...you do realise that every word of this would have been written by a top-flight crisis management PR agency?
He would have presumably signed off on it, but refusing to do, or questioning their judgement, would look very bad to the board.
The PR agency writes what one of the world's most powerful CEOs tells them to write. They can strongly advise sounding sincere, but it's not their decision. I would venture that the reason so many corporate and celebrity apologies sound fake is simply because the client doesn't want to do a real one.
Sounding sincere doesn't mean they actually are, but it does mean they didn't let their ego get in the way of it, which is more than can be said about many who would be caught in a position like this, rich or not.
That doesn't explain why other similar letters, written with similar PR resources, always fail to meaningfully apologize.
Not being facetious, but it is very possible that the person/people in the PR team who wrote it were familiar with similar situations or had a higher emotional intelligence.
Are you suggesting that so many other companies’ PR teams are simply incompetent?
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So they are top-flight PR and crisis management companies that are terrible at emotional intelligence, and Huang just got lucky that rather than hiring one of the apparently-universally-incompetent companies, Nvidia hired the one good one, which nobody elsewhere thought to hire before?
And that’s a simpler answer than Huang actually wanting a more direct apology?
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I assume in those cases that's because they're up against constraints about what they can say without incurring legal liability.
Well, usually the source of information isn't U.S. intelligence agencies via the NYT