>I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban

If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.

This is the timeline:

  Nov 8 :  Jensen issues apology.  NVIDIA allows him to use nvidia.com for this

  Nov 8  :  The Board of Directors publicly backs him up with a "vote of confidence" by stating:  *"no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that "The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team."*  -- from https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-nvidia-board-of-directors

  Nov 11 :  2nd affair gets exposed in the news

  Nov 11 evening :  emergency meeting of Board of Directors is called to fire Jensen Huang
  

Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.

Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.

> Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.

Exactly my read as well. "If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two."

> Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?)

That seems to be the most natural guess based on public information, but it's equally plausible that the board knows more than the public already, whether because they drove investigations, received disclosures from Huang, or received insider tips once the heat started rising. Trust aside, they may already might know worse and more materially or legally impactful things.

That's the kind of thing that a healthy class of professional journalists can help uncover and trace in a way that our post-journalism world is losing the opportunity to do. Even still, I wouldn't be surprised if further scandals for Huang or Nvidia started being reported in coming days and weeks. You might be right that it was just too many sex scandals and general loss of trust, but we just can't expect to know yet.

So to preface, I do not condone adultery / office affairs, etc.

But in the big picture, isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?

Indeed. The world operates on trust. Once trust breaks down, there's no choice but to deal with it directly if you want to remain effective. Unfortunately for Jensen Huang, that meant NVIDIA choosing to not have a leader they can no longer trust.

I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.

> what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair

This is the right line of thinking, but I don't think a second affair is enough. To me, it says there is more we don't know. Possibly a lot more, and a lot worse than a second affair. Apart from anything else, that is the only reason to act this fast. You don't fire a CEO like Jensen in 24 hours over an HR indiscretion.

So I think both you and the parent are correct, but its a combo: he didn't come fully clean, but there is a non-public part that probably looks a lot more like treason that the board knows and we don't.

It may be that, but I feel it's more about managing public perception. Potentially leaking secrets to a literal (stated) enemy of state feels much more catastrophic than infidelity (obviously his wife may not feel that way).

If someone has been: 1. Managing the company well 2. Attracting and retaining good talent 3. Making money for shareholders 4. Building strong company fundamentals

Then forcing a resignation over this seems... odd. I was under the impression that barring this infidelity, Huang was one of the more sane tech CEOs. I feel like I could to literally any other CEO (Zuckerburg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Gates, Jobs) that have done something equally bad or worse, and haven't had to resign.

It also gives them an affair not connected to export issues to hang it on.

> Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.

Yeah, this seems likely. It's also quite possible that he not only "didn't come totally clean" but outright lied to the board i.e. "this was a one-time thing"

> I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang

Hasn't Musk done this multiple times (including having children with subordinates)? He's still the CEO of a few companies. Bill Gates married one!

Boards don't care about this kind of thing unless they are already looking to get rid of someone. Worst case they pay the person off, and the cost will probably be less than a principal engineer earns in a year.

This doesn't pass the smell test. My guess is damning evidence was discovered which incriminates several high-level individuals at Nvidia with willfully bypassing the export ban. The second affair was leaked as a cover for why they were letting him go.

I'm sure it will all come out after a bit.

Reuters is now reporting a 3rd affair...

Well, turns out there really might be a 3rd affair based on how the internet is buzzing. Seems to have been found out a bit after the resignation: https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...

Just saw an "Exclusive" announcement that there is indeed a reported additional relationship with (as of now unnamed) female Nvidia employee.

Many times, a board will maintain that they have full confidence in a CEO right up until they actually fire him. Their non-binding vote of confidence means nothing. Just as one example:

- July 25: Amid the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP publicly stated that Hayward had the board's full support.

- July 27: BP formally announced that Hayward would step down as CEO, with Robert Dudley replacing him.

Similar situations with Bob Chapek, Travis Kalanick, the Boeing CEO in 2019 when all those crashes were happening, Carol Bartz, Bob Diamond...

As folks have said in other contexts recently - if you see two ants in your kitchen, the total number of ants in your kitchen is probably not 2.

Jensen's PR strategy with his open letter was to draw attention TO his affairs. It's a "limited hangout" strategy.

If we're just going to be purely speculative anyway, it could be the case Jensen is the one who himself leaked the 2nd affair, in order to continue this distraction strategy.

I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of the info we have on this is Jensen's PR. 1) Anonymous "leak" tweets are all PR agency slop -- real jouranalist scoopers would take credit to draw attention to themselves. 2) Any Federal investigators aren't going to say 1 word to the public. Ergo, it was always Jensen trying to keep the narrative on his affairs.

And if you want to be TRULY conspiratorial about it, perhaps one or both of the affairs never existed, only the smuggling.

I have seen a weird number of posts/responses trying to say "this isn't because he had an affair" and like, I guess it's not, it's that he had multiple affairs that have confounding effects on the business (with subordinates, with people who got chips to China).

So no, it's not literally about his sex life, but pretending like that doesn't factor into the whole things seems like a very strange point for people to keep making. It may not be that 90% of the cause is "he had sex out of his marriage" but it's also not 0% (it surely doesn't make him a "good leader(tm)" if he's having sex with subordinates)

All of this is based on leaks, mainly from the US government. So the November 8 board decision might've been the cause for the November 11 leak, because the original leak failed to achieve the goal of removing Huang. Remember we're talking about stuff that's over a year old. None of this is an evolving situation.

Classic: It's not the crime. It's the cover-up.

Or the board realized these things are going to keep coming.

