I think a lot of people here seem to underestimate how much of a CEO's job is perception.
"Oh who cares who he slept with, he's been great for Nvidia. Nothing has been proven."
He's one of the most visible CEO's in the most visible industry in the world, and the entire AI economy is dependent upon them. The perception of him as stable is incredibly important.
Merely the suggestion that he is having affairs with people with close ties to China's government, given export controls, is a huge PR problem. Adding in an additional affair with someone under him. And the likelihood that there may be even more out there.
I doubt the Board wants to get rid of Jensen Huang. He's done incredibly well for them. But right now, there's a huge PR shitstorm swirling around the company.
Maybe in six months it all dies down and he comes back, who knows. But right now, you really can't just ignore the problem and hope the media doesn't care about the whole "well she was only sort of a spy" situation.
People are primarily talking about the Chinese spy affair, but the impression I personally got on X was that the subsequently reported affair with a subordinate VP in Nvidia is what did him in.
What did him in was probably the board members/upper leadership getting visits by US officials and getting scared enough to fire him (and lawyering up themselves).
Everything that's happening here has to be interpreted through the lens of American attitudes towards sexuality though. In other countries such France no-one would bat an eye - about the infidelity, at least.
At one point it came out that the former president François Mitterand had a second family and a 16 year old daughter, and people basically just shrugged. There was no big scandal. People mainly just felt sorry for his wife.
There's a very American and very puritan side to this incident.
> In other countries such France no-one would bat an eye - about the infidelity, at least.
I'd disagree with you on this.
There have been several notable examples of public figures in Europe that had an affair made public and either stepped, suffered majorly in elections/polls, etc.
Gennaro Sangiuliano resigned after his affair became public. [0]
Laurent Freixe fired as Nestle's CEO after 1 year. [1]
Bernard Looney left BP "willingly" after multiple affairs came to light. [2]
It's multiple things mixed together. The spy angle.The infidelity angle. The involved with subordinate angle. Think what you will about the second, the others are still relevant.
(Besides, I don't buy the American puritan POV. Look at who is president right now. He got elected twice! And in between only lost narrowly.)
Yeah, I think a lot of people are overlooking that this is the most important executive in a nearly 4 trillion dollar company that is now seen as critical to the future of both the global economy and national security.
This is not the CEO of Olive Garden having an embarrassing sexual escapade. The context here matters. There's actually a small, but non zero, possibility the government tries to nationalize NVIDIA if their leadership don't seem to be on top of things.
The impression I get is that a lot of this is more public than it needs to be, and so it's clear that US/NVIDIA now want him gone, and this is all evidence that things aren't so rosey for NVIDIA, and so it's value drops.
Isn’t there a playbook for the Powell situation? She gets a payout, an extraordinarily generous separation package, signs some documents and agrees to forget about it as she retires or works on her hobbies or whatever. She still is working there, heck, what if there has been other impropriety? Maybe she didn’t get the same raises after the relationship ended..
I don’t think the board are the morality police. I don’t think they care too much but it’s in the news and it shows poor judgment on his part. Not cleaning up the Powell situation and possibly others shows incredibly poor judgment and hubris.
If I had given even one GPU to a Chinese spy--say nothing about $7.5bil worth of them [1]--I'd be going straight to jail. There wouldn't be any discussion of "oh, he made a mistake." People have been sent to jail over a lot less.
But I'm nobody. I just happen to work in the DC town business. Funny how us "nobodies" have to be "made an example of." Such impactful example making.
[1] So what is that? Like, 3 at current market rates?
Are you a cofounder, what technical level of expertise (stored in your brain) the state will lose if they incarcerate; are some of the most pressing questions authorities weigh before taking any decision.
> what technical level of expertise (stored in your brain) the state will lose if they incarcerate; are some of the most pressing questions authorities weigh before taking any decision.
Doing so violates so many things modern civilization is based on, I don't even know where to start.
Because intent matters more than the eventually outcome. If you are legitimately and genuinely duped then you are a moron, but not necessarily a criminal.
There's certainly a two tier legal systems, but I think in this case it largely goes in the other direction. Everything so far is based on unproven allegations, and the groups making the allegations have repeatedly lied in the past on geopolitically convenient topics - which this is. That doesn't mean they're also lying here, but it does mean that allegations should be taken with a grain of salt until proven.
