I imagine there's a lot of mixed emotions at Nvidia. Jensen seemed to have a very likable persona about him and he truly was a great CEO of the company. I imagine many looked up to him and are left to make sense of the past week.
They've also taken a pretty big pay cut this week and potentially into the future.
It has some inertia, but without Huang the company will start to slide into oblivion. The thing they should be most worried about is his tactics for driving up prices and the company's stock price. That could start to haunt (and hurt) them pretty quickly.
I'm not sure about that. Granted, I know noting about his day to day impact on the operation of the company. But, assuming he has run a tight ship and he has hired a number of competent people below him, nVidia will stay relevant for a long time. AMD might rise and challenge their dominance on AI compute. However they're on a cash cow one way or the other for a number of years.
I mean, it's just branding. It's had at least three capitalisation schemes that I can remember.
Weird capitalisation schemes are a particularly bad branding approach, as people tend to just ignore them. This is hardly unique to nvidia; any brand which has a weird capitalisation scheme will tend to have it ignored by most people. Especially where it's really awkward/incorrect-looking (in nvidia's case they're trying to get people to use full-caps for a non-acronym).
I think it's odd the amount of flak this guy took for relationships with adult women, while those involved with Epstein remain mosly undisturbed. If the AI bubble bursts soon, I wonder if people will try to blame Huang's extramarital affairs for it, instead of the rampant misallocation of resources.
It isn't so much the morality of it. CEOs as a group aren't known for excessive scruples. It's the piss-poor judgment he exhibited. Even if everything was consensual, this is a blatant violation of corporate standards and inevitably diminishes his reputation and therefore his effectiveness at his job. He's not only borked his own career, he's lost a ton of money for everyone connected with Nvidia. The question really is, why was he so stupid to think that he wouldn't get caught or that it wouldn't matter?
It's his personal life. As long as he didn't coerce anyone or otherwise cause harm, then there's no problem here. Why should corporate care about what he does when he isn't making them money? Why should anyone at all care? If anything, this is solely between him and his wife, and he didn't marry Nvidia.
Anyway, of anything it's the company that's losing out, not him. He's rich enough to relive a few more lives without ever working, and he's at retirement age. Meanwhile Nvidia now has to handle not having his leadership.
Having an affair with a spy/$8b customer who has targeted you and may make the company complicit in committing actual crimes is very much a problem for the board.
Having multiple affairs with employees that open the company up to reputational and legal liability is very much a problem for the board.
In other words, he was doing this while he was making them money in a way that can affect the bottom line, therefore it is - literally - their business.
Why would you take an RSU from a company that "licenses" hardware they design from the ground up to lock you out of doing what you want with it? You're rewarding the parasite. Don't reward parasites.
That's a pretty subtle and uncommon critique of Nvidia. Reminds me of this YouTube comment I saw on a Valve video once where someone made a huge post about how half life: alyx isn't a real videogame you can own because it isn't available as a physical disc.
Like you aren't technically wrong but, idk, are you expecting anyone to agree?
The forces at work answer your question. Why would someone take RSUs from Nvidia? Obviously because that means they're getting hired at Nvidia which is one of the highest valued companies in the world, and the RSUs represent a lot of more money on top of your high salary and permanent resume clout.
In Taiwan, Nvidia and tsmc are the two highest salary payers in the country. It's frankly funny to think of a Taiwanese engineer hesitating at a Nvidia offer letter because of niche FOSS/right to repair/IP liberation ideological qualms when the alternative is sweatshopping it at some no name chip industry side company that pays 30k/year at the high end.
There's truth to the comments both salawat and you are making. The market forces and incentives are undeniably strong. It can also be true at the same time that vendor lock-in like this is also undesirable.
At the point you've accepted RSUs you're already working for the company. If you hate your employer enough to turn down a significant portion of your total comp package, you really need to question how you got in that position.
Infidelity, possibly violating US law, and Nvidia’s own HR policies that open the company up to huge liability is okay because you took a look at a photo of his wife? Really?
I really hope you take some time to reevaluate this extremely misogynist take.
I don't like him or Nvidia but you can't deny he was the CEO while they achieved exraordinary things. He is just very successful no matter which way you put it.
I don't just mean making money successful like polymarket etc. but he was the head of a company that created multiple huge technical achievements in past decades. He made huge bets on multiple things and the bets actually worked in the end.
And they will very likely replace him with a bunch of accountants. It is not hard to understand why someone would want to have him as a leader instead of an accountant.
Anyone senior signing such a petition should get a very close eye from the new HR and outside counsel. (We don't need to cancel anyone. But a person in management minimizing a boss sleeping with his reports merits a second look.)
Because no one else can fill the shoes. The best that the next CEO can do is either:
a) make improvements on what exists, and thus effectively stagnate in a moving hardware industry, or
b) cut staff (which Nvidia has only done twice in its history: 1996 (near-bankruptcy), and around 2008 (360 / 6.5%), right in the middle of ironing out the Tesla architecture).
The moment their CFO took over, they already announced layoffs.
Alexander the Great was an extraordinary warlord and a mediocre king. He died unexpectedly, and his empire collapsed immediately.
Securing succession is a huge part of leadership in any organization that is supposed to outlast its leader. Because unexpected things can happen at any time, a leader must keep the organization in a shape, where a plausible successor can take over and continue leading it successfully. If no such successors exist, the leader has not done their job properly.
> If no such successors exist, the leader has not done their job properly.
This presupposes that there are successors that can fill the roles. Even after curation, what's left will very rarely match what's required, doubly so with tech-centric companies. The CFO now in charge is the perfect example of this.
A regression to the mean more often than not happens as a result.
They're losing money. It's always money. Denting the company they work for or invest in is a surefire way to get the money-grubbers to raise their hands. These are the people who care more about their personal stake in Nvidia than they do Nvidia as a whole. Good candidates for sacking.
At the end of the day he hasn't been accused of harassment. The two employees he banged didn't complain that he pressured them into banging him. It is still wrong to bang your employees, and there should be penalties for that. But can't he be punished in a way that doesn't also punish the industry, the economy and US competitiveness?
I wish the employees well but there's blood in the water and the sharks are circling. NVIDIA is one hell of a whalefall and there's lots of hungry scavengers out there.
It does seem instinctual; but plenty of people are able to override genetics with idealism.
"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
Maybe, but I can say without a doubt my reaction would be the same regardless of who the CEO is or the company. I think the only thing that matters for a CEO is business acumen, not moral character (and I'm personally moral af, often to a fault it feels like).
Notably real business acumen precludes lawbreaking, but until there is concrete evidence, I won't simply rely on the court of public opinion.
An important factor is that this man could not have sex without endangering his company. There were billions of women he could cheat on his wife with, and about 1000 who would be dangerous to his company to cheat on his wife with. He continually cheated in that pool of 1000.
Otherwise I don't care if this old man has sex, I don't even like thinking about it. But he was reckless and up his own ass about it. And while I don't think that the chips are the gold they're made out to be, and completely don't buy the reasoning of how A. Huang's business would be in the service of Chinese "spying," she's certainly someone who could and would talk business with him. She may have been an advisor on the financial house of cards for all we know, and the Chinese would definitely be interested in destroying the US economy.
Hell, the covert Chinese action might have been to take a woman who is extremely suspicious, get her to sleep with Huang, publicly out the affair, and let the company fall into the hands of somebody who is going to do something very stupid with it. That would still be Huang's fault. Maybe, none of this has anything to do with the Chinese at all, and the Israelis financed A. Huang's company (which was also evading Chinese enforcement) in return for her seducing a known sexually incontinent J. Huang, they publicized it, and with J. Huang's ouster the firm will fall under Israeli control. That would also be Huang's fault.
None of this excessively involves lawbreaking or morality, just stupidity and incompetence. Which is not "business acumen."
There's a lot of "seeming" and "feeling" in the thread, and very little reasoning. It's all Tiger Beat fanboying, and it doesn't help that Nvidia was a video game company before it became a channel-stuffing circular financier working on destroying the US economy.
Video game people are like sports fans, they fall in love with the producers of their entertainment and have parasocial relationships with them. I imagine that a lot of people who work at Nvidia now had that same relationship with the company as children.
> "We are all humans and can make mistakes. Jensen did so many good things and he needs a second chance,” wrote another.
I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
You can think he is amazing at many parts of this job, but at this point it is less of a mistake, and more a pattern of behavior that he knew was hugely risky and decided to cover up.
This is a terrible time for Nvidia employees. But the solution is not to invite the cause of the terrible time back in.
There is disagreement among US officials about the strength of the evidence that Alice Huang was recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), the Chinese equivalent of the CIA, to spy on Jensen Huang — and, by extension, on US policymakers.:
Is there any evidence export laws were being violated and Jensen knew about it. If so did he act single handedly within Nvidia? I find the timing of all this very suspicious and feel like we are only being told a small part of the story.
Many of the allegations are as yet uncorroborated and unconfirmed. There are a large number of people who stand to benefit if Jensen is no longer leading NVIDIA (and advocating for open source AI development). Some of those who stand to benefit have a massive IPO next week. Some who stand to benefit are commenting on these HN threads.
I've heard that many of the asian names that have "ng" in them derive from the same root: Hong, Hung, Huang, Ang, Ng, Ngo(?) etc... I feel like I'm missing a few. But yeah. You'll see a lot of names like this.
Just found this on wiki -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(name) :
"Ng (pronounced [ŋ̍]) is the simplified (tone-less) romanization of the Cantonese surnames 吳/吴 (Jyutping: Ng4, read in Mandarin as pinyin: Wú) and 伍 (Ng5, Mandarin Wǔ); and also of the Hokkien surnames 黃/黄 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂ɡ, Mandarin Huáng) and 阮 (Ńg, Mandarin Ruǎn).
The surname is often pronounced in English as /əŋ/ əng or /ɪŋ/ ing or /ɛŋ/ eng. It is sometimes romanized as Ang, Eng, Ing and Ong in the United States, and as Ung in Australia. In Cambodia, the corresponding surname is Oeng."
Clearly this list doesn't seem to indicate some of the names I listed, but I'm not sure if that's because it's an "example" list, or if some of the names are from different roots. Either way it was interesting to learn.
Chinese is just hard. They use features of human voice that aren't used for literal texts in English, or many other languages for that matter. It's said that cultural upstreams get more complex pronunciation and downstreams tends to drop features to simplify pronunciation and China was kind of one of biggest centers of cultures in ancient times.
