He's a victim, he apologizes well, he's working with the board on this...

Is HN just this millionare-friendly? astroturfed?

Not that I expect a metaphorical lynching, but it's certainly a take when the news is "one of the most important roles in the US is potentially losing national secrets by absurd oversight".

Responsibility implies consequences and as far as I can tell there are none so far, other than minor embarrassment.

Look, Jensen got whatever he wanted, China got the GPUs it wanted - China also turned Jensen into a staunch advocate for selling GPUs to China - everything's good - everyone wins.

"Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang challenged US export controls on advanced semiconductors, arguing that continued technology collaboration and access to the Chinese market are ultimately in America’s best interest. Speaking to reporters in South Korea this week, Huang described China as a “singular, vital, important, dynamic market, and nobody can replace that.” He asserted he would continue campaigning for full access to this market, stating he is "optimistic" that China will remain a key consumer of US chips."

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/nvi...

He's not a traitor or a spy he's a capitalist wanting to make money - that's the American way.

Also note that his wife and children are victims of his unfaithful actions. He is the only one responsible for that - he just said so himself.

What ? If she was in his house and was a real Chinese spy who knows what data she extracted. Sorry, that's news worthy.

This is an interesting take. I'm not sure I agree with it. I understand the principal: that she might have been being dishonest towards him, so he's a victim of lies.

Anyone who's worked in and around any high value, high risk or regulated areas has done the training courses on these sorts of risks though: specifically, people will lie to you to get information out of you.

Sure, on a personal level, consider him a victim if you want. On a professional level, this is him ignoring training, at great risk to the business.

Jensen also probably got too close to Trump and now the China hawks and maybe the dems are out to make an example.

Also Jensen does not have golden shares/full control unlike Musk, Zuckerberg etc. so he can be actually be unseated.

There's $50B at stake, so there's a huge incentive for foundations to ruin what's left of the family.

I don't know; at some point “don't put your dick in people from the Other Side” should be a pretty well known rule if you're someone important. She didn't even hide her nationality.

A world in which Kings rule, and peasants defend their depraved way of life.

I really hope that you are a bot from a PR firm, because it his hard to image people being so servile to power.

Best bet: not too good right now.

He's both a victim and a perpetrator.

And while I usually wouldn't care if he cheated on his wife, because that's between him and his family, in this case, he was also incredibly dumb. This guy could have cheated on his wife with any number of women, but he chose to do it with a Chinese spy. I think having somebody who makes incredibly dumb decisions be the CEO of the world's most important company is definitely newsworthy.

"You're not talking to someone who woke up a loser, but you are talking to someone who woke up next to a Chinese spy."

Of course, the spy aspect could be relevant from a professional perspective (depending on what actions he took or what he knew), but I'm guessing you're talking about him having an affair.

HN cares about money and tech. Don’t take morality or life advice from here.

> It’s the well-documented bias in which people systematically overestimate how morally they would behave compared with others—especially in high-pressure or ambiguous situations—while underestimating the situational forces that actually shape behavior.

I'm sure we're all paragons of moral virtue here but the reality is that unless you've been personally targeted by a nation state and successfully resisted, then you're really just fantasizing. Yeah bro, I'm sure you would have effortlessly resisted the Chinese sex trap, right after you benched 1000, got that hole in one and beat Hamilton at qualifying. You're just that good.

God god, no.

There's very little he could ever accidentally tell someone that would matter that much.

Other than handing over very detailed schemas etc, there's almost nothing important he could tell them.

Maybe some future ideas and plans, maybe some government things about the Administration, it's small peanuts.

Nvidia is an operational success, their IP is embedded within deep layers of know how and expertise.

He's the 'father' of that org, he set the tone, they like him there.

Nvidia would risk being an Intel without him.

He's the visionary behind what they do and the person who influences industries around him to make it real.

The bigger threat is Jensen selling all his stocks at peak (if he was fired). Then, this dude with $100B in the bank could've easily started an NVIIA competitor. He has every component needed for a success. This is why NVIDIA's board would never let this guy go.

He's been consistently showing up and proving himself over decades to be core to Nvidia's success - core as in leadership. I would look to sell my Nvidia shares without knowing him being at the helm.

