And Jensen Huang may have had an improper relationship with at least one of them.
This feels so common that I would not even be quick to assume this is some sort of unknown betrayal to his family. One of the revelations about the Gates' lives was that Bill's promiscuity was apparently baked into their marriage agreement. At this level, your marriage might just be like a fixed mailing address for someone who has multiple homes.
Not to excuse this in any way. But these are the personalities of medieval lords and kings.
That’s what is going on.
Three different news orgs have reported the different affairs.
There isn't really even any point in this third story from the point of view of any "coordinated attack". He's already resigned.
There's probably some mildly interesting risk-balancing that happened behind the scenes because the intel community apparently knew mid-2026 and only spilled the beans now, but this is entirely of Jensen's own doing. He confessed.
He clearly is a top performer, though, managing four-plus relationships is a big job.
You understand that the AI labs in the US have taken a lot of money from thousands of investors. They don't benefit whatsoever in losing their investment to powerful open weight AI models that undermine closed weight ones especially chinese AI models that are rapidly catching up to them.
Nvidia was investing the open weight model ecosystem after realizing that the AI labs were moving off of their GPUs and using in-house chips. Jensen made sure that some Chinese AI labs were getting Nvidia GPUs in order to slow them down in relying or building their domestic ones.
Why would someone who invested a lot of money into any of the >1TN+ AI labs accept the risk of a chinese AI lab undermining them in their future IPO plans?
Thus far, there's no evidence Anthropic was knowingly violating sanctions on China, nor did they donate $25M to the Trump ballroom project while doing so.
(Plus presumably lying to the board about all this as it started to break.)
I'm fine with the idea of not selling chips to China, but this is being used as the catalyst to embed government-controlled kill switches in all advanced chips under the guise preventing chip smuggling to China. Read up on the Chip Security Act sometime. Most on HN would find such a policy on its face abhorent, but those like you will cheer it on now because of the partisan affiliation of specific actors in this story.
> As recently as the summer of last year, Singapore was officially one of Nvidia’s biggest markets, generating 22% of the chip maker’s revenue. Then, practically overnight, it disappeared from the company’s financial disclosures.
> The timeline indicates that Nvidia altered its methodology for reporting the geographic breakdown of its revenue shortly after placing Megaspeed International on an internal block list. It isn’t clear if the two are related, but the shift had the effect of removing visibility into Nvidia’s sales tied to Singapore. That is the home to Megaspeed, the cloud-computing company embroiled in a sex-and-espionage scandal that has engulfed Nvidia and its chief executive.
Sure, sure. Totally on the up-and-up.
They made out like bandits looking the other way.
Because, the powerful men can hide things for a long time, right up until they are no longer powerful.
That's like the entire point of #MeToo. Women are very upset with how much known misbehavior was going on that was kept hush because the men involved were in positions of power, and people preferred keeping that power structure stable over literally putting people doing sex crimes to justice.
What you are seeing is that when women feel like they will be listened to when they come out with a story like this, they will.
That, and there's also the simple effect of "A rich person is suddenly getting dragged through the media, perfect time to share your own gossip if you have some"
You can't blame this on a conspiracy when such simple incentives will cause the same phenomenon, and we have ample examples of exactly that happening.
Jensen was already being blackmailed by the Trump administration for the past year, which Trump all but admits openly here:
https://youtu.be/m2aC8lAOQbg?si=rqqSliGdLF4_Q663&t=1460
@24:20 if the link doesn't maintain the timestamp on your platform.
He doesn't name Jensen, but in hindsight with everything that has come out (including information on the timing of the Rubio memo) he is obviously talking about him and threatening him with jail to become a yes-man, and Jensen complied.
So IMO the real question isn't who was blackmailing Jensen (we know that), the question is: when he was already complying with blackmail for a year, who decided to burn him as an asset? Did it come from the people who were blackmailing him, or an external source? And who gains/loses by the loss of leverage they already had on him?
A lesson, apparently, for everyone asking "what the big deal is".
If ever you wanted to understand the meaning of the word "liability", here it is.
"Coordinated hits", as you put it, have as their prerequisite the creation of a "liability".
As the British police are fond of saying in cold case appeals: allegiances shift.
When a real scandal happens, everything we know or will ever know gets dropped all at once. Anything else and you know someone is pulling the strings. The question is who? My money is on the arrow of time.
A shell game. This is the distraction portion. Then comes the switch, the reveal and the swipe. Watch the market indicators. Nobody buying and selling shares in a trillion-dollar company cares one iota about extramarital affairs. Something else is happening.
Turns out that taxing their wealth is an intervention.
We need to do it if only for their own good to save them from the pressures that cause them to act increasingly antisocial.
Not all, very likely not even most, of course, do this, and it's not always truly mutual or healthy, but surprise surprise, not every couple wants strict monogamy. They just don't want society to judge them for it.
Many ultra high net worth people are married purely for financial reasons. The wife gets whatever she wants but now they don't need to worry about losing control of their company, etc.
This is to say nothing of the biological differences either. Menopause hits some women extremely hard and libido is completely gone. Rather than divorce or mutually suffer, they open up the marriage.
The only thing that would actually be bad is if his wife left him, which we don't know is happening yet. Some women accept the "risk" (to put it tastelessly) of marrying a hundred-billionaire, and stick it out.
I guess people often think the things they imagine making themselves happy would make someone else who has that happy, and I just don't think that's the case that often. I don't think money buys happiness after a point, a certain amount gets rid of a lot of discomfort and stress and brings relief and security, a bit more can buy some happiness, after that it's just number go up.
I say this as somebody who has never had any admiration for this guy (not because of a specific grievance, but because I don't follow tech leadership and am generally pessimistic about them).
That being said his early life is crazy enough that a movie could save him. Lazy thinking is fickle, after all.
He's also spent his life building a large, very influential company.
Could it be that those are the things he values?
Would be investigation ending in jail time.
Two affairs is a pattern.
Three affairs is just funny.
in all seriousness though, what is going on? everything here feels well timed and coordinated. were the powers that be just waiting for US midterms to pass? is there any relationship to the anthropic IPO? my tin foil hat is going to be working overtime these next few days
- The affair(s) were so badly hidden that they became obvious once one was exposed
- High profile CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world means a lot of eyes
- something akin to the Streisand effect keeps things in the news cycle
At that point it was probably just a matter of time until the rest came out.
It is kinda weird that Jensen decided to resign so quickly though. I would’ve expected a longer investigation period involving both the board and Congress.
- Hacker News
- Also Hacker News
> “I work every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t work. And if I’m not working, I’m thinking about work.”
> “I wake up at 5am, and the moment I wake up, I start working… I’m asleep probably by 9:30pm.
https://www.startuparchive.org/p/jensen-huang-there-s-hard-w...
A lot of people have said Nvidia are crazy to get rid of Huang, that he's a singular irreplaceable talent. What if, perhaps, he's not all he's made out to be?
We can find so much to criticize without stretching.