopefully alternative lifestyles will become normalized to the point where our descendants in 30 years will look back on us with the same disappointment that we look back in 1996 gay marriage laws.
ENM among older couples is particularly common. But sure, it's always possible that Jensen was just cheating on his wife without consent. The thing to watch for is whether his wife has expressed unhappiness publicly about the situation. Notice that in articles like https://archive.is/Ubg4k they'll do everything but ask her how she feels. Or if they have, it's possible she's refused to say anything on the topic. That silence means something, and we don't know what. So hold off on the judgments until we have confirmation that she's actually unhappy with it.
From the article's first paragraph: "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned Thursday, capping a spectacular downfall for a poster boy of the artificial intelligence boom whose exit following reports of extramarital affairs now thrusts the chipmaker into an uncertain future."
For a lot of people, it's about the sex. In fact if you only read the first paragraph, you'd come away thinking it was solely about the sex.
At least on HN the sentiment is more nuanced though, which is good.
> Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?)
That seems to be the most natural guess based on public information, but it's equally plausible that the board knows more than the public already, whether because they drove investigations, received disclosures from Huang, or received insider tips once the heat started rising. Trust aside, they may already might know worse and more materially or legally impactful things.
That's the kind of thing that a healthy class of professional journalists can help uncover and trace in a way that our post-journalism world is losing the opportunity to do. Even still, I wouldn't be surprised if further scandals for Huang or Nvidia started being reported in coming days and weeks. You might be right that it was just too many sex scandals and general loss of trust, but we just can't expect to know yet.
> Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people familiar with the matter, Reuters has learned... Reuters is not naming the employee.
Jensen's PR strategy with his open letter was to draw attention TO his affairs. It's a "limited hangout" strategy.
If we're just going to be purely speculative anyway, it could be the case Jensen is the one who himself leaked the 2nd affair, in order to continue this distraction strategy.
I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of the info we have on this is Jensen's PR. 1) Anonymous "leak" tweets are all PR agency slop -- real jouranalist scoopers would take credit to draw attention to themselves. 2) Any Federal investigators aren't going to say 1 word to the public. Ergo, it was always Jensen trying to keep the narrative on his affairs.
And if you want to be TRULY conspiratorial about it, perhaps one or both of the affairs never existed, only the smuggling.
There are certain lines CEOs of this level absolutely cannot cross, and a relationship with a subordinate is one of them. Hiding it, putting the entire company at risk for it, a board can’t trust a ceo that puts their extramarital dalliances ahead of the company’s interest.
Chips to China, on the other hand, is in the company’s interest. That’s what lawyers and lobbyists are for, and when they behave enough, that’s also what “rockstar” CEOs are for.
Jensen got too big for his leather jacket. Simple as.
It may be that, but I feel it's more about managing public perception. Potentially leaking secrets to a literal (stated) enemy of state feels much more catastrophic than infidelity (obviously his wife may not feel that way).
If someone has been:
1. Managing the company well
2. Attracting and retaining good talent
3. Making money for shareholders
4. Building strong company fundamentals
Then forcing a resignation over this seems... odd. I was under the impression that barring this infidelity, Huang was one of the more sane tech CEOs. I feel like I could to literally any other CEO (Zuckerburg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Gates, Jobs) that have done something equally bad or worse, and haven't had to resign.
So to preface, I do not condone adultery / office affairs, etc.
But in the big picture, isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?
Right, and to make it explicit for some people following along who are wondering why companies have that policy... It's to prevent predatory and abuses of power. There's a power imbalance that can easily lead to exploitation.
Adding on to that clarification: The leverage the boss has over the employee creates a rational pressure for the employee to ignore any boundary they might have otherwise had in order to avoid any chance of the boss using that leverage against them.
The reason companies care about this so much is more practical than moral. Bosses having sexual/romantic relationships with employees leads to irrational decisions that are bad for the business.
Because it's likely sexual harassment. In two ways:
1 - did she feel pressured to have a relationship with him? It's hard to have genuinely free consent when he can make or break her career; and
2 - sexual discrimination towards every other employee. Did she get benefits from the relationship? It's more than fair for the rest of the employees to wonder if they'd also been eg sucking his dick if they would have gotten better raises, faster promotions, etc.
> isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?
The issue with workplace relationships with subordinates is that the degree of consent is often not clear.
This exposes the true personality and that the person is a liar and betrays those who trust him. Now think, does he betray only women or shareholders as well?
This is the same sort of timeline argument Noam Chomsky gave me regarding why he thinks that Zelensky stopped negotiating with Russia after Boris Johnson’s visit. After the firefights in Bucha he was still saying they’ll have to make a deal, then Johnson arrived and said Putin is not a man to make deals with. And then Zelensky stopped saying it. I asked Chomsky about this explicitly (whether the discovery of bodies shot point blank in the aftermath of the Russian withdrawal from Bucha was the decisive factor) and he pointed to the timeline. I don’t know if I fully buy that argument:
Chomsky has pretty terrible track record on ascribing motivations in the conflict, going back to Khmer Rouge. Should have really stuck to formal languages.
> what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair
This is the right line of thinking, but I don't think a second affair is enough. To me, it says there is more we don't know. Possibly a lot more, and a lot worse than a second affair. Apart from anything else, that is the only reason to act this fast. You don't fire a CEO like Jensen in 24 hours over an HR indiscretion.
So I think both you and the parent are correct, but its a combo: he didn't come fully clean, but there is a non-public part that probably looks a lot more like treason that the board knows and we don't.
It's absurd that they're going to drop a guy that build the most profitable company in the world over 35 years of working every day, and is basically beloved by his own staff and the industry.
Something stinks to high heaven here.
Elon Musk has multiple allegations of sexual assault against him - he's had sexual relations with at least 4 of his staff including children with one of them while he had children with another women.
Elon solicits young women over social media to have children with (which is also soliciting sex).
He attacked his own regulators during DOGE, has direct meetings with Putin several times since 2022 (still ongoing), he's taken $100's of Millions in investment from Chinese state banks, special deals re: factories and data capture and sharing rights.
And more.
The difference is that Elon has 1) and iron grip over the board and 2) is an aggressive, spiteful person who will attack anyone and everyone - and everyone lives in fear about saying anything negative about Elon.
Jensen is paying the price for being a nice guy.
Apparently he should have been dragging the board over the coals, and threatening the press and industry to keep quiet, to quash the stories, to kiss up to Trump and make sure there's nothing but love from the government etc. etc..
" It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances"
I'm sorry but this is very not true and ... I don't want to be mean but it's effectively naive.
Elon tells his board whatever he wants to tell them including ridiculous fabrications about products, roadmaps, and handles them with total contempt.
> I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang
Hasn't Musk done this multiple times (including having children with subordinates)? He's still the CEO of a few companies. Bill Gates married one!
Boards don't care about this kind of thing unless they are already looking to get rid of someone. Worst case they pay the person off, and the cost will probably be less than a principal engineer earns in a year.
This doesn't pass the smell test. My guess is damning evidence was discovered which incriminates several high-level individuals at Nvidia with willfully bypassing the export ban. The second affair was leaked as a cover for why they were letting him go.
Musk has controlling shares of his companies. If course he's not going to be fired if he answers to himself. And Bill did all that ~40 years ago, not today.
