One of the reasons you want to distribute power and responsibility in powerful organizations and high-stakes enterprises is so that the narcissism or myopia of one man do not come to carry outsized consequences.
When power is spread out across multiple people, it matters less if one of those people is prone to flattery, or in the midst of a midlife crisis, or perhaps just a bit stupid; the limits on his power become limits on the fallout of his character flaws.
A broad distribution of authority also has the virtue of making any one man disposable, replaceable: if he turns out to have poor judgement or counterproductive preoccupations, he can be dispensed with, and his role can be filled anew with someone better suited to its responsibilities.
But if one man becomes synonymous with a company – or a country – then untold numbers of other people live and die by that man's decisions. And when his decisions are bad – petty, selfish, shortsighted, small-minded or dumb – then it is other people who will pay the price. And the price is often quite steep.
Because we live in an era of massive inequality, tightly consolidated corporate leadership, and rule by a billionaire class with large egos and deficient dignity, the US economy is now experiencing one of the latter scenarios, in the form of Jensen Huang, a Silicon Valley billionaire who this week confessed to having an extramarital affair.
This would be tacky and embarrassing for Huang on its own. But because Huang is the longtime CEO of Nvidia, one of the country's largest companies and the manufacturer of advanced chip technology that is powering the US's AI boom, his petty midlife crisis – the kind of small-minded narcissism that can usually be dispensed with in the form of a red sportscar, or indeed with one of the cheesy leather jackets that Huang is prone to wearing – is now a problem for the US economy, and potentially for national security.
Because Huang's mistress was not just any of the interchangeable young women that such men usually go for. This one happened to be a suspected Chinese spy.
It's unclear how much the woman, Huang Le, also known as Alice Huang – no relation – learned from her relationship with the tech billionaire, or how the information she may have gathered could undermine US economic and military interests.
Alice Huang worked in television in China before becoming an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based tech company and one of the largest purchasers of Nvidia's advanced chips. Megaspeed was under investigation by the US commerce department on suspicion of smuggling the advanced chips to China, which is banned from importing them by US law. (Megaspeed said it had offered to cooperate with the US government's investigation but those offers went unanswered.)
According to the New York Times, the investigation was abruptly halted last year after the general counsel for Nvidia, Jensen Huang's company, intervened. Among other things, Jensen Huang is known for his close relationship with Donald Trump.
On Sunday, Huang issued a statement admitting to an affair, and his company announced that it would be launching an investigation into the incident. “The Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised,” which is perhaps a bit too hopeful. On Thursday, Huang stepped down as Nvidia's CEO.
But the statement itself is a reflection of the depth of Huang's control over the country. If you or I had endangered corporate secrets and state security in a flight of reckless, narcissistic frivolity, the way Huang may have done, then our employers would not be announcing the investigation while we kept our jobs. Nvidia's stocks were down when the markets opened on Monday. They may well go down further still.
And yet the scandal is fitting for our current era of Silicon Valley, in which loyalty to Donald Trump has gone from a strategic move by major tech companies to ensure favorable contract and regulatory terms to much more full-throated embrace of the ideology and style of the far right.
Following the lead of its major male executives, the tech industry has become reckless and irresponsible, proud of itself for accelerating technologies it plainly claims to be unable to control, demanding investments in datacenters and government contracts from taxpayers whom it smugly brags about putting out of jobs, and flooding our aesthetic and informational worlds with low-grade slop that is frequently factually inaccurate, often dangerous for vulnerable users, and uncanny in its unpleasantness, bearing a creepy and inhuman sheen in its images and language.
The leaders of this industry seem oblivious to how they appear to other people, and perhaps, insulated by their money and their sycophantic underlings, it does not occur to them that nobody wants the future that they are ushering in, the one they are insisting we all must pay for.
How much money does it take to be so cut off from reality? How much money did Jensen Huang need to have before he convinced himself that Alice Huang, pale, skinny, and fluttering her eyelashes at him at a conference, liked him for his personality?
