We need to be careful not to equate the two affairs as being countable apples-to-apples. An affair with a customer executive that generates several billions dollars of revenue has a much different risk/reward profile for the board than an affair with a direct report employee within the company. The former also has much lower legal risk: bribery laws aren’t properly calibrated for this circumstance and sexual harassment laws are less applicable. As far as the board is concerned, I imagine they’re fine with him having an affair for every single $5B+ signature as long as he’s delivering the goods and doing so without getting caught so overtly that sales are impacted — thus the vote of confidence! — but that internal affair suggests bad judgment rather than greed-driven judgment, and exposes Nvidia to harassment discovery claims and/or exposes that he lied to the board about not having internal affairs, so he’s out.
When the affair with the customer executive involves deals that directly violate federal law? Don’t bet on it.