I don't know why people find this so hard to believe. CEOs of Nestle, Intel, McDonalds, Best Buy, Boeing have been booted once similar affairs came to light. Like this is an express ticket to getting fired no matter who you are.
To me the fact that it was known for a year that the affair was happening, and nothing changed implies that this is more a publicity move rather than anything else. They had to make a change, improve their brand image. Probably nothing will change in how they sell their product, the rules they skirt.
He was also favoring local open weight models in a world where frontier AI companies are lobbying the government for control. Could be one of the reasons why he was ousted.
And yet from the reporting Trump okayed the sale so Nvidia argues they had a license to export from the President. Lutnick was okay with it too apparently and State didn't get a vote. If the reporting is accurate, then I think Nvidia gets zero blowback from the sale.
I think the affair with the Chinese CEO is a considerable factor. Jensen cannot possibly maintain any plausible deniability over Megaspeed's alleged diversion of chips to China and his role therein.
The second affair with an employee likely just dealt a death blow (if it hadn't already been dealt) to Jensen in terms of his ability to ride the crisis out.
Eric Swalwell was not punished and committed something worse than Jensen Huang, because he was a government official. He even ran for Governor and the only reason he as forced to resign was because of a different sexual abuse case.
If our own government officials can't face justice, why should the CEO of a company?
The fact that Nvidia was skirting the export ban was an open secret. So many outlets like NYT itself, Reuters, WSJ, etc have published reports about it starting over a year ago.
I would be so, so surprised if the US government / CIA / etc wouldn't know at all that NVDA was selling to China and skirting the export ban in a meaningful way.
In 50 years from now, some declassified documents will maybe shed light on this specific incident.
I would imagine it being a form of "So, China, we'll let our Jensen guy sell you X in chips, and in return, you do Y in relation to Russia, and Z in relation to Taiwan. Oh, and we need to use one of your spies, in case someone f*cks up".
China doesn't even want Nvidia chips. They're holding up hundreds of thousands of smuggled cards at Hong Kong customs. Many Chinese companies want to take the easy shortcut of using Nvidia, but the Chinese govt wants Chinese companies to go through the pain of helping the domestic chip industry develop.
Plus the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that the lady is a spy. All media report anonymous sources but treat the allegations as fact. Singapore said their investigation of the lady is not due to spying, but no western media picked up that story. The lady traveled to Taiwan with her Hong Kong passport, and the Taiwanese govt also said they have no evidence she's a spy. The Chinese spy agency just started investigating her due to all the commotion (likely for smuggling chips, which China also doesn't want, see above), and also has no idea who she is. Despite all this, the public still treats the spy allegations as a fact.
Jenssen Huang is a victim. Those who wanted to get rid of him and set this up, have succeeded. But everyone is under the mistaken belief that this hurts China somehow. China doesn't give a damn. In the mean time, all Chinese Americans lose. Jenssen is not the first such victim, and won't be the last.
The timing is politically important though; shifts headlines from
"Trump/GOP lost their ass in midterms!" and "Dems intend to investigate GOP/Trump!"
Also provides news channel attacks on Dems; Congress should be looking into national security issues over here in CEO land! Not dividing Congress with partisan hackery!
Important to call out the social engineering going on among all the tribal groups.
I hope you understand the affair with the spy does not strictly matter, but he is in fact being fired because of the affair with a subordinate.
Like everyone, they have a COC/sexual harassment policy, and that is basically always a firing offense in practice.
They cannot place him above it, or else they would be in for infinite liability.
This is why literally nothing mentioned firing until that was discovered, and then it instantly became about firing him.
If they really did, I hope they at least go to prison for a while. I say at least because they actually should be court martiall-ed and spend their next 30 years in a military cell.
The strange situation, however, is that the current administration, specifically Trump, loves Jensen for her thinks they're kindred spirits: both incredibly successful businessmen at the top of the world and at the top of their game (in Trump's mind).
It's an odd situation where, yes, they're breaching national security mandates, but they're also being protected by the man at the top of the organization that makes those national security mandates.
We're watching a comedy film, where the outcome of said comedy film has an effect on the world economy, so we're actually watching a tragedy film.
That's how corruption skews the reality that the powerless are forced to live within.
China is a gigantic market. A company that profit hungry will find it supremely difficult to resist doing business with China. It is almost guaranteed, that they did in some indirect ways sell to China. It's also not like people like Jensen care one bit about the USA. What they care about is pure profit of their own kingdom. Uhm, I mean company, of course.
I’d also note that being complicit and not entirely aware of sanctions evasion -but being in a qualified position that should have been able to discern it- is sufficient for criminal charges and conspiracy. I spent a long time in trading and money movement, and this was the scared straight things our former federal prosecutor internal counsel would lecture us on. The bar for prosecutors in national security, sanctions, conspiracy, etc are very very low and this sort of relationship is a perfect foil. It exposes Nvidia to extreme risk, and Jenson even more so. And being cutoff from Nvidia now makes him prey without the support a major employer and driver of the economy could provide him.
NVIDIA also does tons of military and intelligence work, very sensitive stuff. The idea that the CEO had a significant espionage problem raises significant _criminal_ liabilities.
The U.S. has imposed such harsh semiconductor industry sanctions on China, tightly locking away scientific and technological achievements that will most likely shape the future of all humanity for the next hundred years through political means that change with every few-year election cycle.
It's hard to imagine that in a community that constantly claims to champion freedom and progress, so many people would think from the perspective of the U.S. government and believe in baseless spy allegations, because anyone who knows NVIDIA’s history and Jensen Huang’s background should be able to see that this is a charge forcibly fabricated.
And is your argument that a community who “champions freedom and progress” should be arguing for an authoritarian dictatorship to get access to the latest technology?
Frankly, you're being naive. When it comes to a massive $4 trillion market-cap US corporation and one of the most important companies on planet Earth, money is everything.
If the company struggles without him and it's obvious they need his leadership, he'll be back. Morals be damned.
> Now, back to the main point: your egregious comparison of a potential Huang-return to Jobs-return unfortunately still remains just as terrible.
Here is some reading material to clear up your ignorance:
When Chrisann Brennan became pregnant with their daughter, Lisa, in 1977, Jobs was a young man in his early twenties just as Apple was beginning to take off.
According to Brennan, Jobs reacted with dismay and anger to the news, and they never married. Furthermore, for several years, Jobs denied that he was the father, even going as far as claiming in court documents that he was sterile.
A court-ordered DNA paternity test eventually proved conclusively that he was Lisa's father, after which he was required to provide financial support.
I once again, specifically called out the nature of the exit+return in both my comments.
But sure, I must've forgotten every single one of those factoids you penned down even after reading every biography out there and even after watching all the (mostly terrible) movies about the person.
I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support. This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
There is no support for people like him, CEOs of such big companies, or even any respectful CEO. People would only use him. That's human nature for you.
I think finding humanity in our villains can help us gain perspective so I’d agree on your first point.
However let’s hold both thoughts at once, this was no hit job. Nvidia was forced to act quickly to mitigate business and legal risks. The eventual fallout they’ll face is still not fully known.
> This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!
> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY
Sympathy for the guy having multiple affairs, including with a direct report, including with a spy and credible allegations of doing an end-run about valid export controls imposed by his country?
I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!
No, they are technologists who a) think they are smarter and better than everyone else and, b) think that maybe one day they could also make a billion dollars and still have people care about their feewings.