And in this case it gets even weirder. The alleged Chinese spy is the head of a Singaporean company. The claim is that NVidia sold chips to Singapore, and that company's later actions violated US sanctions on China. Trying to pin this on Jensen is nonsensical. So I agree with the above poster that the reason he was ousted was probably behind-the-scenes intimidation of the NVidia board, because the US can certainly make life very difficult for them, even if no criminal acts can be proven.
If you sold a GPU to a Singaporean company, suffice to say you'd be fine - even if it was at the beckoning of a cute Chinese girl.
It all depends on whether Jensen Huang was aware of where all of those GPUs were going. If he was, and did nothing to stop it, he is complicit. If he didn't know, he is either an idiot or losing his touch, because he, the CEO of the company, didn't notice the sudden increase in sales to this Singaporean company, which just happened to coincide with the export ban. A company whose CEO he just so happened to be fucking.
Too many coincidences. Maybe they really are just coincidences. If they're not, Huang was either acting maliciously, or was compromised. If they are, it doesn't matter, because no one will believe they are, and Huang's ability to function as CEO is ruined from the reputational damage alone anyway.
So all you have to do to get out of an export ban is find some Chinese guy willing to lie and say "I'm not buying them for China, I swear!"? No due dilligence required?
The export ban is harmful not only to NVidia but also to the US. It's a law passed by people who can't see beyond the tip of their noses. Of course it is the law, myopic or not, and so NVidia has a legal requirement to engage in the minimum required standard of diligence as required by the law, but nothing more. A Singaporean cloud compute provider wanting a bunch of chips is about as suspicious as a bakery wanting a bunch of flour.
Not just the optics, but the liabilities and class action lawsuits if they are not acting on it. After all, A board's fiduciary duty is the legal and ethical obligation of board members to act in the best interests of the organization and its stakeholders.
Make no mistake, a lot of this is also lobbying and highly political. He's one of the few who was extremely vocal about open weight modals. Think about it, you run one of the largest AI (hardware) companies in the world and you're out there promoting open source models, which your home country is losing moat to, so the timing of this is not merely "oops, it's just a co-incidence". Anthropic is going IPO at this exact time - and they're known very well to invest millions into lobbying already (just google it), Google just released a new closed source model, Open AI too is cooking up stuff, and all of these companies need the closed source business model to win. What better way than to kill the vocal leader against their business model?
Well, personally, I hope the open weight models win despite all this lobbying.
Jensen has been a loud voice in favor of open-weight models.
A second loud voice has been Palantir's Alex Karp.
Karp has been favoring open-weight models because they allow enterprises to run LLMs on-prem, connected to a company's private data. (Which aligns better with Palantir's approach to enterprise AI, compared to competitors that are cloud-oriented).
Karp just did a 180 degree turn from being a stalwart part of the tech oligarchy that is closely tied to Trump and Trumpism, to this week saying that he has always been a Democrat and is very much a progressive. I wonder if Karp will do a 180 turn regarding open-weight models.
karp can say whatever the fuck he wants for attention but you have to be beyond stupid to think anything he stands for is the slightest bit progressive. fuck out of here
But there's also now going to be more scruitiny on Nvidia selling to grey market sanction busters and sensitivies in Taiwan where the chips are made.
Also, massive question marks over possible leaks to Chinese chip makers.
It's not just PR. It's also government relations, and relations with fabs, which maybe are more expensive to fix.
Imagine you run TSMC and the mainlab fabs are causing you existential fears. And you have Apple, AMD, Google, Intel, etc all asking about roadmaps, and begging for fab quotas. You gonna offer Nvidia a special deal for being a good customer?
There's an increasing agreement about how big of a deal AI is among a growing number of tech luminaries, that if misused it has potential to be very dangerous to humanity. This calls for careful and measured advancement... it also calls for some level of coordination with big players, including China.
Jensen echoes similar sentiments in Emily Chang's interview.
I rue that nuanced opinions are going to brushed aside amidst the nationalist fervor in current ongoing media cycle.
I would hope to think that we can set capitalism aside for a moment to deal with potentially humanity-ending things. We have precedence like non-proliferation treaties for nuclear weapons, hopefully we can work up something similar for these newer things.
You already said "in six months maybe it dies down"
Thats the thing about perception, the internet is loud and irritated, but no one actuals cares, and if you just ignore it and keep moving forward your perception becomes your track record again and not the noise.
