Completely tangential but I always find it interesting how different expressions become attached to specific contexts in people's heads.
"This old house as got good bones" is the realtor 'slaps roof of car' meme that seems to have caught on during the 2010s and peaked during COVID. Now I hear people mindlessly propagating it whenever they talk about renovating/buying an old home.
I'm sure that we'll be hearing this ants in the kitchen of the house with good bones thing forever now.
Possibly Nathan Calvin on Twitter in August: If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
Fable 5.2 couldn't access the full DMN text (nor can I), but suggests the article is about "local TV journalists reacting to a report on minority hiring" and "Sanders" is probably a reporter named Bob Ray Sanders, a reporter in the region (who was later inducted to the National Association of Black Journalists' Hall of Fame). What he actually said is sadly paywalled in the archives.
There's this little part of me wondering if this was all known about for a long time, and the sudden release of information about all three women is coordinated for some nefarious business reason.
Jensen had the choice of coming clean like this, where half of Silicon Valley is rallying to his defence and he remains a multi-billionaire (and maybe saves his marriage), or having this exposed by the new Congress, at which point all manner of punitive countermeasures against Nvidia are on the table.
Currently, Energy & Commerce and Oversight & Investigations are asleep. Come January, they won't be.
Huang, like a lot of Silicon Valley, thought their guy would stay in power and protect them.
With this kind of status and notoriety, so many eyes are on you, it's hard to keep this a secret from everyone, especially when it's happening in the workplace.
The affairs were probably open secrets to those high up for a while. Once Jensen's reputation passes a perceived point of no return, it makes sense for the other higher ups to leak everything they know to the media to shorten the duration of the scandal. The worst has happened, their action will not change, so no need to drag it out.
Powerful men cheating is often normalized in their immediate environment. Jensen was seen with both women many times. It's the Chinese spy and export ban skirt angle that made it untenable.
Cf. the open secret nature around the entire Epstein cabal.
trump is visiting China next week and the first story was about mistress being Chinese spy, so it makes you wonder whether this benefits China, Trump or US interests (don't confuse the latter two, they are two completely different things), I don't think China would leak Chinese spy story unless they are playing serious 4D chess
> and the sudden release of information about all three women is coordinated for some nefarious business reason.
This framing is plain silly because it ignores the sequence of events. NVidia conducted an investigation after Huang admitted to having an affair with someone the US Government believed to be a Chinese spy, and in any case NVidia sold billions worth of embargoed chips to that company (and now it seems we have some proof per another HN front page story that the latest leading Chinese open source models were trained on embargoed NVidia chips). So then the other 2 instances of infidelity came out in the course of the investigation - of course as they definitely should, otherwise it would be a really shitty investigation! And sure, it was known by at least some number of other NVidia employees that Huang had relationships with subordinates (at least according to reporting). But that doesn't change the fact that Huang's relationship with Alice Huang was not known (and in fact denied by Jensen Huang) before this all went down.
It's not like Huang's 3 paramours got together before the investigation started in some sort of nefarious plot.
This might be the most blatantly prejudicial comment I’ve ever seen posted on this website in the many years I’ve been visiting here. Prejudicial, and easily disproven… as all prejudice is.
I always got the impression that it was somewhat of an open secret that most billionaires had soft harems of sorts, usually tacitly understood but never publicly addressed, and that the apparent outrage at affairs/scandals at this level is a sort of charade of allegiance to social norms to enforce the facade that standards of propriety apply even at the highest levels.
You’ve misread the room. Absolutely no one cares about the infidelity. One of the affairs has been public knowledge for months.
The outrage is about new reporting that one affair was with a potential Chinese asset, and the other affairs are more entertainment and/or evidence of bad leadership than anything else.
Yes, one investigation begets others. Also, high profile witnesses come forward voluntarily once the screen is lifted on any unrelated investigation, but not typically before.
Here it seems the dude was just lobbling molotov cocktails at his own house until people started to notice. The conspiracy, if there is one, is what other folks who knew beforehand got out of him before it was made public, not why everyone is now pointing out shit is on fire for him.
This happens all the time with news stories and doesn't require conspiracy theories. Once an initial story breaks, other journalists investigate (if they weren't already). No doubt Nvidia started investigating internally and employees will have leaked the findings.
There isn't really even any point in this third story from the point of view of any "coordinated attack". He's already resigned.
Correlation isn’t causation always. Once there’s a scandal, more people start digging, and the more they dig, the more they find. The news cycle continues rewarding more information, so you keep getting more.
Are you serious? He had multiple affairs is what's going on. Including one with a spy. And people who wouldn't be believed before are now coming forward.
There's probably some mildly interesting risk-balancing that happened behind the scenes because the intel community apparently knew mid-2026 and only spilled the beans now, but this is entirely of Jensen's own doing. He confessed.
He clearly is a top performer, though, managing four-plus relationships is a big job.
You understand that the AI labs in the US have taken a lot of money from thousands of investors. They don't benefit whatsoever in losing their investment to powerful open weight AI models that undermine closed weight ones especially chinese AI models that are rapidly catching up to them.
Nvidia was investing the open weight model ecosystem after realizing that the AI labs were moving off of their GPUs and using in-house chips. Jensen made sure that some Chinese AI labs were getting Nvidia GPUs in order to slow them down in relying or building their domestic ones.