The public fall may seem quick but from my read of the timelines this has been ongoing for a lot longer.
The idea his fall is related to his affair also seems more like an attempt to minimise the fact that NVIDIA have been covertly selling to China when they were not supposed to.
> I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support.
Jensen, if you are reading this and need support you can try looking into BetterHelp. You can even get 20% off using certain partner links. No one should have to go through the stress of loosing their job from Chineese spies alone and with BetterHelp you're just one click away from your very own personal therapist.
Someone of incredible wealth and influence suffering negative outcomes for something wrong that they did?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
The real question we must ask is if a current $30k consumer GPU that initially sold for $2.7k is just as inflated as the 'AI' holdings revenue predictions.
The smart money will wait till the legal mess starts, as the dead cat bounce in the panic sell off is probable as people try to buy the dip. ymmv =3
For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.
Apple used nVidia GPUs in most of its computers. Around 2008-2009, nVidia produced a line of faulty GPUs that were used in the Macbook Pro. This led to widespread hardware failures, and was known as "Bumpgate" because the problem was caused by faulty solder bumps inside the GPU chip. nVidia refused to fully reimburse Apple for repairs because it wasn't contractually obligated to do so. In response, Apple switched away entirely from nVidia GPUs.
I think it was well into 2013 because both the 2011 and 2013 MBPs I had suffered from it. but I thought that was an apple issue (ie not soldering the dicrete gpu well enough to save money on it)
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
You are missing out, the M series laptops are insanely good. Now wondering how the field of ML would have developed if Apple had had Nvidia chips all the way...
And that's kidna funny because now Apple Sillicon has pretty great graphics on their own.
Maybe that's the lesson he learned and why he _supposedly_ was making sure his GPUs were still getting to China. Because he knows that the alternative would lead to good Nvidia Chinese competitor later on
He's not hoarding crap. Man's probably got maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars in free cash, the rest is all loans, stocks, investments and properties.
The only people that should be wealth taxed is leeches like you that see how utterly corrupt the state is with how it handles tax dollars and wants to give it more money.
Being a billionaire is a choice to continue to hoard resources that could be put to useful purposes instead. Yeah, I don't have much sympathy for people who choose to squander our society's resources like that.
Does a billionaire who became billionair by marrying a person who became a billionaire also bears the responsibility of hoarding because they choose to marry that person and not divorce early?
What would be the adverse consequences of wealth-taxing someone who didn't actively choose to be wealthy? They would have a mere 500 million left, which they didn't want anyway?
No, not morally. If she divorces, she should also be subject to that proposed the wealth tax, which she won't mind because according to your frame she didn't choose to hoard.
Genghis Khan probably had bunions and I could have some empathy for the pain endured, but I don't because spending a second feeling anything for him is a second I'm not invested in empathizing with, and better yet, helping people that actually need it.
DO you feel for how depressed that WW2 dictator was before he took his own life? How sad and lonely the big "H" was? That stirs empathy in you? Not me. I make choices about who I spend my mental and emotional efforts on.
Something you might be excited to learn is that empathy is not a finite resource! You can spend as much of it as you want and never actually run out - try it!
It remains possible to feel sympathy for people who have done wrong. He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
> It remains possible to feel sympathy for people who have done wrong.
It does remaining possible; there's no point when they're corporate. Why give him sympathy when himself; or Nvidia would give null shit about you?
> He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
He chose to have the affair and as having my father do the same to my mother; you get no sympathy on cheating. Let them feel pretty terrible. He did nothing but be a parasite in the corporate playground, his actions caught up with him.
The human thing to also do is not pushing AI everywhere for the benefit of themselves and their stakeholders, to the detriment of literally the rest of humanity
Have you never been in a situation where you made mistakes, felt guilty, and appreciated the empathy and sympathy from fellow humans in light of all the shame and vitriol you received counter-wise?
This is his identity. Sure, he’s made some poor choices. Imagine Jobs resigning at the height of iPhone phenomenon or Gates at the very peak of Windows. Not sure if Jensen can bounce back from this psychologically. He’ll be broken for awhile.
I think a lot of people might also disagree with the consequences. Something along the lines of - if it’s all consensual then why does it matter. Disclosing trade secrets (wittingly or otherwise) or skirting export ban is a separate matter that does have real legal consequences if proven true.
"with a spy" where is the proof that she is a spy? It seems to be perfectly ok for CEOs to profess blind allegiance to a terrorist state, like Larry Ellison does, seems like a double standard.
Me too. If he needs somebody to take his place he can reach me at my HN profile page. I'll take the bullet and try to struggle through with just billions of dollars.
I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that
I think the point is that whether he did or didn't, there's so much smoke now, that Nvidia is going to be spending the next few years getting drilled by absolutely every law enforcement agency and government. Even if it genuinely turns out that nothing even slightly bad happened, it's quite damaging the amount of scrutiny Nvidia is going to be under for the foreseeable future.
> Nvidia is going to be spending the next few years getting drilled by absolutely every law enforcement agency and government.
Sounds like this was known or suspected at the highest levels of the administration (Rubio was discussing it per recent reporting). So the question becomes: did Nvidia use a cut out to knowingly avoid the export ban, and if so, did the administration know this?
Yes, they did. Trump talked about an AI CEO committing a crime in the 60 minutes episode, and it is speculated that he was referring to Jensen. And Marco Rubio was frustrated and kept flagging it, but Trump and Lutnick squashed any investigations into it.
It’s not the infidelity part, it’s the undisclosed relationship with a subordinate part. That’s covered in HR training and is a fireable offense in every company I’ve been parr of.
Three things:
Selling GPUs and knowingly avoiding legal restrictions
A relationship with a foreign agent
An inappropriate relationship with a subordinate
Two of these potentially have serious legal consequences.
While it's a fireable offense, my experience with senior management has been that the company is more than happy to help cover it up for them... until they do a bad, and then it becomes a quick ticket to can them without having to admit the real reason for canning them.
That's what everyone keeps saying. INAL but that would give any fired executive hella leverage when the board finally decide to unveil what they've been hiding. I mean, they'll go to discovery and ... perjure themselves? Really?
What claim would the executive have? They can be fired by the board for any reason (except for a few explicitly prohibited reasons), so "they lied about why they fired me" doesn't work as a claim unless you're alleging the real reason is because they're racist or something similar.
The problem would be they'd depose the board and ask when they knew about it. The board member would say, yeah, we've known for a few months but we'd figure we'd just sit on it and see how it played out. I don't know how these things work but that sounds more like the act of an accomplice then anything else.
Depositions happen after the motion to dismiss, which is where you assess "even if the facts you allege are true, you have no case." And "we've known about it for months before we did something about it" isn't enough to get you to an unjust firing.
It makes absolutely no sense to fire him strictly for the relationships. So it's either deeper legal concerns or the board has other grievances and is using this as an excuse.
It'd be so funny if he started actually sharing knowledge to China out of spite after all these. I know he is way too rich to do that, but one can dream.
Yeah I think this is probably the main cause. Jensen is not an idiot. They got so much new business in 'SE Asia' right after the export controls got put in place from companies like Megaspeed. He knew those chips were going to China and either looked the other way or actively facilitated it
One of these individually I think he may have survived with some trouble but 3 dropping in as many weeks with one being tied to illegal diversions and two being with subordinates is too many holes to patch. Plus where there's 3 there's probably more.
