If you are one of the most powerful man on earth you are going to be the target of all the secret services of all powerful countries. Period.

It is their job. You take decisions that are worth billions, you influence people that take decisions that are worth billions, and affect their countries.

They are going to study you for years. Your personality type and that of the people around you. Your weaknesses. Your problems and that of your family.

They will employ the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world to create the perfect Honey trap.

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

It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.

What a load of bollocks. You make it sound like Jensen was some kind of victim here and had no choice. Please let's not normalize moral failings and weaknesses (especially of powerful people).

A significant proportion of the people I know that won the startup lottery ended up losing the money when the girl they were into at high school flies themselves at them, has their kids, then goes back to the dude they were with before with the kids and child support, and this is relatively small fry and without any possible gov involvement.

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

> If you are one of the most powerful man on earth you

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.

The troubling part is the cover-up. Huang seems to have believed that if Republicans kept control of the Congress he wouldn’t have to come clean.

True, to some extent. But also, he should know and see it coming, and people in his entourage should also see it and be briefed/watched by services.

stop making excuses for these people.

Huh, makes you wonder why this isn't available overboard via expensive matchmaking. And if it is why doesn't he use it.

> It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.

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.

It's... really not that hard. All you have to do is be content with what you have, and not go lusting after new opportunities. Although granted, anyone who can pull that off probably isn't going to be a multibillionaire CEO, because that's the kind of personality selected against among CEOs.

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.

few of us can imagine the problems that come with being that type of leader/ceo. Knowing who trust and who is using you is a challenge

Sign me up!

Yet there are plenty of billionaires who do not, at least publicly, have tragic relationships. Steve Jobs? Warren Buffet? Gavin Newsom (for the past 20 years)?

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.

What if we maybe built legal and financial practices that prevented such a concentration of power and wealth that these honey pots would not be viable.

While the dynamic for the physical security of the rich and powerful has changed a bit due to drones, up until recently it was neigh impossible for the common person to threaten the physical security of someone like this, or for nation-states to do so without being noticed.

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

> They will employ the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world to create the perfect Honey trap.

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."

We’re all pretending that these people can’t afford NDAs, background checks or other people to manage these situations. What you’re saying is true and exactly the reason billionaires have an inner circle that manages all this. NFL players with a fraction of the money these people have manage that better. If you’re Jensen, there really ain’t that many excuses you can make.

I've been thinking about this issue a lot in terms of the influence on the US government. The NKVD then KGB coined the term "kompromat" for compromising material.

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...

But you know, she doesn’t really want you, unless you let yourself.

I don't know... I mean I'm just a CEO of a one man company and even I get suspicious when a woman is too nice to me. Surely, with more responsibility you should get even more paranoid

All that effort only to discover Jensen likes what every man likes.

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

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.

So you keep it in your pants. I mean, come on.

> 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.

> They are going to study you for years.

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'.

All of this makes sense assuming you aren't married. An affair is still an affair. If it was just about finding the perfect partner, he should have gotten a divorce first.

Sure, so its a given that they will fall to such tricks? If that's the case, may be don't develop a one person cult of personality and power. They're paid enough to look out for precisely for these things so that they don't make mistakes that'll ruin 100s of people's lives, yet they don't have such concerns when making stupid decisions. He is not designing chips, burning midnight oil on trying to figure out how to dissipate enough heat to get best performance from the chip, the kind of problems that actually are consequential. He is the pizza guy, yet cant do that well.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a -single- man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a -wife- bit on the side"

It would be nice if "the most powerful man on earth" actually had a brain and used it too?

But somehow, it is his company that he brought to that point, and also why would he care for being spied on by a country or another? There is nothing that said that he had to swear fidelity to the US.

> If you are one of the most powerful man on earth

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

The feds tried to disrupt the civil rights movement by faking a bunch of correspondence that made it seem like they were all cheating on their wives. They thought it would work because it worked on the commies in the 30s-50s. It didn't really do shit because their wives all already assumed they were from the get go.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

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

“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...

Makes you wonder if this is why Elon just doesn’t stay attached to one person.

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…

Or the woman was in fact not a spy and that's the story to get this sympathetic reaction.

we will never know

I doubt this was even that sophisticated. These types of people live on deception and extracting benefits for themselves. Pretty woman walks up of course it's theirs for the taking. My God hasn't musk been paying women to birth his children? These people are more or less ill. That's why they are CEOs at high power companies.