The downfall of Jensen Huang?

Jensen Huang is out at NVIDIA. That's kind of like if Steve Jobs had got the boot from Apple around the time of the iPads launch or something. When you were the guy, at the company, you really have to mess up to lose your job, and Jensen did. On Wednesday, we found out he was carrying on with a direct report at NVIDIA. She was married. He was married. Their poor spouses, et cetera. But much more importantly, he also had and lied about an affair with a woman the US government alleges was a Chinese spy. That is, the guy responsible for the most important chips we're staking our entire economy on. The chips open AI and then drop it in Google need. The chips we are very much not sharing with China. The chips that are going to solve all of our problems. The guy who makes those chips and hangs out with the president potentially having enough to bear with a spy from China, you can't make this stuff up and on today's link from box, we won't have to. 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Jensen Huang is probably the most important business leader in the world. I would say maybe not everyone would 100% agree that with that. Of course, AI companies like Google, OpenAI and Thropic have made a lot of money selling AI, but the profit of all of that goes straight back towards Nvidia, which makes the computer chips that run all these data centers that everyone is so concerned about. Over the last few years, they've gone from a pretty big and important company to being the biggest and maybe most important company. Jensen Huang founded the company back in 1993, and he's really the guy who has overseen and driven this transition for Nvidia. I'm fairly confident that AI will drive productivity, revenue growth, and therefore more hiring. Taking advantage of the AI boom to become this kingmaker that gets to decide who gets the AI, computer chips, necessary to build the next generation of AI. Everybody will have to use AI, because if you don't use AI, you're going to lose your job to somebody who does. And with that role, he's become very politically influential. He's one of the tech CEOs who's gotten very close to President Trump over the last couple of years. President Trump is our president. He's my president. And I believe that every American should want our president to succeed. He's spending a lot of time in the Oval Office. He's an incredibly good listener. He is also been able to push his own view of the world into the political sphere. And so that's why he's very important. We should stress that there is a straight-up cult around Jensen, right? People like fond over this man, they're like, "He wears leather jackets, oh my god, it's so cool." What's the story about your leather jacket? It feels like the new Steve Jobs. You can swap out the black turtleneck sweater for the patent leather jacket. Sotheby is just announcing results of its auction of Jensen Huang's leather jacket that ended up fetching $960,000. Exactly. You know, he has kind of like got some of that old-school Silicon Valley computer chip engineer energy. He's a little bit of like your friend's cool dad who knows how to hang and is super successful. He, you know, iconically, I suppose, wears a leather jacket and seems to pull it off, which I don't think any other middle-aged man can say or, you know, to be able to do something like that. And yeah, whenever he travels the world, people are asking for his autograph. And, you know, he's a very good communicator. I think that's where some of his political power comes from. And he has sort of leaned into this persona to sort of continue to boost himself as, you know, this very core figure in the AI revolution. Okay, that's the Jensen side of it. Let's talk about the Alice side of it. What do we know about this alleged Chinese spy? We know some, but we don't actually know a lot, which, you know, some national security experts have been commenting to me and my colleagues, you know, may suggest that there is some intrusion to the fact that she's a spy, Alice Wong is a Chinese citizen. She initially became connected with Jensen a couple years ago. She was an executive at a company called Megaspeed and so Megaspeed builds data centers and then sells access to those data centers to AI companies. They're based in Singapore and they became a huge customer of Nvidia. They bought many billions of dollars worth of computerships. And so, Dyson Wong became, you know, connected with Alice Wong through that sort of customer relationship. And in terms of what we know about Alice Wong, her social media profiles have been scrubbed, but from what we know, she was a journalist earlier in her career. Then she worked in the banking sector for a while before winding up at this Megaspeed company and working in sort of the AI data center space as an executive. And we don't actually know specifically what her role was there, but a couple years ago, she started being photographed in groups of people at parties with Jensen Wong. Right now, we don't know where she is. No one's really been able to get in contact with her and so that's what we know about Alice Wong. Okay, what do we know about this affair? Like maybe when it started and how long it went on. So it's a little murky still. There are photographs of the two of them together in 2024. That's also roughly when Megaspeed began acquiring computerships from Nvidia. And you know, it's a little bit unclear exactly whether Nvidia has severed the relationship with the company. In 2025, there was some indication that the Commerce Department of the US was looking into Megaspeed as potentially a place where computerships were being bought and then transferred to Chinese companies in violation of US export controls. And so it's unclear if Nvidia actually stopped having a business relationship with Megaspeed at that point in time, or if there's some kind of relationship that's continued, Bloomberg reported recently