Journo, NYC expat in Texas. CBS contributor. Stone Cold Gentleman. “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident everybody has decided not to see.”
Dallas, TX
Joined January 2013
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Javier E. David retweeted
Jensen Huang should resign.
As I told @BusinessInsider's @saraheneedleman, I don't see how he can stay on as CEO of Nvidia.
I understand to most shareholders this will seem unimaginable. The man personally built the American semiconductor industry. He created Nvidia, conceived of the GPU, and scaled it into the backbone of the modern intelligence economy. He has personally run the company for 30+ years, commanding an incredible number of direct reports and directly overseeing every aspect of the company's operations.
But this is a truly extraordinary case—an immense misjudgment that opened the company up to unimaginable reputational and legal liability, which will continue to haunt it in the eyes of Republicans and Democrats alike.
And so, for the first time in its history, the board really does need to distinguish between the interests of Jensen Huang the man, and the $4 trillion company he's created.
It's not just that the CEO of the world's largest company engaged in an extramarital affair. He did so with a customer—posing a massive conflict of interest.
It's also clear this was more than a "potential" conflict of interest. The New York Times is reporting that, in addition to shipping Megaspeed huge quantities of its AI chips, Nvidia—under Mr. Huang's supervision—actually did attempt to intervene in the U.S. government's criminal investigation of that customer, Mr. Huang's girlfriend. This was a massive betrayal of President Trump's trust.
And it wasn't just any customer. It was a woman allegedly operating as a spy for China's intelligence service—running a company that served as a middle-man for one of China's largest AI labs (Alibaba). And both the Commerce Department and the Department of Justice seem to believe this may have been happening in violation of U.S. law.
We don't know what information might have been shared in the course of Mr. Huang's personal relationship—be it about Nvidia, its products, its customers, or senior officials across the Trump administration. If I were a major Nvidia partner today, I would be asking questions about what kind of information about my company might have been inadvertently shared with Ms. Huang.
We can't trust Nvidia to conduct or abide a truly independent investigation. Under Mr. Huang's supervision, representatives from the company have made statements about this case that we now know to be false.
It really doesn't matter what you think of the merits of American export control policy, or whether you agree with Jensen about open-source. This was a betrayal of Nvidia's shareholders, its customers, American security interests, and potentially U.S. law.
The company deserves better. The semiconductor industry deserves better. And so I believe, for the first time in its history, Nvidia needs to seriously consider new leadership and a post-Jensen governance plan.
businessinsider.com/jensen-h…
If Jensen Huang goes, “the bull case goes with him. Trying to conceive of a Nvidia without Jensen seems impossible. If he gets ousted, the floor would fall out from under the stock. I don’t know how likely that is, but it would be shattering.”
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Javier E. David retweeted
Wait, wasn’t he traded because Sam Darnold was the future, who got traded because Daniel Jones was the future, who got traded because JJ McCarthy was the future, who got traded because Kyler Murray was the future, who is now the past (together with Wentz) so good ol’ Kirk Cousins can be the future once again?
Worth your time if you’re interested in corporate governance and accountability. Nvidia-Jensen Huang mess shows how important these issues really are.
Anthropic is about to sell the public a trillion-dollar company controlled by 2 shares worth less than a penny.
And the people buying it will have almost no way to change anything that happens next.
I read the voting section of Anthropic's IPO filing, and I think it's the most one-sided deal ever offered to regular investors at this size:
There is exactly ONE Class F share. It belongs to an LLC owned by 7 of Anthropic's co-founders, and it carries 50.1% of all the votes.
There is exactly ONE Class T share. It belongs to Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, and it elects a majority of the board.
If Anthropic were ever liquidated, each of those 2 shares would get its par value of $0.00001.
The public gets Class A shares instead. And Anthropic's own filing says this structure may effectively eliminate their ability to influence important decisions, including a sale of the company.
So here's what that means for anyone who buys:
- They can't replace the board if the company stumbles, because the trust picks the majority and the founders hold half the vote.
- They can't push for a sale, even if someone offers a huge premium.
- They can't stop the board from putting the mission ahead of their money. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, so the board has to weigh shareholders against the long-term benefit of humanity.
- And they can't easily sue over it. Delaware law requires at least 2% of the shares or $2 million worth of stock to bring that kind of claim.
This isn't some far-off hypothetical either.
The filing warns that slowing AI development for safety may not maximize stockholder value. It also says Anthropic recently paused training a next-generation model for more than a month over safety and security concerns.
A public shareholder would've had zero say in that pause.
And here's the part I can't get past:
Each co-founder has pledged to give 80% of their Anthropic equity to charity. The Class F vote stays at 50.1% no matter how much stock they still own.
So the founders can give away most of their money and keep all of their control.
