comms evp | takes + data on storytelling, tech, marketing.
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Remember the AI meeting seating chart from September?
So, the Trump admin knew Jensen Huang was in a relationship with a Chinese spy, and they still sat Huang next to Trump?
Crazy.
Chris Harihar retweeted
Here's what Nvidia's Jensen Huang sent to staff, admitting to affair:
"To my colleagues at NVIDIA,
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. 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. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
Jensen"
It’s no longer a matter of if Huang will go.
He has to at this point, especially now that he admitted to the affair. An affair on its own isn’t a big deal. But this one is, because of the honeypot allegation.
Remember, Nvidia previously denied the affair to NYT. That false denial now looms large and makes a resignation more likely.
But it will take some time.
Keep in mind, Huang will want to negotiate an enormous exit package if he’s leaving. That won’t happen quickly.
NEW: Nat Sec Adviser Marco Rubio oversaw drafting of a highly classified memo this spring that the intel community assessed a woman who had established a close relationship w Jensen Huang was working for China's Ministry of State Security nytimes.com/2026/11/08/us/po…
Yesterday, I predicted Nvidia’s board would announce an investigation into Huang. Lots of pro-Nvidia folks came for me in the replies.
Today, Nvidia did just that.
I’m really good at this shit, bro.
Breaking news from @ianmking: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admits to extramarital affair and the company board is now investigating him being targeted by a Chinese espionage plot. He remains CEO for now. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Hear me out —
A good pro-AI, pro-user stance for the incoming Congress that would probably attract bipartisan support: require frontier AI labs to be more transparent on usage limits and capabilities for paid plans.
What good is building a business, for example, around AI tools without predictable pricing and usage limits?
See Grok Bot, as well. Posting on X at midnight shouldn’t be how companies clarify terms/limits of paid plans.
This is laughable.
It needs to be said that David Sacks has been a failure as AI czar under the Trump administration.
Everything he’s saying Democrats will do (to scare people), Republicans have basically already done. They’ve pressured AI labs and are reviewing models. @GaryMarcus makes a great point about this.
Meanwhile, under Sacks, people don’t seem to like AI. Sentiment continues to trend downward. The midterms were practically a referendum on that, with data centers as an AI proxy.
Listening to Sacks is meaningless, at this point.
David Sacks predicts Democrats will use AI legislation and frontier-model approvals to create a surveillance and censorship state 'turbocharged by superintelligence'
“It’s 100% that Democrats are going to make a major push for AI legislation in the next Congress. The question is what that looks like. And I don’t think you have to speculate too much to understand where it’s going.
“I believe that Democrats want to create a surveillance and censorship state that’s turbocharged by superintelligence. I mean, that’s ultimately the end state.
“How do you get there? You create a department, a federal department of AI. You require that all the so-called frontier models have to be reviewed and approved by that. The regulators give their notes on it. You can’t get a model released unless you address their concerns.
“And their harms will include all the things that the government is telling us that social media companies should be concerned about, like disinformation and misinformation and dissonant thought. All the things that the government was pressuring the social media companies to crack down on and censor during COVID. How quickly we forget all of this.
“They’re going to basically reenact that whole regime again using AI, and it’s going to be infinitely more powerful because we’re talking about superintelligence here. So I do believe that that is the regime that we’re headed towards.”
Chris Harihar retweeted
How quickly they forget.
The Republicans literally tried to shutdown Anthropic for refusing to survey American citizens.
And now @DavidSacks is trying to pin surveillance on the Democrats,
David Sacks occasionally says smart things, but sometimes is both partisan and unfair to an absurd degree.
Note also that the Trump administration DOES review frontier models, but have kept their rules entirely secret—which is invitation to exactly the corruption that Sacks is trying to pin on future Democrats who have thus far done nothing of the sort.
David Sacks says the Democrats will push for a federal Department of AI in the next Congress .... and it would review every frontier model before release.
The proposed 'harms' include disinformation, misinformation and 'dissonant thought' ... the same categories used to pressure social platforms during COVID.
Sacks argues this would create a surveillance and censorship state 'turbocharged by superintelligence'.
For builders: it means model approvals become regulatory, not just technical.
Do you see this as inevitable, or overblown?
People are angry about Grok Bot.
Charted how pissed people are here (based on X posts):
Elon this is not one-click-easy
Paying users are watching Grok Bot fall apart in real time. People are running out of usage days before their limits reset, even on the highest subscription plans
At the same time, the bots are becoming slower, less intelligent, and less reliable every day. Things that used to work perfectly now fail, give wrong answers, or get stuck
People are hitting 100% usage with normal or even lighter workloads, making the product almost useless before the week is over.
Your team has said almost nothing about these serious usage and quality problems
Grok Bot is supposed to be an AI agent that can handle real work. But right now, it's falling apart in front of the very people who trusted your promises
Step up. Fix the usage limits and restore the quality users originally paid for
I’ve managed a few tough CEO exits.