Nice to see a slimeball get what he deserved for once. Too many people in power get a free pass lately. Inexcusable conduct and no morals. We deserve better from our leaders. Elon and Trump next please.
The only reason Jensen is out is because he doesn't pretend AI is an existential threat like Anthropic and OpenAI do to boost their own valuation/moats and to boost the anti-China sentiment for the administration.
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[ 0.53 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadJensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
I don't know why I feel this way. Something just feels off and I can't place it.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
We don't know his relationship with his wife, what their stands on cheating even stands.
You can argue its an image issue, but thats a problem of the press and marketing and not that he might have cheated.
His wife is an adult and is for sure not poor, so its not a situation were she has to stay with him.
I do believe it either has to do with the whole spy story or he did something he really shouldn't have.
I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE
Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".
well, yeah.
Conspiracy reaction: Something is going on here... obviously not due to sleeping with a spy...
Waiting to see how market reacts, I am selling my shares.
Dear Jensen, time to start another company.
No, the alternative is not to “not having affairs”. Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.
Except that we have evidence in this case: he literally admitted to the affair. I don't see any "spin."
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
His argument was “we must not make it more convenient to develop a fully domestic stack”
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is a fairly reasonable adage
So the only thing selling to them accomplishes is give Nvidia more margins. At the cost of boosting the Chinese AI sector - possibly to the point of parity.
China at the moment has the capability to do infrastructural rollouts far faster than US or Europe, but doesn't have the chips to stuff new datacenters with. So it's easy to see why China would want the chips. But it's not like Nvidia is having trouble selling their AI accelerators outside China - and they can't ramp up accelerator production on demand. More demand for accelerators would push the prices even higher, and that would reflect in the margins, but the benefits for Nvidia weren't even that large.
So it was a questionable push all around - even before the spy scandal.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-chips-pile-up-hon...
China also used to posture with "we don't need Nvidia chips" in Q1 this year. But now, schemes to ship those chips anyway are being uncovered - in the wake of Jensen's ousting and in general. Some involve direct shipments, and others involve offshored datacenters being established by Chinese companies to supply compute to China. So we know this "we don't need" was always fake. Chinese government was saying "we don't need them chips" with one hand and devising ways of keeping the supply going with the other.
According to who?
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
Hah. He doesn't have a prenup. That's going to lead to serious enough consequences for him in divorce court.
For someone not familiar with American law: How the fuck is that a bigger problem than the Chinese spy ?
Is there any explicit rules at NVidia forbidding that in a code of conduct somewhere ?
You really think Nvidia would let Huang go (without a replacement matching his skills, experience and knowledge in the field) because he cheated with an employee? It is the spy affair while Huang promoted an open export policy.
Plus thanks to Huang, Nvidia is now under investigation by federal agencies.
None of them care about a CEO cheating.
Also, being fired from the company you founded is a serious consequence.
A famous guy had an island and it was extrajudicially a place where alot of powerful people internationally could come to his island and interchange info and ideas and make deals and things could occur and he collected up all that kind of stuff, including arms deals and the sex stuff.
But Americans are only right now aware of the sex stuff in what he collected up.
The sex stuff is essentially a distraction, the oily film on the deeper ocean of truth.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that's not technically legal.
And the administration allowed the exports later anyway.
If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
I know it's just speculation, but the fact that Nvidia hasn't tried to scapegoat some random compliance officer strongly suggests to me that Jensen did know, and that the board has seen the paper trail that proves it.
Sure, but the US gov itself lifted those controls soon. So they get this for bypassing controls that they lifted and found no use for anyway?
And does anybody really believe those exports, of the #1 most crucial supposedly restricted tech, wheren't covertly greenlit and scruitinized when they happened? Like, it caught anybody in government or nvidia or bodies checking these things as a surprise?
And why would they need some special honeypot for that? He was advocating for sales to china because they're good for nvdia's bottom line, way before he hooked up with that woman!
As for low level details, wouldn't be smarter, less visible to all, and more effective if they honeypotted some key technician instead? The CEO would be too visible in his moves, and too high position to know or care for the low level technical details, the kind that would be of interest to competitors.
More likely they know and were ok those things all along, but he's no longer useful, or his preferences doesn't work well with the new plans in the tech war with China, or they fear what would happen to Nvidia stock with Democrats in power having this compromising info to play up, and they got rid of him.
...maybe. Or maybe not. Consistency in application of the law is not exactly at an all-time high right now.
What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
The problem now is the very public optics of that coming to light in the context of having an affair with a maybe spy.
Why does it have to be a single reason? The business world doesn't work that way.
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
But this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Under these universes that haven't fully internalised the current American corporate morality. Which in itself is a very modern construct.
In many places and times 'sleeping with someone working under you' warranted at most a shrug.
This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.
Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
And Jensen isn't just any CEO, he is the founder and has run the company for thirty years.
He would have survived the affairs if it wasn't for the export control violation aspects.
People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.
Remind me: when did Huang direct NVDA funds to the Trump ballroom fund?
If the second affair didn’t come out, this wouldn’t be a discussion.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
Abuse of power in the case of the second affair to the extent it could've easily turned into a rape scandal and is a big reason why it is a big HR no-no, and in the first case, the affair not being public is exactly the kind of thing a honeypot wants in order to keep you quiet about the kinds of threats that may end up implied.
Either way, the dude is going to be getting investigated and will not be able to effectively lead NVIDIA in the course of what's coming.
For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
wong?
It would have been simpler and more profitable to sell China the GPUs.
One woman from the CCP just burned a couple of trillion out of your 401Ks. Have you said thank you even once? Are you sick of winning yet?
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
dark ops may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Of course, but perception matters.
Lots of this has been known since may, and it sounds like the president was informed she was a spy a year ago.
One wonders if this happened now since the Dems took control of the investigation bodies.
If they had not, would they have kept right on as is?
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Sad day for developers.
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
Interesting times
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
> ban for national security reasons
These don't sound like they are on the same order of magnitude in terms of severity?
Mr. Huang, you’ve admitted that you violated Nvidia’s policy on relations with subordinates. Why should we believe you were faithful to Nvidia’s policy of compliance with national security export controls?
I don't think that is the least bit difficult for a board to ignore.
Time and time we saw executives having affairs and dodging consequences. Elon Mask, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos. All faced much less severe consequences. Definitely not something blow over like this just after a few days it's being reported.
This is a coordinated attack on Jensen and it was very successful.
At most companies it does. HP. Intel. McDonald’s.
The only consistent exception is Musk.
That said, I disagree this is why Jensen was fired. The national-security cover-up is a far bigger deal.
Could be, but that requires time to investigate. Banging employee is different because the board would just have to ask Jensen if the reports are true.
Even Bill Clinton faced relatively minor consequences, considering presidents should be held to a higher moral standard
> considering presidents should be held to a higher moral standard
They’re not. They haven’t been since John Adams.
I hope nobody in the presidential administration needs to resign because of their role in the largest scandal in US history but if so, that is what is best for the country.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
Allows the influence of selection of next CEO that is more aligned with long term Chinese goals. Or punishment for not going along with the plan.
Im not much for conspiracy theories, but if you think about it, in the state that US is in, there is absolutely zero chance US will do anything retaliatory to China if they do spy shit on US soil. China is basically free to play spy games. My guess is that they have their fingers in Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, SpaceX, and AMD, and probably other agents within NVIDIA in high places.
