All of us are human, flawed in many ways and capable of both glorious and cruel acts. Jensen Huang is the CEO of Nvidia and is theoretically as human as the rest of us despite being worth around $150 billion. You could be forgiven for expecting someone like Jensen to be a little bit smarter than most of the rank and file, but apparently not.
For context: Nvidia is the world’s largest supplier of AI-specific processors and is a company now worth somewhere over $4 trillion. Pretty much every bit of large language model AI processing in the world goes through Nvidia chips at some point. They also make graphics processors (GPUs) for video games. Jensen Huang has led Nvidia as its co-founder since 1993, when the firm was only worth a few tens of millions. So it is reasonable to say that the entirety of Nvidia’s value accrued under Jensen Huang’s leadership.
Jensen has admitted to cheating on his wife of over forty years with a Chinese national by the name of Alice Huang (no relation). Alice was apparently passing information to the Chinese government regarding Nvidia’s internal secrets as shared with her by Jensen. There are some suggestions that Jensen Huang and Nvidia’s lobbyists push to open up advanced chip sales to China also looks a bit more suspicious in light of his affair.
But what bothers me most about this whole circumstance is the impact this will have on Jensen’s wife and their family. There has to be a tremendous amount of stress on those relationships right now, and I can’t imagine that the outcomes will be particularly good. I understand both of his adult children work in senior roles at Nvidia as well, which must be uncomfortable for them. All because a powerful man fell for the attentions of an attractive woman despite his supposed intelligence.
It is another one of those circumstances that simply emphasizes how people worth billions of dollars are truly not worth such vast sums based on any particular merit. A smart guy in the right place at the right time and with the right attitude: sure, worthy of success. But not thousands of times the success of an upper-middle class individual, and certainly not morally or ethically any better than the rest of us.
