I was on the leadership team of a startup that is now public, during that build something like that happened (almost exactly the same as this NVIDIA situation sans the spy stuff), there were effectively 5 of us involved in what the outcome should be and it basically came down to: me and another guy didn't want to sit on a leadership team with someone who exercised judgement that way, to the point that it was me and the other guy or affair person, so affair person was out, even tho it was very painful for the business. Also, I don't think what I just described is particularly uncommon.
I have worked at a larger company where the CEO did something similar and across the company all anyone could ask was "why would you do something that dumb", which is not a great way for people to feel about the person supposedly leading the company.
Well, I'm not pro-affair, but I've seen lots of people say "why would you do something that dumb" about lots of executives, doing regular things like changing marketing plans, changing the color of the logo, choosing clearly inferior technology because of the caste of the chief architect, etc.
Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.
Yep that's an even better point. Though I would say there's a distinction between socially-unacceptable and untrustworthy. Being forthcoming both limits surprise (per your point) and mitigates the trust component of deviance.
> Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Why?
I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?
Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.
> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?
This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.
Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.
And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.
Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.
Right, and because he was willing to break a commitment that serious it de-values other commitments he's made, including those more directly relevant to the business.
All this coming from a country that elected twice as President a guy that married three times, led a very sexually promiscuous life, including the notorious boasting, and was accused of sexual misbehaviours by almost 30 women. Hilarious.
The US system gives voters two options for president. Those options are chosen by parties, and parties make terrible choices.
In 2016, the choice was between Trump and Clinton. Clinton famously excused her husband's infidelity by calling the long list of women who claimed they were assaulted as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty".
In 2024, the choice was between Trump and Harris. Harris got into politics by being the mistress of a CA governor.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the US presidential election offered a choice between someone who was moral and someone who was as immoral as our existing political class. But that has not happened in my lifetime, and I don't expect that to change.
One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.
In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.
If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.
Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.
It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.
But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.
> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.
Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.
Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.
I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, they were well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, they agreed to them with their words, in fact. With us it was very simple, provided you're not a bigot, what you do on your own time is not our concern. However, what you do within our business is our concern. If you have intimate relations with anyone inside our company, even if consensual, you're no longer on our leadership team. Then, their actions did not match those words, when that is true, trust is gone. In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect their actions and words to match, and there are people who we know that isn't the case, and on some siding scale, we accept it (I didn't say acceptable). For example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). Groups typically have criteria/standards, if they change that, it may change the group to varying degrees, and that may be ok or not ok, depending on the group. I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?
You cannot tell from the NVDA stock crash if it's because the CEO had an affair, or because NVIDIA illegally sold GPUs to China and is in huge trouble.
I can't see how the stock is highly inflated with a P/E of 20 and expected +100% year over year quarterly results expected in a few days. Normally companies doubling their revenue or profit (not sure which is what the expectation is here) are priced rather higher. A P/E of 20 is what I would expect for Coca-Cola, since it is going to grow at about population rate, since about everyone who wants to drink a Coca-Cola product is already doing so. (KO is currently 28, which I think is high, probably from people rotating out of tech)
Considering that extramarital escapades didn't prevent the current US president from being elected twice - and quite recently at that - I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with cultural acceptance.
At the end of the day, it's also just too simplistic.
Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.
You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.
The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.
The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.
At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.
yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.
This is more than an affair though. This is an affair with someone he has a business relationship with and thus it becomes the interest to the business. There are many many cases where someone give business favors to the person they are having an affair with.
My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.
If he’d had an affair with his physical therapist absolutely no one would care and he wouldn’t be out- it’s the totality of his actions and his extreme lack of judgement at issue.
"you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance."
If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract with a person to whom you've promised utter faithfulness, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy with regard to some boring, impersonal business contracts?
It's perfectly possible to be trustworthy in one thing and not the other. If you can't trust a lion with your flock of sheep doesn't mean you can't trust it with a bunch of bananas.
All (or nearly all) fortune 500 company has a rule against sleeping with a subordinate, and it is one of the most common reasons for a CEO to be fired. If all we learned about was the second affair, I still expect he would have been fired. So every single successful actor has arrived at the same conclusion, but you don’t understand why. This is a great opportunity to learn something new.
