Jensen Huang and the Tale of Two Conspiracy Theories
Disclaimer: I’m an information technology and management nerd, not a finance or stock nerd. I don’t hold positions on any company mentioned in this piece. All of the words below are written by an organic meatbag.
To be clear: I have no inside information on this. This article is 100% speculation. But I’m speculating because we’re being sold a story that makes no sense.
Jensen Huang has admitted to dipping his chips in Alice Huang’s (no relation, but I joke about it anyway) suān méi jiàng (spicy plum sauce). We can probably accept this as true. I know some people are shocked and outraged, but ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful people screw around. A lot. And so do their spouses, a lot. Stunning as it may seem to the middle-class booboisie (to use the great Henry Louis Menken’s term), there are a lot of open marriages and swingers in those crowds. They just tend to be a lot more discrete than the regular open marriage and swinger crowds. We don’t know if Jensen Huang and his wife “had an arrangement,” but the odds are 50/50 if they lived outside of the Bay Area. Inside of the Bay Area? 80/20. Much of the AI community there has been described by some as “one giant polycule” anyway. Oh, there are some crazy stories. Maybe 90/10. So why don’t we hear more about the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful people screwing around? Because the press knows better than to say anything, for two major reasons:
Firstly, it’s a personal safety minefield. To be clear: Jensen Huang and Nvidia’s security team are probably not going to send assassins to go play whack-a-hack. But with so much money flying around, somebody is going to lose a lot of it and you never know if one of those somebodies is intemperate and prone to violence. It’s not worth breaking a tabloid story that will (normally) be forgotten after a few days to take even that relatively small risk.
Secondly, journalists that fail to toe the line of the wealthy and powerful get cut off. If they stop being useful tools, then nobody interesting will talk to them. Breaking stories like this is often considered a career-limiting move, again for a story that’s just not worth the hassle. If all of the so-called journalists start doing it then the value of the stories drop to zero, because the amount of material is practically infinite. They can go after Hollywood and a small number of politicians with the right enemies; nobody important cares about that, and it’s what the market will bear. Occasionally you get a little overlap like when Star Trek actress Jeri “Seven of Nine” Ryan outed her now ex-husband, Senatorial candidate Jack Ryan, as having some sexual proclivities that the voters found to be unappetizing (and paving the way for a narrow win by his opponent, Barack Obama). Or there’s just no hiding things like Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting hammered with the wrong guy, then critically injured, and the police and ambulances got involved.
Jensen Huang hanging with Alice Huang back in June 2024. Nobody cared.
So what is far more newsworthy about Jensen Huang’s affair is that it’s suddenly newsworthy. The pictures of him publicly hanging out with Alice Huang go back well over two years, and he wasn’t worried about it because see: above. Why be sneaky and hide when you know nobody is going to make a fuss over it? It’s not like he’s hanging out with Jeffery Epstein after his first human trafficking conviction like plenty of other rich and powerful people did for over a decade without mention. Having a little dinner or two out in the open with your side-piece is pretty low key by these standards. And then juuuuuust as this otherwise short and forgettable news cycle starts to peak, we get this from The Information:
And so now people are going: “Oh my goodness gracious! He’s not just a philanderer! Maybe he’s a… TRAITOR… as well! Seven billion dollars worth of GPUs! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!”
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