Why would someone who invested a lot of money into any of the >1TN+ AI labs accept the risk of a chinese AI lab undermining them in their future IPO plans?
As I’m sure you know it can be both true that Jensen was getting side pieces like it was going out of style, and also be true that this is a coordinated hit. Note that the media for instance isn’t racing to investigate the strange sex lives of Anthropic senior leadership.
> Note that the media for instance isn’t racing to investigate the strange sex lives of Anthropic senior leadership.
Thus far, there's no evidence Anthropic was knowingly violating sanctions on China, nor did they donate $25M to the Trump ballroom project while doing so.
Yes, it's the illegal stuff (bribes and sanction busting), not the legal stuff (consensual, of-age sex), that's getting him booted. I am very prepared to admit that.
(Plus presumably lying to the board about all this as it started to break.)
From what I had read the sanctions-busting type stuff was really "lobbying the administration to not do anything about it from a regulatory perspective" which is different from just ignoring the law like the talking points claim.
I'm fine with the idea of not selling chips to China, but this is being used as the catalyst to embed government-controlled kill switches in all advanced chips under the guise preventing chip smuggling to China. Read up on the Chip Security Act sometime. Most on HN would find such a policy on its face abhorent, but those like you will cheer it on now because of the partisan affiliation of specific actors in this story.
> As recently as the summer of last year, Singapore was officially one of Nvidia’s biggest markets, generating 22% of the chip maker’s revenue. Then, practically overnight, it disappeared from the company’s financial disclosures.
> The timeline indicates that Nvidia altered its methodology for reporting the geographic breakdown of its revenue shortly after placing Megaspeed International on an internal block list. It isn’t clear if the two are related, but the shift had the effect of removing visibility into Nvidia’s sales tied to Singapore. That is the home to Megaspeed, the cloud-computing company embroiled in a sex-and-espionage scandal that has engulfed Nvidia and its chief executive.
I'm not sure what the point here is? Parts of the government wanted to blacklist Megaspeed, Nvidia apparently first intervened with Lutnick to block this, and then decided to block them internally instead for some reason. The change in revenue disclosure was almost certainly to avoid further complaints about export controls but they never actually violated a control that actually went into place? Worst case for them legally is that they broke their own internal block on selling chips to Megaspeed.
Do you think NVIDIA really thought 20%+ of their market share going to Singapore wasn't something odd going on? Where are you going to put that many datacenters there?
Of course they did! But Megaspeed was never actually sanctioned by the government so I don’t know where the meme of criminal consequences is coming from, aside from partisanship.
> But Megaspeed was never actually sanctioned by the government…
This is irrelevant. There's a blanket ban on physically providing these chips to China; if they knew Megaspeed was diverting chips, it doesn't matter if they were on a list or not, just as you can't trade with North Korea via a new front company. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/technology/china-ai-micro...
There's a good chance a future Democratic administration sees the $25M ballroom donations as plain old bribery, too.
It can also be true that this is the exact pattern you see with powerful men.
Because, the powerful men can hide things for a long time, right up until they are no longer powerful.
That's like the entire point of #MeToo. Women are very upset with how much known misbehavior was going on that was kept hush because the men involved were in positions of power, and people preferred keeping that power structure stable over literally putting people doing sex crimes to justice.
What you are seeing is that when women feel like they will be listened to when they come out with a story like this, they will.
That, and there's also the simple effect of "A rich person is suddenly getting dragged through the media, perfect time to share your own gossip if you have some"
You can't blame this on a conspiracy when such simple incentives will cause the same phenomenon, and we have ample examples of exactly that happening.
So why isn’t that incentive leading to reporters talking about the unusual sex lives of powerful men at Anthropic? It isn’t so much a conspiracy as it is the the Rubio hawk faction eliminating one of their more potent foes.
> This is the worst case of a classic blackmail operation against Jensen and it is highly co-ordinated with major news outlets like the NYT, WSJ, The Economist and FT.
Jensen was already being blackmailed by the Trump administration for the past year, which Trump all but admits openly here:
@24:20 if the link doesn't maintain the timestamp on your platform.
He doesn't name Jensen, but in hindsight with everything that has come out (including information on the timing of the Rubio memo) he is obviously talking about him and threatening him with jail to become a yes-man, and Jensen complied.
So IMO the real question isn't who was blackmailing Jensen (we know that), the question is: when he was already complying with blackmail for a year, who decided to burn him as an asset? Did it come from the people who were blackmailing him, or an external source? And who gains/loses by the loss of leverage they already had on him?
I am reminded of the tv series "the shield". When it ends, our guy is asked "what all do you have to declare". I am paraphrasing.
Pretty sure the board asked the same question. Having finally been called to do their work, they can't just close the books without asking "what else do you have to declare" to both Jensen and at least all the direct reportees. And if there was a declaration, you can always find someone to leak it to the media.
Not saying that happened, just saying that it is likely such direct questions were asked and answered last few days.
A serial adulterer is revealed to have adulterated serially, and SV types are spilling oodles of ink attempting to justify loose morals and bad decision-making so long as it brought increased shareholder value.