Note that that isn't to say "English is a simplistic language", though, it's just that Chinese has complexities in parts that don't necessary overlap with all sorts of intricacies of actual US English. Mastering both would be hard.
But at least it's not like Russian, which apparently uses more and rarer frequency bands - think DTMF, but more than dual and language specific, some overlapping some not. And English is likewise not the simplest kind of all in there as well, at all, to be extra clear.
I think he was just, somewhat dramatically, referring to tones in Chinese and ы in Russian. Neither of which being what makes their respective languages particularly difficult.
Allegedly you guys use the widest range of frequencies for vocalization which is advantageous in acquiring foreign languages.
And human speeches come in harmonics, so I think we must be all using those like different combinations of DTMF tones. Human cochlea is also like a ladder ADC, so it shouldn't be so weird that we use combinations of "pressure points" to encode data rather than relying on a single central frequency.
I didn't mean to say that "them Russians talk multiple concurrent conversations at once by using different bands over there", no, just that different languages use different ranges and combinations of frequencies.
This frequency range and Russian advantage thing used to be widely used as somewhat hallucinatory explanation as to why people from certain country(a neighbor to Russia btw) are so atrocious at English in both input and output, that, allegedly, the ranges just don't overlap that we hear nothing from them and they hear nothing from us. That's why the Russian language came to my mind immediately here.
This theory is a bit inconsistent with reality, though, as our speeches are often considered high pitched than English while the theory argues that we're on the lower side.
> Allegedly you guys use the widest range of frequencies for vocalization which is advantageous in acquiring foreign languages.
That sounds like you are remembering one of those Tomatis's charts, which are simply bullshit. All natural languages are quite similar in terms of their "frequency bands", what is different is the clustering of their phonemes within those bands, e.g. Russian has lots of consonant sounds but very few vowels when compared to English.
I assume you know this, but Chinese is a tonal language. 'Mom scolds the horse' translates as ma ma ma ma. With nothing but tones distinguishing the various 'ma's. People who grew up with only tonal or non-tonal languages tend to do poorly with languages on the other side because they're extremely alien.
Like imagine not being able to use inflections to express emotion when speaking. That'd sound as alien to a non-tonal speaker as the concept of using inflections to express emotion to a tonal-speaker. Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.
There's also the side issue that most non-tonal languages tend to have a relatively close linguistic background. Russian has a massive amount of 'English' cognates (often from shared ancestors predating both), especially if you consider words that are basically cognates but have different stresses or maybe one slightly different vowel sound or whatever. But the number of cognates between tonal and non-tonal languages is far fewer. It makes them much more difficult to learn, at least for me.
> Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.
You certainly can. Just because a morpheme has a tone doesn't mean that there aren't other contributors to pitch, such as sentence pitch contour. Do you actually speak or understand any tonal languages? I can assure you that Chinese people definitely use sentence prosody to convey extremely subtle nuances of meaning.
> The non standard English chara ters really help articulate to the average person how it should sound. Clear as mud.
I don't really understand your complaint. If you want to know how something is pronounced, you'll have to learn how to read pronunciation information. If you want nothing but standard English, then it won't be possible to describe the pronunciation of most foreign words. (For example, no English syllable corresponds to Spanish no - the problems start very early if you try to go this route.)
> The FBI has been investigating Huang’s affair for at least a year. But Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Thursday that there are still “no conclusions reached by the Department of Justice, or by me, or by [FBI] Director Patel around who she is or is not.
Just for context:
> In April 2023, Trump hired [Todd] Blanche to defend him for concealed hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and he led Trump's defense in the 2024 criminal trial. Blanche later defended Trump in cases involving federal classified documents and election obstruction. In November 2024, following his victory in the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump announced Blanche as his nominee for deputy attorney general. Blanche was confirmed by the Senate in March 2025.[1]
He defended Trump's White House media ban[2] and most recently threatened to prosecute Democrats planning oversight probes into the administration[3].
FBI Director Kash Patel, for anyone who doesn't already know, is a Trump loyalist who was a director of Trump Media & Technology Group and reportedly made over $500,000 from Trump's political campaign. It is literally insane that he is the director of anything in the government[4].
Bottom line: time will tell who Alice Huang really was, but given the reports that Trump was informed she might have been a spy a year ago and didn't act on it, you can't expect honesty from loyalists he put in law enforcement positions.
If there's any concern that his inaction was a mistake, you can expect all of the people he put in positions of power to do whatever it takes to defend him, and that includes fudge the truth about the intelligence they had on Alice Huang.
EXACTLY! I'm not sure why more people aren't putting this together. Pretty clear the person he was talking about was Jensen and they were holding this over him for the past year to get what they wanted out of him, probably front-running to enrich themselves.
Indeed he did https://www.threads.com/@carnage4life/post/Dfhghgum6yq/video... and so he was going to put this person (guessing it's Jensen) in jail then had a call with him. So he admits that (Jensen) did something illegal, but we will let it slide....
The problem with this theory is that Trump is one of the people who comes out looking bad here, and now that his party has lost the legislative branch, he's very vulnerable. You can be sure the Democrats are going to investigate what he knew, and when. According to The New York Times reporting, one of the reasons Trump didn't take action was that he didn't want to disrupt Nvidia's chip sales.
Recall that, in exchange for the US lifting export restrictions, Trump negotiated an agreement with Nvidia to receive 25% of the revenue from certain chip sales[1].
Trump prioritizing money over national security is not at all surprising.
There was some speculation that Rubio was the one who leaked this, as he had prepared a memo about Alice Huang that was presented to the president in May.
The $7.5billion in alleged sales to china has removed a couple of trillion in value from the pension and investment funds of Americans this week, all for the infantile hubris and anti-competitive moves toward americas biggest trading partner. It needs to be clear that’s on Trump too, if it wasn’t already. Compromised or not, Jensen was right - sell them the chips and they won’t be forced to get them under the counter or develop their own.
> The $7.5billion in alleged sales to china has removed a couple of trillion in value from the pension and investment funds of Americans this week, all for the infantile hubris and anti-competitive moves toward americas biggest trading partner.
And how many trillions of dollars of wealth has been "removed" by American companies outsourcing their production to China over the past several decades, transferring their IP to Chinese entities through forced joint-ventures, outright IP theft, etc.?
By some estimates, the outright theft alone has caused $15 trillion in cumulative losses. According to the e Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, whose figures are used by the FBI and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, IP theft costs American businesses somewhere between $225 and $600 billion every year, and much of that theft is at the hands of China.
Companies like Facebook and Google aren't allowed in the Chinese market. Do you find that "anti-competitive"?
Nobody is playing fair here and the notion that we can all just trade with each other equanimously is naive. The world isn't that kind and simple.
You are completely wrong here and I suspect the American voter will agree with me. Selling the greatest inventions of American ingenuity and know how directly to a rival is the type of historical shooting yourself in the foot that will be studied for centuries. America has essentially built the internet, the microprocessor, gave it free to the world, then did the same with all the technologies since and what has an American got to show for it exactly? I'd much rather give every teenager in the entire country a 5090 for free than allow a single one to be sold overseas. In the 90s the feds were throwing money at schools to build computer labs even in poor school districts and now we've kinda just stopped giving our kids the latest and greatest and instead force them to compete with the world for hardware. It is too late now but this has been a generational fumble that will be studied for a long long time. We've essentially given away all our advantage to a country that was a backwater when the Intel microprocessor was invented. Frankly embarrassing that it has come to this.
The 5090 – and every other Nvidia GPU – is manufactured in Taiwan and dependent on equipment made in the Netherlands and Germany. If America could build them in the USA without total dependence on the rest of the world your argument might stand.
Taiwan was a similar backwater when the intel microprocessor was invented, yet they’ve clearly done the hard yards to do what the “American voter” had no appetite for.
Free is an interesting word to mean, "sold for money". Also while the US government funded part of the initial internet, both of your examples are private citizens creating something you wish we later restricted. GPU's are graphics processors too, it was too late any when they became useful a sort of general purpose workload chip.
We actually could give every teen a 5090 for free right now, no blocking trade agreements required.
When I was a kid my school had a computer lab worth 200k in 1995 dollars. This was something very few kids had outside of the United States. None of them were locked down and we were encouraged to learn how to program them. Now we just throw some locked down $200 Chrome books at them and think that's gonna produce the next generation of tech innovation. In any case I wasn't talking about free as in commie.
In 1995 you didn’t have: raspberry anything, flipper zero, qemu, commodity smartphones, mail-order circuit board fab—-and that’s just the stuff under $200.
I think I missed what this annecdote means. Lots of countries had computers in 1995.
I also don't understand what you mean by "not free as in commie". Do you mean soft power, we already get that, do you mean something other than resources (what money ultimately is)?
The American voter can wish for anything, including wishing to get all the cheese from the moon. Wishing quite different from having the ability and infrastructure to actually do it, which nobody is stopping americans from doing already.
> Compromised or not, Jensen was right – sell them the chips and they won’t be forced to get them under the counter or develop their own.
I disagree. China is only acquiring technology to copy the best parts and improve the rest. There are plenty of examples over the past decades.
They would never be a permanent customer of Nvidia, they would destroy Nvidia long term by offering better chips for cheaper, especially as they are going to take Taiwan in the near future.
They do this with cars, they did it with solar, they do it with weapons-grade tech.
It’s an absolute fever dream to think selling them chips would mean they wouldn’t get more under the counter and develop their own improved designs.
We are talking about a nation-state actor with unlimited pockets. They can go down all of these roads at the same time and if I were china and winning AI means winning everything, i would exactly that.
Using Jensen like a greedy prostitute to get the goods right from the source was just the easiest way to get those chips.
The collapse of Jensen is also strengthening China, they already have what they wanted, now he gets put in the trash so the US can no longer profit from his undeniable talents attracting investments into American AI domination.
Seriously, what is 4 or 7b to China?
Better than sending Chinese black ops to disappear a ship full of Nvidia chips and risk complications with another nation-state actor.
Why wouldn’t they take the way of least resistance which was through Jensens greed, ego and illoyalty to his wife?
China has a long-term plan, is extremely focused at accomplishing milestones and they are already ahead in almost every sector compared to the US of the past 20 years, that has become a political dumpster fire.
China is winning.
And the chips that Jensen allowed to move there will be used to accelerate the already working strategy in all of its aspects. He didn’t just fuck most of his company and partners as it seems, he fucked every American in existence.
