It happened. Jensen Huang, after becoming the center of the tech scandal of the year, has resigned as CEO of Nvidia, the multitrillion dollar empire he founded.
The scandal, and subsequent abdication, has tanked the AI chipmaker’s stock — but not Huang’s standing among his fellow tech elites.
In the hours before Huang was in effect sacked by his own board, as it was looking increasingly clear he’d be heading out the door, Elon Musk said he’d embrace Huang at one of his companies with open arms.
“Elon please hire Jensen,” the right wing financial blog Zerohedge tweeted on Wednesday evening.
“That would be an honor,” Musk replied.
Huang admitted to having an extramarital affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a Chinese businesswoman who’s an executive at a Singapore-based cloud-computing company called Megaspeed. Alice Huang has been accused by the US government of being a Chinese intelligence asset who allegedly spied on Huang and possibly used her company to divert Nvidia’s AI chips to China.
Despite the seriousness of this scandal, many wealthy elites and tech figures have jumped to defend Nvidia’s Huang, perhaps conscious of the fact that they owe the AI boom to his hardware and his money — which is now a significant driver of the entire global economy. There aren’t many people who could get exposed for cheating on their wife and then have the US president go on a presser the next day and call him “honorable guy,” which is exactly what Donald Trump did. Fellow billionaire Bill Ackman joined in on the Huang parade by venerating him as an “incredible human.”
And then there’s Musk. Days before saying hiring Huang would be an “honor,” he endorsed a post by Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire that called Huang “one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation” and “irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership.”
Cheating on your wife while sleeping around with business associates — and your own employees, as it emerged yesterday — is probably an easy thing to look past for Musk, who has his own track record of dubious relationships. He blew up his friendship with Google cofounder Sergey Brin by reportedly sleeping with his wife, precipitating the couple’s divorce. He also had a relationship and fathered children with Shivon Zillis, who was a board member at his brain implant company Neuralink. And that’s not even getting into his alleged history of sexual misconduct.
What we’re seeing now is titans of the industry circling the wagons around one of their own. And it reveals a lot about their own values — these are the people, after all, who say we should trust them to lead us into a supposed AI utopia.
More on Nvidia: It’s a Really, Really Bad Day for Nvidia
The post Jensen Huang Has Been Sacked by Nvidia. Elon Musk Says He’ll Hire Him appeared first on Futurism.
