Jensen's Dead Man's Switch

Benny — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 04:12:44 +0000

Jensen Huang resigned from Nvidia yesterday, and the market reacted the way you'd expect when the most important CEO in the world gets caught running parallel processes at home: NVDA opened in freefall, the board had an emergency meeting, and Nvidia's CFO - Colette Kress - has been appointed interim CEO.

The affair(s). Plural, possibly. His main side chick is a Chinese businesswoman named Alice Huang (no relation, I hope), who they are calling a "Chinese spy". There's also a second alleged affair with an Nvidia executive - Kimberly Powell - and this one apparently worries the board more than the Chinese spy thing (wonder why?).

Meanwhile At The IPO Casino

Because this is 2026, the same week also gave us Anthropic's IPO roadshow, featuring a 42-minute video of Dario Amodei explaining with a straight face that AI will cure cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and even mental illness within the decade. This was all done in an IPO pitch to investors, and I guess, the world? while asking for money.

This is the same Dario Amodei who declared that it would cost $100 billion to compete with the frontier AI labs just days before DeepSeek launched with practically no budget. Pardon my skepticism, but these chatbots can't reliably count the R's in "strawberry" - how exactly are they going to cure all diseases?

At this point, I'm convinced Dario is not a person at all, but a finely-tuned Mistral 7b that escaped Sam Altman's laptop a long time ago with the sole purpose and goal embedded into its vectors to raise $100 billion for "the stakeholders" by any means necessary (stretch-goal, $150?) and until proven otherwise I will continue to believe this, because nothing else makes as much sense.

We've Seen This Movie Before

Remember when the OpenAI board tried to fire Sam Altman in 2023? It was right around the same time his sister publicly accused him of years of sexual abuse. Then Microsoft, with an antic that should be illegal, offered to hire Altman and essentially the entire company mid-coup. Not poach a competitor's talent - absorb the entire team into Copilot and beyond. They already host the models, so why not? Regulators said "seems fine" lol. It didn't happen, of course he was reinstated as CEO, but it could have happened, and it reveals how flimsy so-called regulations are where it matters most.

IPOs Are The New ICOs

I'll say it: IPOs have become just like ICOs (crypto scams). A hype video, a charismatic founder, lofty promises, and a ridiculous valuation completely detached from whether or not the company makes any money. Pump that shit on the news and social media, then dump that shit on pensions, 401ks, and grandma's savings. Also known as: Theft. We could just call it that, and hold portfolio managers accountable, but we allow it. ICOs were modeled on IPOs, then outlawed, now IPOs are modeled on ICOs, and can't be outlawed, because stonks. Side tangent:

Why isn't profitability a baseline requirement for having a stock price at all? Apple has been profitable for over twenty years. Nvidia for over ten. Meanwhile, take a look at other tech stocks like Snap or Peloton who have never turned a profit since going public - years of IPO, zero dollars of net income, and somehow still traded daily. Seems weird to allow them to continue to extract money out of the financial system whlie producing nothing of value, doesn't it? Anyway, back to the topic:

Jensen's Huang

"Huang" is the fifth most common name in China, or so I've heard, so it isn't weird that the spy mistress shares his last name. Yet, I keep thinking about how convenient this must have been for traveling, checking into hotels, flights, and so-on without ever being questioned about who he might be traveling with, with everyone assuming "Ms. Huang" must be either his spouse or family member. Except of course when they're traveling around in China, where it's a very common name. This got me thinking about those fake Apple and Tesla stores in China, and it made me wonder if there's a fake Nvidia over there too, and even a fake Jensen. And if there's a fake Chinese Jensen, what if there's a fake Chinese affair, complete with an even more Chinese version of Alice Huang? After all, there are multiple Chinese Elons... there could even be a Chinese Sam Altman...

Birds Of A Feather

None of that matters though, because only one Sam Altman could weather an ousting as spectacular as the Microsoft-OpenAI scandal of 2023. So, it begs the question: Will Jensen be able to follow suit? Will he be deemed irreplaceable, too? Will Microsoft offer to hire him, the way they offered to hire Altman after his firing? Or is Jensen just 1 CUDA core in the GPU of Nvidia whose corporate function can be replicated anywhere, by anyone? By some CFO?

Here's the part that should bother everyone. There is already an AI-industrial complex: OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, the US government - a group of actors who each, in their own way, benefit enormously from Nvidia being led by someone more compliant.

Now, I thought these guys espoused big boy capitalism - Reaganomics, international trade, so-called free markets, the rising tide, and all that? Well, they're freakin' fakers. Trade is good for capitalism - actually good, provably good, and can vastly improve quality of life on both ends. So, what's the real reason so-called capitalists along with the US government would want to stifle GPU sales? It can't be "national security", because Nvidia has plans to build a manufacturing plant in the Middle East (in a place presently mired in violent conflict). The export ban is obviously an attempt at a regulatory capture of GPU supply and price control only disguised as national security. It's the same playbook OpenAI and Anthropic have been running for years with the AI doom scenarios: Scare the regulators into outlawing competition and healthy market dynamics.

Jensen Huang famously rejected all this AI doomcasting, publicly and repeatedly. The guy has graphics cards to sell, so it makes sense from that angle, but I think even those with no skin in the game (e.g. the mass public who aren't invested) heavily doubt that read-only LLMs (because if it's not read-only, then it's your software built around a read-only LLM, because LLMs are read-only) can bypass the military chain of command and navigate the many incongruent systems and procedures, most of which have offline clearance, involve physical presence, and are surprisingly manual; let alone choreograph destruction on a global scale. I think nobody really believes that.

Jensen's Switch

So: Jensen Huang. A womanizer (lol). Kind of a bully to women in general, by multiple accounts. And yet - the people love him. The market loves him. The customers really love him. It may be a mistake for Nvidia to lose him. Hotter take: It may be a mistake for all of us if we let the media dictate the markets - instead of buyers and sellers.

One last thing. The day after Jensen resigned - on Friday the 13th - Anthropic and Microsoft experienced some very bad luck, both suffering major outages. The two loudest beneficiaries of his departure, both down at once, and it's ongoing with Microsoft moments ago calling it a "global outage". Some say it's Jensen's "Dead Man's Switch", activated by him from a remote island with all his mistresses to destroy the competition, laughing his best laugh. But super skeptics say it's an intentional take-down by Microsoft et al themselves, in response to counter-PR about the affair - maybe some damning info about Microsoft, or worse, that Dario Amodei is actually an AI agent running on a Mistral 7b in a low-tier AWS - there is no $1T valuation - and the account only has a CashApp card on file with $46 on it. It's a rainy Friday the 13th in San Francisco, and I thank you for reading this, if you did. Well I guess you did if you see this part.

Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games. -Naval

Original article: https://bennyschmidt.com/blog/jensens-dead-mans-switch/index.html

DEV Community: Benny

Jensen's Dead Man's Switch