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So the big story is Jensen Huang had an affair with now a second woman
source: https://thehill.com/business/6214833-nvidia-ceo-jesen-huang-affair/
It’s like, what is wrong with this guy? I predict NVDA stock will recover, and this does not affect AI overall or the upcoming Anthropic listing. What began as a personal matter has now consumed the news cycle, but does not affect much outside of Nvidia, IMHO.
This ties in with the ambiguities of morality. I predict Mr. Huang will recover. He will remain in good standing with the public and the media despite this. Yet had he been revealed as using a sock puppet for posting "badthink" online, well, this would be much worse in the eyes of the public. Indeed, Patrick Stewart had 2 affairs and it amounted to a footnote in media coverage of his passing. All he has to do is just lay low and he will recover, unlike, say, Louis C.K., whose career was destroyed (obviously consent is an issue here, too, and an affair presumes consent, whereas for #MeToo this was a murkier area).
The second part is about the smuggling and espionage aspect, where the implications, if true, would be much worse, an actual criminal offense, than merely a consenting couple having sex (albeit involving the CEO of the largest publicly traded company in the world), yet the lax reaction by Washington is weird.
It's being treated with the same seriousness as smoking pot behind McDonald's--technically a crime in some jurisdictions, but whatever. Espionage and smuggling were always considered grave offenses (e.g. in the context of the Cold War or Prohibition) and now they are secondary, inconsequential to the affair. Morality is weird...what people take offense to, how mores change (like anti-racism being much more important than faithfulness). I think it's implicitly understood Nvidia is a huge success and central to the US tech boom. Actually doing something would have almost all downside.
The second affair doesn't add any new information. We already knew (from the first affair) what kind of person he is, and that he had compromised the foreign policy of the United States. I guess now we find out that he also compromised his own executive team? Who cares?
It does bring up an interesting corporate governance question: How does the duty to ensure that the company operates legally weigh against the duty to protect shareholder financial interests? Like, if they decide that no one will prosecute over the export control violation, do they have to keep letting Jensen sell chips to China? Do they have to keep letting him bang executives? Delaware corporate law wasn't designed to handle decisions worth trillions of dollars.
The new information is it increases the odds of him leaving. Indeed, the stock fell a lot in afterhours on the news.
CEOs who deliver results and are not breaking the law should be allowed to do what they want, so no disagreement here. I think he doesn’t want to stay. He’s the opposite of Elon Musk: he’s not going to put up a fight here. He sees his legacy of turning Nvidia around from a gaming company to the leading semiconductor company. He can retire with that intact.
I mean yes, but why? Are people treating it as evidence that the c-suite is stacked with talentless hacks with no skills other than being unusually attractive for 40+? Somehow I don't think that's what is driving the pressure.
As I understand it it increases the odds of him leaving because it's a more normal type of corporate offense that there are better-established scripts for the board to speedily fire him over. They already wanted to get rid of him, but the standards and norms in their milieu make it easier to get rid of him for sexual impropriety within the company than breaking natsec outside it.
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