Enough smart people in the US government have seen that, but they are dealing with a kleptocratic family and friends scheme that is selling their nation’s interests to enrich themselves. It is what it is.
My idea is that Trump threw Jensen under the bus to tank stock market because democrats won recently.
Trump followers are big on “Trump is good for stock market”. I think market already dipped when democrats won but now it is not a dip anymore, that’s quite a crash we have now.
>Trump was informed she might have been a spy a year ago and didn't act on it
You don't know that at all. It's not standard procedure to immediately publicly out possible spies. Lots of reasons why not to do that including not wanting to let adversaries know you know who their spies are or to use them to feed bad intel or for watching what the spy does.
Not to mention the Commerce Department continually dragging their heels on Megaspeed being added to the export blacklist despite being requested to by US intelligence agencies.
Singapore also forbid her from returning to the country and only dropped the investigation because US law enforcement did not respond to their requests for assistance. This was reported by Reuters.
"A third category, one that would change everything, would arise only if the board’s investigation finds Huang knew about the intelligence connection. That would be “a whole other ball game,” as Bartlett said."
It seems fairly clear to me that this is the case. His misstep was political in nature, I think , or maybe the Chinese chip wagon train. But the affairs are neither relevant nor noteworthy except as an excuse for the resignation. NVIDIA is a strategic national asset at this point.
An alternate could be, that the entire goal of all of this was because the Chinese government wanted to remove a highly effective CEO, from producing what is now a worldwide grip on top level AI compute power.
She is not a "spy", but she represented and was connected to the companies in mainland China who were trying to build data centers in Singapore, Malaysia, etc which would then be used and leased by Alibaba and others. The scale of the money involved ($ billions) means that there was zero way anyone in the CPC didn't have knowledge, even if it was low level bureaucrats. This may not end up as "smuggling" in legal terms in the eventual court battle.
Now I know for anyone outside of China, that equates to "spy", but she was not MSS especially when they are currently holding 600k cards in HK and actively trying to prevent cards from entering.
I think there's got to be more variety of differentiation between being an agent of national interest as a national of a nation and being a spy. It takes more than acting in America's interest for an American business person to be an "agent" or a "spy."
This isn't to discount the issues with NVIDIA and whether they knowingly participated in circumventing chip bans. Or conflict of interest issues. But running a business that benefits China as a Chinese national and making some reports to the nation just doesn't seem like "spy" to me any more than being part of the British East India company made a Brit a spy.
Yeah it’s one of those things anyone can argue either way. To some, unless they find a Chinese spy school diploma with her name she won’t be “spy”. That’s just not how it works. There are various levels of involvement and recruitment. All the way down to being an unwitting cooperator (for all she knows, she is helping a business associate or friend in Singapore source GPUs) or something like that.
Given the current organ extraction system from criminals in China, and the 100% control by the party, any Chinese citizen who happens to be in a position of interest to the CCP, either in China or outside, and gets a call to help the Motherland will know the options...
Sourcing in that article is extremely thin. Basically it's just quoting Blanche and Trump (hardly neutral observers, the administration is implicated here!) and then citing the existence (but not communication to the journalist) of "officials" who hold the opinion. The CIA thing is hilarious because it says that they aren't convince (I'm not making this up) "according to a source".
This is a beat sweetening story. You write up what your sources want you to write in exchange for them giving you juicier stuff later. It says almost nothing about the certainty within the intelligence agencies.
trump admin, whose officials quashed and suppressed investigations into this criminal enterprise with the alleged spy as far back as a year ago, is casting doubt on these claims? No shit huh?
The second biggest economy in the world is trying to buy your chips, and you think it's fucking a woman that made it happen ?
(and it's not even selling to China. It's selling to Malaysia, which resells to China, which is perfectly legal. The US can go fuck itself, its rules do not apply to the whole world)
There is no disagreement. Nobody has any evidence. Zero. Even Singapore and Taiwan have no evidence. The media admitted since day 1 that they had no evidence other than "intelligence officials said so", but chose to report it uncritically anyway. And the public chose to interpret allegations as facts (or, as your parent said, "likely" even though that's based on nothing but the fact that she's Chinese) anyway.
> I will say: if she was a spy, she was terrible at it.
We have an entire administration who are terrible at their jobs—who commit crimes and then go onto a news program and tell everyone that they committed a crime. I don't think that's evidence against her being a spy. Not these days.
I saw YT content saying in CN business culture her position would be what's know as a 'white glove'— a kind of black market intermediary whose description perfectly matches the actions she is claimed to have taken in her business dealings with nVidia.
I mean, the intelligence community of this adminstration has zero credibility anymore. There's no reason to take anything coming out of official channels seriously.
Good god… The depravity of HN on this subject is boundless. What does being a founder have to do with it? Why would the bar be lower for them? What is with this misplaced hero worship and bootlicking?
Extramarital affairs are extremely common among these CEOs.
Jensen was dumb enough to have one with a Chinese spy, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he's one of the best CEOs of the modern era, and his work at Nvidia has been outstanding.
NVIDIA is the crown jewel of the US at this point, the company powering all of AI, which has global geopolitical implications. Jensen is by all accounts the visionary and solid leader of the company. Weakening it because of an affair is batshit fucking crazy.
I agree its morally wrong, but that's really a personal issue for the family, it's not a crime. Sleeping with some employees is barely a problem IMO. And worst of all, when I look at the amount of corruption and immorality amonst say Musk, Zuckerberg, the Trump White House going after Jensen is crazy. Jensen is the billionaire who's happy to pay all his taxes and not interfere with politics or elections.
And besides all that, it seems the Trump admin KNEW about Alice Huang and Jensen's relationship for a year, Lutnick also knew. with the Why is Jensen the only one going down for this? He is getting crucified because he's less Machiavellian than all the rest.
Because this isn't a moral issue, its a dirty political fight to entrench power within OpenAI & Anthropic. Without the Chinese companies getting chips, we would not have Deepseek or Kimi or any frontier-level open weight models. And if these guys succeed, we will all be locked into corporate paid models that spy on you and censor you for a long time. People need to look at the bigger picture, killing open-weight models may be good for a few US cos but it is terrible for the world.
Also, these women are all age-appropriate and none were minors. One would think that's the world's lowest bar and not even worth mentioning, but, well..
This whole thing makes it look like his mistake was not going to Epstein's Island and participate in a hypothetical Mutually Assured Incrimination pact.
> I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
My understanding is, the thing that got him effectively fired, [0] is not the affairs themselves, it was not being candid with his board about the extent of the problem–he admitted to them the affair with Alice Huang, but didn't tell them about his other affairs (including at least one with a direct report) until after the board was made aware of them independently.
A board can put up with a CEO who cheats on his wife. It can't put up with a CEO who hides things from it.
[0] formally speaking he resigned, but it seems likely the board communicated to him "if you don't resign, we'll fire you"
Yes, if it puts the CEO or the company at jeopardy of blackmail or litigation.
As with security vetting interviews they don't necessarily care about the morality of the actions, just that they are wware and can prepare for the consequences.
There was a very simple choice the CEO could have made which would have avoided all this, anyway.
If you are the CEO of a publicly traded company you are essentially the property of the board. Not sure what’s hard to understand here. If you behave “non-robotically” in certain ways, you lose your job.
Shocking how many people think a board could do anything OTHER than firing him even for just what’s known today about fucking subordinates, never mind what the export control investigations find.
What’s clear is you have no experience with this at all and are saying outright falsehoods confidently.
You are none of those things. All of reality if current CEOs today proves you wrong. Your take is so laughable it’s as if it was written by a child or a teenager.
If a CEO is already involved in one public scandal, I think they are obliged to inform the board of any other potential scandals of the same kind.
Also, we don't know exactly what Huang said to the board. Maybe, they didn't explicitly ask if there were any other affairs, and he didn't answer the question they didn't explicitly ask. Maybe, they did ask, and he lied and falsely said this was the only one.
There's this thing called nuance my friend. Circumstances and expectations change dramatically when you're already dealing with a PR nightmare involving cheating. At that point, yes, the expectation is you're honest about other indiscretions.
> Are you saying a CEO needs to disclose everyone they have sex with to the board?
If they work under you, yes? It's written into every business conduct policy I've ever seen?
It should be really obvious why entering into a sexual relationship with someone who reports to you without disclosing it to your manager is bad. The CEO reports to the board, so they disclose it to them.
It is equally obvious why not reporting rape is bad, but many don't. It is easy to blame the victim when you are not they, but it is not so easy when you're actually in it and have to process the emotions. Being manipulated into having extramarital affairs is not the norm for 60-something married guys. A large segment of 60-something married guys are invisible to the world; often even to their own wife. It is not something such people normally grow up around to see how to handle themselves.
If he cheated on his wife with people who weren't either subordinates or (at best) business partners, that'd be one thing.
Also I know this place is full of SV ghouls who only give a shit about what the stock tickers on their brokerages look like, but the amount of people defending infidelity is insane to me
I agree. The habitual lack of discretion and long-view judgement that enables repeated affairs certainly doesn’t engender trust in running a company.
Even if, as others have suggested, the evidence against Alice Huang isn’t strong, there are still huge conflicts of interest and repeated lies in play. Let’s move on
makes no sense, he isn't some recent hire you need proxies like that to judge. He is the most successful ceo of all time, arguably, so I don't think hes short in trust to run Nvidia well.
Possibly knowingly selling your product illegally when you’re instructed to not do that, as well as conducting numerous affairs with direct reports cannot be defined as running the company well.
Even leaving out the sale to China part, sleeping with direct reports is unethical and presents so many conflicts of interest. He was lucky the damage was minimal for so long
Funny how some people on Hacker News are super excited about open Chinese models trained on NVIDIA hardware, and then some others are so negative on the "rival nation". All the while it is increasingly likely that:
- there is no concrete evidence that Alice Huang was even a spy
- the whole thing was made up due to nothing but pure Sinophobia
It’s pretty apparent that nobody can run nvidia like he did though. Firing him so abruptly is the first circle of the drain. He’s spent years building connections and a supply chain in Taiwan and the rest of Asia while coordinating operations and design in America. So when I say there’s nobody who could replace him it really does seem like that because nobody else will have that background of business relationships. It shouldn’t be overlooked that he’s made huge numbers of people in Taiwan phenomenally wealthy, and they’re not likely to be amenable to someone new coming in and claiming his status, especially if that person has been involved with getting him fired.
