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The board is investigating because the woman he had the affair with is a Chinese spy.

Neither the board nor the US government nor investors nor the average person gives a shit about a CEO having an affair as long it doesn't compromise his ability to do his job well.

What OP is implying is that the Board likely implicitly condoned any effort Jensen would take to make sales to China including making underhanded deals that look like honeypot operations but may as well have been a double honeypot operation. The implication is that the outcome of said affair was actually good for Nvidia. You imply that the interests of Nvidia and the US government and by extension the US public are aligned. That’s a citation-needed level assumption. Nvidia just wants to make money. The government hopefully has different interests.
The penalties for ITAR/EAR violations are severe so I suspect it's as ludicrous and incorrect a theory as one might suspect.

What is interesting is the woman appears to be extremely mid-looking.

If there is a lesson to be learned from all these extremely powerful men cheating on their wives with objectively ordinary women (e.g. Gates, Bezos, Tiger Woods) it's that the most beautiful woman in the world is worth about the same as the woman that works at McDonald's.

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Just to be clear, alleged spy, and working for a foreign government which wants to do a tremendous amount of incredibly profitable business with the company. Which he should be carefully weighing against the very real legal risks when the US government doesn't want that business to happen. And if he can't remain impartial, the board should be concerned about whether he can make the right decision for shareholders about that risk/profit.
Alleged Chinese spy unless I’m reading the article wrong? A Chinese intelligence asset could mean someone who just had CPC membership in college. Not that I’m saying Alice Huang isn’t a spy, I just would want more information before deciding.
She was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy.

Also, just to be clear here: the story is that Jensen was also going to Taiwan to meet with this person who was helping Alibaba evade sanctions, when Jensen met with this person Alibaba reps were always there, and in the US Jensen was making media appearances saying that sanctions on China had to be lifted.

Bear in mind that multiple people at Supermicro were charged for allegedly smuggling servers to China, and that the reason Megaspeed is being investigated is for effectively the same thing. Jensen denied he had anything to do with Supermicro, it is going to be much harder to say the same thing here.

I don't think the affair itself is necessarily related to the direction this will shortly take.

There is a huge difference between smugglers and spies though. Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else, you definitely don’t need a handler in zhongnanhai.
> Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else

What you need to be a smuggler is to avoid prison.

When one side is fully aware that you are a smuggler that they can rat on to the other side whenever they want, even a child could blackmail you.

So that's one (fairly realistic imo) pathway from smuggler -> to espionage.

This is a hypothetical anyways.

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> She was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy.

MLK Jr. was being monitored by the FBI and CIA, who believed he was a Communist.

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Doesn’t sound like the Alibaba reps were at _every_ meeting
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She was also the CEO of a large customer. That sounds like it could impact his job performance.
Chinese spy can mean everything from “sell us more GPUs to China or I leak our affair” (which I think NVDA would be very happy with - they’ve already admitted to chip diversion, and their senior execs have been arrested for the same) to trade secrets being given to Huawei.

IMHO, I’m speculating, but I think the affair could’ve happened first, and then the MSS got involved for access and blackmail.

There is, after all, statistically a high correlation with rich billionaires and infidelity…

> ...and then the MSS got involved for access and blackmail.

If you look at Megaspeed, it has Chinese state asset written all over it.

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