Their game is basically rearrange the pieces so eventually China becomes the world number one superpower, while keeping the status quo as much as possible
bipartisan bill[1] needed to decapitate[2] opposition[3] to expanded controls/moratoria and install “neutral” caretakers[4] until passage
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/09/10/2026/bipartisan-ai-saf...
[2] https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2120745928722087948
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035303
[4] current CFO Kress or former Apple CEO Tim Cook (suggested by president in social media post)
This was blatantly obvious. Do we really think Malaysia was using Billions in GPUs on some secret AI project?
I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.
Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.
Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Before Nov 11, it looked like NVIDIA might try to ride out the storm and keep Jensen at the helm especially if they saw that the China accusations and evidence wasn't strong enough to be a problem. Again, it was totally unnecessary for the board to publicly back him up if they had plans to get rid of him because of China allegations. However, the Board of Directors emergency Nov 11 meeting is inconsistent with the Nov 8 statement affirming Jensen's leadership.Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.
Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
So no, it's not literally about his sex life, but pretending like that doesn't factor into the whole things seems like a very strange point for people to keep making. It may not be that 90% of the cause is "he had sex out of his marriage" but it's also not 0% (it surely doesn't make him a "good leader(tm)" if he's having sex with subordinates)
Also, implies anyone not posting on HN forfeits personhood by default
National defense makes this a much bigger deal than people seem to understand.
This is an export security violation. Still criminal, but not tax evasion or anything like it, and the monetary value holds no legal relevance - the number of articles themselves does.
- July 25: Amid the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP publicly stated that Hayward had the board's full support.
- July 27: BP formally announced that Hayward would step down as CEO, with Robert Dudley replacing him.
Similar situations with Bob Chapek, Travis Kalanick, the Boeing CEO in 2019 when all those crashes were happening, Carol Bartz, Bob Diamond...
I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.
Nobody trusted Trump yet he had the loyalty of all the tech giants because they needed him to make money.
In the case of Haung, the cost of having him as COE simply became greater than the risk to the business of him leaving. Trust had nothing to do with the equation.
My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it. From all appearances, NVidia was playing ball with the Trump administration. He was a frequent ally of President Trump, Trump supposedly knew about this information for the last year and sat on it, and even the CIA leaks that started it stressed how much Huang had praised the Trump administration. Reportedly they had already voluntarily stopped exports to MegaSpeed [2] as of June 2025. China, however, has a lot more to gain from his departure. It's going to harm NVidia very severely: reportedly he's very hands-on, "the conductor that makes a very complex operation work", and as a founder the whole knowledge pyramid that the company is based upon rests with him. If they want their domestic hardware industry to surpass NVidia, the easiest way to do that is to take out NVidia leadership.
I suspect that he was compromised by both the CIA and CCP, and with tensions rising between them, eventually found a situation where they each wanted him to do different things, and he couldn't satisfy both. Likely the CIA got wind that the CCP was going to move with their leverage, and published to stave that off. This also has the nice side benefit for U.S. power of letting the other side know the extent to which the CIA knows what you're doing, and showing that even the CEO of the richest company on earth is not immune to U.S laws. But it's still a net negative to U.S. power to have Huang out as CEO of NVidia, simply because it's such a net negative to NVidia. This is only a desirable outcome if he's going to be ousted anyway, or if he is otherwise compromised to become a Chinese puppet.
I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes. First affair, okay, it could be an indiscretion that happened in the past, cut ties and do damage control. But if there's a second (and third and fourth and many others?) affair and everybody knows about it, it becomes impossible for Huang to lead the company because everybody has so much leverage on him.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50462327
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121
No they don't. They just lost access to Nvidia chips that they still rely on (even if not said out in the open). Alibaba's stock tanked on the news for example.
> I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes.
The role was to get the agenda off spying and export (the things you'd go to jail for)
They would prefer their companies buy local, as it will advance their local semiconductor infrastructure.
However, these companies would prefer Nvidia if they are allowed. All the advances in the past few years are due to advanced chips being restricted, so they had to step up.
They already do. Local produces maybe >5% of the volume needed. It's NOT prefer or not. It just doesn't exist.
Some people believe that the key moat for AI is the model, and under this model (hah) torpedoing NVidia would be bad for China and good for the U.S. because they won't have access to cutting-edge NVidia hardware for model-training. Other people believe the key moat for AI is the hardware, and under this model torpedoing NVidia would be good for China because it'd allow Chinese hardware makers to catch up and bad for the U.S. because it destroys our key competitive advantage.
Interesting that a policy decision depends so heavily on a question of fact, but that isn't unique to this issue. (I suspect that left and right would agree on abortion if they could agree on whether personhood begins at conception or birth, but they don't, so). There's also an element of time preferences here too: it's likely that model training is dominant now, but hardware will be dominant when you project out a few years, and so both factions could be right but on different timescales.
Exactly my read as well. "If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two."
After they caught him in a lie, they may not have been able to not fire him.
They can't legally not fire him. But they can legally re-hire him after firing him. So ironically the ONLY way he can continue at nVidia is by being fired - we just have to wait a few days and there will be an Altman-like resurrection.
More seriously, I was also curious. A quick search seems to say the earliest recent source is https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
> In the course of an experimental way, down in the depths of a science building, a beaker full of fermented sugar is left on a shelf. Sometime later one of the experimenters returned to the scene ... to find two cockroaches in the beaker, one of which had a family of about a dozen—the other had drowned itself in rum. AND WHO WOULDN'T IN THE FACE OF SUCH OVERWHELMING RESPONSIBILITIES.
Don't live in Silicon Valley though.
https://nypost.com/2026/11/12/business/ousted-nvidia-ceo-jen...
I don't think this has anything to do with trust. It's absurd not to trust Huang as the best possible CEO for the company that he brought from zero to 5 trillion dollars in value. It's about being afraid of public opinion, and especially fear of being blamed for not taking the expected decision.
Huang betrayed 38 years of trust his wife put into him and recently betrayed the Board by lying to them. That's already admitted, no ifs or buts. He clearly had reasons, as he is a sane person. His reasons were romantic engagement with (alleged) spy. Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job. The Board needs to do bunch of "what ifs" in such situation, including paranoid ones, such as "what if this woman had such access to NVIDIA tech stack that each cheap is infused with some form of Chinese virus". We simply don't know how far this goes, but this firing certainly shows much further than just a consequence of a romantic fling.
Sane people still make irrational decisions.
It's one of the weird dichotomies of our species.
But.
He put together a string of frankly insane mistakes that are now endangering that 5 trillion dollar company from both the inside and outside. There's no chance in hell that they're going to go from $5T back to 0, but you are not understanding the trouble they're in.
Internally, boinking your direct reports (who also happened to have a string of recent promotions) is incredibly ruinous to a company's internal culture, destroying notions of internal meritocracy. How would you feel if all your hard work was apparently not as important as putting out for the CEO? Do you think that would make you eager to do your best work for that CEO? And that's even before thinking about the insane legal liability.
Externally, he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed to simultaneously mess with national security and, it seems, circumvent export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. nVidia is in some extremely serious shit, and will have the government breathing down their necks between now and the end of time.
Jensen is actually extremely well respected by his staff and has the highest staff approvals in almost all of tech.
I'm certain that his personal foibles won't engender him any love, but it's not unheard of.