It's weird, right? You see the same thing in police investigations. Oh, they know some things early, then, later, release more information? We're not that dumb.
When a real scandal happens, everything we know or will ever know gets dropped all at once. Anything else and you know someone is pulling the strings. The question is who? My money is on the arrow of time.
A shell game. This is the distraction portion. Then comes the switch, the reveal and the swipe. Watch the market indicators. Nobody buying and selling shares in a trillion-dollar company cares one iota about extramarital affairs. Something else is happening.
First person who gets it. It’s 2026, there is no moral panic here. Shareholders don’t care. It’s all completely fake and orchestrated as cover for some other purpose (To offload shares or otherwise).
They might not care about affairs, but they are probably interested in the possibility that Nvidia circumvented US export controls, is being covertly influenced by China, and so on
This attitude is probably why they need to sue for damages. The number of people in Silicon Valley who have convinced themselves being a sex pest and walking national-security risk is a spoil of conquest needs to be struck down now if we're going to continue to exist as an industry.
There is an obvious pattern for these high level executive roles. They are all workaholics, they are not particularly loyal, they all have loose moral compasses, they don't have any clear line between work and their personal life, and they treat relationships like business arrangements.
This feels so common that I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family. One of the revelations about the Gates' lives was that Bill's promiscuity was apparently baked into their marriage agreement. At this level, your marriage might just be like a fixed mailing address for someone who has multiple homes.
Not to excuse this in any way. But these are the personalities of medieval lords and kings.
He would spend a week with a special friend every year (they'd hike together?), and this was in his marriage contract. That woman is now a VC. You can easily find out more if you google this.
Lots of wives would be okay with this! It isn’t a betrayal of trust, it’s not an open-ended arrangement with unknown scope and terrors, it’s plainly declared up front, it’s so infrequent that it has little to no risk of displacing the primary marriage relationship, it minimizes jealousy, it isn’t a side fling that could be stumbled across by accident in the everyday by the wife, it’s a controlled outlet for long-term desires, it’s not likely to cause financial distraction, dependency, or drain. And that’s just ninety seconds worth of solid good reasons :)
There is something in it for the wife. The world is a bit more "House of Cards" than some people assume. Aside from the French and a few others, western cultures seem almost uniquely dishonest about the tacit assumption that successful men will have mistresses. This isn't a new thing. Warren Buffett was essentially married to two women most of his life and no one cared.
Many wives highly value the accrued status of being formally married to a high-status person. You can take half the money but the social status doesn't follow. No one cares about a billionaire divorcee with no status beyond a bank account.
Jensen and Lori met in early 1980s or so when they were 17 and 19 years old respectively. Moreover they got married in 1985, 13 years before Nvidia was even founded. Quite different from Bill and Melinda hooking up after Microsoft don't you think ? Not to mention his apology.
> I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family
But (unless "unknown" is doing a lot of work in your sentence) Huang literally said this in his letter to NVidia employees: "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you said. In the 2000-2015 timeframe, I really idolized a lot of these successful tech leaders - they seemed incredibly smart, hard-working, and talented (though also of course lucky). But over time I came to the realization that many of them just fundamentally think very differently than I do, and I view that other way of thinking with disgust. The main issue is it seems like nearly all of their relationships are transactional, and they have a lack of empathy and willingness to be ruthless that is simply anathema to me.
I wonder if he followed a modern trend and was on TRT, it seems like a pattern for celebrity/powerful men of age these days: get on TRT, get in shape, cheat on your wife.
I think people would be shocked to find out just how common "don't ask, don't tell" is among couples, especially among the rich, famous, and powerful. Everyone ganged up on Jada Smith until Will admitted he too sought outside "entanglements." Most couples who do this just hide it well enough, and it's only a problem when one of them is caught.
Not all, very likely not even most, of course, do this, and it's not always truly mutual or healthy, but surprise surprise, not every couple wants strict monogamy. They just don't want society to judge them for it.
People keep saying this like it makes it better... If I knew my partner was a serial philanderer it wouldn't make me feel great, even if said partner was worth billions.
A lot of marriages are purely for superficial image. Many people also fall out of love but stay together legally for various reasons.
Many ultra high net worth people are married purely for financial reasons. The wife gets whatever she wants but now they don't need to worry about losing control of their company, etc.
This is to say nothing of the biological differences either. Menopause hits some women extremely hard and libido is completely gone. Rather than divorce or mutually suffer, they open up the marriage.
When you see two ants in the kitchen there's likely many more.
Huang has been a great boss and steward of Nvidia, but ultimately falling for subordinates is grave enough, adding alleged Chinese spies, and allegations you sold Tencent billions of hardware through shady Singaporean companies for which the alleged spy worked etc and the board had no other options.
At this point it would be surprising if what we know is likely a small part and the Nvidia board saw enough very quickly to ask for his head.
There's no need to look. Jensen Huang might have been great for his shareholders, but he sure has been screwing the rest of us over hard.
He was responsible for hanging consumers out to dry by destroying the consumer PC market in chase of more profit. He is gambling with the world economy. He appears on interviews being a dick about all of this.
So I'd say this is very much in character for him.
I understand this is true in a strictly legal and financial sense. I hope you are simply pointing out a factual statement and not bootlicking for companies with business practices that make your own life worse?
