Friday, November 13, 2026

A Tale of Two Huangs and One Lutnick

 Jensen Huang was born in Taiwan on February 17th, 1963. His birth name was, Jen-Hsuan Huang. According to Wikipedia when he was 10 years old Jensen's parents sent him and his brother to live with an aunt and uncle in Tacoma, Washington. The aunt and the uncle, who were also new to the country and had a limited knowledge of English promptly sent the two boys off to what they thought was a prestigious Kentucky boarding school, The Oneida Baptist Institute. It was actually a private reform institute for troubled youth. It was at the school he quickly learned the American tradition of the barter. Jensen Huang taught his roommate how to read, while the roommate taught him how to pump iron. 

Skipping forward. after years of rising in the tech ranks, Huang hooked up with pals Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem at a Denny's outside of East San Jose and put together, Nvidia. Their main product was going to be graphics chips for video games. Today the company is worth almost four trillion dollars and Jensen Huang's cut so far has been around $200 billion. 

No wonder Donald Trump likes him. (It doesn't hurt that Huang is donor helping pay for Trump's ballroom/bunker project at the east end of the White House.) While Huang wasn't at Trump's second inauguration--he was in Taiwan celebrating the Chinese lunar new year with family and friends--the President did take him along to mainline China on his last trip there. He is also a frequent visitor to the Oval Office and also served on Trump's science and tech advisory council along with Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and others. 

Jensen Huang is known for a couple of other things. First, he has a proclivity for leather jackets, usually black. and other snazzy clothes. Zuckerberg reportedly said, "He's like Taylor Swift, but for tech." Second, we also know, Jensen Huang just can't keep it in his pants. He married Lori Huang in 1985 and they have two kids. Despite those vows and children, it has recently become public knowledge he was having a not to subtle affair with Alice Huang (no relation) who is a Chinese national living in Singapore. After that news broke, thanks to the New York Times, and the walls began to crumble, Jensen Huang admitted he had also engaged in previous affairs with two Nvidia employees. After the news broke about the affair with Alice Huang, the President of the United States told the media. "I think he's an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. You just have to hear it." 

I'm sure he does, Mr. President. It probably goes something like, "Well, she was hot and I was horny."

Now all this could be written off as just another decadent chapter in the wildly corrupt Trumpian age. However, morality and decency aside, we have another problem. A few years ago, Nvidia pivoted away from making game graphic chips to advanced AI chips--that's when the big money really began to roll in. Alice Huang was a senior executive for a a Singapore based company named Megaspeed who buys those chips from Nvidia. U.S. intelligence services suspected Megaspeed of selling those chips to the People's Republic of China, who, in theory is an adversary. In addition, the same intel sources think--although to be fair, they haven't been able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt yet--Alice Huang is pulling down a salary from the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Her main job was to spy on Jensen Huang. 

Oops. For those wondering, that loud thump you just heard is the shit hitting the fan. 

Depending on who you believe, the President was advised of Jensen Huang's, let's say, indiscretions by Marco Rubio just prior to the trip to China that Huang was invited on. Trump claims he never knew about it, or Alice Huang's possible connection to the Reds, even though Rubio claims he was there. (The meeting reportedly took place on Air Force One during a stopover in Alaska on the way to Beijing.) There are also reports of a top-secret memo sent out by the State Department a year ago warning individuals and services that Jensen Huang might be compromised by a Chinese spy. 

But wait, as the TV ad says, there is more. According to Fortune, US. officials had suspected for years Megaspeed and its Malaysian subsidiary, Speedmatric, were selling the Chinese Nvidia AI chips. One DOJ estimate was that in a two-year period while Alice Huang was running the Megaspeed operation, companies unloaded $7.5 billion in chips to China. 

Seeing what was coming, Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent went on CNBC last Friday and pointed his finger directly at Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Bessent claimed the Treasury Department, the Department of Defense and the State Département all wanted to stop sales of the chips to those two companies, but Commerce had the final say, and Lutnick refused to pull the trigger. 

Hey, who knows, maybe Alice was going to introduce him to a sorority sister, and he didn't want to risk the hookup.

So that's where we stand right now. Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia for having three sordid affairs, one with a possible Chinese spy. The Department of Commerce thinks it's fine to sell advanced AI chips to a couple of Chinese front companies. The President of the United States says no one told him anything.  And the Secretary of the Treasury is standing in front of the national media hollering, "Don't Blame me. It wasn't my fault; Lutnick did it!"

Ah yes, standing operating procedure as we've come to know it over the last two years.


11-13-26

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