For over a decade CUDA was nothing but a money and silicon wasting function that brought in very little extra revenue for the amount of company resources it uses. And arguably it started even before CUDA with Cg. And I will say another unpopular thing, they are in hardware business, apart from the past 1 - 2 years which they are enjoying massive success, for most of the past 30 years hardware business are 10x tougher than Software side.

Most CEO would have given up. Paul Graham invented the term to describe it, Founder Mode.

And for another note about comments elsewhere in the thread that Open AI is what brought up the current AI craze. Nvidia was already selling to OpenAI via introduction of Elon Musk in 2016.

I seriously doubt Nvidia would have been anywhere close to what they are today without Jensen's Leadership.

The one big thing I will given Huang credit for is not going all-in on blockchain and recognizing it as a bubble. NVidia never really pivoted from their core business/customers to support crypto miners, unlike what they're doing with AI.

Consider that the leak destroys the legitimacy of Huang's lobbying efforts efforts against tighter chips controls to China. In parallel the NYT released yesterday their investigation into commerce dept approvals of h200 chips to Chinese entities that the NYT claims are ghost offices linked to Chinese military contractors [1]. Also consider that these events put Nvidia under long term congressional security oversight with an installed watch dog. Nvidia is losing it's autonomy to cut international deals. Seems like the CIA/permeant state is getting nervous about China again.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/07/business/economy/nvidia-c...

(May 2026) https://culperresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Culper...

Alternatively this could be a Chinese play designed to sow dissent and disruption in the USA post the mid-terms.

Or, it could just be a rather trivial story about an over confident and all to human titan of industry making the kind of mess in his personal life that a lot of people end up making - watch any TV mini series for example after example.

This "what distraction are they trying to make" line is ridiculous conspiracism. It's completely obvious that someone leaked it to the NY Times because they are alarmed that the admin is doing nothing about what is obviously a huge national security problem.

Neither the board nor the US government nor investors nor the average person gives a shit about a CEO having an affair as long it doesn't compromise his ability to do his job well.

So male infidelity is not a big deal?

- Is this person susceptible to blackmail from the secrets they're keeping?

- Has this person performed a notable breach of trust?

- Has this person displayed a notable lack of judgement?

Even when the alleged misconduct is private, #1 is of particular concern. Airing it out is an obvious way to lessen that specific concern. The allegations here raise the other concerns too, however.

It's because the woman is a member of the PRC, and it's being made into a national security issue, regardless of whether he announces it or not.

The strategic thing is for him to come forward first.

However if he cheated with a chinese spy then he was targeted by China and that raises this to a national security risk.

It also sounds like it was known something was going on with foreign agencies and Jensen, do this puts it out in the open and clears the air.

Lastly, if anyone was trying to use the affair as leverage over him, the best way to break the leverage is to just come out and spill the tea yourself (so to speak)

Because it's already public. This is called "getting ahead of/seizing the narrative"

Not long I suspect, we don't expect much from tech CEOs. Nobody even remembers when Bezos cheated on his wife.

Unless the CEO happens to be the CEO of what is considered one of the most important company for national security and future, and his private life involves somebody who appears to be a spy for the biggest competitor for world hegemony. Then it's kind of big deal for everybody.

Bedding an adversarial entity's agent in a regulated field is a serious matter (for the company) with potentially serious consequences. It can lead to executive decapitation, it can even lead to / criminal investigations if the operative bypassed export controls using executive proximity.. the fallout can be great and widespread.

It can also be a nothingburger and an amusing page six divorce story in the end where we all read how rich cry as well. Time will tell. What's telling of where this might lead and how serious it is, is that it was US federal government that warned about this.

That's the real reason that this affair is a problem. It made him blackmailable.

Jensen is as powerful as any politician, if not more so. Same with Elon, etc.

If you don't want that then get rid of the ability for such individuals to amass so much power.

They tried every persona: Sexy, shy, homely. Same sex. Confrontational. Open, but scared her overseers would punish her. Still get a ping now and then.

Detection and prevention is key

https://foxandlion.pub/analysis/traitors-among-us-who-is-vul...