I'm on the betting side that nvidia will perform about as well as it has been with or without him. This is a distraction that will have an impact, to be sure, but nvidia is in a hot field of very few competitors, even after 3 years of this AI craze. In an ecosystem like that i'd say inertia plays a bigger role.
Yeah I’m not saying the effects will be immediate. But it is certainly very jarring for absolutely everyone concerned. In the immediate future everything will continue as it is today, just once we’re 6-12-18-36 months down the line in a Jensen-free Nvidia the weakness could really start to show.
Usually a transition like this can be done well when a company has some mature product or service that prints money, like Apple or Microsoft or Google for example, and the company then needs a safe pair of hands to keep that machine running. It doesn’t seem like Nvidia is in exactly that kind of situation, it’s more like a red queen race that they’re the ones leading right now.
If he was French, this would be an attaboy moment - without the spy allegations, he'd be cheered on. However... in such a puritanic country as US, I suspect it was the second disclosed affair that cost him his position.
After all, it changed the narrative from Huang being "someone who fell to nation-state honeytrapping" to a regular, equal-opportunity filanderer.
So a German spy would have been ok? I don't get all of these rival nation thing when it comes to China. Do they want Americans to be poor? Who would they sell their stuff then?
At least in many countries outside the US. There was this fun thing happening then Walmart tried to expand to Europe ... doing zero investigation about social norms before that. They tried to forbid their employees to have relationships. But the germans just said "To the heck, we don't let restrict our freedom by private entities". Over there there are thousands of marriages between e.g. a hospital Dr. med. and nurses. And all of them started as a relationship between a superior and one subordinate. From a german PoV this is entirely okay. What would not be okay is abusing the power of being a superior ... but that has to be backed with evidence first, otherwise it's just a sly accusation.
Don't people have personal freedom of expression in the US? Or can't they enforce their freedom against the powers of the employers or the lynch justice like moralizing of complete strangers?
For the obvious reason that you spend many hours of your week in the workplace, it becomes the place where you meet the most people in your life and that includes friends but also your potential love or sexual partners. As simple as that.
It's not illegal to have relationships with subordinates in the US. It's usually against company policy because the risk of lawsuits, or even just people quitting over relationships gone sideways, is too high. Bosses have a lot of power over people because healthcare is tied to employment. Employment is often the only thing keeping one and ones family from being homeless.
There's also a long history of bosses exploiting power dynamics for their personal pleasure.
The idea is not my own - my wife read it to me from Instagram;
>If Jensen had sex with underaged girls with other billionaires on a secret island, all he would get would be his name being redacted from documents doxxing his victims.
This looks like some three letter agency dumping what they have on him, most likely as a punishment for not playing ball.
In these circumstances, I don't really feel like in addition to messing up his reputation and his famil(y/ies¹) and other punishments his going to have, there should be another punishment given to his company and employees.
Ofc, my knowledge of CEO level management or even advanced GPUs is limited and I welcome any critique to straighten up my limited views. Just wanted to point out hypocrisy and the tendency to throw out the baby with bathwater.
The king plays by different rules. He even gets immunity from investigation if SCOTUS is to be believed. Our president-king also can give immunity to others with no oversight in the form of a pardon.
Apparently a constitution means only what 5 people say it means. Thanks Mitch!
I find this attitude disgusting. I can’t say “it has no place on HN” because the last day or so of comments on this subject has proved many people seem to think money washes away all.
Infidelity, conflicts of interests, potentially some “light treason”, but, but, but “shareholder value”… just gross.
If she was a spy and wasn't flagged to him by the FBI, it's the FBI's fuck up. Are private citizens expected to run their own counter-intelligence agency? The spy thing is only problematic if he knew she was one and somehow didn't inform the FBI.
As for the extramarital thing, it's a private matter between him and his wife. Unless someone alleges there was any sexual harassment involved, but I have seen no claim that it is the case so far.
If you are running the most valuable company in the world that produces items so strategic geopolitics is shaped around them ? Then yes - US counterintelligence at that point should have had a channel to you to tell you - dude! She may be a spy - pls stop.
And just letting it go on is either a sign of gargantuan incompetence or willful action by them . Not sure which :)
"likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws."
Well, USA is selling Russia a lot of "dual-use components", including Texas Instruments chips found in drones and nobody makes a lot of fuss about that, even though, in theory, there are imposed sanctions on Russia because it started a war, keeps pushing hybrid war against USA NATO allies.
So, selling graphic cards does not sound like a big deal, especially given the fact that China, likewise Russia, North Korea or Iran can purchase anything through the fake companies place in Ireland, the Netherlands or any other tax paradise where nobody ask too many questions.
This is easy peasy now, in the globalized economy, more, it was always easy peasy, even during the middle of cold war and CoCom times, communistic countries could buy anything they wanted, e.g. communistic Poland had a net of companies in Brazil through which is smuggled whatever it wanted to purchase.
Should the U.S. government protect U.S. citizens being targeted by foreign governments? Or at least notify them of the spying? Individuals or even companies are in huge disadvantage facing active threats from nation states.
The real crime was going against the narrative about doom, scarcity, and that only american corpos could protect us against the open weight models that are certainly compromized. That's what he's paying for.
No but seriously, i wonder who the next CEO will be, what song will they be signing then
I agree that the guy was an asshole to his wife. but the reason he is being ousted is because someone wants someone else.
I dont know if there is intention to scale bad sentiments with China, I dont know if there was really any spy or gpu's in china due to his actions, but they make it seem it was because his affairs and not his connections with other chinese companies and politics which i find concerning.
Chinese spy or other mistresses are not a reason preventing him to come back. Scrutiny on the finances of the Jensen orchestrated bubble is. The house has started to come down for good and bringing back the keystone of the fragile GPU card building is not stopping the collapse. Nvidia needs a fresh face to deal with the contractual, financial and legal challenges of industrial scale mess.
Who among us hadn't slept with a customer (who is a smuggler) and two employees?
Look, I absolutely get that Huang is a singular CEO. In a culture of CEO worship, he is a rare one where you can clearly say he drove the success of the company. For employees with equity, his tenure has been astoundingly good.
That said, what we know is deeply troubling, and the people who made this call (Jensen and/or the board) have the biggest vested interest, and they may know of deeper issues.
Also, Jensen's external credibility is mortally wounded. He has been one of the loudest proponents for exporting chips to China. We now know he had an illicit relationship with a Chinese national who was smuggling Nvidia product to China. The policy positions he took are entangled with his undisclosed (until now) personal liabilities. And this is a very sensitive policy issue.
Yeah the guy was treating Nvidia as his personal harem and sleeping with one of his customers in what would have been a massive conflict of interest even if it hadn't turned out to be a potential Chinese Intelligence operation. We are way beyond 'mistake' at this point.
It could be a billion fucking affairs, and it would still remain personal matters that should never lead to Huang being canned. American puritanism at its finest.
>likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
Literally everyone knew. China renting Malaysian GPUs isn't new. Gamers Nexus has a full two hours documentary of "nvidia is full of shit and knows china is getting A100s and H100s and so does the US government". Alice Huang is likely not a spy either.
"7th richest man in the world sticks his dick in random places and cheats on his wife" no fucking shit sherlock, does a bear shit in the woods too ?
It’s not about the affair it never was. He’s being removed likely because he was intimately involved setting up deals circumventing export restrictions. It’s likely the 3 letter agencies knew about it for a long time but it either got too egregious or the political will swung in the favor of action. Either way get affair is the public face of a much more serious infraction
Getting whiplash from which side of the issues people are angry about on the current administration's party on either social or economic/geopolitical impacts, and this other matter with Jensen and his sexual affairs vs. the economic/geopolitical issues of NVIDIA exports since this was with a Chinese spy.
Confused on whether people are actually upset about both or even understand the issue, or are just upset about one thing while using the other as ammunition.
It's one of those news stories that ends up being a good Rorschach test. There are a lot of different possible angles and takes, which means someone's opinion ends up saying something about themselves.
A lot of people became millionaires during his tenure, suppose it’s not surprising that brings a lot of loyalty. Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right move for the company though.
It is almost certainly the case that many of his defenders here and elsewhere have a meaningful financial incentive to defend him and hope for his return. The good news is that they're easy to spot, sycophants and boot-lickers for money almost always are.
> He may be a thief, he may be a robber of temples, he may he the very chief man in every sort of vice and criminality; but he is a gallant general and a fortunate one, and he must be preserved for the critical emergencies of the republic.
Fine words, but you know what happened, right? The second pleading against Verres which you're quoting from was never delivered. The bastard was utterly guilty:
> [Verres and his defender Hortensius tried to delay the trial until a more sympathetic judge was available, but Cicero] opened his case with a short and blistering speech. He listed all of Verres crimes during his time as governor of Sicily and showed evidence that Verres had amassed 40 million sesterces in that time. The effect of the first brief speech was so overwhelming that on August 13 Hortensius abandoned the defence as hopeless, and recommended his client leave the country. The following day, Verres was found guilty and fined three million sesterces.
Jensen should start a new company and hire them. California's ban on non-competes is one of the few good laws it has and made Silicon Valley what it is. Time for another traitorous eight.
That company would suck because it wouldn't own any NVidia patents nor the copyright to their software and it wouldn't have the contractual relationship with TSMC that NVidia has. Nor their customers.
Even with patents, copyrights, etc as mentioned in a sibling comment, it would be interesting what he could do if he had a fresh start. There might have been ideas that challenged the existing business that he could be free to pursue.
He'd have no shortage of talent and funding to embark on such a venture.
The big question is once the dust settles (including a possible divorce), he'll still have billions of dollars and need a reason to get out of bed. Being that he's a famous workaholic, I imagine he will try something new after he's done licking his wounds.
Are these Chinese employees? If it's true Huang betrayed America for China it would make sense why they wouldn't be as upset. I doubt the employees have as full of a story like the board does so they may not know the extent of his misdeeds.
I see where they’re coming from. Is the CEO in the position to be an upstanding moral citizen and flawless in his person life or is his job to increase the size of the business and returns to shareholders? If it’s not actually damaging to the company’s reputation and it will lose value without him…
On the other hand the potential spy stuff and corruption is quite worrying.
Literally zero evidence for this but a NYT journalist claiming anonymous sources, with the same journalist having many scoops in the past where their source was executives at Anthropic.
The DOJ, The CIA and the FBI are all saying that these claims she was a spy are not convincing...
Its a very calculated political hitjob, when the spy allegations didn't hold up, and the megamond accusations were hearsay at best, all of a sudden they started dropoing new affairs. Its very scheduled/coordinated.