Powerful interests want Nvidia to change directions and my guess is that they didn’t think that would happen under Jensen.

even MULTIPLE affairs ?

This is the same sort of timeline argument Noam Chomsky gave me regarding why he thinks that Zelensky stopped negotiating with Russia after Boris Johnson’s visit. After the firefights in Bucha he was still saying they’ll have to make a deal, then Johnson arrived and said Putin is not a man to make deals with. And then Zelensky stopped saying it. I asked Chomsky about this explicitly (whether the discovery of bodies shot point blank in the aftermath of the Russian withdrawal from Bucha was the decisive factor) and he pointed to the timeline. I don’t know if I fully buy that argument:

https://youtu.be/_BypvatagNQ?si=1CDGUZKSd6r3jz_n

It's absurd that they're going to drop a guy that build the most profitable company in the world over 35 years of working every day, and is basically beloved by his own staff and the industry.

Something stinks to high heaven here.

Elon Musk has multiple allegations of sexual assault against him - he's had sexual relations with at least 4 of his staff including children with one of them while he had children with another women.

Elon solicits young women over social media to have children with (which is also soliciting sex).

He attacked his own regulators during DOGE, has direct meetings with Putin several times since 2022 (still ongoing), he's taken $100's of Millions in investment from Chinese state banks, special deals re: factories and data capture and sharing rights.

And more.

The difference is that Elon has 1) and iron grip over the board and 2) is an aggressive, spiteful person who will attack anyone and everyone - and everyone lives in fear about saying anything negative about Elon.

Jensen is paying the price for being a nice guy.

Apparently he should have been dragging the board over the coals, and threatening the press and industry to keep quiet, to quash the stories, to kiss up to Trump and make sure there's nothing but love from the government etc. etc..

" It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances"

I'm sorry but this is very not true and ... I don't want to be mean but it's effectively naive.

Elon tells his board whatever he wants to tell them including ridiculous fabrications about products, roadmaps, and handles them with total contempt.

This is game of power, not trust.

The fact that someone's sex life would factor into the decision at all is so backwards.

First, polyamory has been gaining popularity. But a lot of poly people I've met keep that strictly secret, because their friends and family wouldn't understand and would judge them harshly.

Second, the problem isn't that he slept with someone other than his wife (we don't know what kind of agreements they have in place, and ENM is a thing in 2026). It's that he slept with a subordinate. And that's a real problem due to the power differential that exists between him and his employees.

So it's not the second affair per se, but bad judgement. Dating at companies should only happen parallel in the hierarchy, not up or down.

What I'm pushing back on is the notion that someone should be judged simply for fucking someone who isn't his wife. There's a reason people keep ENM agreements a secret, due to the judgmental attitude from the public at large.

Hopefully alternative lifestyles will become normalized to the point where our descendants in 30 years will look back on us with the same disappointment that we look back in 1996 gay marriage laws.

ENM among older couples is particularly common. But sure, it's always possible that Jensen was just cheating on his wife without consent. The thing to watch for is whether his wife has expressed unhappiness publicly about the situation. Notice that in articles like https://archive.is/Ubg4k they'll do everything but ask her how she feels. Or if they have, it's possible she's refused to say anything on the topic. That silence means something, and we don't know what. So hold off on the judgments until we have confirmation that she's actually unhappy with it.

There was a comment yesterday that suggested this was either a Chinese intelligence to destroy NVidia, or CIA operation to get Nvidia under control of a friendly puppet. [1]

My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it. From all appearances, NVidia was playing ball with the Trump administration. He was a frequent ally of President Trump, Trump supposedly knew about this information for the last year and sat on it, and even the CIA leaks that started it stressed how much Huang had praised the Trump administration. Reportedly they had already voluntarily stopped exports to MegaSpeed [2] as of June 2025. China, however, has a lot more to gain from his departure. It's going to harm NVidia very severely: reportedly he's very hands-on, "the conductor that makes a very complex operation work", and as a founder the whole knowledge pyramid that the company is based upon rests with him. If they want their domestic hardware industry to surpass NVidia, the easiest way to do that is to take out NVidia leadership.

I suspect that he was compromised by both the CIA and CCP, and with tensions rising between them, eventually found a situation where they each wanted him to do different things, and he couldn't satisfy both. Likely the CIA got wind that the CCP was going to move with their leverage, and published to stave that off. This also has the nice side benefit for U.S. power of letting the other side know the extent to which the CIA knows what you're doing, and showing that even the CEO of the richest company on earth is not immune to U.S laws. But it's still a net negative to U.S. power to have Huang out as CEO of NVidia, simply because it's such a net negative to NVidia. This is only a desirable outcome if he's going to be ousted anyway, or if he is otherwise compromised to become a Chinese puppet.

I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes. First affair, okay, it could be an indiscretion that happened in the past, cut ties and do damage control. But if there's a second (and third and fourth and many others?) affair and everybody knows about it, it becomes impossible for Huang to lead the company because everybody has so much leverage on him.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50462327

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121

This is the right read.

There are certain lines CEOs of this level absolutely cannot cross, and a relationship with a subordinate is one of them. Hiding it, putting the entire company at risk for it, a board can’t trust a ceo that puts their extramarital dalliances ahead of the company’s interest.

Chips to China, on the other hand, is in the company’s interest. That’s what lawyers and lobbyists are for, and when they behave enough, that’s also what “rockstar” CEOs are for.

Jensen got too big for his leather jacket. Simple as.