alt Hacker NewsNvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
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A banger of a tweet: "A man who pioneered parallel processing cannot be expected to run a single thread" [1]
Personally I think if she's a spy he is a victim. Who knows what his relationship with his wife is. It's none of the public's business.
The only newsworthy part of this is possibility he could've been blackmailed in the past about it and I assume this is what the investigation will be about.
"To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust." I hope he told them in person. I don't understand why this is mentioned inside the NVIDIA press release.
His family is not of other peoples business....
Incredibly sad and demoralizing to see the rationalizations and excuses people are making for this behavior in the comments here (or for the likely lack of professional consequences). But I guess these are the times in which we live.
How integral is Huang to the success of Nvidia? As much as he seems to have done a good job, he appears less integral than with some companies like Bezos/Amazon or Zuckerberg/Meta (whether these are/were or not is besides the point, they are seen as such).
I'd expect a board to fire a CEO over this, so he will have to be critical to the business, more than a normal CEO is critical, to survive. The market reaction to him going would also be interesting. Seems like the markets are starting to figure out what the value is here.
It boggles my mind that Singapore!=China in terms of export controls. They're the same thing.
by the way - are we allowed to debate whether the alleged honeypot was in fact herself an intelligence agent of one sort or another, or was it just the (somewhat justified) background level of ‘she / her company is a Chinese national / has significant Chinese ownership whether private or public, and therefore subject to China’s version of our US national security letters.
I just was seeing very little advance-neutralizing of 1950s Red Scare talk in these comments.
Spooks from CIA must be aware of this for a long time. The only question now is why this information is leaked now? What is the distraction they are trying to create by leaking this now?
Take this with a grain of salt, but my guess is that the board on some level has to judge him as being so high performing that they would try to keep him as long as that doesn't cause too much PR damage to the company, or the deals get them in too much trouble with the government.
This is just a total guess, but I assume what a lot of the board want is for him to sell as much to China or indirect channels as he can get away with. So whatever these deals were that involved this woman, they probably want him to get those deals through it he can get away with it (although they wouldn't admit it).
I see this more or less as Huang doing his job. And relative to international expectations at that level of wealth, one public affair is probably not something most of the board (presumably largely male) is going to (privately) judge him for.
So if the board is investigating, I assume what they are trying to figure out is if the US government is going to do anything (probably not) or waiting to see if there is going to be some kind of public demand for him to be removed. Or it there is something likely to come out that will cause either of those things.
I've never seen a more direct statement, with the right priorities, in such a case.
As always, recovery under stress is more telling than speed on the happy path.
The other name founders - Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs - fell into the guise of their own image propagating down their leadership chain; Huang seems to be actually leading, often by example. I'd expect his team to do ok without him, but believe only he could make some of the hard decisions, particularly now that their success is bounded by their customers'.
I feel uncomfortable asking in a thread like this but why would a CEO talk about his private life publically?
I know others have said this is a carefully written statement, but in my culture I would feel it would be rude not to keep it private? Sorry if this sounds autistic.
I find the geopolitical aspects of this news far more interesting than the affair drama.
That is totally unprecedented.
are there trainings on honey traps, like waht can a company do to prevent this ?? i just feel bad for his wife and also him
I don’t really understand what’s the issue with “cheating” his wife.
That’s his personal life and I fail to see why are we supposed to behave like some kind of religious zealots on marriage.
The best way to handle this should probably be to be upfront about it so that he could not be blackmailed. His only mistake was that he didn’t disclose it earlier when rumours surfaced
Not at all defending his actions, but I am reminded of someone in an earlier thread predicting that there may be some political reasons for this to come out, and that we may see NVIDIA do favors for the US government some time soon. That doesn't seem to be the case, but an observation:
"I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American." sounds like the exact words one would say if one expects to be threatened of being un-patriotic and therefore cancelled in the right-wing sense. In fact it sounds like something you would hear on South Park, it's a bit ridiculous. As others have pointed out in here, affair or not, the spy label is very much up to US government opinion.
I heard a guy I respect say “there’s a short list of things people will ruin their lives for.”
I’m not sure if this will ruin Jensen’s life or not, but it’s a good opportunity for us all to remember that the short-term high is usually not worth it.
Now we have to re-evaluate all his statements in favor of selling to China. For example, we want China to build on "our stack". On the face of it, that seems correct. If China has multiple stacks to pick from why wouldn't we want them to pick our stack? But do they have such a choice?
I like to see this more alpha pivot in tech.