Also me saying this instantly gets downvoted. There's bots in this thread downvoting any mention of this.
If the NYT destroys their reputation with this, you can be the first to tell us. Until then, what they report has some weight to it. I also think you're understating the amount of details that have been provided.
If people are downvoting you it's because you're spinning conspiracy theories around a topic that a lot of people have personal financial interests in.
The type of person who takes NYT reporting uncritically would not change their opinion if this is false. The NYT has been deeply embedded in the American state propaganda arm for a long time, remember WMDs in Iraq?
Deeply embedded meaning they have a deep network of sources, or deeply embedded meaning they are working in concert with American intelligence services?
The sort of quick rule I have for measuring credibility is "how much of a story is it when a reporter or outlet gets something meaningfully wrong?" For the NYT, it's a rather important story, like the Iraq WMDs you mentioned. Which, needless to say, was over 20 years ago.
> Deeply embedded meaning they have a deep network of sources, or deeply embedded meaning they are working in concert with American intelligence services?
¿Por qué no los dos? Access Journalism easily explains both phenomena. Journalists know where their bread is buttered - members of the "deep network of sources" may occasionally call in favors, or drop breadcrumbs leading journalists to a specific, preselected destinations.
A recent HN thread led me down the rabbit-hole that included an observation by some (British) monarchy insider that they'd intentionally leak a story to the press, and the article would include the usual "We have reached out to the royal family for comment" spiel, and yet the entire article is the comment by the royal family. On the other side of the Atlantic, it wasn't too long ago that JD Vance was outed as the unnamed source on a story that the Trump admin subsequently attempted to sue for.
How are they conspiracies...This is CNNs reporting. I hate how people can just label something a conspiracy to discredit it. I dont believe in conspiracies actually, everything I said is verifiably true. You are literally a character out of an Orwell novel. Think for yourself for once.
But the NYT laundered crimes against humanity and covered up the death of 30k children over the last three years. They published dozens of provably fabricated stories to do so. Sorry they dont have weight to their journalism, they are completely beholden to whatever special interest that benefits them.
Ana Swanson, the NYT journalist who broke this scoop on Jensen frequently uses Jack Clark an Anthropic founder as a source in her AI scoops.
Dont call me a conspiracy theorist, and stop letting people think for you. Use your brain twat.
It's the very definition of a conspiracy. You are claiming that people conspired to perform a character assassination of Jensen Huang, while dropping hints of involvement of Anthropic, which especially on this forum invokes further conspiracy.
You're using the "conspiratorial they" (as I like to call it), that "they" failed with the spy allegations so started releasing information about affairs.
And then, to top it off, you play victim and say there are bots scanning the comments and automatically downvoting you.
This also only touches on the potential spy aspect. The largest part of the story is Nvidia seemingly intentionally breaking US trade laws over something that a significant part of the AI industry believes should be treated as dangerous as nuclear weapons.
Conspiracy theories don't have to be wrong or crazy, but what evidence do you have to so confidently claim that yours is correct?
---
I've been following Nvidia for a long time. I've seen online discussions of the company become increasingly corrupted since 2020/2021. The only explanation that's held up for me is that money corrupts, and there are a lot of individual shareholders of Nvidia stock that feel a duty to try and protect their investment. I have no idea if that applies to you, but I'm saying it to give you an idea of the angle I'm reading these threads from. More recently, AI has provided new potential sources of corruption aside from investments. When I see you and the mass of other people in these threads that are presenting these ideas of a conspiracy to take down Jensen Huang for sinister reasons, well... my initial reaction is rather negative.
What constitutes the reason for a political hit job? Seems to me that Trump likes Jensen quite a bit, and has quite a bit of influence over the DOJ etc. There is also a lot of economic reason why the administration would want as little disruption as possible.
I've seen claims that it's anyone from Marco Rubio to Sam Altman, but I'm not really that sure what to think. There are a lot of players with our era's unique mix of idiocy and incompetence involved.
> What constitutes the reason for a political hit job?
The timing is curious; the admin knew for at least a year and managed to keep a lid on it, and then congress flipped, meaning the oversight and intelligence committees would be chaired by people with a (D) in their name
> Seems to me that Trump likes Jensen quite a bit
Marco Rubio probably doesn't; which would explain why it was leaked to the press and not via a formal DoJ or Commerce Department investigation. If Rubio has presidential ambitions, now is probably the best time for this to come out and not after the Democratic party gets subpoena power, and difficult questions about the administrations inaction to go with it.
So your theory is that Trump allowed Nvidia to ignore Biden-era export controls, under the table? And now that that is likely to be exposed, they are pre-emptively leaking the story and taking on the case?
I mean, that doesn't seem that ridiculous. The story is, currently, mostly "oh, no, leather jacket nvidia guy got fired". In the alternate universe where this didn't leak, the story would instead, in early 2027, be "administration was covering up for the guy shagging the alleged spy, who has given the administration tens of millions of dollars for a ballroom". And I mean, that's part of the story now, but it's not really _dominating_ the story. From Trump's point of view, the current story is certainly better framing than "Trump covered this up, presumably because the guy was bribing him", which is how it would look if it came out in a congressional enquiry.
Honestly I'd expect more leaks of this type over the next month or so, as the administration prepares for scrutiny.
Trump blanket pardoned insurrectionists, some of whom were felons, committed violence, had history of rape, etc. His appointments know the price of a pardon is absolute loyalty or $1mm USD (or Trump coin equivalent).
So, even assuming that that magic pardon comes (and there are all sorts of ways that it might not; Trump is not, y'know, the most _reliable_), there would still be a huge _optics_ problem (actually, the pardon would make it worse). People are currently annoyed about corruption. If this had come out when a congressional investigation poked at it, then there would have been a very obvious narrative that would be extremely bad for Trump and more broadly for Republicans; rich guy gives $25m for Trump's vanity project, and rich guy's little problem just... goes away. I mean, it is very obvious how that could be framed.
And that narrative's still there, but I think probably subsumed a bit by the "nvidia kicks out CEO" story. Like, if I was a republican I'd definitely prefer to see this version of events than the "congressional investigation finds it" one.
> So your theory is that Trump allowed Nvidia to ignore Biden-era export controls, under the table?
Not my theory - Trump himself said that he knew for about a year.
> And now that that is likely to be exposed, they are pre-emptively leaking the story and taking on the case?
What case? Jensen resigned and that's the end of it. Which is the ideal outcome for the Secretary of State - or VP - who wishes to campaign for the presidency without being interrogated by the other party on what they knew about accepting a bribe from a compromised tech CEO. Given how the leaks were sequenced, the story has is no longer about deliberate NatSec lapses, but about how Jensen can't keep it it in his pants, and even that story will be dead by the endom of the month.
he's implying that anthropic employees want Jensen gone because he doesn't care about existential risk and such + he's pro open weight models and if he's getting cards to china he is propping up the models they like to whine about.
This is the exact message I get from contacts on the hill. They say Anthropic is driving this. My question is, "why?" Hard to understand what the motivation is.
Jensen was a huge supporter of open weight models and exporting GPUs to China, both of which Anthropic didn't like, and he's been pretty critical about all the AI safety and doomer stuff the frontier labs have been on about.
But honestly, I would not have expected something like from Dario. Heck, I have a hard time seeing even Altman trying something like this, largely because he realizes his dependency on GPUs and the role Jensen has been playing in boosting the entire AI economy. If Dario is driving this, it seems uncharacteristically short-sighted.
As a board director, you'd trust him to tell you the truth when he's completely fine lying to his wife, family, friends -- and you, to your face, leading you to defend him publicly putting your reputation and that of the whole board and company at risk, while he continues to lie to you about multiple secret affairs, including with two direct reports and a big (perhaps legally dubious and potentially dangerous) customer?
Forget the spy stuff. If your CEO is schtupping customers and employees, are you really going to trust him with running your company? If you, as a board member, don't draw the line at hiding the sausage in your customers and subordinates, where do you draw it? Drunken bar fights? Road rage incidents? Rape? Murder? All fine as long as it's his personal life? All fine if he's making the company money? I don't think that's how most BoDs for massive corporations operate.
Basically yes I would not care at all if he's lying to his wife or family or friends, that's his own personal life. It's not illegal to lie or cheat or bang your customers. Criminal behaviour is much worse and besides, you may as well get rid of them if they're going to jail anyway. If I was on the board I'd want the guy who's getting me rich, not a moral CEO or one you could have a beer with, or a nice guy. If the reputational damage of non-illegal activity (or even minor illegal activity - I wouldn't care if the CEO is doing drugs or speeding or whatever) is not going to damage the company as much as getting rid of him (which it wouldn't, who on earth is going to boycott a company for being run by a cheater?) then it just doesn't make sense to get rid of them.
Not actually advocating this but as a thought experiment:
The shareholders could offer him a bonus/his position back in exchange for chemically castrating himself. In the context of private jets and crazy executive perks that supposedly give the company a slight edge, this actually doesn't seem that unreasonable. I'm sure the market could put a price on how much value it adds.
> If it’s not actually damaging to the company’s reputation
There is a lot of talk about morality and all sorts of things here on HN in regards to this, but isn't this basically the reason? I'm Danish nvidia is one of the major news stories because of this. Lots of bad press all around the globe. As much as I'd personally like for CEO's to be held accountable for their morals, I think it's quite simply about reputation.
Theres zero evidence that this lady was a spy, zero evidence for any of the claims.
I dont even like Jensen but this is ridiculous. We need more media literacy in this country, we can't just hop on whatever narrative the NYT, WSJ and CNN push onto us.
This whole thing is clearly a political hit job on behalf of the AI lab lobby. Wild everyone fell for this garbage.
They literally trickled out leaks about random affairs, this was highky coordinated and hard to tell who was exactly responsible. But the journalist at the NYT responsible for these initial leaks has tons of past scoops with sources at the highest levels of Anthropic.
Edit: This got downvoted literally instantly. This is a new account and my karma instantly went to zero... Bots much.
The leaks all coming out simultaneously after being slept on for a year, and then Jensen resigning quickly rather than putting up a fight means there's something going on behind the scenes. Its common sense, not a conspiracy theory.
It is an opinion. None of us were there. Maybe he did have an affair, maybe he did not. You are just assuming that the part that you believe, is the part that is true.
Nonetheless, their exposure right now looks much less like a random event, than like something orchestrated by a "deep state" (who could be just a bunch of guys from his own company, discontent with his leadership, not necessarily people from intelligence agencies, political circles or rival companies, though that is also possible).