that there were some documents suggesting that Nvidia had continued a business relationship with Megaspeed even after this news came out that the company may have been transferring some of its computer chips to China. And a lot of this news around this affair is breaking this week, but it seems like people have known that this was going on for much longer than that. Is that right? Yeah, it seems as if the relationship was sort of hidden in plain sight. Like I said, there are now photos that are turning up and photos that had been shown in previous reports over the last couple of years of the two together. And it's not like we have a photo of them making out or something like that. But it's going to restaurants and groups and standing together, sitting down next to each other. And the relationship, not necessarily the idea that it was a sexual relationship and intimate relationship, has been reported on. The New York Times reporting up to a year ago that the two were friends. There was another report from the New York Times in late October that the two were in a relationship and that the US government for about a year had known that she or had believed that she was in the leg of spy that that information came over to Donald Trump's desk. And that Donald Trump did not notify Nvidia or Jensen Huang that the person that he had been in a relationship with was a spy or was believed to be a spy by US intelligence services. Okay, so it remains to be seen what the government will or won't do about this whole affair. But Nvidia's board has taken action. Tell us what happened there. Yeah. So on Sunday, Jensen Huang admitted to this affair and it had kind of been in the news for a while. It had been reported that he had had a relationship with Alice Huang, the executive at this customer of NVIDIAs, who the US government believed was a spy, but it wasn't clear yet exactly what that relationship was, and the company had said very clearly and gents along himself had said in public on the record to reporters that the relationship was completely normal, it was not unusual. And then he changed his story on Sunday, he said I'd actually had an affair, he apologized to his wife to the company, the board said that they were going to investigate. And that sort of set off several days of this firestorm of some people saying how can someone admit to having an affair with an alleged spy and maintain their job. And a lot of people in the tech world saying the complete opposite, saying we cannot lose this guy. Jensen Huang is extremely important to the entire tech industry. He makes sure that the computer chips get where they need to go. He's built NVIDIA up to be this Titan in AI. And he has all the relationships, he's the founder of the company, he knows everything about how this industry works, and there's this real palpable feeling among tech people that were he to go, it would have disastrous effects for the industry. And so now that he has gone, he has resigned, he is also off of the board of NVIDIA. So it's not as if he's just going to sort of be behind the scenes, continue to do things, but maybe not the public figure anymore. He is out of the company, I think it's now we're going to see, okay, does this actually trigger the popping of the AI bubble or does this lead to some major change that causes serious problems for other AI companies? Or do we all just sort of move on, someone else starts running NVIDIA, they keep making these computer chips, maybe over time there's some kind of an impact, but for now we're sort of waiting to see what's going to happen. He's the only person I can name at NVIDIA, who replaces him? Yeah, so the CFO call at Cress is going to be the interim CEO, and she's been in the company for a long time, she's very well respected, and she has been on the conference call. So I think people who are paying a lot of attention to NVIDIA probably know of her, and then the company will do a search for a new CEO, all sorts of names are being floated, people who are saying Tim Cook could come out of retirement in the form of CEO of Apple, and run a video. Now that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who has done a fantastic job, has resigned, there was only one man to take his place. Tim Cook of Apple, a legend replaces a legend. President Donald J. Trump, I don't know if anyone has actually asked him that, but yeah, I mean, it does leave this company in a bit of a lot of time. Are there only like five guys in Silicon Valley? Yeah, I mean, that's the five guys certainly think so. Should we be concerned that our other tech leaders are going to be duped like this, be they, I don't know, at Google, or open AI, or anthropic? Yeah, I mean, it's a huge joke in San Francisco that people are always talking about attractive women coming up to you and asking for secrets about the company you work at. Like it's a joke because it happens all the time? I mean, you know, it happens, but it is a big topic of conversation, and I think that there is a lot of pressure on the companies that are involved in AI to do more when it comes to security, and I think this incident will obviously just increase that pressure. So, we're going to investigate this guy, right? We're going to ask Garrett in a minute on today's play. 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With JIRA, learn more at JIRA.