And honestly, we are all human and all of us make mistakes. Having an affair is usually something that should be resolved privately, in your personal life, not in public. The business context of this affair is clearly something he wasn’t aware of at the time and punishing him for being deceived seems extreme.
He's gonna fall for it again. It may just be harder for the spys to pull it off.
Not because he had an affair (who cares, really, and hardly uncommon), but because he had an affair that endangered the company, and in some respects our country.
Functionally, it's not different from "left an unlocked phone at a bar". A mistake anyone could make, but, when you're paid what he's paid, that type of mistake is the thing you're paid not to make.
This a known attack vectors that global security teams and front of house security teams go over yearly with C suite.
It might actually sustain civilized communication and behaviour, e.g a small lie to not hurt someone’s feelings.
Of course this level of deception in a marriage is worse, but it’s naive to think anyone is entirely honest.
Also keep in mind that divorce is not some formulaic thing. Most divorces are settled out of court and a hypothetical settlement could have terms that allow him to keep those shares in exchange for something else (e.g. maybe he agrees to pay her the cash value or agrees to a large and permanent alimony structure). I doubt the Nvidia board is worried about this issue considering the other, more immediate problems here (like the fact that his mistress is a Chinese spy).
Everyone always assumes wives are naive wilting flowers, but for all we know she has her own private life on the side. It's really none of our business.
10 minutes alone with his laptop and a well crafted malicious USB is enough.
illicit visit with a few nice gifts, all bugged.
her whole role may have been simply to isolate where is and his laptop is inside of a hotel or building so that another team can slip in and grab it or clone it.
he could have kept his mouth 100% shut and been on full opsec the whole time and still gotten played by CCP intelligence.
and at this level of the game he should fuckin know better.
Yes. The cheating is only a small part of it, although it does confirm he's a piece of trash and thereby throws into question his capability as a leader. More seriously, he potentially colluded with this person, an agent of a foreign government, to bypass export restrictions. The investigation that will follow exposes Nvidia very badly.
Honestly I don't even care about the restrictions, not my law.
Edit: lol people would down vote this. Cheating is cool if you’re a billionaire!
But the knee jerk maximum-cancel for any offense is a problem. CEOs are not saints. Very few people are. If our standard for corporate leadership is not just to be good at business but also to be above reproach personally… who’s left?
It’s an unfortunate fact that humans are generally fallible and imperfect. Jack Welch cheated on his wife. Many other execs have. It sucks, but the world would not be better if there were a career death penalty for doing so.
Nobody is saying he can't retain most/all of hi billions and do something else. But, leading a multi-billion dollar business should come with some minimum expectation of morality. If for nothing else because being an immoral turd opens you to extortion.
I really don't get the sentiment that flying around the world to cavort with a Chinese spy is ok-ish. That's insane.
"He could just leave nVidia, the company he built btw., and build another 4 trillion company before he dies."
This is not at all true; our standards are extremely low for moral behaviour from public figures, and they traditionally face minor or no consequences for even severely unethical or actively criminal behaviour.
You can't say we need to preach forgiveness rather than consequences when no consequences are happening at all; it reads as insincere, and is at best inaccurate.
If every C-level in the world is morally suspect, we have a bigger problem. Seriously, is your claim that being a bit iffy is a pre-requisite for the job? That's a pretty damning statement about capitalism if that's the claim.
This world view is not only more accurate, but also more forgiving, and and overall leads to a less angry world view.
(For that matter, let's not pretend that if he resigned now he wouldn't be able to immediately pick up work again if he wanted to. Because, to reiterate, he is worth over $150 billion dollars. He could start a new company. He could start ten new companies. He could buy an island and build a secret underwater volcano lair to start a new career as a Bond villain. Assuming he doesn't have a secret underwater volcano lair already, of course.)
I concur, but...
> Jack Welch
You might have picked a better example than the guy who systematically hollowed out the American institution that was GE by evangelizing cartoonishly corporatist short-term MBA culture then leaving when the bill came due and washing his hands of that destructive movement that he propelled to the forefront of American business. There are tons of great leaders who did hurtful things in their private lives. I don't think that Jack Welch is exemplary of that first criterion (unless you count a legacy of financial engineering and grinding employees into pulp as leadership).