It is hard to believe that the coincidence in time with the results of the elections, and/or with the Anthropic IPO, is due to chance.
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[ 0.75 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadThey've also taken a pretty big pay cut this week and potentially into the future.
Now I am waiting for Microsoft to enter the drama like they did with OpenAI
He didn’t do anything incredible.
Unfortunately Jensen's 3.8% of $NVDA and/or golden handcuffs won't let him do this; but what I'd give to live in that universe.
Just as soon as they get their systems back up!
Weird capitalisation schemes are a particularly bad branding approach, as people tend to just ignore them. This is hardly unique to nvidia; any brand which has a weird capitalisation scheme will tend to have it ignored by most people. Especially where it's really awkward/incorrect-looking (in nvidia's case they're trying to get people to use full-caps for a non-acronym).
Anyway, of anything it's the company that's losing out, not him. He's rich enough to relive a few more lives without ever working, and he's at retirement age. Meanwhile Nvidia now has to handle not having his leadership.
Having an affair with a spy/$8b customer who has targeted you and may make the company complicit in committing actual crimes is very much a problem for the board.
Having multiple affairs with employees that open the company up to reputational and legal liability is very much a problem for the board.
In other words, he was doing this while he was making them money in a way that can affect the bottom line, therefore it is - literally - their business.
It’s easy to say you don’t have a price when no one is offering to buy you.
Like you aren't technically wrong but, idk, are you expecting anyone to agree?
The forces at work answer your question. Why would someone take RSUs from Nvidia? Obviously because that means they're getting hired at Nvidia which is one of the highest valued companies in the world, and the RSUs represent a lot of more money on top of your high salary and permanent resume clout.
In Taiwan, Nvidia and tsmc are the two highest salary payers in the country. It's frankly funny to think of a Taiwanese engineer hesitating at a Nvidia offer letter because of niche FOSS/right to repair/IP liberation ideological qualms when the alternative is sweatshopping it at some no name chip industry side company that pays 30k/year at the high end.
At the point you've accepted RSUs you're already working for the company. If you hate your employer enough to turn down a significant portion of your total comp package, you really need to question how you got in that position.
I really hope you take some time to reevaluate this extremely misogynist take.
I don't just mean making money successful like polymarket etc. but he was the head of a company that created multiple huge technical achievements in past decades. He made huge bets on multiple things and the bets actually worked in the end.
And they will very likely replace him with a bunch of accountants. It is not hard to understand why someone would want to have him as a leader instead of an accountant.
Silicon Valley culture jumped the shark.
Anyone senior signing such a petition should get a very close eye from the new HR and outside counsel. (We don't need to cancel anyone. But a person in management minimizing a boss sleeping with his reports merits a second look.)
Because no one else can fill the shoes. The best that the next CEO can do is either:
a) make improvements on what exists, and thus effectively stagnate in a moving hardware industry, or
b) cut staff (which Nvidia has only done twice in its history: 1996 (near-bankruptcy), and around 2008 (360 / 6.5%), right in the middle of ironing out the Tesla architecture).
The moment their CFO took over, they already announced layoffs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BayAreaTalk/comments/1xu5wzy/nvidia...
The CFO is almost never one that makes unique product decisions.
Alexander the Great was an extraordinary warlord and a mediocre king. He died unexpectedly, and his empire collapsed immediately.
Securing succession is a huge part of leadership in any organization that is supposed to outlast its leader. Because unexpected things can happen at any time, a leader must keep the organization in a shape, where a plausible successor can take over and continue leading it successfully. If no such successors exist, the leader has not done their job properly.
This presupposes that there are successors that can fill the roles. Even after curation, what's left will very rarely match what's required, doubly so with tech-centric companies. The CFO now in charge is the perfect example of this.
A regression to the mean more often than not happens as a result.
You could have the exact same situation with a different company/CEO and the HN comments would be completely different
This is just how people work.
"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
Notably real business acumen precludes lawbreaking, but until there is concrete evidence, I won't simply rely on the court of public opinion.
Otherwise I don't care if this old man has sex, I don't even like thinking about it. But he was reckless and up his own ass about it. And while I don't think that the chips are the gold they're made out to be, and completely don't buy the reasoning of how A. Huang's business would be in the service of Chinese "spying," she's certainly someone who could and would talk business with him. She may have been an advisor on the financial house of cards for all we know, and the Chinese would definitely be interested in destroying the US economy.
Hell, the covert Chinese action might have been to take a woman who is extremely suspicious, get her to sleep with Huang, publicly out the affair, and let the company fall into the hands of somebody who is going to do something very stupid with it. That would still be Huang's fault. Maybe, none of this has anything to do with the Chinese at all, and the Israelis financed A. Huang's company (which was also evading Chinese enforcement) in return for her seducing a known sexually incontinent J. Huang, they publicized it, and with J. Huang's ouster the firm will fall under Israeli control. That would also be Huang's fault.
None of this excessively involves lawbreaking or morality, just stupidity and incompetence. Which is not "business acumen."
Video game people are like sports fans, they fall in love with the producers of their entertainment and have parasocial relationships with them. I imagine that a lot of people who work at Nvidia now had that same relationship with the company as children.
I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
You can think he is amazing at many parts of this job, but at this point it is less of a mistake, and more a pattern of behavior that he knew was hugely risky and decided to cover up.
This is a terrible time for Nvidia employees. But the solution is not to invite the cause of the terrible time back in.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
this is what the parent is saying is the problem. How is her not being spy change that?
And what's with all the people who think complex investigations get completed in days?
Almost certainly the same last name (黃/黄, huang2). It's also sometimes romanized as Wong (though some Wongs are 王, wang2).
Just found this on wiki -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(name) : "Ng (pronounced [ŋ̍]) is the simplified (tone-less) romanization of the Cantonese surnames 吳/吴 (Jyutping: Ng4, read in Mandarin as pinyin: Wú) and 伍 (Ng5, Mandarin Wǔ); and also of the Hokkien surnames 黃/黄 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂ɡ, Mandarin Huáng) and 阮 (Ńg, Mandarin Ruǎn).
The surname is often pronounced in English as /əŋ/ əng or /ɪŋ/ ing or /ɛŋ/ eng. It is sometimes romanized as Ang, Eng, Ing and Ong in the United States, and as Ung in Australia. In Cambodia, the corresponding surname is Oeng."
Clearly this list doesn't seem to indicate some of the names I listed, but I'm not sure if that's because it's an "example" list, or if some of the names are from different roots. Either way it was interesting to learn.
Note that that isn't to say "English is a simplistic language", though, it's just that Chinese has complexities in parts that don't necessary overlap with all sorts of intricacies of actual US English. Mastering both would be hard.
But at least it's not like Russian, which apparently uses more and rarer frequency bands - think DTMF, but more than dual and language specific, some overlapping some not. And English is likewise not the simplest kind of all in there as well, at all, to be extra clear.
As a russian I need some explanation here.
And human speeches come in harmonics, so I think we must be all using those like different combinations of DTMF tones. Human cochlea is also like a ladder ADC, so it shouldn't be so weird that we use combinations of "pressure points" to encode data rather than relying on a single central frequency.
I didn't mean to say that "them Russians talk multiple concurrent conversations at once by using different bands over there", no, just that different languages use different ranges and combinations of frequencies.
This frequency range and Russian advantage thing used to be widely used as somewhat hallucinatory explanation as to why people from certain country(a neighbor to Russia btw) are so atrocious at English in both input and output, that, allegedly, the ranges just don't overlap that we hear nothing from them and they hear nothing from us. That's why the Russian language came to my mind immediately here.
This theory is a bit inconsistent with reality, though, as our speeches are often considered high pitched than English while the theory argues that we're on the lower side.
That sounds like you are remembering one of those Tomatis's charts, which are simply bullshit. All natural languages are quite similar in terms of their "frequency bands", what is different is the clustering of their phonemes within those bands, e.g. Russian has lots of consonant sounds but very few vowels when compared to English.
Like imagine not being able to use inflections to express emotion when speaking. That'd sound as alien to a non-tonal speaker as the concept of using inflections to express emotion to a tonal-speaker. Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.
There's also the side issue that most non-tonal languages tend to have a relatively close linguistic background. Russian has a massive amount of 'English' cognates (often from shared ancestors predating both), especially if you consider words that are basically cognates but have different stresses or maybe one slightly different vowel sound or whatever. But the number of cognates between tonal and non-tonal languages is far fewer. It makes them much more difficult to learn, at least for me.
You certainly can. Just because a morpheme has a tone doesn't mean that there aren't other contributors to pitch, such as sentence pitch contour. Do you actually speak or understand any tonal languages? I can assure you that Chinese people definitely use sentence prosody to convey extremely subtle nuances of meaning.
I don't really understand your complaint. If you want to know how something is pronounced, you'll have to learn how to read pronunciation information. If you want nothing but standard English, then it won't be possible to describe the pronunciation of most foreign words. (For example, no English syllable corresponds to Spanish no - the problems start very early if you try to go this route.)
Are you looking for information, or not?
okay, but if a man named john smith had an affair with a woman named jane smith it would be a funny coincidence the same. do you have a point?
Just for context:
> In April 2023, Trump hired [Todd] Blanche to defend him for concealed hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and he led Trump's defense in the 2024 criminal trial. Blanche later defended Trump in cases involving federal classified documents and election obstruction. In November 2024, following his victory in the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump announced Blanche as his nominee for deputy attorney general. Blanche was confirmed by the Senate in March 2025.[1]
He defended Trump's White House media ban[2] and most recently threatened to prosecute Democrats planning oversight probes into the administration[3].
FBI Director Kash Patel, for anyone who doesn't already know, is a Trump loyalist who was a director of Trump Media & Technology Group and reportedly made over $500,000 from Trump's political campaign. It is literally insane that he is the director of anything in the government[4].
Bottom line: time will tell who Alice Huang really was, but given the reports that Trump was informed she might have been a spy a year ago and didn't act on it, you can't expect honesty from loyalists he put in law enforcement positions.
If there's any concern that his inaction was a mistake, you can expect all of the people he put in positions of power to do whatever it takes to defend him, and that includes fudge the truth about the intelligence they had on Alice Huang.
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/27/todd-blanche...
[3] https://www.ms.now/news/todd-blanche-threat-prosecution-demo...
[4] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/the-fbis-controversial-...