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. Support for this show comes from What Not. Have a side hustle you're ready to launch, but no platform to launch it on? Or maybe you're already selling your items, but you're feeling bogged down by expensive storefront rent and high market place fees. You want a cash in, or a pair down, get started with What Not. What Not is the leading live shopping platform for buyers and sellers of just about everything. Every minute, thousands of items will sell on What Not, from clothing and vintage collectibles to baked goods and electronics. With just products in a phone, anyone can start selling. At any time, for free. What Not handles the full transaction, sellers simply print a shipping label and hit send. I tried What Not, and I had a really fun experience, buying on a couple different sellers' pages, interacting with them, talking with them. I picked up a really beautiful vintage wool coat that, on live, the seller measured for me and confirmed the exact dimensions and sizes, so I knew it would be a great fit for fall. So if you've got a business idea you've been sitting on, or just a passion project in a phone, search What Not. That's W-H-A-T and OT in the App Store. Download and start selling right away. Garrett, you've kind of suggested what NVIDIA's importance to the world is. It's been called the central bank of AI, no big deal. Which is so important that we figure out what he may have disclosed to this alleged spy. However, there's a lot of confusion right now about what the president's going to do about this, about how long he's known about this, and what he potentially hasn't done about this the entire time. How long has the president known about this as far as we know? As far as we know, the president has known about the fact that Jensen Huang was in a relationship with someone that the US government thought was a spy for about a year, right? So this circulated within the administration and the decision was made not to tell Jensen. So that doesn't necessarily mean that it was automatically some kind of corrupt decision of President Trump protecting Jensen Huang. There's all sorts of reasons why you might not want to tell someone they're being spied on. The number one being they might blow up the operation. Maybe you want to learn more. Maybe you suspect that the person themselves knows that they're being spied on and is willingly sharing information and you need some more time to gather that. And so it's unclear why the US government specifically chose not to pull in Jensen Huang. And it's also a little bit unclear whether he knows he was being spied on, whether maybe he was told through some kind of back channel. He has said that he did not know that she was a spy and he is admitting to the affair, to the infidelity. He's admitting to essentially breaking and videos code of conduct by sleeping with one of his customers, but he is not admitting at all to knowing that she was a spy and definitely not admitting to sharing any information willfully. It feels like this is the kind of thing that the government would investigate. There's been reporting that the Commerce Department was involved with some kind of investigation, but that investigation came to an end and no one really knows why. So the context here is that the United States and China are in an AI race. And going back to the first Trump administration, there's been pretty aggressive export control saying we don't want China to get our tech so that they can develop AI. And the Biden administration continued that he increased the export controls on China. China was complaining very loudly about this. They said, we don't care. We want to win AI. Now we need to slow you guys down. When Trump came in, he actually lifted his foot off the gas a little bit. They didn't throw the gates open and say, you can have whatever you want. All American companies can sell whatever they want to China. But he said, you know, some AI chips that are less powerful than sort of the state of the art, we can send those to Chinese companies. And the other thing that national security experts have pointed out is that the Trump administration could theoretically have been doing more to stop the smuggling of computer chips to China. And that's where this story gets so important for national security. So mega speed is accused of essentially being a front for Chinese companies to get access to computer chips. Journalists have gone to mega speed's office in Singapore, where it's based. And there was only a couple people working there. It didn't really seem like there was a lot going on. The video has said all through this process over the last couple of years that no, we've checked it out. Megaspeed is a legitimate company and we're not breaking the law when it comes to this. And so there's a lot of questions and everyone is focused on finding out both journalists and I would say congressional Democrats when they come into office in the new year. Is there something more going on here? Is there something where the Chinese either, you know, convinced Jensen Wong to sell more chips to them or Jensen Wong himself who has been advocating for selling more chips to China? He, you know, essentially did this himself. He's been pressuring the president. He's been donating to him. He's been glad handing with the president and the president has been listening more to this corporate executive who is his friend and who donated him a bunch of money rather than listening to China Hawks or, you know, national security experts who say we should be limiting what China is able to access. And that's really where the locus of this investigation is going to be. It's not so much that Jensen Wong hadn't a fair. It's more the fact that he himself is someone who has said we need to sell more computer chips to China and he was involved with a Chinese, a ledger Chinese spy. And he's very close to the president and had influence on the president. You mentioned the Democrats have they said anything? Are they going to hold Jensen Wong to account? Are they going to call them in front of Congress for an investigation for a testimony? So going forward, I mean, there's two big things here, right? One of them is these investigations into Jensen Wong and this whole situation, right? So the company is likely going to continue to investigate maybe more information will come out there. Jensen Wong has been called to speak later this month in Congress. And congressional Democrats have also said that when they come into