But I'm not sure how hard it would be to resist a honey trap.

I mean a state sponsored enterprise to get you to have sex with someone (or one of a group of people).

Getting him to have sex with her was literally this woman's day job and she was probably told it was a matter of national security.

It is quite absurd once you think about it.

I think it says a lot about what wealth does to you. A lot of people dream of wealth but I suspect many would be less than thrilled by the reality. It must be incredibly isolating. You constantly have to fend off people who are trying to use you. It must make it harder to trust anyone. A lot of ordinary life experiences are now barred to you.

For example, a lot of executives in these trillion dollar companies are forbidden from flying commercial for security reasons. Nobody would think about missing the airport and everything that entails. In most places it's an objectively awful experience but it's still a shared experience. Going to a private FBO by helicopter to take a Global 7500 direct to your destination is something only a tiny portion of the population can relate to.

So I think this kind of isolation makes such wealthy and/or powerful people more susceptible to this kind of thing because, in a way, they're starved from a lot of human interaction and experiences in a way most of us can't understand (and wouldn't want).

What really is the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth? You kind of have to have sociopathic tendencies (IMHO) because such wealth simply cannot exist without the impoverishment of millions of people. And for you it's kind of a golden prison.

[1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...

His likely ex-wife is about to be very rich tho.

I think what you've just described is "post nut clarity". I'm sure he knew what he did immediately, but the gravity of the consequences might've taken a bit to catch up to him.

People continue to under-value the spank bank. SMH.

It's not about religion, it's about trust and keeping promises. Like it or not, the default understanding in a marital relationship in many places in the world is monogamy. Some people, of course, engage in other practices, after an explicit discussion, and agreement and understanding. But presumably Huang's wife believed she and her husband were in a monogamous relationship, and trusted Huang to keep it that way. That's the issue; religion is irrelevant. (And different religious practices have different things to say about monogamy vs. polyamory, and atheists decide for themselves if they want to be monogamists or polyamorists; religion need not be involved at all.)

But regardless, I think his infidelity is not his employees' business; IMO it's weird to bring it up in this way. The bit about his affair partner possibly(?) being a spy is the thing that actually matters to NVIDIA and NVIDIA employees, but he only dedicates a few sentences to it.

The moralists also conveniently ignore that the vast majority of men is not very attractive. Cheating would take a lot of effort for them. In contrast, I knew some men who were attractive enough they had to fend off women almost daily. For them, not cheating takes a lot of effort. The bottomline is that most of the 5/10 guys who say "I would never cheat" would do so the very next day if a 9/10 woman suddenly got interested in them, which is exactly what happened in this case.

That's Japan. Don't make it sound like other parts of Asia are like this.

It's not a nothing burger but if it results in Jensen leaving Nvidia that would be a travesty IMO. We shouldn't push people out for making a mistake, especially one that should in any other circumstance not become public.

I think everyone with a brain did.

It was done intentionally to send a message to him and to wrap him over the knuckles.

Great people all round.

Consider the timing of the reporting - the first report from NYT comes out on Nov 6th - just enough time after mid-terms. Consider that follow up reporting clearly identifying Rubio as the author of the in-administration warning memo.

JD and Rubio (and who knows who else) are clearly trying to find ways to distance themselves from Trump without being completely cut to pieces, now that it's completely clear that the Trump brand is toxic.

It's part of normal business operations not some secret illegal shady kick backs operation within some kind of spy movie.

There's no need to secretly infiltrate a company when the company is working happily with you. People underestimate how close big business and 3 letter agencies actually are in many cases.

And that's not even talking about the less clandestine methods of just ringing their General Counsel and saying "Hey buddy we're the US government we need X Y Z".

i mean it is political in the sense that he slept with a chinese spy while also doing business deals with chinese companies.

but if you're suggesting this has something to do with the midterms, what would even be the gain

Would that count?

This letter is just part of the ceremony of events that is expected to happen afterwards.

She was also a Chinese spy.

> 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.

He admitted to the affair. No one has admitted to being a pedo. Much less forgivable.