Your perception becomes the noise when you let it drown out the real signal.
Many leaders and engineers at Nvida are multi-millionaires many times over, they don't need to be there, they love the culture, vision and leadership. With Jensen gone, that could all change. I'm sure many employees are looking at the exit now.
Not if there is much more scrutiny on American GPU exports going forward. I remain very surprised Nvidia has enough of an advantage that primary nation states cannot replicate it.
Agreed, but I think this is because of our own ignorance rather than an argument itself. I'm a huge space enthusiast, but it endlessly confuses me why e.g. China can't simply copy SpaceX. SpaceX's rocket tech isn't exactly secretive, and China has been trying for years - but they continue to lag behind in spite of a surplus of funding and brainpower.
I think there are things about 'real world' development that people from a software background tend to not have a good intuition for. An analog I'm drawn to is how annoying it can sometimes be to put together a somewhat more complex desk, chair, or whatever else from some place. In that case you have everything perfectly hand-crafted to fit together and be assembled by any old idiot, yet it can still somehow be tricky sometimes. And obviously doing 'real things' in the real world is going to be many orders of magnitude trickier. No idea if that's the issue, but it's at least my mental model for now.
Wosrst case scenario in my opinion is that this leads to serious financial troubles for Nvidia to the point that the US tries to take it over.
Both parties have toyed with a sovereign wealth fund and government takeover of the means of production. Doing so in an industry considered a national security concern wouldn't be the out of the question, but it would be a very, very bad turn of events.
I'd be interested to hear where I mat be going awry here. To me a government taking over industry is a bad idea, but I could be wrong or I could be letting my biases jade realistic outcomes here.
I didn't downvote, but the idea of nationalizing the second largest publicly held company on earth is ridiculously extreme. It's very very far outside of the American overton window, to the point of not being a realistic outcome.
Right, it's alleged spy. We don't even know if she's actually a spy yet, but people are already talking about it like it's a definite thing. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Places like reddit are notorious for putting heads on a spike on just allegations (eg. Depp v. Heard)
Her being or not being a spy isn't the issue. He was at the wheel and admits to infidelity. Now everyone has to second guess his statements retroactively.
What are you talking about? Dude built one of most expensive companies in the world, that enabled huge advancements in AI. If anything he proved that he can do things and his judgements in this area were right.
Not hardly. Look if you entertain the position of leadership remember that you are a collective representation of your entity. Jensen was exposed as saying:
This would be a reasonable response if it was swinging and not cheating. The problem is lying and breaking promises.
Consider Warren Buffet's advice on hiring
> We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.
Not sure Reddit or HN is putting his head on a spike.
He admitted the affair and now it turns out he's had affairs with two subordinates.
If Nvidia had not told him to resign, it would have no viable way of enforcing its own regulations about sleeping with reports.
Oh come on. Everyone knows these tech CEOs are distasteful humans, people just buy from them because they have little competition (from fellow evil tech CEOs).
The CEO's personality is irrelevant if they're selling something that's in high enough demand. Money matters more than anything.
This particular scandal is an issue for Nvidia because:
1. Actual espionage, national security, etc. is potentially in play - criminal charges cost money.
2. Liability from potential lawsuits around in-office affairs - civil suits cost money.
Interpersonal relationships at companies are quite common, at all levels up to the C-suite. It depends on company policy whether it's permitted or not and Nvidia had no policy barring it. It becomes a legal problem in the event of coercion or favoritism, but otherwise, it happens.
> We avoid situations where our actions might create a conflict—actual or potential—between our personal gain and our obligations to NVIDIA. If such conflicts arise, we immediately remove ourselves from any decision-making role in the matter
Yep, that doesn't say anything about personal private relationships between employees. Some companies have antifraternization policies, this is not that.
But such relationships can affect day-to-day decisions in a way that compromises the financial performance of Nvidia (by showing favouritism, for example).
I agree this other relationship gets more into gossip territory.
Thought, critics will no doubt be able to spin it as suspect: If it turns out that Jensen kept a spy as his mistress knowingly, what favours is he willing to afford the ladies…
I’m sorry for the employee if this was a genuine love affair.