power in January, they will be asking him and then the second big thing that comes out of this is what does America do when it comes to China and AI? Now that one of the biggest advocates for being a bit more friendly towards China when it comes to selling them things that they need for AI is out of the room, right? And completely discredited, I think that the China hawks, those who say we need to crack down more aggressively, we need to limit China's access to AI computer chips, they are really coming into ascendancy here and they're in the Republican Party, they're Democratic Party, some of them, you know, people like Marco Rubio or even in the administration, right, in the cabinet. And so I think there's this real question of do we see a much stronger push to actually ramp up controls on China and how does Trump respond? There's all sorts of geopolitical things that could sort of spin out of this CEO affair. You know, I'm old enough to remember when like a board tried to get rid of Sam Altman and then he was just like back a week later. Was it a day later? I don't even know. But like Elon Musk is already offering Jensen Huang a job. Is there a fair chance that he just goes somewhere that's, I don't know, not that concerned about espionage affairs or, you know, getting with your VP of like health or whatever it is? Is he just going to go work for China? Yeah, I don't think he's going to go work for China. I mean, this is definitely the wildest corporate story since Sam Altman was fired as CEO and brought back three or four days later. It's a very different situation. That was a startup where you essentially have five or six investors who kind of get to make the call about who the CEO is and the employees at that company overwhelmingly want it to bring Sam Altman back. I think they wanted more continuity to company, but they also wanted to make sure that their company didn't go under and go bankrupt and get disappeared, which was sort of on the table at that point in time. In videos not going anywhere, obviously employees have lost a lot of money in terms of the stock value already coming down due to the situation. So employees are probably shocked. They're probably upset. Jensen Wong is broadly loved at NVIDIA. And so I can definitely see that employees would be doing petitions, asking for him to return. But this is a giant public company and the board makes a decision here and Jensen Wong was, you know, untruthful publicly. And I think that's also will make other public companies, you know, hesitant before rushing to bring him on as CEO. I'm sure that he could do something with Elon Musk, Elon Musk runs companies where, you know, that though being public, they seem to not follow the rules of the rest of the world. And so I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, I'm sure, you know, this is definitely not the end of Jensen Wong. He is obviously a titan in the industry. And I'm sure, you know, has a lot that he still wants to accomplish in his life. But yeah, I'm sure he will be maybe taking it quiet for at least a couple of weeks here. I mean, as we've talked about many times in the show, like half of our economy is staked on AI at this point. How concerned should we be that maybe one of the most important people in this industry, if not the most important person in this industry, was so easily duped in this honeypot situation? I saw him on the Ezra Klein show saying he doesn't know his home address. My first confession, I actually don't know my address and I don't really believe that to be true. It's completely true. Are these the people we should be trusting with the future of our society? I mean, it's a really good reminder that people are people and I do think that we like to lionize individuals and say, you know, they are the ones who are going to take us into the future and they are inventing the future and it's so incredible. And I do think Johnson Wallen gets a lot of credit for making sure that the companies kept up in AI, but at the end of the day, it was also a lucky break for them that the computer chips they were making just happen to work well for the math that is required by artificial intelligence. I do think that this speaks to something that a lot of people across the country and maybe even the world really feel. They do not want to sign off the future to half a dozen, a dozen dudes in Silicon Valley and their collaborators in the Trump White House. I think that is a view that a lot of people increasingly have. I think it was one of the factors in the midterm, maybe not the most important one, but people are concerned about concentration of power. They're concerned about AI and they don't see it as something that they themselves have control over. And I think that, again, there have been a lot of people who have come out to defend that Gents Wong and other CEOs and you can also make the comparison to Elon Musk. A lot of people really, really don't like him and a lot of people say, "Well, he's the reason we have rockets and electric cars," and so I think that this is just going to be another thing that adds skepticism to the idea that people like Gents Wong should be the ones making the final decision when it comes to artificial intelligence. Jared DaVink has had a busy week at The Washington Post, Ian King has also been busy at Bloomberg and we thank him for his time, Kelly Wesinger, Abishai Artsy, Amin Alsaadi, Gabriel Donatov, David Tattishore, and Bridger Dunnig had made the show today, along with me, I'm Sean Ramis Firm and this is today's splint. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project, one app for accounting another for inventory another for sales and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform, no messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at od.com/vox, that's od.o.com/vox. If you have a dog or cat, here's something you need to know. 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