> Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)

Why? I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?

Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.

Maybe I don't understand enough the US culture.

Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.

> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?

This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.

Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.

And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.

One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.

In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.

If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.

Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.

It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.

But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.

> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.

> Why?

It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.

Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.

Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.

I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, they were well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, they agreed to them with their words, in fact. With us it was very simple, provided you're not a bigot, what you do on your own time is not our concern. However, what you do within our business is our concern. If you have intimate relations with anyone inside our company, even if consensual, you're no longer on our leadership team. Then, their actions did not match those words, when that is true, trust is gone. In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect their actions and words to match, and there are people who we know that isn't the case, and on some siding scale, we accept it (I didn't say acceptable). For example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). Groups typically have criteria/standards, if they change that, it may change the group to varying degrees, and that may be ok or not ok, depending on the group. I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?

*Everything on a spectrum.

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