せきよぅ

Jensen Huang is the purest living embodiment of what America still is when it works: a place that takes a skinny, non-English-speaking Asian kid from a reform school in the poorest county in Kentucky, hands him a toilet brush, and thirty-five years later watches him build the machine that is rewiring the entire human economy. Born in Taiwan, sent to Thailand, then at nine shipped to America with his brother because the fallout from the Vietnam War made staying dangerous. The school his uncle found was Oneida Baptist Institute in Clay County, Kentucky, one of the poorest counties in the country, and a reform academy for troubled boys, not a normal boarding school. He was the youngest on campus, spoke almost no English, and cleaned the bathrooms used by roughly a hundred older boys who smoked, carried knives, and settled disputes with violence. That was his job. He did it to survive. His parents arrived two years later with almost nothing, pulled the boys out, and settled in Portland. He graduated high school at sixteen, worked the graveyard shift at Denny’s for years starting at fifteen, went to Oregon State at seventeen, and graduated in 1984 with a BSEE, highest honors. AMD, then LSI Logic. In 1993, he, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem sketched the GPU idea in a booth at the Denny’s on Berryessa Road and founded NVIDIA. The first chip (NV1) bet on the wrong graphics math. He flew to Sega, admitted their next chip was a dead end, and asked them to cancel the contract but still pay the remaining money. They did. That cash bought one more shot. A million units in four months. The company survived. Years later, Intel used a licensing dispute to push NVIDIA out of the chipset business entirely. Jensen took the hit, exited, and doubled down elsewhere. Then he spent a decade building CUDA for a market that barely existed while Wall Street hated it. He kept going. 2023 arrived. AI was there. NVIDIA became a trillion-dollar company. Prosperity is the hardest test. Not every man can carry a full cup. Sudden elevation frequently leads to pride and a fall. The most exacting test of all to survive is prosperity. At sixty-three, with the twilight of his life visible, he must have looked back at the whole arc and understood how high he had climbed. That’s when the devil came for him. And yes, he failed this final test: he admitted he was unfaithful to his wife. Reports followed of relationships with Alice Huang (no relation), and with NVIDIA employees including Kimberly Powell, the long-tenured vice president of healthcare who reports directly to him. The board accepted his resignation. Look at the facts. Alice Huang’s company was a major customer. NVIDIA took every precaution: it asked for and received U.S. government permission on the chips it supplied, and later cut Megaspeed as a precaution even though no formal sanctions had been imposed. One cannot accuse Jensen of smuggling chips when the U.S. government itself gave its permission. There is no wrongdoing here, nothing illegal. On the affairs: the usual rule against boss-subordinate relationships exists because power imbalance can destroy free consent. That logic applies when the subordinate’s livelihood depends on not saying no. It does not apply the same way here. Roughly three-quarters of NVIDIA’s workforce are millionaires from the stock he created; about half are worth more than $25 million. These are not the maids whose visa is expiring. These are high-level professionals who already had options and stayed for the mission. Kimberly Powell has been there since 2008; she built the healthcare business. High-status men are desired. Ambitious women pursue proximity to the man who built the thing. Objectification runs both ways. He was not coercing the powerless. Consent is still the line. Context is not nothing. None of us will face the test he faced, because none of us will reach the height he reached. The boy who scrubbed toilets built the infrastructure of the next industrial age. That is the American bargain. It is not the petty status games and power plots of people who have not produced a millionth of what he produced. Get him back. We stand with Jensen.