> Andy Byron, the chief executive of New York-based tech company Astronomer, has resigned from his role after he was spotted embracing an employee at a Coldplay concert, according to a statement shared with CNN on Saturday.

Also from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/coldplay-kiss-c...

> Former McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook was fired in November 2019 after it was discovered he had engaged in a consensual relationship with a subordinate, breaching company rules that prohibit managers from dating employees they oversee. Easterbrook admitted the relationship, calling it a mistake, and stepped down. Initially, he left with a $40 million severance package.

What other consequences do you want? Jail? Infidelity is not a crime in the US.

Secondly if he's willing to lie to his wife and family he's obviously willing to lie to anyone for much less. It tells you something about the character of a person, how can anyone trust a cheater?

https://foxandlion.pub/analysis/traitors-among-us-who-is-vul...

> A balanced, patient, and motivated Machiavellian can wait while they cultivate what they need. They may take 10 years to act; they may well wait 20 years. When the strike comes, it will come out of the blue – and their tracks will already be covered.

I don't mean to belittle the letter, but Jensen's PR firm undoubtedly helped with the letter and undoubtedly had advisors who specialize in this.

Even if he didn’t know she was an intelligence asset, it’s hard to believe he didn’t at least suspect Megaspeed was a conduit to China. If you read the press reports, there were a ton of red flags.

Nvidia has also said he’ll stay on as CEO while the investigation runs. I can’t think of many CEOs who would survive this, let alone without taking any time off.

china has to resort to honeypots because they have few legitimate political tools to influence decisions of an american company. not so for Trump et al - there are much more effective ways for the president to coerce a ceo than telling the world they let a potentially compromised individual help make policy decisions lol

ugh...

Common sense and judgement fluctuate. Humans, you know, we're prone to entirely unpredictable moments of emotional weakness. Maybe we're hungry, maybe we're tired, maybe the missus or the kids have been sick, maybe we just don't want to face leg-day after 12-hours of strategising. As per the attack and defense argument: A defender only needs to be wrong once.

As if it were that easy? Being that rich and influental means someone out there will attempt (and succeed) to game you.

*Crash in progress.

In that case, you also have access to practically every resource on the planet to run a background check on the person of your interest. He didn't do it; that implies a lack of judgment, so he fell short of what's expected of him.

Jensen fell for convenience, or was blindsided by some trait of her personality. Otherwise, executives use escort services all the time.

This is really not true. Spies are just people, there aren't that many of them, and they don't come "customized". The overlap of effective spies and "the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world" is very close to zero.

What you are describing is conspiracy-theory thinking or the kind of stuff you see in James Bond movies. Not real life.

Obviously spies exist, like here, but she's just... a normal woman who has a job as a spy and tried to seduce him and succeeded. He may have turned down five others who failed miserably in their attempts.

And sure they try to put together a psychological profile of the person, but that's also not really rocket science, and it's going to be pretty basic stuff. "Your weaknesses" is not going to be that exciting. Maybe he's really into expensive wines. It's not like he has a secret gambling addiction.

So let's just keep this reality-based and not fantasy-based.

That meant that the only way to attack these people was a soft attack in the form of social interactions or social media and as such it's always struck me as extremely foolish for these kinds of people to let themselves be preyed upon in this manner.

Like they have teams of people who keep them physically safe, but not mentally safe, so in the age of social media a motivated attacker can, with enough cleverness[0][1] directly reach the mind of someone who otherwise couldn't be reached.

Why does that happen?

I think it's not so much because they're juicy targets that entities with unlimited resources can meticulously target like you describe but because people like Jensen Huang or Bill Gates are very technically competent they probably lack the social skills so they're too often the Michael Scott to the Todd Packer in situations like this[2] and when a hint of opportunity to be sexually promiscuous is presented to them they seize on it without thinking of the consequences.

Think of the married blue collar dudes who pick up bored divorcees at some dive sports bar after watching the big game and then drive home drunk, juggling multiple mistresses and a family life with relative ease for years.

A manager like Jensen Huang may be able to handle multiple business units but he can't manage a single mistress handling his unit because that just isn't his skill set.