Recall that, in exchange for the US lifting export restrictions, Trump negotiated an agreement with Nvidia to receive 25% of the revenue from certain chip sales[1].
Trump prioritizing money over national security is not at all surprising.
There was some speculation that Rubio was the one who leaked this, as he had prepared a memo about Alice Huang that was presented to the president in May.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/trump-nvidia-h200-china-ai-c...
And how many trillions of dollars of wealth has been "removed" by American companies outsourcing their production to China over the past several decades, transferring their IP to Chinese entities through forced joint-ventures, outright IP theft, etc.?
By some estimates, the outright theft alone has caused $15 trillion in cumulative losses. According to the e Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, whose figures are used by the FBI and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, IP theft costs American businesses somewhere between $225 and $600 billion every year, and much of that theft is at the hands of China.
Companies like Facebook and Google aren't allowed in the Chinese market. Do you find that "anti-competitive"?
Nobody is playing fair here and the notion that we can all just trade with each other equanimously is naive. The world isn't that kind and simple.
Taiwan was a similar backwater when the intel microprocessor was invented, yet they’ve clearly done the hard yards to do what the “American voter” had no appetite for.
We actually could give every teen a 5090 for free right now, no blocking trade agreements required.
I disagree. China is only acquiring technology to copy the best parts and improve the rest. There are plenty of examples over the past decades.
They would never be a permanent customer of Nvidia, they would destroy Nvidia long term by offering better chips for cheaper, especially as they are going to take Taiwan in the near future.
They do this with cars, they did it with solar, they do it with weapons-grade tech.
It’s an absolute fever dream to think selling them chips would mean they wouldn’t get more under the counter and develop their own improved designs.
We are talking about a nation-state actor with unlimited pockets. They can go down all of these roads at the same time and if I were china and winning AI means winning everything, i would exactly that.
Using Jensen like a greedy prostitute to get the goods right from the source was just the easiest way to get those chips.
The collapse of Jensen is also strengthening China, they already have what they wanted, now he gets put in the trash so the US can no longer profit from his undeniable talents attracting investments into American AI domination.
Seriously, what is 4 or 7b to China?
Better than sending Chinese black ops to disappear a ship full of Nvidia chips and risk complications with another nation-state actor.
Why wouldn’t they take the way of least resistance which was through Jensens greed, ego and illoyalty to his wife?
China has a long-term plan, is extremely focused at accomplishing milestones and they are already ahead in almost every sector compared to the US of the past 20 years, that has become a political dumpster fire.
China is winning.
And the chips that Jensen allowed to move there will be used to accelerate the already working strategy in all of its aspects. He didn’t just fuck most of his company and partners as it seems, he fucked every American in existence.
Enough smart people in the US government have seen that, but they are dealing with a kleptocratic family and friends scheme that is selling their nation’s interests to enrich themselves. It is what it is.
Jensen like Trump and his family is only helping number 1.
Trump followers are big on “Trump is good for stock market”. I think market already dipped when democrats won but now it is not a dip anymore, that’s quite a crash we have now.
he's say something about it "hes a disgusting man, sold out nvidia and for what?" or something even less coherent
You don't know that at all. It's not standard procedure to immediately publicly out possible spies. Lots of reasons why not to do that including not wanting to let adversaries know you know who their spies are or to use them to feed bad intel or for watching what the spy does.
https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/mark-h...
However, if Jensen Huang was made aware of the potential for espionage, then his position is far more precarious.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/09/the-race-is-on-to-sue-nvid...
"A third category, one that would change everything, would arise only if the board’s investigation finds Huang knew about the intelligence connection. That would be “a whole other ball game,” as Bartlett said."
I have signed on to the Rosen class action.
US IC knows he knew, but cannot disclose the means at trial, so they’re doing this to remove him from NVidia.
Such cunning, making such a poor helpless man succumb to such obviously completely 100% fireable offenses.
You know that AYE rhymes with EYE, right?
A: legality
B: morality
C: what the political power wants
D: what shareholders wants
E: what the "CIA" wants, which is influenced by A, B and C, and D but its own thing
...
Z: business consequences, the sum of all of the above
I've slept with people I wouldn't even allow to look at my phone lol
What he made aware of circumventing export controls?
Now I know for anyone outside of China, that equates to "spy", but she was not MSS especially when they are currently holding 600k cards in HK and actively trying to prevent cards from entering.
This isn't to discount the issues with NVIDIA and whether they knowingly participated in circumventing chip bans. Or conflict of interest issues. But running a business that benefits China as a Chinese national and making some reports to the nation just doesn't seem like "spy" to me any more than being part of the British East India company made a Brit a spy.
That is the result of this: every person of Chinese ethnicity with enough clout is now known to be assumed to be a spy in the eyes of the NYT.
Have you talked to Jack Ma lately ?
This is a beat sweetening story. You write up what your sources want you to write in exchange for them giving you juicier stuff later. It says almost nothing about the certainty within the intelligence agencies.
Jensen’s dismissal as CEO could still be because of the affairs, especially the one with an Nvidia VP.
(and it's not even selling to China. It's selling to Malaysia, which resells to China, which is perfectly legal. The US can go fuck itself, its rules do not apply to the whole world)
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-jensen-huang-spy-claim-nvidia...
If I was caught shagging a customer, it would be curtains for me.
unzips leather jacket
We have an entire administration who are terrible at their jobs—who commit crimes and then go onto a news program and tell everyone that they committed a crime. I don't think that's evidence against her being a spy. Not these days.
I don’t think an affair or ten matters in the US.
See the difference?
Jensen was dumb enough to have one with a Chinese spy, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he's one of the best CEOs of the modern era, and his work at Nvidia has been outstanding.
I agree its morally wrong, but that's really a personal issue for the family, it's not a crime. Sleeping with some employees is barely a problem IMO. And worst of all, when I look at the amount of corruption and immorality amonst say Musk, Zuckerberg, the Trump White House going after Jensen is crazy. Jensen is the billionaire who's happy to pay all his taxes and not interfere with politics or elections.
And besides all that, it seems the Trump admin KNEW about Alice Huang and Jensen's relationship for a year, Lutnick also knew. with the Why is Jensen the only one going down for this? He is getting crucified because he's less Machiavellian than all the rest.
Because this isn't a moral issue, its a dirty political fight to entrench power within OpenAI & Anthropic. Without the Chinese companies getting chips, we would not have Deepseek or Kimi or any frontier-level open weight models. And if these guys succeed, we will all be locked into corporate paid models that spy on you and censor you for a long time. People need to look at the bigger picture, killing open-weight models may be good for a few US cos but it is terrible for the world.
My understanding is, the thing that got him effectively fired, [0] is not the affairs themselves, it was not being candid with his board about the extent of the problem–he admitted to them the affair with Alice Huang, but didn't tell them about his other affairs (including at least one with a direct report) until after the board was made aware of them independently.
A board can put up with a CEO who cheats on his wife. It can't put up with a CEO who hides things from it.
[0] formally speaking he resigned, but it seems likely the board communicated to him "if you don't resign, we'll fire you"
As with security vetting interviews they don't necessarily care about the morality of the actions, just that they are wware and can prepare for the consequences.
There was a very simple choice the CEO could have made which would have avoided all this, anyway.
Shocking how many people think a board could do anything OTHER than firing him even for just what’s known today about fucking subordinates, never mind what the export control investigations find.
You are none of those things. All of reality if current CEOs today proves you wrong. Your take is so laughable it’s as if it was written by a child or a teenager.
Also, we don't know exactly what Huang said to the board. Maybe, they didn't explicitly ask if there were any other affairs, and he didn't answer the question they didn't explicitly ask. Maybe, they did ask, and he lied and falsely said this was the only one.
If they work under you, yes? It's written into every business conduct policy I've ever seen?
It should be really obvious why entering into a sexual relationship with someone who reports to you without disclosing it to your manager is bad. The CEO reports to the board, so they disclose it to them.
Also I know this place is full of SV ghouls who only give a shit about what the stock tickers on their brokerages look like, but the amount of people defending infidelity is insane to me
Aren't you supposed to get trained on this every year?
In corporate America, that means he was fired. Nobody who "resigns" under such circumstances actually does so voluntarily.
Even if, as others have suggested, the evidence against Alice Huang isn’t strong, there are still huge conflicts of interest and repeated lies in play. Let’s move on
Even leaving out the sale to China part, sleeping with direct reports is unethical and presents so many conflicts of interest. He was lucky the damage was minimal for so long
- there is no concrete evidence that Alice Huang was even a spy
- the whole thing was made up due to nothing but pure Sinophobia
Usually a transition like this can be done well when a company has some mature product or service that prints money, like Apple or Microsoft or Google for example, and the company then needs a safe pair of hands to keep that machine running. It doesn’t seem like Nvidia is in exactly that kind of situation, it’s more like a red queen race that they’re the ones leading right now.
erm, open borders, sweaty
If he was French, this would be an attaboy moment - without the spy allegations, he'd be cheered on. However... in such a puritanic country as US, I suspect it was the second disclosed affair that cost him his position.
After all, it changed the narrative from Huang being "someone who fell to nation-state honeytrapping" to a regular, equal-opportunity filanderer.
... than this still is stricly a private thing.
At least in many countries outside the US. There was this fun thing happening then Walmart tried to expand to Europe ... doing zero investigation about social norms before that. They tried to forbid their employees to have relationships. But the germans just said "To the heck, we don't let restrict our freedom by private entities". Over there there are thousands of marriages between e.g. a hospital Dr. med. and nurses. And all of them started as a relationship between a superior and one subordinate. From a german PoV this is entirely okay. What would not be okay is abusing the power of being a superior ... but that has to be backed with evidence first, otherwise it's just a sly accusation.
Don't people have personal freedom of expression in the US? Or can't they enforce their freedom against the powers of the employers or the lynch justice like moralizing of complete strangers?
Always puzzles me.
For the obvious reason that you spend many hours of your week in the workplace, it becomes the place where you meet the most people in your life and that includes friends but also your potential love or sexual partners. As simple as that.
There's also a long history of bosses exploiting power dynamics for their personal pleasure.
This looks like some three letter agency dumping what they have on him, most likely as a punishment for not playing ball.
In these circumstances, I don't really feel like in addition to messing up his reputation and his famil(y/ies¹) and other punishments his going to have, there should be another punishment given to his company and employees.
Ofc, my knowledge of CEO level management or even advanced GPUs is limited and I welcome any critique to straighten up my limited views. Just wanted to point out hypocrisy and the tendency to throw out the baby with bathwater.