Did a considerably worse job than Image Gen 2.0 on my standard test prompt.
"A macro close-up photograph of an old watchmaker's hands carefully replacing a tiny gear inside a vintage pocket watch. The watch mechanism is partially submerged in a shallow dish of clear water, causing visible refraction and light caustics across the brass gears. A single drop of water is falling from a pair of steel tweezers, captured mid-splash on the water's surface. Reflect the watchmaker's face, slightly distorted, in the curved glass of the watch face. Sharp focus throughout, natural window lighting from the left, shot on 100mm macro lens."
Last month I visited the Scottish Borders and generally found this to be true, especially in Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso. I wasn't shocked however as I find the situation in Canada to be very similar (in the UK switch cannabis dispensaries for chippies). 25 years ago when a Wal-Mart came to the small town I grew up in, only took a couple of years to gut the high street, certainly Amazon threw fuel on that fire.
I wish they'd replace the chippies with cannabis dispensaries here. Though then they might need to open new chippies to serve the stoners. Win-win, maybe?
Every time a big box store (Staples, Best Buy, Toys R Us that kinda thing) location in my area closes down, it's not replaced with another. Instead one of those liquidation "Amazon returns" type stores opens. It makes retail look very sick.
The harsh reality is that more often than not the shops don't add much value over ordering online and having it delivered. Of course there are exceptions, but even then malls are more convenient and have easier parking.
Progress will unavoidably kill more and more physical shops, but this has huge cons: cities are emptier and more dangerous.
In the average European mediterranean city shops provide lights, vibe, safety.
As people feel less secure, because it's getting dark at 5-6 pm half the year (the time people usually leave work) and shops are closed, they also go downtown less accelerating the death of other businesses.
And the only people on the streets are either those returning home, drunks, or immigrants doing god knows what. And this progressive decay accelerates. The only shops left are then bought en masse by foreign entrepeneurs, often working the place with their families 16 hours per day to squeeze pennies.
Any random downtown in Italy bar the most touristic places that have people all year suffers of this, even major centers (100k+ citizens).
This is mostly good things for people to think about, but... "immigrants doing god knows what" just looks like racism dropped into an otherwise reasonable ramble. Hopefully that's not how you meant it.
It's racism because how to even tell if people are immigrants? "Oh we're in Britain but they're not white. Must be immigrants.". People born and living all their lives in Britain who are not white or speaking to their friends in English can probably fill a whole city, but the implied thought of "not white, must be immigrants" is racism...
It's the reality of most cities in northern Italy, e.g. the one my SO lives in: Reggio Emilia.
If you go out after 7 pm most of the year half the people downtown are immigrants selling drugs, doing petty crime or whistling and annoying women.
I see and live that, and have female family members and friends being assaulted by these people, and they are immigrants.
It's not a matter of skin color, but demographics.
They are young, male, unemployed and from a different culture, they are more prone to decaying and aggressive behavior. But it's a fact, they make the cities less safe and they dominate the stats in petty and violent crimes.
Reggio Emilia, like pretty much everywhere we refer to as “provincia” (essentially Italy outside Rome and Milan), has never really had much going on after 6 pm. That's certainly not a new phenomenon brought about by drunk immigrants.
Unfortunately, the most powerful men in the world at this point are known to harass and assault women. That doesn't mean it's ok when the powerless do it, but you should be careful about attributing it to their demographics. It's something men need to address globally, not try to scapegoat immigrants for.
One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty, which makes sense, since those who are doing well have more motivation to avoid disturbing the status quo.
The most powerful men in the world do not loiter in city centres, which is what the commenter is referring to. It is a common phenomenon across Europe, readily observable, that groups of young men, commonly (but not exclusively) foreign, loiter in loose groups in town and city centres, where they appear to be doing... nothing.
I think the commenter has expanded further on what he or she thinks they ARE doing, I reserve judgement - but this phenomenon is apparent.
