“Corporate culture in our case is about intellectual honesty.”- Jensen Huang, ex-CEO of Nvidia
By Marc C. Johnson
Hello, friends:
I don’t know about you but I’ve had more than enough of this talk about the new Democratic majorities in Congress being careful about “overreach” when they take control on January 3.
I mean it’s only been less than two weeks since we found out that a sizable majority of Americans aren’t as politically addled as we had come to believe. By most accounts we were collectively mad as hell about the cost of things, a stupid war and the kind of corruption we used to associate with Caligula.¹
And all of a sudden Democrats are being told to temper their expectations about changing things.
The large Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate should be a sign, so this thinking goes, that Democrats risk something by focusing on more than one thing at a time, like investigating corruption AND trying to legislate solutions to national problems such as health care, immigration and stupid wars. ²
The implication being that a bunch of smart, articulate younger folk – Jon Ossoff, James Talarico, Abdul El-Sayed, Annie Andrews, Peggy Flanagan, Scott Colom, etc. – just can’t risk be distracted by chewing gum while walking.
(And to be clear I’m not speaking of voters in Wyoming and Idaho when I reference newly de-addled Americans. In fact it’s an under reported story out of the midterm elections that the Cowboy State and the Gem State actually voted on November 3 to join the old Confederacy now that Texas, North and South Carolina and Mississippi decided they’d had enough.)
Investigating and ending corruption and then legislating IS the job
Truth be told the news this week absolutely screams of the imperative for congressional Democrats to act on many fronts.
In short you gotta do numerous things at once: investigate and further expose the vast corruption that has overtaken an entire political party, its leader, his family and his Cabinet. At the same time find ways to make the corruption illegal, regulated and disqualifying. And then tie the corruption to the failure to address real kitchen table issues.
Now, let’s talk for a moment about Jensen Huang, until a couple of days ago the “smartest” man in the world and among the richest who has now been brought low by a sex and spy scandal that would make everyone except Donald John Trump blush.
Here’s one of the funniest and snarkiest guys on the whole world wide Intertube, Matt Labash:
Don’t hate me for being a softie, but I’m almost starting to feel sorry for Jensen Huang. Overnight, he has become one of those rarest of billionaires: the kind who has been held accountable for any reason. I mean, Donald Trump has been accused of rape, insurrection, costing every American household thousands of extra dollars, demolishing the East Wing without a permit, and vandalizing the Oval Office with Liberace fixtures and a glue gun. And they still let him run the free world. Meanwhile, all Trump’s little buddy Huang did was bonk (an alleged) Chinese spy, who he probably thought was just a nice girl who was really into married 63-year-old midgets in Fonzi jackets. And while everyone is gleefully Huang Chunging on his grave (sorry), one could make a case that Trump himself was digitally-manipulated by President Xi on his last visit, speaking of illicit Chinese contacts. So where is the Justice For Jensen? Here’s hoping he at least secured enough severance to buy some leather pants to complete the leather ensemble, though I imagine they’ll all end up at the cleaners, where his wife will likely be taking him.
OK, I can’t top that, but I can connect the next two dots and say this whole Nvidia, Huang, China, Trump, Lutnick thing is precisely the kind of corruption that no longer addled Americans voted against on November 3.
Howard Lutnick, the smug, arrogant, corruptly slimy Commerce Secretary, is going to be the fall guy for the Trump Administration as it attempts to turn the other way and then cover up the whole Chinese spy who fancies “married 63-year-old midgets in Fonzi jackets” scandal.
Lutnick used to run a Wall Street investment firm – Cantor Fitzgerald – that is now run by his sons and lo and behold is in the middle of the scandal.
Here’s part of a CNBC report on the tangled web that may end up as one of the great scandals in American history, and may even reach the Top Ten scandals of the Trump Administration:
In late September, Cantor Fitzgerald hosted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other top executives from the chipmaker for investor meetings in New York, according to a Cantor research report reviewed by CNBC.
The Wall Street firm liked what it heard.
“We continue to view NVDA as the best risk/reward in our coverage,” Cantor analyst C.J. Muse and his colleagues wrote in a research report dated Oct. 3 that maintained a $350 price target and overweight rating on the stock.
Yet the firm formerly run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now led by his sons, Brandon and Kyle, reported a nearly 50% decline in the number of Nvidia shares it held between September 2025 and March 2026, according to a CNBC analysis of securities filings that excludes options. Nvidia had been one of the largest stock positions reported in Cantor’s filings.
The decline coincided with White House and U.S. intelligence officials pressing Lutnick to crack down on Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of funneling Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips to China. Lutnick repeatedly resisted those efforts, according to Axios.
By the time Cantor hosted Huang in New York, Lutnick had also received a classified intelligence warning, according to Axios, about Huang’s ties to a suspected Chinese spy and had appeared alongside the CEO at a G20 technology summit in North Carolina.
Even as Cantor pared back its Nvidia stake, it continued doing business across the chipmaker’s AI empire. A CNBC review of securities filings, corporate announcements and Wall Street research found the firm has helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for Nvidia’s business partners while maintaining close ties to the chipmaker’s leadership.
Those ties have drawn fresh scrutiny following Huang’s resignation Thursday and Axios’ reporting that Lutnick repeatedly resisted a crackdown on companies suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips to China, despite President Donald Trump authorizing new export restrictions on those companies for a third time on Nov. 5.