>I understand this is true in a strictly legal and financial sense.
"Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business. Getting salty because a company decided to switch to a more profitable customer, while understandable, is also totally unreasonable. It's like getting mad at a band for selling $1000 concert tickets after they made it big. Doubly so when the product segment being affected is essentially a luxury product to begin with.
You're not really arguing anything here except that greed is expected, which is fair but not logical in the sense that, there is nothing about a business that says it has to operate this way, and no law that says being a fair and good entity in our community is necessarily going to bankrupt them. It's a choice leadership makes, for obvious and boring reasons, to fuck over the general community.
Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.
Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
The sad part is that we simply don't expect it anymore, because we no longer see businesses as part of our communities. Just as profit engines, with no other goal.
Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
>Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.
>Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
No, in both cases they'll just get scalped. If you're selling something for $1 that the market is willing to pay $10 for, the market will find a way to equalize this.
>Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
Give me a break. This might work if it's walmart replacing a dozen local shops with a giant big box store on the edge of town, but GPUs are already a niche luxury product. If there's one sector where it's justified for companies to make outsized profits on, it's this. Otherwise it's as out of touch as getting mad at Hermes for selling $10k hand bags.
Yes so thinking purely in corporate thoughts, the supply is the issue on concerts and GPUs. For supply constrained items like concert space, or theme parks, other countries where profit isn't the dominant motive will sell tickets via lotteries or first in, first serve, ID linked and no reselling.
For the GPU situation, consumer GPU supply is constrained because demand isn't being met. It's not being met (in my understanding) because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI. The solution would have been to create and supply two different verticals independently, and to open the ecosystem up for other manufacturers to help meet B2B supply. There is precedent for this going in different directions, but it was a choice nVidia made to squeeze the market for every penny. Extremely good business. Shareholders are stoked, a fantastic win for the stock market.
I can't worry about all things but since you bring hermes bags up, yes that is also a pretty clear sign of a perverse economy. Selling an at-cost $10 bag for $10,000 is pretty disappointing behaviour by the seller and the buyer. The seller does it because they can, and the buyer does it because they don't mind getting fleeced. The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
This is the world we live in, I get that, but it's no less disappointing to see the majority of people get ditched for the sake of the shareholders time and time again. If you feel that this isn't what's happening then I would be interested in that, otherwise we might just disagree on some base principles which is fine but probably not worth debating.
>For supply constrained items like concert space, or theme parks, other countries where profit isn't the dominant motive will sell tickets via lotteries or first in, first serve, ID linked and no reselling.
How are you going to enforce this for GPUs? Even if you somehow add the remote tracking systems that AI safety proponents have been asking for, you can still make a handy profit renting out your GPU to people who want to play gta6 or whatever.
>because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI
Maybe if you need CUDA specifically for AI workloads. For gaming AMD or intel is perfectly serviceable. It's not as good as a RTX 5090, but again that's like complaining you can only afford a LV bag rather than a Hermes (the embarrassment!)
>The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
Maybe if you're only interested in carrying stuff, but not if you're interested in status signaling. The same applies to some extent for concerts. How many people are going for the experience of nosebleed seats (or standing room), overpriced food, and other travel hassles, vs the social cachet of being to a limited concert?
I click on these ant kitchen people expecting some new account with 3 karma, nope, old ass accounts with lots of karma. Humans and bots converging in functionality.
Is it so bad? He founded one of history's most successful companies in one of the most exciting sectors on the planet and ran it for 33 years. He's 63.
The only thing that would actually be bad is if his wife left him, which we don't know is happening yet. Some women accept the "risk" (to put it tastelessly) of marrying a hundred-billionaire, and stick it out.
Depends on what he values, I don't think I'd be any happier with 150bn than maybe 100m, they're both large enough that I couldn't possibly see myself spending it. Not with this specific case, but I often see people saying/implying people must be happy because they're rich/founded a successful company/achieved something great/<insert desirable thing here>.
I guess people often think the things they imagine making themselves happy would make someone else who has that happy, and I just don't think that's the case that often. I don't think money buys happiness after a point, a certain amount gets rid of a lot of discomfort and stress and brings relief and security, a bit more can buy some happiness, after that it's just number go up.
Exactly, a lot of people (especially those who have plenty of material wealth) focus much more on legacy. Here we're watching Jensen's legacy turn into that of an incompetent and possibly a traitor, on top of being morally bankrupt. That can't feel good. It will color everything he has ever said or done, I'm sure you can find plenty of his quotes that will now seem ridiculous.
Despite not being a full subscriber to the "death of the author" concept, I do think we tend to ironically lean a little too petty/unrelated in our criticisms of big names when we discover their sexual sins, and I think this is an example of that. Yes, I'm sure you could find some quotes in there that are hypocritical given his sexual conduct, but I can't find one on an initial review. I think sometimes this can kind of harm the legitimate criticism by association.
I say this as somebody who has never had any admiration for this guy (not because of a specific grievance, but because I don't follow tech leadership and am generally pessimistic about them).
You're 1) projecting that it is my opinion, and not my estimation of public opinion; and 2) seemingly unfamiliar with how most people think - "we" do not lean toward anything but laziness, and this is how lazy thought works.