Dario Amodei told 60 Minutes last year that he's deeply uncomfortable with AI decisions being made by a few companies and a few people. When he was asked who elected him, he said no one.
Now his company's IPO hands 50.1% of the votes to 7 people, and he's one of them.
And guess who's being lined up to buy it?
Anthropic has weighed reserving 15% to 20% of the IPO for individual investors, according to Bloomberg. JPMorgan is leading the US retail push, and Citigroup is handling retail buyers in places like Japan, Britain and Canada.
The same filing warns that AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.
So regular people are being asked to buy a company that says its product could threaten humanity, with no real vote on how it's run.
Anthropic's answer is that this is the whole point. The structure is built to keep Wall Street from pressuring it into cutting corners on safety. The trustees have no financial stake in the company. Google and Meta gave their founders control and still made shareholders rich. And every buyer gets all of this in writing before they buy.
But Zuckerberg's control comes from shares he owns, so when Meta's stock falls, he loses money too. Anthropic's 2 control shares can't lose anything.
Anyone buying this IPO is paying full price to hand control to 7 founders and 5 trustees.
They're desperate for money and they don't care about your money.
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Javier E. David retweeted
🚨 750 gallons of water flowing every MINUTE, and it's being reused.
CNBC goes inside the next generation of data center cooling technology, where water circulates in a closed loop instead of constantly drawing fresh water from local supplies.
Javier E. David retweeted
This is what happens when people mistake a board game for an economics education.
Monopoly has a fixed amount of wealth, no innovation, no investment, no productivity growth, and no new businesses. Capitalism has spent centuries doing precisely what Monopoly cannot, creating wealth that didn't previously exist.
The richest people in 1900 couldn't buy an antibiotic, a smartphone, or a commercial flight. Today, ordinary people have access to things kings couldn't have imagined.
Monopoly is a game about acquiring existing assets. Capitalism is an economic system that allows people to create entirely new ones.
If your understanding of economics comes from passing Go and collecting $200, perhaps sit this one out.
Javier E. David retweeted
The Data Center Buildout Is Not Dead
The Senate’s 73-25 vote to advance the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act undercuts the claim that rapid data center expansion is politically finished.
With White House support and President Trump publicly backing the measure as a way to unleash energy production and protect ratepayers, the bill both raises costs for operators and clears the largest practical obstacle to new capacity: the inability to build power and transmission on a workable timeline.
Under the legislation, large loads of roughly 20 megawatts or more must cover the full incremental cost of the generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades built to serve them. Ratepayers are shielded from cost shifting, and states gain additional tools to impose collateral or other requirements. Modeling suggests this could meaningfully increase the retail power price faced by data centers and add roughly 10 percent to the annualized cost of a gigawatt-scale facility. Those numbers are real, and some marginal projects will be repriced or delayed.
They are not fatal. The same bill shortens federal environmental reviews, limits the window for legal challenges, strengthens project certainty, and expands federal transmission siting authority after a defined state review period. The binding constraint on data center growth has not been the willingness of capital to fund servers; it has been the multi-year wait for reliable power. Faster permitting of generation and transmission addresses that bottleneck directly.
Higher power costs and clearer cost allocation will push some developers toward co-located generation or more selective site selection. That is an adjustment, not a shutdown. The combination of ratepayer protections, accelerated infrastructure deployment, and explicit Trump administration support is more likely to sustain the buildout than to end it. The political signal is that Washington is prepared to let the projects proceed, provided the incremental costs fall on the operators rather than on everyone else.
Javier E. David retweeted
So many questions about this…
• What of Gunn’s plan will still happen beyond what’s in production or post?
• Will the actors he cast stay in their roles?
• Was this a Safran/Gunn choice or a Paramount choice? Or both?
• Why can’t DC feel like a steady franchise?
sheesh. Life comes at ya fast. Didn't love everything, but directionally agreed with Gunn's vision. Hoping DCU can find some stability and much-deserved success, for the sake of us fans
James Gunn and Peter Safran will no longer run DC Studios.
Jeremy Latcham, who previously served as a producer at Marvel Studios, is taking over DC.
(Source: hollywoodreporter.com/movies…)
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Dan Ives on Jensen Huang kompromat mess:
“Jensen has become the global face of the AI Revolution and that now will be front and center for Nvidia how to navigate this very difficult situation looking forward,” says Nvidia board may yet force him out $NVDA
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Javier E. David retweeted
Regarding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's affair with an apparent Chinese intelligence asset, here's how I see the situation.
First, there are a few glaring national security issues with this case:
1. Whether Chinese intelligence has obtained any sensitive, non-public information about Nvidia, its products, or—most overlooked—its customers.
