Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO on 11 November, days after he admitted an affair with a woman US intelligence is said to suspect is a spy. Reporting since then says there was more.
The New York Times reported a relationship with one of his direct reports. Reuters reported an intimate relationship with a second employee. Nvidia has not confirmed either report, and the board has not published its investigation’s findings.
Nvidia is the world’s second most valuable company. It lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value in days. That should tell you how much of the global economy is a house of cards.
Whether his marriage is open is not our business, and it changes nothing. The issue is an alleged conflict of interest that nobody stopped. That is a governance failure, and it is exactly what DEI, compliance and ethics teams have spent decades trying to prevent.
Research links narcissistic CEOs to bold, volatile strategy and, in a separate study, to fraud. I say this as a founder, and as an executive who has worked for and with many brilliant ones. The trait that produces a huge vision and a taste for risk also removes the brakes.
Add the incentives of venture capital and public markets. In my experience, boards often reward growth first and human impact last.
Here is what Nvidia looked like, according to Fortune: about 60 direct reports to one CEO, no COO, no chief compliance officer, and no clearly outlined succession plan, in one governance professor’s words. It had no Chair until 11 November. The first, Harvey Jones, is 73 and has been on the board since 1993.
Something like this was always going to happen. It’s deeply unfortunate that it happened to a cornerstone of the global economy, but many of us saw something like this coming.
People are shaped by their incentives and the people around them. Look at Uber. Its founder resigned in 2017, and AP reported that the outside review’s recommendations showed a company “out of control”. I have never seen one of these scandals cleaned up without a reset of both the executive team and the board, and that’s not a unique opinion among my peers.
The issue was never that a CEO had relationships. It was who they were with: a business associate US intelligence reportedly suspects of spying and, allegedly, someone who reported to him. Boards should absolutely treat that as a conflict of interest. Nvidia’s own code of conduct reportedly lists personal relationships as a possible one.
In every case of executive misconduct I’ve seen, what was raised or initially revealed was the tip of the iceberg. I’m not saying whether it’s true here or not, I’m saying every decision needs to be looked at with very heightened scrutiny before a final judgment is made.
Circular financing, where a supplier invests in a customer that then buys its products, is legal and disclosed. It is also risky. And when that risk underpins this much of the global economy, it should be treated with more care, rather than less. It ties valuations together, so one weak link can pull down the rest. Nvidia’s announced $100 billion OpenAI investment drew bubble warnings in 2025. Given the conduct now alleged, investors should look harder at the deals the CEO championed.
A leader surrounded by people who look and think like them is how you get groupthink. In experimental markets, ethnic diversity lowered price bubbles. A study of listed firms linked more women on boards to less securities fraud. There isn’t a direct linear relationship between diversity and excellent decisions, but a leadership class this homogenous will keep making the same mistakes together.
The former Google ethical AI leader Timnit Gebru and others have been warning about these issues for literally a decade.
The people building AI have put numbers on the cost. Geoffrey Hinton has said there is a 10 to 20% chance AI takes control from humans. Dario Amodei has put a 10 to 25% chance on a catastrophic outcome. Elon Musk has said around 20%. These are guesses, as Hinton says himself, but they come from the builders. Anthropic’s S-1 now warns of “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity”.
I did not consent to those risks being taken with my life, or my parents retirement accounts. I doubt you did either.
On 10 November, the Australian Government announced mandatory safety protections for frontier AI companies, a new regulator and “significant penalties”. I have concerns about both the scope of the rules and whether they will be implemented well. Rules that choke legitimate innovation will fail, and so will rules that only exist on paper.
But if companies are refusing to voluntarily do the right thing (for both humans and their stock price), what other real options do we have?
The fact that my LinkedIn feed is full of Australian tech leaders more worried about “innovation” than the impacts of the industry on regular people is deeply concerning to me.
Predictably, a woman has been called in to clean this up. Colette Kress has been Nvidia’s CFO since 2013. She is now interim CEO with earnings due on 17 November. She is no outsider. She sat on the executive team through the deals above.
The pattern still has a name. Researchers coined the glass cliff in 2005, and a 2020 meta-analysis found women are often appointed to precarious leadership positions, though the effect varies by context. Being asked to fix what you did not break is hard at the best of times.
So perhaps, if and when we recover, we can have a real conversation about what pushing marginalised people out of tech has cost us: risk taking beyond the point of excuse, echo chambers focused on returns at the expense of everyone else, and the fact that we treat basic good judgment and governance as radical.
None of this is expensive, but it will prevent a lot of very expensive problems:
- Write a rule that sexual and/or romantic relationships with direct reports and business associates must avoided, and disclosed and resolved if unavoidable.
- Appoint an independent Chair.
- Name a succession plan, and update it every year.
- Hire a compliance lead who reports to the board.
- When a conduct issue surfaces, review the deals the CEO championed.
Governance is boring until it’s the only thing anyone is talking about. Fix it while it’s still boring. And maybe, let a woman in the room before it blows up.
- Aubrey Blanche is the director of ethical advisory & strategic partnerships at The Ethics Centre and the founder of The Mathpath.