In parts of Asia it is "expected" that a successful politician or businessman will have a "second family". I'm thinking the spying part (Huang is from Taiwan and was possibly leaking info to China) is considered worse than the cheating part by everyone involved.
Sounds logical to me!
There is no way he would have known that the woman was a spy. Also we can't know if the allegations are true or not either until proven somehow. The woman was from Singapore. Singapore has denied it. but lets assume that she was a spy so why hasn't she been charged yet? Where is she? The chips apparently went to Malaysia .. is there a proof that they were moved to China? There are claims that their clouds were used by the Chinese. Something doesn't add up here.
Malaysia doesnt even show up in the graph of owners but obviously has imported some chips.. were they illegal ones.. who knows. How much relative power does this malaysia have? If it did, wouldnt show up in the graph?
https://epoch.ai/data/ai-chip-owners?view=graph&tab=count&co...
or sometimes - you shed the image of being a family man & embrace being a 'player'
the reason bond was made - was the guy who the novel was based on - being a double-agent couldn't be honey-trapped as he was already womanizing.
The most interesting part might be that this is coming out so publicly.
Someone leaked intelligence assessments to the New York Times.
Maybe this was just a regular leak ... but ...
Jensen/Nvidia has not been playing ball with other parts of the AI industry and the administration, pushing heavily against export bans and promoting open source models/companies , which is clearly against the interests of SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic.
This is conspiracy theory territory, of course, but I wouldn't be too surprised if this was an intentional leak.
Man of all the girls in all the towns in all the world why the spy?
“Vanity…definitely my favorite sin.”
- Devils Advocate
Maybe they are just an innocent couple who fell in love, and his wife was not providing the affection he needed. Why jump to conclusions?
Would this lead to him stepping down or dialing it up? NVDIA will be fine with either way, but how much does he really adds to its value?
His private life is irrelevant. He’s an adult and can do what he wants. It only matters if he spilled secrets to the spy
-NVDA/Huang gifted Trump $25 million for his ballroom
-NVDA Huang agreed to pay Trump 15% of sales of certain chips to China
-Trump gave Huang the "National Medal of Science"
-Huang on AF1 for last China trip
This seems like the tip of the iceberg on a major corruption story.
I'm not sure what actual letters like this are supposed to achieve (besides protecting his ass I mean). Are employees supposed to stand beside their fallen leader, are they supposed to go about their business differently? Anybody having affairs with subordinates can't be trusted to make good judgement calls with respect to internal leadership / delegation, at least it wouldn't seem so to me.
A BoingBoing article from 2003, "Pr0nstar Catalina's appearance at Nvidia E3 party raises eyebrows": https://boingboing.net/2003/05/27/pr0nstar-catalinas-a.html .
Is Jensen most likely on his way out? I think yes, more interesting times ahead and will his exit eventually help in reducing Nvidia's dominance which might be a desirable result though there're quite a few conditions to be met so that it indeed is one.
I hope it’s apparent to everyone that the natsec state (whether CIA or FBI for its domestic counterintel mandate) had to actively engage in ‘conspiracy theorizing’ in order to determine whatever exposure Jensen had, which seems to be bearing out to some as-yet-unknown degree. Worth keeping in mind next time you’re feeling shy about expressing your own latest conspiracy theorizing.
If you're the CIA, wouldn't you want to plant employees, or 'hire' employees at major firms like this? I guess I assume they do already. Probably each major corporation has 10-50+ employees getting kick backs from the government.
What if she wasn’t a spy and it was just an affair.
I suspect nothing will change at Nvidia although Jensen does not have any sort of "super shares" so he can easily be deposed by the board if they really want to. But why would they.
Apart from his direct family, who cares? Why is this an issue? It's 2026, we literally had a human child trafficking ring with multiple presidents involved and it didnt lead to anything or move the needle on stuff.
There was no reason to make this public and this happens just after the midterms.
This screams political hit job.
Rich Americans don't face consequences. Unless he spilled secrets that would put Nvidia's competitive advantage in jeopardy he'll probably be required to attend some mandatory government/corporate seminar on espionage for a couple of weeks and then things will go back to business as usual.
When the money is this big, all ethics go out the window.
He doesn't need to apology, it's a common failure of man.
Opinions on the affair and the public discourse aside, I have to say though that it is the first time in a long time that I see an apology letter written from a business person in the name of the company that actually admits wrongdoing and has accountability.
Usually they are more along the lines of fake apologies like "I'm sorry that you feel that way", or in this particular case I would imagine something like "I'm sorry that I was spied on, I was doing my best and nothing prepared me to deal with a foreign agent".
It's refreshing to see words like "My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.".