2. Whether Chinese intelligence may have indirectly obtained any sensitive information about President Trump, senior U.S. officials, or White House staff via their interactions with Mr. Huang.
3. Whether Mr. Huang's confidential personal relationship with his customer might have unduly influenced the company's policy positions vis-a-vis China, or its decision to sell large numbers of its chips to Megaspeed—a company that has been under investigation by the Commerce Department for violations of American law.
Second, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress will probably have a few distinct baskets of concern as they inevitably ask Mr. Huang to testify. The way I see it, there are:
1. Objections to the company's default policy position—that it should be permitted to sell large numbers of AI chips to customers in China in ways that undermine American security interests.
2. Objections to the company's aggressive lobbying campaign and hard-ball influence in DC, which has reportedly placed undue pressure on independent researchers and think tank staff.
3. Objections, primarily from Democrats, who have accused the company of corruption in its relationship with certain individuals in the President's orbit.
4. Objections to this latest extramarital affair—between the CEO of the largest company in the world, and one of his customers. This would be a governance nightmare for any publicly traded company, even if she weren't a spy.
Javier E. David retweeted
Morgan Stanley out with a long note this morning (80 pages)… they still expect hyperscaler capex to hit $1.6 trillion in 2027
Javier E. David retweeted
so just to recap a crazy week:
- $3 trillion was wiped out of markets in 24 hours
- then Jensen admits cheating on his wife with a chinese spy in a company-wide email
- anthropic & openAI valuations get slashed down to $1-1.3 trillion, openai raises only $10/30B target
- despite this anthropic rumored to have hit $80 billion ARR, ChatGPT hits 20% google search volume, openai hits 1.2B weekly users
- 67% of americans think AI will cause more harm than good. 56% don’t want data centers.
- this endangers 45% of data center projects next year putting AI progress at risk.
- and yet METR reports anthropic internal model research is improving at 2X the rate per year hinting RSI is near.
- Openai + Google admit their internal models have started to make significant breakthroughs in science
- google & microsoft are offering to buyout (lay off) 75,000+ employees to fund their capex spend next year.
rumored this week:
- GPT 6.2 astra
- fable 5.5 + anthropic IPO roadshow kick off.
strap in.
👀 👀 “Per a current Megaspeed employee, "every single time" $NVDA's CEO visits their facility, Alibaba reps come too. One former $NVDA employee told us that internally, Nvidia employees speculated as to the seemingly special nature of the relationship with Jensen.”
NEW: We are short Nvidia $NVDA. We believe Nvidia has a significant China problem. Please see our full report and disclosures now available on our website, link in bio.
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Javier E. David retweeted
Let me say out loud what I think everyone is feeling right now…
Jensen was the poster child for a CEO who didn’t get caught up in these types of controversies.
He is the last person you would think could get caught up in something like this.
When it comes to the AI revolution, he is at the center of it. Without NVIDIA, there is no AI revolution. In many respects, he has been emblematic of American capitalism over the past few years. A dishwasher at Denny’s had an idea and turned it into a $5T company.
Everyone simply thought Jensen was above these types of things.
I don’t even want this to be about a rich powerful man cheating on his wife…we have heard this story over and over again. That isn’t to normalize it as being okay, but it’s not really shocking.
However, the broader issue here is what infidelity implies about someone’s character. You can make many excuses to justify it, but we all know that infidelity is not a good thing. There is a lack of morality involved when it comes to cheating.
When you are the CEO of a $5T company, the question now emerges: if you can lie to your wife, can you also lie about other things…like China’s access to your technology?
I don’t really know what to think. My gut tells me that Jensen has acted ethically in most fronts when it comes to business, but I also know that to build a $5T company, the lines around ethics can blur easily. A framework for being able to make sense of and justify your actions is very, very important and we all simply don’t know if this affair will result in anything bad in regards to America’s national security with China.
I don’t think this is good for the stock market or the AI trade. There will now be investigations and concerns around Nvidia and Nvidia is in control of how all the semis do. I also think this story may have leaked last week and that’s part of why we saw such a massive de-risking by institutions.
I do think there is a world where the market moves beyond this, especially if the investigation doesn’t show any meaningful compromised intelligence. I also think the public will be willing to forgive Jensen, at the end of the day he is a human and infidelity has obviously been part of many marriages, much less such a high profile one.
This is just a really weird moment and not something I ever expected from Jensen. It will now be up to the market to decide how important and meaningful this is when it comes to where the AI trade goes.
$NVDA
Jensen has admitted to the affair in a memo sent to Nvidia employees today. The company is now beginning an internal investigation.
Jensen:
“I love our country and our company, and I am committed to protecting Nvidia and supporting America’s national security. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.”
“Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company, and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security.”