That is completely true and fascinates me. If you go to any city centre, train station, etc. in Europe, you will find lots of black people just... doing nothing. They are just there, sitting, perhaps alone, perhaps many of them. They aren't even talking or doing anything, they just stare into the distance. They are part of the scenery. I have no idea what this means, who brought them here, what they actually do (if anything), and who's going to take them away (and when).
>One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty
Yes, but be careful about implying that the dominant causation is poverty -> crime. Crime is the best cause of poverty because it makes doing business impossible and forces every actor to make every aspect of their life more and more inefficient in order to protect what they already have. Places like, say, Singapore are case studies in how a crackdown on law and order is all it takes to make a place go from very poor to extremely wealthy in a generation or so.
Because in a large number of cases, people are conflating economic situation with culture or race. And many of these so-called cultural or racial components disappear in the "home" country when you look at people in the middle class and above. Just like violent crime rates drop massively for those same races and cultures in the country they have immigrated to when they gain economic independence.
It's quite possible that high levels of immigration of unskilled or otherwise unemployable people is a bad thing for a country that shouldn't be allowed. That is a very different thing than acting like the reason it is a bad idea is because of their culture or race.
Of course there is one, but what exactly is "immigrant culture"?
That is my problem with the whole thing, all just gets thrown into one bag "immigrants". The women assaulting islamist gets the same label as the homosexual atheist fleeing where they are in charge. (And never mind that the bible contains mostly the same bad passages as the quoran and I never done the numbers, but I assume if we count and plot "muslims killed by non non muslims vs "non muslims killed by muslims" - that number would not match the felt reality)
It's our religious belief (or closest thing to it) and overall it's adaptive. It's like asking a Christian why it's so hard to not just admit god isn't real. There aren't many monoculture ethnostates doing great right now and they're pretty much all on the path towards extinction given current fertility rates
Why is it so hard to admit that there is a cultural (and, by extension, racial) component?
What does "by extension" mean? Culture is voluntary. You can (and should) walk away from a flawed culture. Race is an unsheddable fixed attribute.
Meanwhile, both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups, making discrimination a losing proposition even aside from its inherent immorality.
>both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups
Btw, the premise underlying this fact is a fallacy. It is the norm for population groups, even meaningfully differing ones, to have "more internal variation" than between groups.
There is more variation in height within sexes than between them, but despite this there is still a very (statistically and culturally) significant difference in average height between men and women.
It's even possible for two distributions to be completely separated by a given variable while still having more internal variance.
The fallacy comes into play when you use those characteristics to prejudge individual humans.
Tall women are taller than short men, so if you're hiring a librarian who needs to be able to reach books on a high shelf, you still need to look at the individual. Society as a whole suffers if you run employment ads saying "Women need not apply," so we rightfully deter that.
> One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty, which makes sense, since those who are doing well have more motivation to avoid disturbing the status quo.
What are some of the other "facts" "we" know about? Are you conveniently ignoring the Epstein class and all we've learned?
The original use of quotation marks in English, before scare quotes came along, was to suggest that the words you're using came from someone else. Fun fact: that's actually why they're called quotation marks.
That's what's going on here. @passive is repeating the word "fact" from the parent comment.
Yeah, we remember. And thanks to the attitude displayed in your comment, these complaints were not taken seriously. until these specific Italians ended up with control of massive illegitimate industries, gambling, and loan sharking, ran protection rackets that victimised and intimidated thousands of legitimate small businesses, and murdered hundreds of innocents.
There was always the option to just not let them in in the first place. Many people at the time (HP Lovecraft being an example) thought that Ellis-Island migration into the United States was an existential mistake.
>but has been allowed to fester b/c the Mob was (so far) worse.
It's been allowed to fester because the late 20th century was (so far) the high water mark for societal tolerance of that sort of thing and it hasn't been abused enough since to really see much legal scrutiny.
..and in the case of some of those Italians, they were absolutely right.
High-trust Anglo civilization is not compatible with the attitude towards civil authority common in the 19th-century Mezzogiorno. It took literal generations to fix.
>High-trust Anglo civilization is not compatible with the attitude towards civil authority common in the 19th-century Mezzogiorno. It took literal generations to fix.
