詹森倒台的余波The Fallout from Jensen’s Downfall

Welcome, Weekenders! Jexit, as I’d like to christen Huang’s departure from Nvidia, is an ugly matter, an implosion with fallout across continents and several different industries. No one irradiated by it walks away a picture of good health.

Huang obfuscated the truth, promising senior executives at his company that he’d had just the one affair, with Alice Huang, the former executive at Megaspeed, a major Nvidia customer. But that wasn’t the case. He reportedly had at least two others, including one with a direct report.

Nvidia’s board almost didn’t act and only did so on the insistence of the company’s general counsel, Tim Teter. I’m not surprised. The board is dominated by people who’ve known Huang for decades. And there was not even a board chair.

The friendships Huang thought he had in Washington weren’t nearly enough to save him, a reminder of the fickleness of politics as Silicon Valley goes through the necessary course correction to win influence with the ascendant left. (Alex Karp is a Democrat again, did you hear?) Indeed, it looks pretty obvious that some factions within Trump-led Washington worked against Huang. Many of the reporters who have been most active in the last week are in Washington.

Some U.S. authorities say the former Megaspeed executive was a spy. Was she? More reports in recent days cast doubt on whether she really was. No matter. The mere implication was a useful weapon to wield against Huang.

The spy-who-loved-him situation was catnip for reporters, but I don’t want to hand out laurels to the media. Huang’s bullying tendencies went underhighlighted for years—first because Nvidia was too complex and confusing to cover, and then because of Huang’s presentation of himself as a nerdish, articulate poster boy for the AI age. It makes me wonder who else is escaping close coverage as the tech landscape continues to widen and morph.

Throughout Jexit, Huang has maintained a sizable base of support in Silicon Valley. A host of prominent names rushed to his defense—from venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and Ron Conway to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. Huang still has a legion of allies within Nvidia. On Thursday evening, a petition from Nvidia employees circulated online advocating for his reinstatement.

I wonder how misguided that hero worship might later seem. Congressional investigations into Huang and Nvidia loom—he has agreed to testify before Thanksgiving—and already we’re starting to see reports about how he really ran Nvidia, a place where he was comfortable steamrolling over more cautious executives.

Stephen Witt, who wrote a 2025 biography of Huang, “The Thinking Machine,” describes him in a new essay for The New York Times as a person energized “by arrogance and toxic self-regard.”Witt also makes it clear how willfully blind everyone was to Huang’s behavior. When Nvidia began in the early ’90s, its corporate mascot was Dawn, an “underdressed, large-breasted C.G.I. pixie” that was “memory-holed in 2020 around the time Mr. Huang started to talk about empowering women within the company.”

The title of Witt’s book refers to both the technology Huang sold and Huang himself. As Witt has contemplated Jexit, he has mulled whether he might return to covering Huang: “I should write a sequel: ‘The What-Were-You-Thinking?! Machine.’”—Abram Brown (abe@theinformation.com) Listening: “Dropping Names With Brent and Jonny” Let’s acknowledge the Horta in the room—so to speak.

With Patrick Stewart’s death last week, more than a few of us have been feeling nostalgic about “Star Trek,” myself included, and it pushed me toward a welcome discovery: Brent Spiner (aka Data) and Jonathan Frakes (aka Commander Riker) have spent the last few months together debuting a podcast! And it is utterly delightful.

The conceit behind “Dropping Names With Brent and Jonny” is simple: Guests from across the entertainment firmament join Spiner and Frakes to talk about their careers and how they’ve intersected with other famous people. (A bell dings each time someone drops a name.) It’s a nod to just how far the “Star Trek” acting universe extends, and some of their guests beam in direct from Trek land. William Shatner (Captain Kirk) and LeVar Burton (Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge) have both appeared—as have Michael Dorn (Worf) and Seth MacFarlane (the “Family Guy” creator, who has a major Trek obsession). But the show is not a total Trekkie con: Noah Wyle and Ron Perlman have stopped by, too.

Another recent guest was Margo Martindale, the beloved character actress (and Frakes’ former Harvard University classmate). I especially enjoyed that conversation. Frequently, “Dropping Names” is a window into B-list Hollywood, an existence beneath the industry’s shiniest tier. It is not an entirely unexplored new world, but it is a strange one filled with what-ifs and missed connections. Stewart escaped from it—Spiner and Frakes never did.