They aren't saying "maximum cancel", they're just saying maybe this guy shouldn't be running one of the most consequential companies in the world when he's more interested in dopamine farming.
At the end of the day, asking a billionaire to resign his role, so he can sail off into the sunset on his yacht and have all the affairs he wants for the rest of his days isn't really on any scale of punishment or cancelling I'm familiar with.
Somehow we live in a world where with great power comes no responsibility or accountability, and it's quickly becoming too big of a problem to handle.
Along with a lot of people who are not executives, and people who were not executives at the time and went on to become executives. Like it or not cheating is relatively common, our species is not strictly monogamous and the evidence can be found in male anatomy (read about it if you are interested, particularly in comparison to Chimpanzee and Gorilla anatomy).
I am not saying this as a defense of cheating; it is just a fact that people cheat on their spouses, regardless of the moral implications or how "never cool" it is.
This research is deeply suspect, theorises far beyond its data, and tends to be galloped from to the is/ought fallacy.
You are absolutely saying this as a defence of cheating, and it would be more compelling if you said that outright.
Have you also considered the fact that you can get married without taking such an oath? A wedding ceremony is not how you get married. You get married by signing a document that says you are marrying the other person who signs the document, and then filing the document with the government. Marriage is a legal arrangement that primarily covers property rights and certain legal decisions (e.g. the presumption that your spouse can make decisions on your behalf if you are incapacitated). Even in the few remaining places where cheating has any meaningful legal significance divorce lawyers often advise clients not to bother -- it is rarely worth pursuing and most people just want to finish the divorce as quickly as possible and all filing for fault will do is raise your legal fees (for little tangible benefit).
I might evaluate someone’s good sense before investing, and this was bad decision-making, but it’s hardly the whole of his career.
But then we culturally decided divorce doesn't count. "Till death do we part" became "Till death or major or minor inconvenience or whim do we part." Then culturally we decided that marrying an oath-breaker is just Tuesday.
Funny things, the rules we make up to justify nonsensical behaviour.
The entire scandal is a scandal to be sure. That he cheated on his wife with an intelligence operative and whatever happened beyond that is a problem and needs to be investigated and dealt with
But this thread was about him cheating on his wife full stop. He could have cheated with anyone else and it would not have been a problem. The cheating wasn't the problem, it was who he cheated with and what happened downstream
I mean... he did lie through his teeth to make it seem better, so not exactly trustworthy no. That he didn't sell the nuclear codes doesn't mean people trusted him after that.
I don’t know why so many people jump so easily to canceling someone.
I’m not religious at all, but one of our oldest texts in modern circulation says “let he without sin cast the first stone”- we’re all guilty of something after all, and while some poeple have no moral compass at all, some people rationalise ”a little” indecency or indiscretion.
I’m not defending him, but it doesn’t tell me he is not trustworthy in totality, its just distasteful and I don’t like it and I think this behaviour is worth some social punishment.
When did we fall back to religious level purity requirements in persons personal life in order to interact / do biz with them?
If your co-worker cheats on his/her partner should they be fired from their job?
I will credit him the consideration that she is a state actor probably extensively trained in how to leverage men's weaknesses and fool them.
How is billionaire related? Its such an unoriginal complaint.
I would argue that he's not a hall pass given the coverage.
And no one said a word about the affairs of Bill Gates, or Sergei Brin, or Donald Trump or Arnold Schwarzenegger, …
But when my neighbor Jim Regular cheated on his wife, it was on the front page of the New York Times.
Or was it perhaps not actually like that at all?
If it does, where do you draw the line? What personal moral failing deserves to be fired for and which do not?
I am not supporting cheating, I am just pointing to the facts. I am poor and not famous and I would not cheat, but if I would be a billionaire or the King of America I have no idea what I would do, I am not spending a single neuron-milisecond thinking about that.