HR will use the information to ensure the two are not subordinate to one another. Example: A is dating B at the same company. HR will make sure that A is not subordinate to B and vice versa. This will reduce conflict of interest.

Disclosing your secret affair to HR would be a hilarious move...

HR of course has no particular duty to out him to Mrs Huang. However, on the other hand, anyone with access to this personnel record, so long as the affair remains undiscovered, has an extremely inappropriate piece of kompromat against the CEO of a trillion dollar company. Maybe that's a small list of people but it seems like a terrible amount of power, to the point I don't think I'd be comfortable with anyone having this piece of information in their heads, let alone on a "consensual relationship disclosure form" Docusign.

Fire you, probably.

Are you sure your company's policy allows this kind of relationship where cheating is involved? Infidelity might violate a morality clause, right?

Knowingly allowing ongoing misconduct or consciously ignoring resulting harm is considered bad faith

Protecting the CEO for the directors’ own interest is considered a loyalty problem.

Both of these things would make them personally liable in a shareholder derivative lawsuit.

California permits personal liability for directors perpetrating harassment and prohibits aiding or abetting prohibited conduct.

That's the directors.

Company wise - actions by the CEO are generally imputable directly to the company. This leads to potential hostile-environment claims even by employees who never had a relationship with the CEO, and those claims have been particularly cognizable in California.

Non-termination is also likely to lead to punitive damages, because it will be seen as "malice" or "reckless indifference".

Value wise - sexual harassment verdicts - depends who sued, but probably <150 million to start, long term cost maybe a billion very worst case.

Shareholder derivative lawsuits (where directors are personally liable if they end up with a finding of bad faith) - insanely more - hundreds of millions to billions.

The max value available for the company to pay out.

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It's entirely up to company policy. Nvidia had no policy barring personal relationships among employees. When it's a direct report it creates some risk that staffers will claim coercion or favoritism. For many companies, that risk is too high to allow, but I've worked for publicly traded companies where that sort of thing happened openly.

Musk has most of the voting power in his own companies, so he has loads more of freedom because he answers to himself.

I once owned an LP by Dr. John where he sang "Woman is the root of all evil. Money is bad but it's legal" :-)

He of course didn't mean women per se are evil, but that "affairs" with them are. Just his opinion.

Too much money is bad for most people, it corrupts their morality. But money is legal. It doesn't get you fired. You will have many friends because of it. You can get away with a lot of things with high-priced lawyers.

Laughed out loud! Thanks for this new terminology.

So there is a third ant.

https://archive.is/nXQE3

At this rate, I'd go with a bet of Jensen over 3.5 affairs

Google, Facebook, et al have dual class/super-voting shares. The top people have more than 51% of the vote.

Tesla is an outlier here -- Musk currently has 20%, and that's up from like 12%.

Jensen has like 5%. Jobs owned 11% of Apple when he was forced out.

It should be fairly obvious why people who control the vote of q company can get away with more than people who don't.

+1. I'm sure Danny is well aware of what happened/s at Google.

Google was a clusterfuck (literally?) of people boning other people they shouldn't have been.

It's not really a counterexample, though, because most of the people in question are no longer there, and lost their jobs over their affairs. As far as I've heard, Sundar is pretty clean, almost robotic, and has a low-profile personal life. He is the polar opposite in that regard of Sergey (who was a walking HR violation) and Eric (whose NDA-bound mistresses are legendary across Silicon Valley). Much of the reason why they have stepped back from operating roles and fucked off to being class-B shareholders only is because their personal lives are a liability to a major company operating in the environment that Google does today.

DannyBee is undoubtedly well aware of that, having been a lawyer for Google during the time period when this went down.

No, not if it's consensual. That is, of course, another common human point of interaction that frequently leads to hookups/relationships.

Generally I don't most handbooks have affair with a customer as being an offense. Arguably, that is just good business. On the other hand, having an affair with a vendor would be a problem.

I couldn't find any examples of this in a full-text book search, but besides some technical works about insects, and some material about noah's ark, I did find, from 1942:

> In the course of an experimental way, down in the depths of a science building, a beaker full of fermented sugar is left on a shelf. Sometime later one of the experimenters returned to the scene ... to find two cockroaches in the beaker, one of which had a family of about a dozen—the other had drowned itself in rum. AND WHO WOULDN'T IN THE FACE OF SUCH OVERWHELMING RESPONSIBILITIES.

This is a paraphrase of the less technical-sounding: "if you find two ants in the kitchen, you don't have a two-ant problem" which I definitely heard my mom say in the 90s (about actual ants, not metaphorically).

I just did a quick search and concluded the same. I wonder if he got it from somewhere before. If you have Twitter account please ask him!

Nonsense, this is just folk wisdom. Ask your parents.

If I found two CEOs in my kitchen, I probably wouldn't be suspicious that there was a third hiding somewhere.

Don't live in Silicon Valley though.

Can't confirm; replaced all my CEOs with AI

Probably still the best fit even if it costs the company billions.

> there's more they know that we don't

They know that media and politicians were asking for his head, and that it was riskier for their own asses to resist than to concede. It's that simple.

I don't think there is anything more to it than self preservation. All humans and I'd say living beings are good at it.

This is why martyrs are so praised. You have to overcome this instinct of self preservation to give up your life. I suspect most people can't do it in the heat of the moment.

Basically what others have said, it doesn't matter if Jensen is good at his job or even if nVidia prospers under Jensen. I don't think the board members care one lick about that. What matters to them is their own self interest and it takes a lot of experience to realize that executive leadership and even the board does not instinctively value the goals of the organization above their own self interest. I submit this is true because of the massive amount of bribing err I mean incentive alignment that the organization gives in terms of like stock options or bonuses for meeting certain targets.

>Jensen's damn good at his job, love him or hate him.

He can barely stay coherent to reality during interviews and on stage. Especially when the AI generated slides don't make sense.

He got honeypotted by a rival superpower and appears to have actively helped to circumvent national security concerns and export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

My god, how much more spectacular could his mistakes be? Does he have to eat a baby live on TikTok while proclaiming "transistors are dead, we're going back to vacuum tubes" or something?

There are very few human beings in history who could have taken nVidia from zero to megatrillions like he did, but the idea of him continuing to run the company after this is absolute absurdity.

I think his unfair, and much of it not true.

Jensen is actually extremely well respected by his staff and has the highest staff approvals in almost all of tech.

I'm certain that his personal foibles won't engender him any love, but it's not unheard of.

Elon Musk has had sexual relations with at least 4 staffers, children with one - while he was having children with his wife.

Where's the scandal?

"he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed "

Where is the evidence of this? Give me one specific allegation?

His mistress was passing information to the government, ok, as will many nationals that have met with him, and as US nationals often do as well.

Elon is in direct contact with Putin several times a year since 2022 - and there's no good reason for that.

Consider putting all of that in context vis-a-vis much of the rest of corporate America and consider the rest of his contributions.

Obviously it's fair to bring all of this up, but it's intensely hypocritical for the most part.

> Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job.

Sane people still make irrational decisions.

It's one of the weird dichotomies of our species.

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Also worth noting that in the event his wife doesn't stand by him, this immediately becomes the second largest divorce settlement in history (behind only Bill and Melinda Gates). That's not the kind of headlines the PR department is love with either.