An ethics expert said the relationship between Lutnick and his former firm’s investments may raise questions, given what the secretary knew about Nvidia.
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and now a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota said that while “there’s no proof of” Lutnick sharing nonpublic information with Cantor Fitzgerald, “the appearance doesn’t look great.”
“His conversations with his sons better be about publicly available information,” Painter told CNBC.
There is no evidence that Lutnick’s sons had advance knowledge of the intelligence concerns, that changes in Cantor’s reported holdings were tied to any warnings or that the firm’s business interests influenced their father’s decisions.
That last paragraph is what congressional investigations are for.
There is so much going on here – Chinese spies, AI chips (the things that drive the energy and water gulping data centers that Americans are belatedly waking up to hate while asking, “What the ….”), a single company (Nvidia) cornering 90% of the market for the most important chips and driving an impossible to sustain market boom, and a sleazy administration that is clearly in on the grift.
Did I mention national security threat? The president of the United States knew that the top AI executive in the world was potentially compromised by a Chinese spy and did nothing but take that executive with him to … China.
Where to begin, I mean beyond the treason?
How about with this: The Huang/Nvidia story is, at its core, an epic corporate governance failure – a company with no succession plan, a CEO with 60 direct reports, and a culture that came to believe the boss was irreplaceable. Add that apparently very many people inside the company knew of the Fonzi jacket guy’s problems – two reported affairs with employees in addition to the alleged spy – but did nothing, because, well, this is the Age of Corruption.
Here’s Edward Segal in Forbes:
Nvidia does not have a succession plan in place because Huang does not believe in them. “The reason for that is because if you’re worried about succession planning, if you’re worried all that anxiety of succession planning, then what should you do about it? Then you break it all back down,” he said on the Lex Friedman podcast earlier this year.
In lieu of preparing a plan, Huang recommended that “The most important thing you should do today, if you care about the future of your company, post you, is to pass on knowledge, information, insight, skills, experience as often and continuously as you can. Which is the reason why I continuously reason about everything in front of my team.”
It would seem Huang really reasoned in front of at least two members of his team.
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine got it about right, I think.
If you are the board of directors of a mature $4 trillion company, what you want, when you discover that your CEO is having affairs with customers and employees and maybe involved an espionage situation, is to be able to get rid of him. You want that decision to be easy and minimally destructive. You want a deep bench of possible successors, a clear org chart that a new CEO can manage, a company that can run on its own without its visionary CEO making every decision. “Huang has used the structure of the company as a way to make himself hard to fire,” writes Byrne Hobart, and that’s the bad governance.
It’s hard, of course. There were no good answers for the board this week, or 10 years ago. Nvidia’s stock returned 700,000% during Huang’s tenure as CEO, and arguably a lot of that is because of his intense and personalistic management style. A board that pushed Huang, over the years, to run the company more normally might have given up a lot of shareholder value; it might have turned Nvidia into a normal company, in a bad way. But the result is that Nvidia had a hard-to-fire CEO and had to fire him. And that’s not great for shareholders either.
And one more. This from Katie Baker at The Ringer:
Huang’s son, daughter, and son-in-law all work for Nvidia. Spencer Huang is a director of product management in robotics; Madison Huang is a senior director of product marketing; and Madison’s husband, Nico Caprez, is a VP who handles Nvidia’s “neocloud” customers. (Yes, that’s the category Megaspeed [the company the alleged spy works for] falls into.) But the Huangfam are not necessarily serious people, so to speak. Their past experience includes running a cocktail bar in Taipei (Spencer), attending Le Cordon Bleu and working for the luxury brand LVMH (Madison), and alpine ski racing (Nico—who, to be fair, also worked at a Zurich asset management firm).
No wonder Trump likes this guy.
Now, walking and chewing
Political advantage is often defined by the ability to seize a moment when your opponent makes a mistake. The Trump-Huang scandal is such a mistake and such a moment.
I can guarantee there will be more to this growing scandal than we know right now and the new majority Democrats must pounce and use this political hole of viscous mucus as the sharp end of a sustained attack on Trumpy corruption.
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Investigate to be sure, but demand resignations and firings. This scandal is already inside the Oval Office. Bonus points to the first Democrat who calls for Trump’s resignation on national security grounds.
How about serious legislation to provide real oversight and public safeguards against AI abuses? How about issuing subpoenas to members of the asleep at the wheel Nvidia board of directors so they can tell the nation, under oath, what they were doing to earn their $363,000 annual compensation? How about demanding an end to government contracts with Nvidia?
Of course it would be nice if we had a Justice Department to pursue legal action against the company and executives, but even without that congressional Democrats can draw up a proposed indictment and show voters what a serious and not corrupt Democratic administration will do in the face of such malfeasance.
Jensen Huang and Elon Musk are every bit as much the face of Trumpism as the Orange Man himself.
With Donald Trump’s approval continuing to tank in the wake of the disastrous Republican showing in the mid-term elections we have arrived at the moment to once and for all put a stake through Trumpism.
If all this sounds too harsh to some, I say sorry but you’re missing the importance of the moment.
Start walking (or running) and get out the Big League Chew.
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