That's the question, isn't it. It's easy enough to armchair quarterback and say that, as a man, I'm not that distasteful, and that I wouldn't do that, but I haven't been put in that position before. I can pretend to be the most pious, on the other side of my keyboard over the Internet, but, honestly, I haven't actually been sitting in that (bed)room as a billionaire against a woman who's motivated to get me to do her bidding. I can say all I want about what I would do, but that's all just hot air.
As a person with some social skills and what I'd like to consider ethics, I have gotten clear indication from beautiful women that they want to sleep with me. But if you're already at the point where you're in the bedroom with them and you find them attractive and know theyre willing, you're already losing. You're better off not getting to that point at all and cutting it off waay earlier.
Every man can be honest and break up or at least tell their partner that they liked another woman. There is no excuse for cheaters and you shouldn't be making it up.
People are not perfect. We succumb to all manner of temptation even as minor as eating that bag of chips by yourself.
But if I was that rich and married, I’d just divorce my wife, give her a ton of money, and use the many legal ways to enjoy the company of beautiful women.
That’s what really gets me. Which such resources at hand they behave so unethically when they can get what they want, when they want, with no complications if they really want to indulge themselves.
Marriage is somewhat of a fictional concept in human society. We aren’t like that penguin that mates for life.
We impose guardrails on people by making both entering and exiting a marriage expensive but that doesn’t mean marriage itself is real, physical thing you can feel and touch - it’s all a shared fiction like an LLC.
Insofar, expecting people to believe in the same fiction with the same fanaticism as you seems a stretch to me.
Assuming, given the context, you are using "cheating" in the colloquial sense of intimate relationships with other people, the marriage agreement has both parties agree to prioritize their respective partner, but it says nothing about exclusivity.
Maybe you're confusing marriage with some other agreement?
It's really not and even now most of you never heard the psychological concept of situational structural crime. Literally the idea that people otherwise normal can get incentivized to do dubious things because of the particular system they are put into.
A lot of the attribution bias has been one direction when in reality it's bidirectional. More people should study actual psych ideas and not rely on generalizations based on their own limited perspective.
There’s no situation where I would destroy the life I have with my spouse because I value it too much. Offer me a billion, the answer is no. Tell me I’d save the world, also no. What’s your book psychology say is wrong about that? ;)
Dude we just got married. Why you make me think of this?
Then again, how long was Huang married? Children? Enough means to support anyone in any configuration... Not like they needed to stick together for the mortgage.
Dunno. One should not do it, I agree. But I can imagine there are difficult times for relationships. What I want to say is: I agree cheating should be legal.
In this case I'm assuming Mr+Mrs Huang were in a monogamous relation. Which, well, I have no knowledge of nor desire to know more about.
In modern societies it's a problem between them. And I think I prefer it that way.
I think a lot of people who care deeply about optics overemphasize the importance of optics. Which is understandable.
To many people, optics matter less than other things. Shareholders want profit, employees want a certain trajectory, tech leaders want products or services. To most of these, they really couldn't care less who Jensen goes to bed with.
I might even go as far as saying that to most people who actually matter in this context, PR is probably not their top consideration.
No it isn't. This fabricated reality is all about control. And that's why we have these totally fucked up societies and psychopath politicians who do not give a flying f about the populace. Because who can adhere to these standards? Psychos.
I don't like NVDA and Huang, but this ridiculous double standard that certain people adhere to is akin to a cult's thought process. You are the CEO, you cannot have emotions, you have to hide your personal life, you have to show outside how great of a person you are blablabla.
If you have good optics to the outside, well, you are our man. Oh, there was a chap called Jimmy Saville. He was such a sweet person, and he raped kids by the dozens. DOESNT MATTER! He had good optics. There you go, wallow in the mud, crazy f'rs and offer your children to the rapist.
At the end of the day he is just another human being. The same human being like anybody else. End of story. Rest is hyperbole and powerless people trying to exert some influence on an individual.... because of corpo skullduggery. Bleh.
There is no particular standard. What matters is continuity in perception. If Jensen had been a sleezeball from day one then he'd be free to do whatever he wants now and nobody would bat an eye.
When the share price is at max max any slight crosswind is going to knock it hard too. And this is a big one because a trifecta of scandal, the spy thing and him being ousted and so that brain and leadership and image being lost. Wouldn't be so bad on a value share probably (I invest in another scandal ridden CEO stock so I know the drill!)
With the recent midterm / AI crash, I'll leave this stock well alone. Might buy at sub 100 if panic sets in.