Elon Musk has had sexual relations with at least 4 staffers, children with one - while he was having children with his wife.
Where's the scandal?
"he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed "
Where is the evidence of this? Give me one specific allegation?
His mistress was passing information to the government, ok, as will many nationals that have met with him, and as US nationals often do as well.
Elon is in direct contact with Putin several times a year since 2022 - and there's no good reason for that.
Consider putting all of that in context vis-a-vis much of the rest of corporate America and consider the rest of his contributions.
Obviously it's fair to bring all of this up, but it's intensely hypocritical for the most part.
https://archive.ph/c4kmF
---
Next to the Nvidia chief was a woman named Huang Le, or Alice Huang, an executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed, which was poised to buy $2 billion of Nvidia A.I. technology over the next year. Though Ms. Huang and Megaspeed are little-known players in the A.I. industry, their association with Nvidia and its chief executive has recently become a preoccupation in Washington.
Commerce Department officials have been investigating whether Megaspeed, which has close ties to Chinese tech firms, is helping companies in China sidestep American export restrictions, according to more than a half dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an examination that is not public.
The inquiry, which is active, calls into question how closely Nvidia is tracking where its A.I. chips end up and highlights the possibility of American export laws easily being sidestepped. Megaspeed is also facing scrutiny from Singaporean police, who told The New York Times in a statement that they are investigating the company for breaching local laws, without elaborating further.
It's absurd to suggest that Nvidia would need to secretly ship a handful of chips to some sketchy actor when Nvidia chips have a a mile a line long for sales.
Jensen can sell his inventory 10x over. You have to have buying power just to get a hold of them.
Anything is possible but it would be extra stupid for one of the smartest people in the world to risk everything for literally no reason at all.
a story as old as time
His mistress was talking to the Chines government - literally as all people over there are compelled to do - and - was hustling Nvidia chips - as thousands of people are doing.
The idea that Nvidia would knowingly help people do something bad would require some material evidence before it could be a headline.
Consider the opposite possibility - that they were doing this and this this might prove that the "mile long line" for sales is in fact not as long as it looks from the outside.
The bar shouldn't be Musk!!
Musk is 'below the bar'.
Jensen is 'just at the bar' for this maybe slightly above.
I'm not condoning, I'm contextualizing.
He didn't do anything wrong or illegal (that we know of), other than breach of trust with his wife.
This media around this is crazy and slanderous.
All of the press is screaming about 'affair with spy and possibly secrets' , which is very unfair.
She's not a 'spy' - she's a hustler looking to make money by reselling GPUs, and she's 'talking to the Chinese government' as literally they are all compelled to do.
Are Jensen and Elon 'spies' because they talk to the State Dept. and US Gov all the time about goings on in China?
In an ideal world - we would have to contend with Jensen's actions, but I'm doubtful he'd be nerfed for personal foibles, which are not material or public concern.
Assuming that he did not hand over key secrets or information, which I highly doubt and which there are no specific allegations, this is a media / meme wave, completely out of context.
The only saving grace in this, is that the Nvidia board may be friendly to him, in which case, maybe they 'know something' that is not public, and this is the 'nice way out' but even then I'm doubtful.
Elon has normalized his bad behaviour and he controls the board - there's no 'smoke that can make a fire' around him as long as the companies are doing ok. He also aggressively threatens people and very few will speak out against him.
There might be a tinge of racism with the 'honey pot' stuff, and 'chinese spy' has hints of orientalism as well. The headlines are really leaning in to the 'Asian Sex Spy' stuff which is terrible. And I've see posts with rich guys and their Asian wives - not nice.
Fair point, but I don't think it's only partially the case.
But it seems especially goofy because it appears it's only about the non-Chinese affairs, since the timeline suggests he was in the clear until the second one came out.
Does anyone here think that sleeping with a billionaire CEO is something that these successful, executive-level women were actually coerced into? That's the fear run-of-the-mill "boss sleeping with subordinates" harassment suits are (usually justifiably) about. That the subordinate was either pressured into the arrangement in the first place, or that she at some point would have wished to stop, but would credibly fear retaliation and thus be coerced to continue.
I'm trying to imagine concretely what that could have possibly been like. Somehow I don't think he could be that desperate to be with a specific woman who didn't want him, that he would threaten an executive to get her into bed, nor to be so obsessed with keeping the affair going that he would even think of threatening revenge against someone who, by definition, obviously had the ability to ruin his life just by opening her mouth. The women held all the power over him, as evidenced by the fact that they just used that power to end his career.
Remember, this a guy who shepherds a multitrillion dollar company. He needs to be able to demonstrate good judgement, and that generally means not screwing the crew, or Chinese spies.
Perfect timing: https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...
The lies may be part of it, but if you didn't fire them for the COC/SH violation, you would be in for near infinite liability because it ends up as evidence that the culture from the top was tolerant of violations, etc. THis is not conjecture, it's what has basically always happened in the legal realm when companies try to work around it.
Protecting the CEO for the directors’ own interest is considered a loyalty problem.
Both of these things would make them personally liable in a shareholder derivative lawsuit.
California permits personal liability for directors perpetrating harassment and prohibits aiding or abetting prohibited conduct.
That's the directors.
Company wise - actions by the CEO are generally imputable directly to the company. This leads to potential hostile-environment claims even by employees who never had a relationship with the CEO, and those claims have been particularly cognizable in California.
Non-termination is also likely to lead to punitive damages, because it will be seen as "malice" or "reckless indifference".
Value wise - sexual harassment verdicts - depends who sued, but probably <150 million to start, long term cost maybe a billion very worst case.
Shareholder derivative lawsuits (where directors are personally liable if they end up with a finding of bad faith) - insanely more - hundreds of millions to billions.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...
He of course didn't mean women per se are evil, but that "affairs" with them are. Just his opinion.
Too much money is bad for most people, it corrupts their morality. But money is legal. It doesn't get you fired. You will have many friends because of it. You can get away with a lot of things with high-priced lawyers.
Some people get to have affairs with subordinates, others don't. It's a question of if they have the support of the people pulling the levers or not as to whether it's considered acceptable. Universal rules are for little people, once beyond a certain position they are merely tools for selectively shutting out opposition.
Tesla is an outlier here -- Musk currently has 20%, and that's up from like 12%.
Jensen has like 5%. Jobs owned 11% of Apple when he was forced out.
It should be fairly obvious why people who control the vote of q company can get away with more than people who don't.
It's not really a counterexample, though, because most of the people in question are no longer there, and lost their jobs over their affairs. As far as I've heard, Sundar is pretty clean, almost robotic, and has a low-profile personal life. He is the polar opposite in that regard of Sergey (who was a walking HR violation) and Eric (whose NDA-bound mistresses are legendary across Silicon Valley). Much of the reason why they have stepped back from operating roles and fucked off to being class-B shareholders only is because their personal lives are a liability to a major company operating in the environment that Google does today.
DannyBee is undoubtedly well aware of that, having been a lawyer for Google during the time period when this went down.
Sundar always looked to me like he used Andy Rubin's similar habits to finally push him out of the door, and then institutionalized using accusations of this nature as a weapon against everyone below. Obviously Sergey escaped by virtue of ascending to a higher level.
In my company, it's explicitly not forbidden, but the relationship has to be disclosed to HR early on (source: yearly training). That being said, I'm not sure what HR is going to do with the information.
