Jensen Huang and the Tale of Two Conspiracy Theories

Erik on Tech


Jensen Huang and the Tale of Two Conspiracy Theories

Is he a horny idiot or a fall guy?

Erik on Tech
17 hours ago





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!”

Does This Even Make Sense?

Now, look: seven billion dollars is crazy spectacular pile of money to you and seven billion dollars is a crazy spectacular pile of money to me. It’s not a crazy spectacular pile of money to Jensen Huang. He can wipe his ass with seven billion dollars. While I have no idea what kind of magical … let’s just keep this family-friendly and call it a “rice cooker” … Alice Huang has and what kind of “meals” she can “cook up” with it, I’m pretty sure it’s not worth seven billion dollars. And that’s gross, not net. So to speak.

The story we’re being sold is that the dude who made his company one of the most valuable in human history, and who has a history of being a complete sleaze (go back and look at bumpgate for a great example), risked it all for chump change and the occasional use of, let’s be fair, a mid-tier and pretty well-used “rice cooker.”

And I’m cocking my head to the side and asking “Really?”

Because, sure, that’s a conspiracy that could, theoretically, happen. It just doesn’t strike me as even remotely likely. Maybe she made him feel special? Nah, Jensen Huang feels plenty special all on his own. If he’s feeling down he has his leather jackets. And even the moderately-wealthy and powerful have no problems getting rice or hamburgers or sausage or whatever other meals they feel even slightly peckish for. The conspiracy theory we’re being sold right now is, frankly, quite the stupid one. So let’s take a look at some much harder facts that happen to be much more relevant oh, say, right about now:

Exactly one week ago, Donald Trump and Party got completely nuked in the mid-terms. Some of the issues they got nuked on were data centers, AI, and an economy struggling under high interest rates (among other things) pushed up, at least partially, by massive AI borrowing. And the guy who sold Donald Trump the bag of goods containing those things was, let’s be honest: Jensen Huang. Zuckerberg is a sleazy nerd that most people hate, with no sales skills. Elon Musk is an autistic nerd who strongly appeals to a certain subset of other autistic nerds, but otherwise has no sales skills. Jensen Huang is the only person in that crowd with the persuasion ability capable of convincing Trump to go all-in.

Also, the AI industry is in a bit of a money pickle. They’ve tapped out the venture capitalists and mostly tapped out private equity, which leaves the Final Boss of Finance: Wall Street. Wall Street has looked at Anthropic’s S-1 and proclaimed: “We are not impressed.” But Wall Street had already been convinced to run up the values of big tech (aside from Apple) pushed by a giant load of AI hype, that is now slowly crashing down. And the architect of that hype and the circular financing that drove it was (drumroll, please) Jensen Huang. And this could very well wind up crashing the entire stock market.

So over the past few weeks, Jensen Huang has royally screwed over some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. The kind of people who can get the corporate press to ignore the normal rules about them and their peers getting a little freaky with it. And, in, Trump and Party’s case, the kind of people who can cook up and leak all kinds of legal problems. All of these people very suddenly need somebody to blame. And very suddenly somebody is being abruptly and ham-fistedly being repositioned from super-cool industry savant to someone a lot more blamable.

Huh.

Again, this is nothing more than another conspiracy theory. But at least it’s not a brazenly stupid one.