We need to be careful not to equate the two affairs as being countable apples-to-apples. An affair with a customer executive that generates several billions dollars of revenue has a much different risk/reward profile for the board than an affair with a direct report employee within the company. The former also has much lower legal risk: bribery laws aren’t properly calibrated for this circumstance and sexual harassment laws are less applicable. As far as the board is concerned, I imagine they’re fine with him having an affair for every single $5B+ signature as long as he’s delivering the goods and doing so without getting caught so overtly that sales are impacted — thus the vote of confidence! — but that internal affair suggests bad judgment rather than greed-driven judgment, and exposes Nvidia to harassment discovery claims and/or exposes that he lied to the board about not having internal affairs, so he’s out.
When the affair with the customer executive involves deals that directly violate federal law? Don’t bet on it.
Assuming that federal law is enforced neutrally and uniformly, your point is completely correct.
That assumption has not held to date in this presidential cycle, and Jensen Huang has openly had the backing of that president. From a financial perspective, that would considerably lower their financial risk estimate of either having to pay a fine and/or hand over one or two C-level executives for some rich person prison-vacation time. I would assume the board is competent and has verbally, off the record, discussed how many billions of dollars they expect to be fined in the worst case and accepted that as the cost of doing (corrupt) business, but we could get lucky and find they did so with a paper trail that’ll come out in court someday :D
loading story #50475637