1: sorry for that joke to those whom it offends.
Apparently a constitution means only what 5 people say it means. Thanks Mitch!
Why care at all about the private life of a CEO?
Infidelity, conflicts of interests, potentially some “light treason”, but, but, but “shareholder value”… just gross.
Those of you who can't make the connection can relax and sit this one out.
If anything, it's the spy aspect that would qualify as gross negligence, but affairs themselves are his personal issues to sort out.
As for the extramarital thing, it's a private matter between him and his wife. Unless someone alleges there was any sexual harassment involved, but I have seen no claim that it is the case so far.
And just letting it go on is either a sign of gargantuan incompetence or willful action by them . Not sure which :)
Well, USA is selling Russia a lot of "dual-use components", including Texas Instruments chips found in drones and nobody makes a lot of fuss about that, even though, in theory, there are imposed sanctions on Russia because it started a war, keeps pushing hybrid war against USA NATO allies.
So, selling graphic cards does not sound like a big deal, especially given the fact that China, likewise Russia, North Korea or Iran can purchase anything through the fake companies place in Ireland, the Netherlands or any other tax paradise where nobody ask too many questions.
This is easy peasy now, in the globalized economy, more, it was always easy peasy, even during the middle of cold war and CoCom times, communistic countries could buy anything they wanted, e.g. communistic Poland had a net of companies in Brazil through which is smuggled whatever it wanted to purchase.
No but seriously, i wonder who the next CEO will be, what song will they be signing then
The part where he screwed three people directly related to his job: A customer/client, and two subordinates.
Look, I absolutely get that Huang is a singular CEO. In a culture of CEO worship, he is a rare one where you can clearly say he drove the success of the company. For employees with equity, his tenure has been astoundingly good.
That said, what we know is deeply troubling, and the people who made this call (Jensen and/or the board) have the biggest vested interest, and they may know of deeper issues.
Also, Jensen's external credibility is mortally wounded. He has been one of the loudest proponents for exporting chips to China. We now know he had an illicit relationship with a Chinese national who was smuggling Nvidia product to China. The policy positions he took are entangled with his undisclosed (until now) personal liabilities. And this is a very sensitive policy issue.
>likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
Literally everyone knew. China renting Malaysian GPUs isn't new. Gamers Nexus has a full two hours documentary of "nvidia is full of shit and knows china is getting A100s and H100s and so does the US government". Alice Huang is likely not a spy either.
"7th richest man in the world sticks his dick in random places and cheats on his wife" no fucking shit sherlock, does a bear shit in the woods too ?
Everyone lost a boatload of stock value, but at least two of them also had to watch their boyfriend get fired.
It is quite interesting how enthused some people are at the idea of him being deposed supposedly for things far less egregious than many before him.
Confused on whether people are actually upset about both or even understand the issue, or are just upset about one thing while using the other as ammunition.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it
Cicero, Against Verres (tr. Yonge, 1903)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Verres#Trial_and_exile
> [Verres and his defender Hortensius tried to delay the trial until a more sympathetic judge was available, but Cicero] opened his case with a short and blistering speech. He listed all of Verres crimes during his time as governor of Sicily and showed evidence that Verres had amassed 40 million sesterces in that time. The effect of the first brief speech was so overwhelming that on August 13 Hortensius abandoned the defence as hopeless, and recommended his client leave the country. The following day, Verres was found guilty and fined three million sesterces.
He'd have no shortage of talent and funding to embark on such a venture.
The big question is once the dust settles (including a possible divorce), he'll still have billions of dollars and need a reason to get out of bed. Being that he's a famous workaholic, I imagine he will try something new after he's done licking his wounds.
buddy, i have some news for you
On the other hand the potential spy stuff and corruption is quite worrying.
The DOJ, The CIA and the FBI are all saying that these claims she was a spy are not convincing...
Its a very calculated political hitjob, when the spy allegations didn't hold up, and the megamond accusations were hearsay at best, all of a sudden they started dropoing new affairs. Its very scheduled/coordinated.
Also me saying this instantly gets downvoted. There's bots in this thread downvoting any mention of this.
If people are downvoting you it's because you're spinning conspiracy theories around a topic that a lot of people have personal financial interests in.
The sort of quick rule I have for measuring credibility is "how much of a story is it when a reporter or outlet gets something meaningfully wrong?" For the NYT, it's a rather important story, like the Iraq WMDs you mentioned. Which, needless to say, was over 20 years ago.
We'll see what the truth ends up being with time.
¿Por qué no los dos? Access Journalism easily explains both phenomena. Journalists know where their bread is buttered - members of the "deep network of sources" may occasionally call in favors, or drop breadcrumbs leading journalists to a specific, preselected destinations.
A recent HN thread led me down the rabbit-hole that included an observation by some (British) monarchy insider that they'd intentionally leak a story to the press, and the article would include the usual "We have reached out to the royal family for comment" spiel, and yet the entire article is the comment by the royal family. On the other side of the Atlantic, it wasn't too long ago that JD Vance was outed as the unnamed source on a story that the Trump admin subsequently attempted to sue for.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
Not really relevant,
But the NYT laundered crimes against humanity and covered up the death of 30k children over the last three years. They published dozens of provably fabricated stories to do so. Sorry they dont have weight to their journalism, they are completely beholden to whatever special interest that benefits them.
Ana Swanson, the NYT journalist who broke this scoop on Jensen frequently uses Jack Clark an Anthropic founder as a source in her AI scoops.
Dont call me a conspiracy theorist, and stop letting people think for you. Use your brain twat.
You're using the "conspiratorial they" (as I like to call it), that "they" failed with the spy allegations so started releasing information about affairs.
And then, to top it off, you play victim and say there are bots scanning the comments and automatically downvoting you.
This also only touches on the potential spy aspect. The largest part of the story is Nvidia seemingly intentionally breaking US trade laws over something that a significant part of the AI industry believes should be treated as dangerous as nuclear weapons.
Conspiracy theories don't have to be wrong or crazy, but what evidence do you have to so confidently claim that yours is correct?
---
I've been following Nvidia for a long time. I've seen online discussions of the company become increasingly corrupted since 2020/2021. The only explanation that's held up for me is that money corrupts, and there are a lot of individual shareholders of Nvidia stock that feel a duty to try and protect their investment. I have no idea if that applies to you, but I'm saying it to give you an idea of the angle I'm reading these threads from. More recently, AI has provided new potential sources of corruption aside from investments. When I see you and the mass of other people in these threads that are presenting these ideas of a conspiracy to take down Jensen Huang for sinister reasons, well... my initial reaction is rather negative.
> This is not a conspiracy theory
> [proceeds to explain carefully organized plot between Anthropic, Rubio and Bessent]
————————
> This is not smuggling
> [proceeds to explain that if destination country is cool with imports then it’s ok to send goods via 3rd country]
————————
> She was not a spy
> [explains what she did and what spies do, same thing]
The timing is curious; the admin knew for at least a year and managed to keep a lid on it, and then congress flipped, meaning the oversight and intelligence committees would be chaired by people with a (D) in their name
> Seems to me that Trump likes Jensen quite a bit
Marco Rubio probably doesn't; which would explain why it was leaked to the press and not via a formal DoJ or Commerce Department investigation. If Rubio has presidential ambitions, now is probably the best time for this to come out and not after the Democratic party gets subpoena power, and difficult questions about the administrations inaction to go with it.
Honestly I'd expect more leaks of this type over the next month or so, as the administration prepares for scrutiny.
And that narrative's still there, but I think probably subsumed a bit by the "nvidia kicks out CEO" story. Like, if I was a republican I'd definitely prefer to see this version of events than the "congressional investigation finds it" one.
Marco Rubio is not, and he - if he were to get a Trump pardon, that'd kill Rubio's chances of being POTUS.
Not my theory - Trump himself said that he knew for about a year.
> And now that that is likely to be exposed, they are pre-emptively leaking the story and taking on the case?
What case? Jensen resigned and that's the end of it. Which is the ideal outcome for the Secretary of State - or VP - who wishes to campaign for the presidency without being interrogated by the other party on what they knew about accepting a bribe from a compromised tech CEO. Given how the leaks were sequenced, the story has is no longer about deliberate NatSec lapses, but about how Jensen can't keep it it in his pants, and even that story will be dead by the endom of the month.
So much for the bot downvoting theory
But honestly, I would not have expected something like from Dario. Heck, I have a hard time seeing even Altman trying something like this, largely because he realizes his dependency on GPUs and the role Jensen has been playing in boosting the entire AI economy. If Dario is driving this, it seems uncharacteristically short-sighted.
Forget the spy stuff. If your CEO is schtupping customers and employees, are you really going to trust him with running your company? If you, as a board member, don't draw the line at hiding the sausage in your customers and subordinates, where do you draw it? Drunken bar fights? Road rage incidents? Rape? Murder? All fine as long as it's his personal life? All fine if he's making the company money? I don't think that's how most BoDs for massive corporations operate.
There is a lot of talk about morality and all sorts of things here on HN in regards to this, but isn't this basically the reason? I'm Danish nvidia is one of the major news stories because of this. Lots of bad press all around the globe. As much as I'd personally like for CEO's to be held accountable for their morals, I think it's quite simply about reputation.
Wasn't that Coldplay concert CEO also fired?
I dont even like Jensen but this is ridiculous. We need more media literacy in this country, we can't just hop on whatever narrative the NYT, WSJ and CNN push onto us.
This whole thing is clearly a political hit job on behalf of the AI lab lobby. Wild everyone fell for this garbage.
They literally trickled out leaks about random affairs, this was highky coordinated and hard to tell who was exactly responsible. But the journalist at the NYT responsible for these initial leaks has tons of past scoops with sources at the highest levels of Anthropic.
Edit: This got downvoted literally instantly. This is a new account and my karma instantly went to zero... Bots much.
> Its common sense, not a conspiracy theory.
It's some kind of sense – nonsense.
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company#...
> You are just assuming that the part that you believe, is the part that is true.
Tautology, of course I believe what I assume to be true.
Nonetheless, their exposure right now looks much less like a random event, than like something orchestrated by a "deep state" (who could be just a bunch of guys from his own company, discontent with his leadership, not necessarily people from intelligence agencies, political circles or rival companies, though that is also possible).
It is hard to believe that the coincidence in time with the results of the elections, and/or with the Anthropic IPO, is due to chance.