I suppose this way they can warn you to date people who are not direct reports… which hopefully you are not doing. Or offer you options (being transferred).
That said, Kimberly Powell (former Vice President of Healthcare at Nvidia), reported directly to Jensen Huang. That is a big no-no, probably enough to be demoted and/or fired, especially as CEO.
HR of course has no particular duty to out him to Mrs Huang. However, on the other hand, anyone with access to this personnel record, so long as the affair remains undiscovered, has an extremely inappropriate piece of kompromat against the CEO of a trillion dollar company. Maybe that's a small list of people but it seems like a terrible amount of power, to the point I don't think I'd be comfortable with anyone having this piece of information in their heads, let alone on a "consensual relationship disclosure form" Docusign.
But sure, I'm willing to concede that for Huang the leather jacket might have signalled a mid-life crisis of some sort. All the more reason to beware of putting those types of guys in power, because they're always going to be the most susceptible to getting completely fished.
First, polyamory has been gaining popularity. But a lot of poly people I've met keep that strictly secret, because their friends and family wouldn't understand and would judge them harshly.
Second, the problem isn't that he slept with someone other than his wife (we don't know what kind of agreements they have in place, and ENM is a thing in 2026). It's that he slept with a subordinate. And that's a real problem due to the power differential that exists between him and his employees.
So it's not the second affair per se, but bad judgement. Dating at companies should only happen parallel in the hierarchy, not up or down.
What I'm pushing back on is the notion that someone should be judged simply for fucking someone who isn't his wife. There's a reason people keep ENM agreements a secret, due to the judgmental attitude from the public at large.
Hopefully alternative lifestyles will become normalized to the point where our descendants in 30 years will look back on us with the same disappointment that we look back in 1996 gay marriage laws.
ENM among older couples is particularly common. But sure, it's always possible that Jensen was just cheating on his wife without consent. The thing to watch for is whether his wife has expressed unhappiness publicly about the situation. Notice that in articles like https://archive.is/Ubg4k they'll do everything but ask her how she feels. Or if they have, it's possible she's refused to say anything on the topic. That silence means something, and we don't know what. So hold off on the judgments until we have confirmation that she's actually unhappy with it.
This isn't a story about the sex
For a lot of people, it's about the sex. In fact if you only read the first paragraph, you'd come away thinking it was solely about the sex.
At least on HN the sentiment is more nuanced though, which is good.
That seems to be the most natural guess based on public information, but it's equally plausible that the board knows more than the public already, whether because they drove investigations, received disclosures from Huang, or received insider tips once the heat started rising. Trust aside, they may already might know worse and more materially or legally impactful things.
That's the kind of thing that a healthy class of professional journalists can help uncover and trace in a way that our post-journalism world is losing the opportunity to do. Even still, I wouldn't be surprised if further scandals for Huang or Nvidia started being reported in coming days and weeks. You might be right that it was just too many sex scandals and general loss of trust, but we just can't expect to know yet.
Reports are just breaking that this is indeed the case.
> Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people familiar with the matter, Reuters has learned... Reuters is not naming the employee.
don't has to be a journalist, it could be a spy too... :-)
If we're just going to be purely speculative anyway, it could be the case Jensen is the one who himself leaked the 2nd affair, in order to continue this distraction strategy.
I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of the info we have on this is Jensen's PR. 1) Anonymous "leak" tweets are all PR agency slop -- real jouranalist scoopers would take credit to draw attention to themselves. 2) Any Federal investigators aren't going to say 1 word to the public. Ergo, it was always Jensen trying to keep the narrative on his affairs.
And if you want to be TRULY conspiratorial about it, perhaps one or both of the affairs never existed, only the smuggling.
There are certain lines CEOs of this level absolutely cannot cross, and a relationship with a subordinate is one of them. Hiding it, putting the entire company at risk for it, a board can’t trust a ceo that puts their extramarital dalliances ahead of the company’s interest.
Chips to China, on the other hand, is in the company’s interest. That’s what lawyers and lobbyists are for, and when they behave enough, that’s also what “rockstar” CEOs are for.
Jensen got too big for his leather jacket. Simple as.
If someone has been: 1. Managing the company well 2. Attracting and retaining good talent 3. Making money for shareholders 4. Building strong company fundamentals
Then forcing a resignation over this seems... odd. I was under the impression that barring this infidelity, Huang was one of the more sane tech CEOs. I feel like I could to literally any other CEO (Zuckerburg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Gates, Jobs) that have done something equally bad or worse, and haven't had to resign.
But in the big picture, isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?
All 42,000 employees should be held to the same standard, otherwise you will end up with all kinds of problems within the company.
Company leadership should lead by example as well.
1 - did she feel pressured to have a relationship with him? It's hard to have genuinely free consent when he can make or break her career; and
2 - sexual discrimination towards every other employee. Did she get benefits from the relationship? It's more than fair for the rest of the employees to wonder if they'd also been eg sucking his dick if they would have gotten better raises, faster promotions, etc.
All of them are big deals, but being deceived by a spy isn't the same as choosing to break an important rule.
https://youtu.be/_BypvatagNQ?si=1CDGUZKSd6r3jz_n
This is the right line of thinking, but I don't think a second affair is enough. To me, it says there is more we don't know. Possibly a lot more, and a lot worse than a second affair. Apart from anything else, that is the only reason to act this fast. You don't fire a CEO like Jensen in 24 hours over an HR indiscretion.
So I think both you and the parent are correct, but its a combo: he didn't come fully clean, but there is a non-public part that probably looks a lot more like treason that the board knows and we don't.
Something stinks to high heaven here.
Elon Musk has multiple allegations of sexual assault against him - he's had sexual relations with at least 4 of his staff including children with one of them while he had children with another women.
Elon solicits young women over social media to have children with (which is also soliciting sex).
He attacked his own regulators during DOGE, has direct meetings with Putin several times since 2022 (still ongoing), he's taken $100's of Millions in investment from Chinese state banks, special deals re: factories and data capture and sharing rights.
And more.
The difference is that Elon has 1) and iron grip over the board and 2) is an aggressive, spiteful person who will attack anyone and everyone - and everyone lives in fear about saying anything negative about Elon.
Jensen is paying the price for being a nice guy.
Apparently he should have been dragging the board over the coals, and threatening the press and industry to keep quiet, to quash the stories, to kiss up to Trump and make sure there's nothing but love from the government etc. etc..
" It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances"
I'm sorry but this is very not true and ... I don't want to be mean but it's effectively naive.
Elon tells his board whatever he wants to tell them including ridiculous fabrications about products, roadmaps, and handles them with total contempt.
This is game of power, not trust.
Hasn't Musk done this multiple times (including having children with subordinates)? He's still the CEO of a few companies. Bill Gates married one!
Boards don't care about this kind of thing unless they are already looking to get rid of someone. Worst case they pay the person off, and the cost will probably be less than a principal engineer earns in a year.
This doesn't pass the smell test. My guess is damning evidence was discovered which incriminates several high-level individuals at Nvidia with willfully bypassing the export ban. The second affair was leaked as a cover for why they were letting him go.
I'm sure it will all come out after a bit.
I don't know why people find this so hard to believe. CEOs of Nestle, Intel, McDonalds, Best Buy, Boeing have been booted once similar affairs came to light. Like this is an express ticket to getting fired no matter who you are.