That being said his early life is crazy enough that a movie could save him. Lazy thinking is fickle, after all.
Who was that comedian that said something along of "I'd rather be depressed in an Rolls Royce than in a Honda"... Money doesn't buy happiness, but it removes the worry of where you are going to sleep tonight.
For sure, he's probably deeply unhappy about his legacy. I just mean "this is how it could all end" implies something a little more dramatic than that. While money doesn't buy happiness after a certain amount, it does buy the satisfaction of supporting your future generations. And that's not even to mention what he built.
At the current rate of disclosure Huang is going to be revealed to have had an affair with every woman in the world by 2038. It’s vital that we build out infrastructure to support this if we don’t want to be left behind.
At least we’ve now passed the tipping point where the majority of affairs are domestic. Some country out there is going to achieve HSM (Huang Second Marriage) and it’s vital to future prosperity that we make sure it’s the US.
"Claude, build me a website that tracks with whom Jensen Huang had an affair yet! Register the domain hasjensenhuanghadanaffair.with and treat GETs on subdirectories as names for queries, like hasjensenhuanghadanaffair.with/JaneDoe should display whether he had an affair with Jane Doe."
in all seriousness though, what is going on? everything here feels well timed and coordinated. were the powers that be just waiting for US midterms to pass? is there any relationship to the anthropic IPO? my tin foil hat is going to be working overtime these next few days
I mean it’s just much more of a favorable political environment for the board to investigate Huang. And journalists know that if there’s smoke, there’s likely fire. So it seems like a pretty natural pile-on if anything.
It is kinda weird that Jensen decided to resign so quickly though. I would’ve expected a longer investigation period involving both the board and Congress.
I should've worded my post differently. Jensen had a fast rise as a household name and the attention that came with it. Before 2020 I doubt more than 2% of the population could've named the CEO of Nvidia.
To be known by 2% of US Population as a business leader is by all means a household name. What then happened is more like superstar status akin to Steve Jobs. You simply can't rise higher than that.
Sure, but jail time for bypassing the export ban can definitely make it harder to use the money. Then again, given his affiliation with the POTUS he probably won't get jail time.
Parrots another article - even w ", Report Says" as the end of the headline.
The original article is from Reuters, partially written by this woman below whose history is all Washington stories then bam 4 articles on Nvidia and tech.
It all lining up perfectly with their quarterly earnings call does seem like a bit of a strange coincidence at the very least.
These are also not actually new developments, but years old. So they could have easily been stockpiled ahead of time, ready to deploy when opportune. Or maybe that's just standard when you're high profile enough? It's like accumulating and strategically burning 0 days. Or trading them for that matter.
Or at least the original report was like this. These newer ones are perfectly well explained by opportunism imo, if one is to believe that the anonymous sources really are company internal.
> lining up perfectly with their quarterly earnings call
Availability heuristic. A short seller was writing about Nvidia's China-disclosure problem in May. Huang's affair with Ms. Huang came out before Halloween. If one month before earnings is fair game, then you're going to have a lot of conspiracies to clean up.
To a certain point I don't really care about how many subordinates it ends up being (something tells me there are more), but it does make all of the grindset quotes CEOs like Huang barf up all the more laughable.
> “I work every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t work. And if I’m not working, I’m thinking about work.”
> “I wake up at 5am, and the moment I wake up, I start working… I’m asleep probably by 9:30pm.
A lot of people have said Nvidia are crazy to get rid of Huang, that he's a singular irreplaceable talent. What if, perhaps, he's not all he's made out to be?
He's bush league compared to Elon Musk who runs 6 companies simultaneously (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, Boring, xAI) yet finds time to father at least 14 kids with at least 4 different women!
He very clearly isn't fully dedicated to his work, given his multiple affairs with his employees. Someone that was _actually_ laser focused on their company would, you know, not sleep with employees.
I think this is a weird angle. A man's unfaithfulness might very well be correlated with failures in his responsibilities as a leader, but the simple idea of working hard doesn't seem like one of them. In fact, if I may say something a little eyebrow-raising, that particular quality might even be inversely correlated...
We can find so much to criticize without stretching.
At how many $billion of market value should a board just figure that it's a cost of doing business to hire retired spooks to keep track of the CEO's personal life, and ensure that he has a pipeline of well-paid, background-checked, NDA-signed mistresses available to divert his eyes from the employees and spies?
We have to figure out where this comes from! It's so recent: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828285 references https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535 - that's the earliest I've seen so far. Others?
Edit: thanks ChatGPT: https://barrypopik.com/blog/there_is_never_one_cockroach_bus...
Proverb #232 of https://www.asau.ru/files/pdf/2759983.pdf says it's attested from 1991:
232 There is never just one cockroach. (1991)
Variant: There is never just one cockroach in the kitchen
Ants are nicer though.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html
"In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen."
"This old house as got good bones" is the realtor 'slaps roof of car' meme that seems to have caught on during the 2010s and peaked during COVID. Now I hear people mindlessly propagating it whenever they talk about renovating/buying an old home.
I'm sure that we'll be hearing this ants in the kitchen of the house with good bones thing forever now.