[0] https://gwern.net/doc/www/web.archive.org/5e00c6993450adc597...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2010/06/08/127564512/for-the-love-of-goo...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Ci_oopVTk

I heard stories of the CIA doing a class with new State Department employees, or ones at a certain level, that among other things involved the instructor "rating" everyone ("You're a 4, you're a 6, you're a 5..."), with the point being "If a woman comes up to you at a bar, and she's a 9 or a 10, she's either an escort or a foreign asset, and your safest assumption is the latter."

But if you're married, with kids, and you're willing to throw that away to chase someone else, I'd argue you have a serious personality flaw going on there.

Look at recent and current tech CEOs. Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg sure…but Amodie, Altman, Cook, Nadella seem to be in stable relationships, and stable in general.

No, not all men think with their dicks. Huang’s martial fidelity is below average.

If you join a 3 letter agency or the military or probably many government departments and contractors, you'll have to go through a background check. The more sensitive the information you have access to, the more extensive the background check. The particular employer won't necessarily care what skeletons are in your closet. They're concerned with your ability to be blackmailed or bribed. So if you get in a lot of debt, you can lose your security clearance. Some of the most successful spies have recruited with a relative pittance of money in comparison to the damage they can do.

But there's one exception to all this: if you an elected politician, you don't need to go through any of this. The FBI can't disqualify you. Even if you're in the executive, the FBI might disqualify you but the president can overrule that. Case in point: Jared Kushner [1].

There are a bunch of politicians and senior staff who are DL (ie secretly gay). There's a running joke that Grindr has an outage every time the RNC Convention is in town (eg [2]). The ownership of and access to Grindr's platform and data is actually a national security concern.

And then there's the Jeffrey Epstein of it all.

So while things like honeypots have existed and will continue to exist (as might be the case here with NVidia), you might find yourself asking "how do these powerful people fall for this stuff or end up having dirt?" whereas I think you should be asking "do these people become powerful and/or rich because they're compromised or can be compromised?"

Someone who is compromised is on the team and won't rat you out. It's mutually assured destruction.

I'm really not sure what we do about it. Ideally politicians should be able to pass security clearance background checks but that's a moral hazard as the agency, whose head is a political appointee, could effectively veto certain candidates. This has the hallmarks of the J. Edgar Hoover years.

A system intentionally filtering out people with integrity who aren't compromised is a sobering and depressing thought.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/officials-reje...

[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/grindr-app-crashes-milwaukee-rnc-19...

The people in here acting like they would be immune to all this are kidding themselves.

I think most normal people have tried Doritos at some point, which are the flavour-equivalent of what you’re describing here. It’s food designed to satisfy your human needs and desires.

> Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.

She’s a woman, not a sweet from Willy Wonka’s factory. If you find yourself thinking “wow, she couldn’t be more perfect, it’s like she’s too good to be true” then perhaps as the CEO of a billion dollar company with national security concerns you should consider hey, maybe she is too good to be true? Maybe look into that?

All else aside, if you find yourself being tempted, you make sure she isn’t around you. The CEO compensation more than makes up for your sacrifice.

Lol. Jensen Hueng's case was likely figured out in a smoke filled room somewhere in the bowels of some intelligence agency in China, agents passing around pictures of Jensen while puffing on cigarettes. One them tosses a picture on the table and just says 'he always wears that leather jacket'. The others nod, and one them sucks in the air while shaking the ashes into an ashtray, 'We have a few candidates in mind'.

So just hire women? Sounds like an incredibly simple solution to being security compromised.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

“It takes the machinations of an intelligence apparatus more powerful than you can comprehend to make a rich guy cheat on his wife” lmaooo

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/49712639/49ers-owner-jed...

But another reason why as someone of such a high caliber you should never be alone with other women. Always have a bodyguard or something, surely you can afford someone…

we will never know

You mean, employing male prostitutes is somehow any better?

is it pre consumer level trading, with institutional trading happening on different time windows?

i guess we'll actually find out if he gave away useful nvidia secrets in years from now, but by then the tech might not matter all that much to Nvidia.

he was cheating on his wife before now, and Nvidia was doing just fine

The US National Security blob certainly cares, but not because of the infidelity.