Reasons For Which Jensen Huang Was Not Fired.

^{Nvidia’s board of directors has made their judgment.}

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. Yes, I use em and en dashes (⇧⌥-hyphen and ⌥-hyphen on Mac keyboards, respectively).

People endlessly debate and discuss the greatest quotes in literature: William Shakespeare proclaiming “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Mary Shelley lamenting “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created.” Emily Brontë squirming while penning “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” For me, there is one and only one contender for the greatest literary quote of all time:

^{The greatest quote in literary history. Fight me.}

What We Can All Agree On:

As I wrote on Tuesday (and I think everyone agrees), the official story that Huang is out because he was caught dipping his chips in Alice Huang’s suān méi jiàng (spicy plum sauce), as well as an Nvidia VP is laughable. Nobody cares. We’re expected to believe that the board of directors of world’s second-most valuable corporation, headquartered in the not-so-ultra-tradcon Bay Area, has suddenly and abruptly decided that Victorian-era puritanism is more important to them than oh, say, money. And even in Victorian England it was pretty common for wealthy men to keep a few mistresses around. If it was just this, Jensen Huang could have just posted the contents of this joke meme and everyone would forget about it after a week or two:

^{Truth, if only it was true.}

I mean, it would be darkly funny if the one ultra-wealthy and powerful guy who recently gets caught banging a bunch of women that happen to be of legal age winds up getting nuked for it, but I just don’t see it. All of the pieces of this story—Alice Huang and her extremely suspicious corporate relationships—have been floating around for over a year, and nobody cared until the Wall Street Journal and New York Times suddenly started caring at almost the exact same time. Curious. Something is afoot. As I’ve already published, my wild and unsubstantiated guess is Donald Trump and his cronies. They have the motive, the method, and the opportunity. Glenn Greenwald posted today that he also believes that it was someone with S-tier power:

The Loonies for Loonies Theory:

Some other guesses and clues have surfaced. Let’s start with the one Greenwald was responding to, because I think it’s the funniest: that Anthropic and / or the rest of the Effective Altruists are behind this. Even some people I personally like have latched onto this one and sorry, friends, this isn’t it. If you really want a breakdown of the reasoning (and truly believe that AI can cure the brain cancer that results from reading it), you can dig through this.

Yes, Anthropic and the EA crowd are full of weirdos with weird grudges. Doesn’t matter. First of all, they all know that there is a very, very real probability that they’ll have to beg more money out of Nvidia within the next few months. They may not like Daddy Corebucks, but they’re not going to risk slitting their own financial throats over it. Secondly, no matter how mad they are it explains exactly nothing about why Jensen Huang and his board threw in the towel instantly. This would more or less be the conversation:

Anthropic: “Hey, yo, we’re declaring war on you Nvidia! Fear us!”

Nvidia Board: “Oh wow! That’s wild! Ummmm…. We guess we should immediately fire our top general, for whom we have no replacement, because clearly that makes the most sense and maximizes shareholder value.”

Jensen Huang: “I suddenly hate money and power and GPUs. I’m going to run away and live out my days tending to my anime waifu harem.”

^{Did Jensen Huang want to give up and go live the anime protagonist life?}

That piece ends with a pretty funny and thirsty attention plea to Elon Musk, which really tells you all you need to know about whoever wrote it.