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Notes -
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang caught having affair with Chinese spy.
There was some discussion of this in the Sunday thread, but I think this is a big deal worth a top-level post.
The woman, Alice Huang (no relation), is an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed. The official story from Nvidia, up until last week, was that this was a totally normal nothing-to-see-here business relationship with a client. Jensen himself now seems to admit this is not the case.
Jensen has been strongly opposed to chip export controls for some time. No doubt prosaic conserns about margins and market expansion were a major factor, but now we have to wonder how much corruption, blackmail, and CCP blackops might have played a role. There have been rumors of... irregularities regarding some Nvidia chip shipments to Asia. There is new reporting today that Nvidia itself intervened to squash a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed.
I feel like the board has to fire him after this, but on the other hand it seems almost unthinkable. Imagine Apple firing Steve Jobs. There might be pressure from investors to keep him on. It will be interesting to see how the National Security apparatus responds to such a massive persistant vulnerability if it comes to that.
It's been quite fascinating (and frankly disappointing if unsurprising) to me to see the people wax poetic about how Western values are dying and how America needs to be first and how China needs to be stopped rush to Jensen's defense and go on about how it was a "mistake" (it went on for over a year if the Trump admin is to be believed) and how it isn't a big deal or how he had "good intentions" or how it is actually somehow actually justified.
All of the VC people (Shaun McGuire, etc), stock scammers (Bill Ackman, etc), GPU sellers (Elon Musk, etc), podcast talking heads (Gavin Baker, etc), just to name a few. It wasn't enough for them to lightly "condemn" it or even just say nothing at all. They had to be part of the Jensen Defense Force.
I'm not surprised that when they said "America first" they really meant "my stock portfolio first" but it is another in a long list of revealing actions by these guys.
Even if they are Christian infidelity to his wife doesn't have any bearing on him leading Nvidia, or does it? If he knew she was a Chinese spy or somehow extortet/compromised him is the important thing.
Infidelity obvious has bearing on his moral character, which impacts everything he does. It's insane to pretend otherwise.
If I'm scouting a CEO, I probably want him to have a mistress. Lacking a mistress probably indicates a lack of ambition, or a skill issue, both of which are fatal in a leader. Like one of the old school scouts in Moneyball moving a guy down a draft board because of a fat girlfriend, but I think the analytics back me up on this.
If you look at the performance of tech stocks after major infidelity events, Gates gets got and MSFT goes up, Bezos gets buffaloed into ending his marriage by an all-time gold-digger and AMZN goes up, Musk's companies continue to roll despite whatever it is he's doing with his complete lack of moral fiber.
If you score American presidents by mistresses, infidelity is highly correlated with quality. The loyal presidents (Dubya, Obama, Ford) were mostly flops, the lotharios (Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Clinton) were much more effective. Presidents are a good proxy because if they did, we pretty much know about it. Similar results obtain for English kings, and biblical kings for that matter.
So it's not that it doesn't impact everything he does, it's that it's probably a positive indicator.
And hell, spy stuff aside, she's a perfectly appropriate gf for Jensen. She's age appropriate, she's intelligent, they have a lot in common. They look good together. She's not a floozy or a room temperature iq tramp. For one of the most powerful men in the world, a billionaire with the power to make or break countries and companies, this is a very reasonable degree of infidelity! He's worth $90bn and he has a peer girlfriend that he takes out for nice dinners. That's way above average degrees of monogamy from such a man, and even then it apparently took the full power of the CCP to get it done.
Wow this is crazy. Huh I hadn't actually thought of it like that. I suppose that makes sense yeah. I don't love it but I can't argue with the logic heh.
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