August 5th about Open AI:
https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
September 4th.. still about Open AI:
https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2095854095139537064
November 11th.. Alex Lawsen on Twitter, referencing Nathan's post (above):
https://x.com/lxrjl/status/2120640689620861335
Fable 5.2 couldn't access the full DMN text (nor can I), but suggests the article is about "local TV journalists reacting to a report on minority hiring" and "Sanders" is probably a reporter named Bob Ray Sanders, a reporter in the region (who was later inducted to the National Association of Black Journalists' Hall of Fame). What he actually said is sadly paywalled in the archives.
And Jensen Huang may have had an improper relationship with at least one of them.
Jensen had the choice of coming clean like this, where half of Silicon Valley is rallying to his defence and he remains a multi-billionaire (and maybe saves his marriage), or having this exposed by the new Congress, at which point all manner of punitive countermeasures against Nvidia are on the table.
Currently, Energy & Commerce and Oversight & Investigations are asleep. Come January, they won't be.
Huang, like a lot of Silicon Valley, thought their guy would stay in power and protect them.
Cf. the open secret nature around the entire Epstein cabal.
This framing is plain silly because it ignores the sequence of events. NVidia conducted an investigation after Huang admitted to having an affair with someone the US Government believed to be a Chinese spy, and in any case NVidia sold billions worth of embargoed chips to that company (and now it seems we have some proof per another HN front page story that the latest leading Chinese open source models were trained on embargoed NVidia chips). So then the other 2 instances of infidelity came out in the course of the investigation - of course as they definitely should, otherwise it would be a really shitty investigation! And sure, it was known by at least some number of other NVidia employees that Huang had relationships with subordinates (at least according to reporting). But that doesn't change the fact that Huang's relationship with Alice Huang was not known (and in fact denied by Jensen Huang) before this all went down.
It's not like Huang's 3 paramours got together before the investigation started in some sort of nefarious plot.
The idea that NVIDIA would continue whatever arrangement they had under increasing pressure is really childish.
The outrage is about new reporting that one affair was with a potential Chinese asset, and the other affairs are more entertainment and/or evidence of bad leadership than anything else.
The actual infidelity they really do not care about.
To be honest, I think Jensen's wife herself probably knew about it and just didn't care either. A don't ask, don't tell scenario.
That’s what is going on.
Three different news orgs have reported the different affairs.
There isn't really even any point in this third story from the point of view of any "coordinated attack". He's already resigned.
tbf, these side affairs i think are more just people piling on
There's probably some mildly interesting risk-balancing that happened behind the scenes because the intel community apparently knew mid-2026 and only spilled the beans now, but this is entirely of Jensen's own doing. He confessed.
He clearly is a top performer, though, managing four-plus relationships is a big job.
mid-2025*
You understand that the AI labs in the US have taken a lot of money from thousands of investors. They don't benefit whatsoever in losing their investment to powerful open weight AI models that undermine closed weight ones especially chinese AI models that are rapidly catching up to them.
Nvidia was investing the open weight model ecosystem after realizing that the AI labs were moving off of their GPUs and using in-house chips. Jensen made sure that some Chinese AI labs were getting Nvidia GPUs in order to slow them down in relying or building their domestic ones.
Why would someone who invested a lot of money into any of the >1TN+ AI labs accept the risk of a chinese AI lab undermining them in their future IPO plans?
Thus far, there's no evidence Anthropic was knowingly violating sanctions on China, nor did they donate $25M to the Trump ballroom project while doing so.
(Plus presumably lying to the board about all this as it started to break.)
I'm fine with the idea of not selling chips to China, but this is being used as the catalyst to embed government-controlled kill switches in all advanced chips under the guise preventing chip smuggling to China. Read up on the Chip Security Act sometime. Most on HN would find such a policy on its face abhorent, but those like you will cheer it on now because of the partisan affiliation of specific actors in this story.
> As recently as the summer of last year, Singapore was officially one of Nvidia’s biggest markets, generating 22% of the chip maker’s revenue. Then, practically overnight, it disappeared from the company’s financial disclosures.
> The timeline indicates that Nvidia altered its methodology for reporting the geographic breakdown of its revenue shortly after placing Megaspeed International on an internal block list. It isn’t clear if the two are related, but the shift had the effect of removing visibility into Nvidia’s sales tied to Singapore. That is the home to Megaspeed, the cloud-computing company embroiled in a sex-and-espionage scandal that has engulfed Nvidia and its chief executive.
Sure, sure. Totally on the up-and-up.
They made out like bandits looking the other way.
This is irrelevant. There's a blanket ban on physically providing these chips to China; if they knew Megaspeed was diverting chips, it doesn't matter if they were on a list or not, just as you can't trade with North Korea via a new front company. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/technology/china-ai-micro...
There's a good chance a future Democratic administration sees the $25M ballroom donations as plain old bribery, too.
Because, the powerful men can hide things for a long time, right up until they are no longer powerful.
That's like the entire point of #MeToo. Women are very upset with how much known misbehavior was going on that was kept hush because the men involved were in positions of power, and people preferred keeping that power structure stable over literally putting people doing sex crimes to justice.
What you are seeing is that when women feel like they will be listened to when they come out with a story like this, they will.
That, and there's also the simple effect of "A rich person is suddenly getting dragged through the media, perfect time to share your own gossip if you have some"
You can't blame this on a conspiracy when such simple incentives will cause the same phenomenon, and we have ample examples of exactly that happening.
