Tech billionaires continue to find new ways to alienate themselves from the public. After broad disillusionment with Big Tech played a major role in last week’s midterm elections, AI chipmaker Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was forced to publicly admit that he had cheated on his wife with a suspected Chinese spy.
“I was unfaithful to my wife,” he wrote in a memo. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did.”
While infidelity among the obscenely rich isn’t in itself surprising, his affair could have major ripple effects on the entire economy — which has become massively dependent on the fate of the AI industry.
Shares of the chipmaker fell a stunning eight percent when trading resumed Monday morning — but then greed kicked in, with the stock rebounding to a loss of around four percent. Nvidia’s investigation into the affair clearly has investors rattled, though, and likely worried that Huang could lose control of one of the most valuable companies in the world, so expect a wild ride as the market grapples with exactly how bad the scandal actually is.
The woman Huang was involved with is Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang — no relation; it’s common last name — who has been accused of passing sensitive information to Beijing, Reuters reports. (The Chinese government has since described the narrative as “purely a groundless accusation, slander, and a smear.”)
Huang holds a roughly 3.6 percent stake in Nvidia, making him the fifth-largest shareholder. Nonetheless, he has ruled the chipmaker with an iron first, with dozens of executives reporting directly to him, per Reuters.
The timing of the revelation couldn’t have been worse. As last week’s midterm elections proved, the AI industry has an enormous PR problem and is struggling to convince voters of the tech’s benefits.
“The market’s probably telling you now this does no favors to the stock whatsoever in a time when there’s a lot of conjecture as to the buildout of data centres,” Pepperstone head of research Chris Weston told Reuters.
Fellow billionaires have since come to Huang’s defense, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk agreeing with a post on his social media platform that his actions were “dumb” but that he was “irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership.”
President Donald Trump, who himself has a lengthy history of facing infidelity and sexual assault accusations, tried to downplay the severity of Huang’s actions, a revelation that would’ve once buried any executive’s chances of saving face.
“I hope everything’s fine,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “He’s done such an incredible job.”
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