Waspy paternalism gave us eugenics, multi-generational welfare and plenty of other great stuff so it's not like the alternative is all that much better.
When commercial rents aren't artificially inflated it allows for a greater diversity of businesses. There are tons of businesses that could exist if the government wasnt so intent on running a plantation economy.
I'm not sure what government has to do with it, it doesn't set the price of rents.
Rents do get progressively lower in distressed areas because they are distressed, and higher in high demand ones, but that's not enough when less customers are entering your shops anyway.
Government adds mountains of red tape, taxes employers to death and has reduced the spending power of the median worker to below poland through its plantation migration policy.
Commercial units sit empty instead of lowering rents because of the 'extend and pretend' in lending. The banks can't afford to revalue commercial real estate at the current market rate. It's like the 70s again.
You are right that the units sit empty because the banks have loan covenants with the landlords that minimum rent is XX, which is higher than the unit is currently worth.
It isn't so much extend and pretend, its landlord CANT lower the rent without violating their loan.
If you get government involved, this will just get more expensive. We need to wait it out until the landlord can't pay the loan anyway and is forced to sell the building at a massive loss. Then the new owner will have a new loan with a new price floor and the dance can start over.
> It isn't so much extend and pretend, its landlord CANT lower the rent without violating their loan.
IANAPropertyGuy, but IIRC the banks don't really want to foreclose on it anyway, because that means recognizing that they made losing loans and they don't want to have to figure out what to do with the building that can't be sold off for much.
Hence strategically looking the other way when landlords off "first X months free" deals in lieu of an officially-lower rent.
This is exactly the case. On my Canadian high street the redevelopments are either empty or exclusively high cost businesses. I looked at the rent arrears notice posted on one failed shop and the rate would exclude anything not a money mill. They'll be no lutiers or second hand bookstores in the shiny towers on my street.
What if you had a rental agreement where you pay $x for y% of the property but the landlord lets you use the whole thing and x/(y*0.01) > minimum rent?
Or you pay minimum rent but your landlord gives you some of it back?
You cannot have real estate as an investment (sometimes the only one without capital gains tax), and simultaneously people living around and hanging out. Investment real estate pushes permanent inhabitants out.
Investment real estate has traditionally been a way for individuals and small landlords to build wealth over time. More recently, governments have decided that they want to add tons and tons of regulations to rentals, making it impossible for small landlords to continue to make a profit. Hence, they sell to big landlords who are impossible for tenants to deal with.
Do you understand where that "built wealth" comes from? It doesn't appear from the ether - it's transferred from one person to another. In this case, it's transferred from a legitimate useful business to a rent-seeking investor who creates no value but holds value hostage. And if the amount of "built wealth" is too high, no business exists that can afford to pay it, and so it doesn't get "built".
That wealth comes from using the land, not owning it. The landlord has nothing to do with it - he only takes as much of the wealth someone else created as he can get away with.
Traditionaly as in since what post redlining ban downzoning in the 1960s? No peasant was expecting their hovel to be an investment vehicle where they’d replace the doorknobs with cheaper furnishings and 10x their investment and somehow their peasant kids working peasant jobs would afford that.
I mean isn’t the whole rub the cost of housing is outpacing wages? Goes to show how short our historical perspective really is.
> No peasant was expecting their hovel to be an investment vehicle
It is not:) There had been a fortunate coincidence of factors such as economy, job market, demography, immigration from EU countries which all enabled it. That's all over now, it's gone.
What happens when all rent is extracted? We're about to find out.
>In the average European mediterranean city shops provide lights, vibe, safety.
It's incredible how much of what we consider safety ultimately boils down to totally arbitrary vibes. There are tons of cities in the mediterranean that are way more dangerous than the worst parts of the uk, but because Italy has better PR (and isn't the target of right-wing hysteria), nobody cares.
People respond to what's happening locally. There's no question UK towns have been getting more lawless and dangerous than they were, say, twenty years ago. It may not be very bad in absolute terms, but that's not the criteria people use for comparison.
I am pretty sure there has been similar scenarios unfolding across the EU to various degrees, and I have heard more than one rumours of forcing those big supermarket chain to have local shops to help bolster the high streets footfall.
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