Jensen was already being blackmailed by the Trump administration for the past year, which Trump all but admits openly here:
https://youtu.be/m2aC8lAOQbg?si=rqqSliGdLF4_Q663&t=1460
@24:20 if the link doesn't maintain the timestamp on your platform.
He doesn't name Jensen, but in hindsight with everything that has come out (including information on the timing of the Rubio memo) he is obviously talking about him and threatening him with jail to become a yes-man, and Jensen complied.
So IMO the real question isn't who was blackmailing Jensen (we know that), the question is: when he was already complying with blackmail for a year, who decided to burn him as an asset? Did it come from the people who were blackmailing him, or an external source? And who gains/loses by the loss of leverage they already had on him?
A lesson, apparently, for everyone asking "what the big deal is".
If ever you wanted to understand the meaning of the word "liability", here it is.
"Coordinated hits", as you put it, have as their prerequisite the creation of a "liability".
As the British police are fond of saying in cold case appeals: allegiances shift.
Pretty sure the board asked the same question. Having finally been called to do their work, they can't just close the books without asking "what else do you have to declare" to both Jensen and at least all the direct reportees. And if there was a declaration, you can always find someone to leak it to the media.
Not saying that happened, just saying that it is likely such direct questions were asked and answered last few days.
When a real scandal happens, everything we know or will ever know gets dropped all at once. Anything else and you know someone is pulling the strings. The question is who? My money is on the arrow of time.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6688834/
Turns out that taxing their wealth is an intervention.
We need to do it if only for their own good to save them from the pressures that cause them to act increasingly antisocial.
A shell game. This is the distraction portion. Then comes the switch, the reveal and the swipe. Watch the market indicators. Nobody buying and selling shares in a trillion-dollar company cares one iota about extramarital affairs. Something else is happening.
----
I hope that the people he had affairs with are treated ok and not retaliated against or hounded by the world news media.
This attitude is probably why they need to sue for damages. The number of people in Silicon Valley who have convinced themselves being a sex pest and walking national-security risk is a spoil of conquest needs to be struck down now if we're going to continue to exist as an industry.
This feels so common that I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family. One of the revelations about the Gates' lives was that Bill's promiscuity was apparently baked into their marriage agreement. At this level, your marriage might just be like a fixed mailing address for someone who has multiple homes.
Not to excuse this in any way. But these are the personalities of medieval lords and kings.
Are there details on this? Yes, I do like the sordid gossip.
There is something in it for the wife. The world is a bit more "House of Cards" than some people assume. Aside from the French and a few others, western cultures seem almost uniquely dishonest about the tacit assumption that successful men will have mistresses. This isn't a new thing. Warren Buffett was essentially married to two women most of his life and no one cared.
Many wives highly value the accrued status of being formally married to a high-status person. You can take half the money but the social status doesn't follow. No one cares about a billionaire divorcee with no status beyond a bank account.
But (unless "unknown" is doing a lot of work in your sentence) Huang literally said this in his letter to NVidia employees: "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you said. In the 2000-2015 timeframe, I really idolized a lot of these successful tech leaders - they seemed incredibly smart, hard-working, and talented (though also of course lucky). But over time I came to the realization that many of them just fundamentally think very differently than I do, and I view that other way of thinking with disgust. The main issue is it seems like nearly all of their relationships are transactional, and they have a lack of empathy and willingness to be ruthless that is simply anathema to me.
Not all, very likely not even most, of course, do this, and it's not always truly mutual or healthy, but surprise surprise, not every couple wants strict monogamy. They just don't want society to judge them for it.
Many ultra high net worth people are married purely for financial reasons. The wife gets whatever she wants but now they don't need to worry about losing control of their company, etc.
This is to say nothing of the biological differences either. Menopause hits some women extremely hard and libido is completely gone. Rather than divorce or mutually suffer, they open up the marriage.
Huang has been a great boss and steward of Nvidia, but ultimately falling for subordinates is grave enough, adding alleged Chinese spies, and allegations you sold Tencent billions of hardware through shady Singaporean companies for which the alleged spy worked etc and the board had no other options.
At this point it would be surprising if what we know is likely a small part and the Nvidia board saw enough very quickly to ask for his head.
He was responsible for hanging consumers out to dry by destroying the consumer PC market in chase of more profit. He is gambling with the world economy. He appears on interviews being a dick about all of this.
So I'd say this is very much in character for him.
"Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business. Getting salty because a company decided to switch to a more profitable customer, while understandable, is also totally unreasonable. It's like getting mad at a band for selling $1000 concert tickets after they made it big. Doubly so when the product segment being affected is essentially a luxury product to begin with.
Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.
Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
The sad part is that we simply don't expect it anymore, because we no longer see businesses as part of our communities. Just as profit engines, with no other goal.
Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
>Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.
No, in both cases they'll just get scalped. If you're selling something for $1 that the market is willing to pay $10 for, the market will find a way to equalize this.
>Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.
Give me a break. This might work if it's walmart replacing a dozen local shops with a giant big box store on the edge of town, but GPUs are already a niche luxury product. If there's one sector where it's justified for companies to make outsized profits on, it's this. Otherwise it's as out of touch as getting mad at Hermes for selling $10k hand bags.
