Exactly my read as well. "If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two."
The lies may be part of it, but if you didn't fire them for the COC/SH violation, you would be in for near infinite liability because it ends up as evidence that the culture from the top was tolerant of violations, etc. THis is not conjecture, it's what has basically always happened in the legal realm when companies try to work around it.
In my company, it's explicitly not forbidden, but the relationship has to be disclosed to HR early on (source: yearly training). That being said, I'm not sure what HR is going to do with the information.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...
Some people get to have affairs with subordinates, others don't. It's a question of if they have the support of the people pulling the levers or not as to whether it's considered acceptable. Universal rules are for little people, once beyond a certain position they are merely tools for selectively shutting out opposition.
After they caught him in a lie, they may not have been able to not fire him.
They can't legally not fire him. But they can legally re-hire him after firing him. So ironically the ONLY way he can continue at nVidia is by being fired - we just have to wait a few days and there will be an Altman-like resurrection.
More seriously, I was also curious. A quick search seems to say the earliest recent source is https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
I don't think this has anything to do with trust. It's absurd not to trust Huang as the best possible CEO for the company that he brought from zero to 5 trillion dollars in value. It's about being afraid of public opinion, and especially fear of being blamed for not taking the expected decision.
They know that media and politicians were asking for his head, and that it was riskier for their own asses to resist than to concede. It's that simple.
This is why martyrs are so praised. You have to overcome this instinct of self preservation to give up your life. I suspect most people can't do it in the heat of the moment.
Basically what others have said, it doesn't matter if Jensen is good at his job or even if nVidia prospers under Jensen. I don't think the board members care one lick about that. What matters to them is their own self interest and it takes a lot of experience to realize that executive leadership and even the board does not instinctively value the goals of the organization above their own self interest. I submit this is true because of the massive amount of bribing err I mean incentive alignment that the organization gives in terms of like stock options or bonuses for meeting certain targets.
He can barely stay coherent to reality during interviews and on stage. Especially when the AI generated slides don't make sense.
My god, how much more spectacular could his mistakes be? Does he have to eat a baby live on TikTok while proclaiming "transistors are dead, we're going back to vacuum tubes" or something?
There are very few human beings in history who could have taken nVidia from zero to megatrillions like he did, but the idea of him continuing to run the company after this is absolute absurdity.
But.
He put together a string of frankly insane mistakes that are now endangering that 5 trillion dollar company from both the inside and outside. There's no chance in hell that they're going to go from $5T back to 0, but you are not understanding the trouble they're in.
Internally, boinking your direct reports (who also happened to have a string of recent promotions) is incredibly ruinous to a company's internal culture, destroying notions of internal meritocracy. How would you feel if all your hard work was apparently not as important as putting out for the CEO? Do you think that would make you eager to do your best work for that CEO? And that's even before thinking about the insane legal liability.
Externally, he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed to simultaneously mess with national security and, it seems, circumvent export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. nVidia is in some extremely serious shit, and will have the government breathing down their necks between now and the end of time.
Jensen is actually extremely well respected by his staff and has the highest staff approvals in almost all of tech.
I'm certain that his personal foibles won't engender him any love, but it's not unheard of.
Elon Musk has had sexual relations with at least 4 staffers, children with one - while he was having children with his wife.
Where's the scandal?
"he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed "
Where is the evidence of this? Give me one specific allegation?
His mistress was passing information to the government, ok, as will many nationals that have met with him, and as US nationals often do as well.
Elon is in direct contact with Putin several times a year since 2022 - and there's no good reason for that.
Consider putting all of that in context vis-a-vis much of the rest of corporate America and consider the rest of his contributions.
Obviously it's fair to bring all of this up, but it's intensely hypocritical for the most part.
Huang betrayed 38 years of trust his wife put into him and recently betrayed the Board by lying to them. That's already admitted, no ifs or buts. He clearly had reasons, as he is a sane person. His reasons were romantic engagement with (alleged) spy. Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job. The Board needs to do bunch of "what ifs" in such situation, including paranoid ones, such as "what if this woman had such access to NVIDIA tech stack that each cheap is infused with some form of Chinese virus". We simply don't know how far this goes, but this firing certainly shows much further than just a consequence of a romantic fling.
Sane people still make irrational decisions.
It's one of the weird dichotomies of our species.
https://nypost.com/2026/11/12/business/ousted-nvidia-ceo-jen...
https://glonce.com/nvidia-bankrolls-its-own-customers-the-ec...
Perfect timing: https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...