Nvidia is facing a pretty serious crisis here, especially post-midterms. Had Republicans kept power, there would be less pressure to do anything. But with Dems winning Congress, this report will prob lead to hearings and subpoenas.
Ultimately, Dems have a mandate to “go after” tech. Nvidia and others that linked arms with Trump are all targets. And this will be a good, concrete example of how that coziness led to bad behavior, with Trump turning a blind eye to Huang’s relationship being a natsec risk.
Nvidia needs to act for the good of the company. It needs to show that it remains independent and free from Chinese influence (to Dems, etc.), so it will likely launch an internal investigation. Depending on what it finds, Huang could stay or be forced to resign. If there’s obvious wrongdoing, his exit will happen sooner.
Of course, this assumes the reporting is accurate. But Dem control of Congress changes the trajectory of this quite a bit.
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far:
- The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT)
- Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg)
- The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT)
- The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT)
- Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia.
- Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia.
- Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia.
- Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world.
What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point.
The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
Make Dev Bond, you cowards!
Harry Styles had talks with execs about playing the next James Bond.
(Source: variety.com/2026/film/news/j…)
Imagine being on Nvidia’s communications team this morning. 💀
Yeesh.
NEW:
The US government believes Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang had a romantic relationship with a Chinese woman whom the US intelligence community believes was recruited to spy for China’s Ministry of State Security, the country’s main intelligence agency.
Chinese intelligence could exploit a relationship with Huang to obtain sensitive information about Nvidia’s most advanced technology which could help China accelerate its military and intelligence capabilities while undermining the technological advantage the United States is trying to protect.
Full Story: bit.ly/4zpNQ7v
ALT Jensen Huang, wearing glasses and a dark suit, shakes hands with Donald Trump outdoors. Trump wears a blue suit and light blue tie. Elon Musk and other people stand behind them.
I don’t know how a team could look at the midterm results, where empathy was a defining characteristic of the winning candidates, and conclude that performative outrage and hyperbolic toughness are what people want right now.
Not everyone can speak like Zohran.
But here are a few messaging lessons from this clip that other Dems can adopt:
1-Lead with the pain. People are struggling. Address that directly.
2-Local is cool. A generic Democratic agenda and message aren’t as effective as a locally informed message. Local = authentic and grassroots.
3-Work with anyone. People are tired of obstructionists and want leaders to work together, no matter what, to get shit done.
4-Speak to urgency. Any set of solutions can be useful as long as they speak to the urgency of the moment. As Zohran says here, rent is due on the first of the month, and nothing else matters.
5-Economic populism is a winning message. It keeps Dems on message and helps them speak to a wider base of people. Top versus bottom, not left versus right, as Tallarico says.
6-Be warm. No one wants a cold, facts-only messenger. Smile, engage positively with the interviewer, and try to be likable.
Did I use this meme correctly.
Elon Musk says the lack of popularity for data centers is temporary because of the prosperity that is brought by them:
"The lack of popularity is where there aren't data centers and they think a data center will have a bad effect. Memphis is booming because of @SpaceX. The restaurants are full, the hotels are full, we're paying twice the prevailing wage people were earning before. We've also helped local schools. And the tax revenue the county and city are earnings is tremendous. I think this popularity thing is a temporary concern because there actually is tremendous prosperity that is brought by the data centers. Talk to the people in town and they feel it because their businesses are booming."
(via 33rd Annual Baron Investment Conference today in NYC)
More Pangram image detector testing:
On the left, I have an image of a listing pulled directly from Zillow. Pangram identified it as having no AI in the image (which I assume is correct).
I then used Gemini to add a bike to the lower-right-hand corner of the image, took a screenshot of the AI-manipulated photo and ran it through Pangram.
Pangram still says likely no AI.
Other image detectors, however, correctly identify the AI-manipulated photo as AI.
I used ChatGPT to add a tumor to a clean brain scan. You can see it on the right-hand side. I then ran the AI-manipulated image through Pangram, which detected it as AI-generated. That's likely because I used the original image provided by ChatGPT, making the metadata easy to identify.
To really test the tech, I then took a screenshot of the same image, including the AI-added tumor, and ran that screenshot through Pangram. This time, it came back as "likely no AI," despite the tumor being AI-created.
Full disclosure: I do comms for a competitor, so I'm biased (though the competitor didn't ask me to conduct this test). That said, I think Pangram is very good at detecting AI text, but less effective with images. See additional images for examples of other detectors that successfully caught the screenshot.
Elon caught 3 separate anger spikes this week on X, including from some typically friendly audiences.
The great Grok Bot rug pull of 2026 blew up and is still getting backlash from the tech/AI community. Then the election imploded a few days later. Now the Cybertruck winddown today.
Narratively, this is the first week in a long time he's actually, very clearly lost.