For the GPU situation, consumer GPU supply is constrained because demand isn't being met. It's not being met (in my understanding) because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI. The solution would have been to create and supply two different verticals independently, and to open the ecosystem up for other manufacturers to help meet B2B supply. There is precedent for this going in different directions, but it was a choice nVidia made to squeeze the market for every penny. Extremely good business. Shareholders are stoked, a fantastic win for the stock market.
I can't worry about all things but since you bring hermes bags up, yes that is also a pretty clear sign of a perverse economy. Selling an at-cost $10 bag for $10,000 is pretty disappointing behaviour by the seller and the buyer. The seller does it because they can, and the buyer does it because they don't mind getting fleeced. The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
This is the world we live in, I get that, but it's no less disappointing to see the majority of people get ditched for the sake of the shareholders time and time again. If you feel that this isn't what's happening then I would be interested in that, otherwise we might just disagree on some base principles which is fine but probably not worth debating.
How are you going to enforce this for GPUs? Even if you somehow add the remote tracking systems that AI safety proponents have been asking for, you can still make a handy profit renting out your GPU to people who want to play gta6 or whatever.
>because NVidia has a monopoly on the software ecosystem around the workloads that are diverting consumer GPU supply to businesses, first crypto, recently AI
Maybe if you need CUDA specifically for AI workloads. For gaming AMD or intel is perfectly serviceable. It's not as good as a RTX 5090, but again that's like complaining you can only afford a LV bag rather than a Hermes (the embarrassment!)
>The key difference there is you can still get full utility from a bag for $15, but you have to participate in this new GPU market to get a GPU.
Maybe if you're only interested in carrying stuff, but not if you're interested in status signaling. The same applies to some extent for concerts. How many people are going for the experience of nosebleed seats (or standing room), overpriced food, and other travel hassles, vs the social cachet of being to a limited concert?
Demand has far exceeded supply, and so consumers are priced out.
This is no different than how most developing countries have been priced out of top GPUs since the dawn of computing.
It sucks, but to pin the blame on someone for not selling you a GPU at below market rates is... not fruitful.
After all, when you see two ants in the kitchen..
The only thing that would actually be bad is if his wife left him, which we don't know is happening yet. Some women accept the "risk" (to put it tastelessly) of marrying a hundred-billionaire, and stick it out.
I guess people often think the things they imagine making themselves happy would make someone else who has that happy, and I just don't think that's the case that often. I don't think money buys happiness after a point, a certain amount gets rid of a lot of discomfort and stress and brings relief and security, a bit more can buy some happiness, after that it's just number go up.
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/jensen-huang-quotes
I say this as somebody who has never had any admiration for this guy (not because of a specific grievance, but because I don't follow tech leadership and am generally pessimistic about them).
That being said his early life is crazy enough that a movie could save him. Lazy thinking is fickle, after all.
He's also spent his life building a large, very influential company.
Could it be that those are the things he values?
Would be investigation ending in jail time.
At least we’ve now passed the tipping point where the majority of affairs are domestic. Some country out there is going to achieve HSM (Huang Second Marriage) and it’s vital to future prosperity that we make sure it’s the US.
Two affairs is a pattern.
Three affairs is just funny.
And frankly at this point, where nothing surprises you anymore we should probably just enjoy some stupid pictures with captions
in all seriousness though, what is going on? everything here feels well timed and coordinated. were the powers that be just waiting for US midterms to pass? is there any relationship to the anthropic IPO? my tin foil hat is going to be working overtime these next few days
- The affair(s) were so badly hidden that they became obvious once one was exposed
- High profile CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world means a lot of eyes
- something akin to the Streisand effect keeps things in the news cycle
At that point it was probably just a matter of time until the rest came out.
It is kinda weird that Jensen decided to resign so quickly though. I would’ve expected a longer investigation period involving both the board and Congress.
[insert joke about three rides that we know of here]
The original article is from Reuters, partially written by this woman below whose history is all Washington stories then bam 4 articles on Nvidia and tech.
https://www.reuters.com/authors/alexandra-alper/
Appears to be manipulated news (which we're used to), story is real but should be seen through that lens - why?
These are also not actually new developments, but years old. So they could have easily been stockpiled ahead of time, ready to deploy when opportune. Or maybe that's just standard when you're high profile enough? It's like accumulating and strategically burning 0 days. Or trading them for that matter.
Or at least the original report was like this. These newer ones are perfectly well explained by opportunism imo, if one is to believe that the anonymous sources really are company internal.
Availability heuristic. A short seller was writing about Nvidia's China-disclosure problem in May. Huang's affair with Ms. Huang came out before Halloween. If one month before earnings is fair game, then you're going to have a lot of conspiracies to clean up.
> “I work every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t work. And if I’m not working, I’m thinking about work.”
> “I wake up at 5am, and the moment I wake up, I start working… I’m asleep probably by 9:30pm.
https://www.startuparchive.org/p/jensen-huang-there-s-hard-w...
A lot of people have said Nvidia are crazy to get rid of Huang, that he's a singular irreplaceable talent. What if, perhaps, he's not all he's made out to be?
We can find so much to criticize without stretching.
- Hacker News
- Also Hacker News