Yeah, most people only have one personal secretary, and in order to be able to show favoritism to one employee over another it would be necessary for them to be in similar positions. It would be remarkably silly to say "You're giving me the tough coding assignments instead of giving them to your secretary, you're blatantly favoring her" when the secretary was never hired for her coding skills.

Favoritism certainly can happen in other situations, of course. Heck, "the GM's girlfriend" is a (negative) trope in tabletop RPG groups for a reason, or spouses favoring each other in competitive board games. And those are situations where (usually) no money is involved, and it's just for fun. Add money to the situation and it can be a dangerous mix. If someone really must end up being a supervisor over his own spouse plus other people, best to have someone neutral double-checking his decisions. It's easy to be blind to one's own conflicts of interest.

I would just go ahead and assume people favor own married partners, siblings or kids when they are in these situations. That does not mean executive kids can never be hired, of course.

But like, people favorite their own friends or long time colleagues too, even outside romantic relationships. It is not graded school.

> and that was the end of it.

Is it...? I feel like there's a lot more to unpack here. What if the thing a person fell in love with was that somebody just had more power (over them)?

I'd argue that people should fall in love on equal grounds, so the personality of a partner matters more than the perceived status of power.

I've read your comment three times and I still don't know exactly what philosophical position you're staking out. What are you saying, exactly? I suspect I'm going to disagree with your position (I certainly disagree with what I think your position is), but before I start arguing against it, it would be nice to actually understand it.

Are you saying that because he invented something that changed the world, his misbehavior should be ignored? If that's what you're saying, I wonder where you would draw the line: an affair? Embezzling? Murder? At what point would the misbehavior be so bad that it should not be excused by his past inventions? At what point does the inventor not get to use "But I'm changing the world" as an excuse?

Or perhaps I'm misreading you. You did, after all, open with saying that you agree with my comment that you're replying to. So if your only point is "the board didn't care, that was an excuse to get rid of him" and you're not excusing his behavior, then sure, I agree with that statement. His behavior was an open secret among the company, after all; they had to have known, but were willing to ignore it when it was convenient to them. Which is immoral of them, let me add. I agree with you that that's what they did. I do NOT agree (and I hope you're not saying) that it was ethical or moral of them to ignore it until it became publicly known.

> This guy created billions of dollars

No, the engineers he employed did. They will continue to do so after his departure.

The point is not to prevent it, the point is to minimise the resulting liability. Whether by re-org'ing so that the people who are sleeping together are not in a direct reporting relationship, or by letting one party go, and so on...

A presidential impeachment that votes along partisan lines has little to do with corporate policies.

It seems you have little argument here.

Nestlé, Astronomer, Kohl's, Norfolk Southern, BP, NBCUniversal, McDonald's, HP, CBOE - all have removed CEOs for undisclosed company relationship.

The only ones that survive are owners with majority stakes, which is very obviously a personal conflict.

Firing the president of Trumpistan is much harder than firing the CEO of a public corporation.

>A manager having a relationship with a subordinate is unethical, but let's not call it outright rape, OK? There is a difference.

A manager fucking his subordinate is coercion at the very least due to the power imbalance.

This is not a consensual relationship for the same reason that sex with a "willing" person held at gunpoint isn't (even if there is no explicit verbal threat).

Whether it crosses a criminal threshold of sexual harassment or sexual assault , depends on the jurisdiction and circumstance.

In any case, it is not OK.

It is immaterial whether coercion of this sort is "not outright" rape.

Parent commenter's logic that justifies it because the CEO "has value" applies to "outright" rape as well.

If sexual harassment of a few employees is "pennies" compared to Jensen's value, so is "outright" rape.

This is what I have issue with.