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.

[dead]

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.