Didn't Musk completely disprove this theory by doing Nazi salutes without consequences to his position? Turns out actually CEO perception doesn’t matter.
If it were a female CEO being ostracized for having an affair she would clamor that "men do it all the time" and how sexist "society" is obsessed with controlling women's bodies.
Is this a concrete double standard that has occurred in Silicon Valley at an F100 company in recent years, or is this an imagined hypothetical double standard?
We have Jensen Huang as example #1, can you provide example #2 that fits your hypothetical?
> I think a lot of people here seem to underestimate how much of a CEO's job is perception.
What a load of crap. Elon Musk is deranged and nobody bats an eye. Zuck is proven to steal and sell data illegally for political gains in authoritative countries with Cambridge analytica and nobody cares. This guy has 2 affairs and is out.
Obviously in context GP means nobody in a position to make Elon's behavior negatively impact his companies has done so to any meaningful degree. Customers, partners, and advertisers have not really fled from Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX, Cursor, etc.; Most kinds of antisocial behaviors can be overlooked so long as there's money to be made.
I think Musk controls enough of his companies' voting stock that random people's feelings about him aren't as impactful.
I say this with complete neutrality on whether Huang got a raw deal or is not... actually tbh I feel like he's been a massive jackass, brought this all on himself and has only himself to blame, how could you be so reckless, etc... AND also he is getting a raw deal and an undeserved lynch mob. If that makes sense.
>Researchers estimate that Tesla lost between 1 million and 1.26 million U.S. vehicle sales through early 2025 due to this backlash—meaning sales would have been 67% to 83% higher without the negative perception effect.
It's not that it is overlooked. It certainly have some effect. But he is so rich that he doesn't really care. When Tesla was something new, when it was product for "better people" image was everything. Now it is not that important because it's a everyday ordinary car.
I can see the point. It's not really about ethics as such, but, it is bad publicity.
In trillion-dollar companies any bad publicity can have huge financial percussions for its investors. HUang himself must understand that, and he is a major investor in NVIDIA. He probably saves a lot of money by resigning.
I am sure lots can be said on this topic (what the hell was Jensen doing!); others will say it, but I want to add that expectation management and posturing is very important in this age.
You mean the age where Donald Trump, a known liar and felon, was re-elected, on the promise of lower prices and no more wars, then proceeded to do implement the opposite of those promises?
You and I both know that they have very different groups of people they are supposed to please, and the moral expectations exerted on the two are far from the same.
You are basically saying it's ok with Trump base, because Trump is acting according to their expectations. If Trump shot someone on 5th avenue I think it would be truly bad, but not so in the eyes of Trump supporters. At least that's what Trump himself thinks, and has said.
I mean I don't think Trump is well calibrated in that. Also personally we really should not get distracted by what Trump says or not says. His ramblings (not his actual political moves) are too much of a distraction for actual productive causes like cost of living.
Musk and Zuck both have far more voting power in their companies than Jensen Huang does in Nvidia. Zuck specifically has effectively unilateral control.
And Elon sleeps with every woman possible going so far as building a Texas compound for these women and children. If Musk were to sleep with a Chinese spy his excuse would simply be she was ovulating at the time.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. This shit is so commonplace and well-known regarding the elites and CEO's. It should've been priced in anyways.
My theory is the rest of the oligarchy was getting scared of NVIDIA's stranglehold on AI development and the broader economy and felt they needed to knock Huang and the company down a peg or two. Maybe install a bit of a crony CEO (a la Tim Apple).
Not sure was he forced to resign, or whether he just thought doing so would keep the stock-price from falling, and thus save Huang himself a ton of money.
"Oh who cares who he slept with, he's been great for Nvidia. Nothing has been proven."
He's one of the most visible CEO's in the most visible industry in the world, and the entire AI economy is dependent upon them. The perception of him as stable is incredibly important.
Merely the suggestion that he is having affairs with people with close ties to China's government, given export controls, is a huge PR problem. Adding in an additional affair with someone under him. And the likelihood that there may be even more out there.
I doubt the Board wants to get rid of Jensen Huang. He's done incredibly well for them. But right now, there's a huge PR shitstorm swirling around the company.
Maybe in six months it all dies down and he comes back, who knows. But right now, you really can't just ignore the problem and hope the media doesn't care about the whole "well she was only sort of a spy" situation.