The problem is that Jensen destroyed Nvidia's plausible deniability.
The second affair with an employee likely just dealt a death blow (if it hadn't already been dealt) to Jensen in terms of his ability to ride the crisis out.
If our own government officials can't face justice, why should the CEO of a company?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC3Kh40dEQY
If an executive suddenly starts wearing a leather jacket, watch out!
He controlled the trade and price for a global asset more valuable than gold as a single person. Some people didn't want that, it's that simple.
No way an affair would nuke his CEO's position.
Is rumor and conjecture enough?
In 50 years from now, some declassified documents will maybe shed light on this specific incident.
I would imagine it being a form of "So, China, we'll let our Jensen guy sell you X in chips, and in return, you do Y in relation to Russia, and Z in relation to Taiwan. Oh, and we need to use one of your spies, in case someone f*cks up".
Plus the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that the lady is a spy. All media report anonymous sources but treat the allegations as fact. Singapore said their investigation of the lady is not due to spying, but no western media picked up that story. The lady traveled to Taiwan with her Hong Kong passport, and the Taiwanese govt also said they have no evidence she's a spy. The Chinese spy agency just started investigating her due to all the commotion (likely for smuggling chips, which China also doesn't want, see above), and also has no idea who she is. Despite all this, the public still treats the spy allegations as a fact.
Jenssen Huang is a victim. Those who wanted to get rid of him and set this up, have succeeded. But everyone is under the mistaken belief that this hurts China somehow. China doesn't give a damn. In the mean time, all Chinese Americans lose. Jenssen is not the first such victim, and won't be the last.
"Trump/GOP lost their ass in midterms!" and "Dems intend to investigate GOP/Trump!"
Also provides news channel attacks on Dems; Congress should be looking into national security issues over here in CEO land! Not dividing Congress with partisan hackery!
Important to call out the social engineering going on among all the tribal groups.
Like everyone, they have a COC/sexual harassment policy, and that is basically always a firing offense in practice. They cannot place him above it, or else they would be in for infinite liability.
This is why literally nothing mentioned firing until that was discovered, and then it instantly became about firing him.
Sleeping with a Chinese spy or subordinate turns a personal problem into a workplace problem.
You could be right, but you're putting way , way too much faith in the board etc.
These people can be clowns. Don't over estimate how ridiculous, petty, thin skinned and arbitrary boards can be.
Of course they are why wouldnt they.
>NATIONAL SECURITY REASONS
Clipper Chip Mark 5 nonsense.
It's an odd situation where, yes, they're breaching national security mandates, but they're also being protected by the man at the top of the organization that makes those national security mandates.
We're watching a comedy film, where the outcome of said comedy film has an effect on the world economy, so we're actually watching a tragedy film.
That's how corruption skews the reality that the powerless are forced to live within.
And is your argument that a community who “champions freedom and progress” should be arguing for an authoritarian dictatorship to get access to the latest technology?
If the company struggles without him and it's obvious they need his leadership, he'll be back. Morals be damned.
Now, back to the main point: your egregious comparison of a potential Huang-return to Jobs-return unfortunately still remains just as terrible.
OP wasn't talking about his morals, unless you think OP is on Nvidia's board.
Here is some reading material to clear up your ignorance:
When Chrisann Brennan became pregnant with their daughter, Lisa, in 1977, Jobs was a young man in his early twenties just as Apple was beginning to take off.
According to Brennan, Jobs reacted with dismay and anger to the news, and they never married. Furthermore, for several years, Jobs denied that he was the father, even going as far as claiming in court documents that he was sterile.
A court-ordered DNA paternity test eventually proved conclusively that he was Lisa's father, after which he was required to provide financial support.
But sure, I must've forgotten every single one of those factoids you penned down even after reading every biography out there and even after watching all the (mostly terrible) movies about the person.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
I mean yes, he shouldn't be hounded, but if he'd kept it in his pants, he could have avoided all this nastiness.
However let’s hold both thoughts at once, this was no hit job. Nvidia was forced to act quickly to mitigate business and legal risks. The eventual fallout they’ll face is still not fully known.
Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!
> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY
I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!
The idea his fall is related to his affair also seems more like an attempt to minimise the fact that NVIDIA have been covertly selling to China when they were not supposed to.
Jensen, if you are reading this and need support you can try looking into BetterHelp. You can even get 20% off using certain partner links. No one should have to go through the stress of loosing their job from Chineese spies alone and with BetterHelp you're just one click away from your very own personal therapist.
Are you serious?
I for one hope all humans are ok, regardless of their status.
He's worth like $140 billion. $70 billion if he gets divorced. He'll be fine.
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
The real question we must ask is if a current $30k consumer GPU that initially sold for $2.7k is just as inflated as the 'AI' holdings revenue predictions.
The smart money will wait till the legal mess starts, as the dead cat bounce in the panic sell off is probable as people try to buy the dip. ymmv =3
Apparently I am able to, what was that?
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
This is truly the year of the Linux pcs and you’re missing out running anything else.
How so?
Maybe that's the lesson he learned and why he _supposedly_ was making sure his GPUs were still getting to China. Because he knows that the alternative would lead to good Nvidia Chinese competitor later on
Pretty sure all those nVidia employees over the years had a bigger hand in building it.
The only people that should be wealth taxed is leeches like you that see how utterly corrupt the state is with how it handles tax dollars and wants to give it more money.
(I personally don’t care about Jensen. I just don’t think that “people don’t deserve sympathy because they are billionaires” makes any sense.)
Why? He caused this. He chose to have affairs with a spy and a subordinate. Now he has to deal with the consequences.
cause this place is full of incels
DO you feel for how depressed that WW2 dictator was before he took his own life? How sad and lonely the big "H" was? That stirs empathy in you? Not me. I make choices about who I spend my mental and emotional efforts on.
But you shouldn't have empathy because you like him or anything.
You should have empathy when he proves he's changed. You can make mistakes, we all do. You don't deserve empathy.
He sells GPUs, he's not a rockstar.
It does remaining possible; there's no point when they're corporate. Why give him sympathy when himself; or Nvidia would give null shit about you?
> He's one of the richest men on the planet, he's acted with hubris and ignominy, he's betrayed his loved ones, and he's also probably feeling pretty terrible right now.
He chose to have the affair and as having my father do the same to my mother; you get no sympathy on cheating. Let them feel pretty terrible. He did nothing but be a parasite in the corporate playground, his actions caught up with him.
Changing everything to get out from rock bottom.
Some billionaire cheats on their wife and I am suppose to mourn for them?
You want me to be empathetic for a sociopath? Blow me.
Unless you follow up that hope with change you're hoping in to hot air.
I think you have misunderstood me. I'm not telling you to feel anything and I'm not going to sleep tonight feeling sad for Jensen Huang either.
based on the reporting about the second affair, it's possible his security has had to shut down similar witnesses in the past.
Me too. If he needs somebody to take his place he can reach me at my HN profile page. I'll take the bullet and try to struggle through with just billions of dollars.
Sounds like this was known or suspected at the highest levels of the administration (Rubio was discussing it per recent reporting). So the question becomes: did Nvidia use a cut out to knowingly avoid the export ban, and if so, did the administration know this?
Two of these potentially have serious legal consequences.
Oh sorry Jensen you broke one of the rules in the HR handbook we have to fire you now nothing we can do.
It isn't an arbitrary policy.