Now well into their 70s, both actors seem charmingly comfortable at their place within it.—Abram Brown Reading: “Ladies’ Man” by Laurence Leamer A question we’ve all been asking ourselves this week: Why would someone with great wealth and power risk it all for sex?

Well, at least in the case of John F. Kennedy Jr., his lifelong randiness was seemingly an effort to prove to himself that he wasn’t the weak, chronically ill fellow he in fact was. “Sex was an assertion of health—a way to defy his ailments,” Laurence Leamer writes in “Ladies’ Man,” a new biography of JFK told chiefly via his many romances. (Leamer’s 2012 bestseller “Capote’s Women” was turned into FX’s “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.”)

Leamer’s retelling of the president’s life is gossiply enveloping, though it never applies a gimlet-eyed gaze to its handsome, oft-idolized subject. Leamer portrays Kennedy as shallow and callow, with a self-professed “slam, bam, thank-you-ma’am” motto toward women. By Kennedy’s own count, he slept with well over 1,000 women, an estimate he offered casually to a friend without compunction.

Lovesickness may never have troubled Kennedy, but he did suffer from a number of other ailments, including his famous bad back, as well as Addison’s disease, which affects the adrenal glands. In accounting these maladies, “Ladies’ Man” doubles as an unsettling look at midcentury medicine: Among many procedures and treatments, Kennedy underwent four back surgeries and relied on small, steroid-filled pellets inserted under his skin. As Leamer dryly notes in an observation as true of the Kennedys’ era as of our own, “the wealthy sometimes pursue experimental cures that most other people would never consider.”

“Ladies’ Man” broadly charts the Kennedy clan’s rise to prominence, an ascendance marked by the dalliances of JFK’s sister Kathleen, a London socialite who later attached herself to “one of the great roués” of British nobility, and those of his millionaire father. The paterfamilias had his own bravado thinking on fornication—“I want to get the most out of life, including sex”—and was known to labor over hiring a new secretary, sometimes interviewing several dozen applicants.

In several chapters, Leamer shows the extent to which elites like the Kennedys will go to keep their misdeeds hidden. That was never more important to JFK than it became in cloaking his affair with Marilyn Monroe. When gossip spread about the president’s relationship with the actress, Kennedy coerced friend William Haddad, a former journalist turned Peace Corps inspector general, to dispel the rumors among the media even though they were true. “He lied to me,” Haddad recalled. “He used my credibility.”—A.B.

The film from director Lance Oppenheim that has lately sucked up so much of the oxygen within pop culture is his joint production with Nathan Fielder—yes, that would be “You Can See Everything,” the Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Perhaps I could also direct your attention to the other Oppenheim movie that came out this fall, “Primetime,” which is newly available for streaming rental.

Like “You Can See Everything,” “Primetime” is a movie about complicated deceptions, exploitation and false identities—a fictionalized biopic of NBC journalist Chris Hansen, host of “To Catch a Predator,” the short-lived, hidden-camera show from the 2000s that set up sting operations to capture men who wanted child sex. Hansen is portrayed by Robert Pattinson, who brings a reptilian carnivorousness to a star turn that will probably nab him an Oscar nomination.

The supporting performances are also excellent, with Emmy winner Merritt Wever as “To Catch a Predator” producer Andie Bender and Skyler Gisondo as Decoy Dan, a youthful, almost androgynous actor who assumes the role of onscreen bait.

Oppenheim keeps “Primetime”’s focus narrow, and it unfolds over the first few months of Hansen’s frantic campaign to turn his ickfest into a hit NBC program that could compete against ABC’s “Lost.”Oppenheim’s camerawork and shot selection in “Primetime” feels like a somewhat unfamiliar style for a feature film—a reflection of his decade-plus career in documentaries. (His “Ren Faire,” which examined the drama around a Renaissance fair in Texas, was a 2024 HBO standout.)

Oppenheim likes shadows and grimy soft focus, and what he ends up with is a vérité-esque haunted house picture. (The climax comes as a fierce rainstorm lashes a tidy suburban home, calling to mind “Poltergeist”’s finale.) The most obvious ghouls in “Primetime” are the sex perverts, who are summoned and duly exorcised in quick order. They’re not the only dark souls, though: Hansen is another, scheming to seize fame and snare increasingly prominent men on camera.

And thus emerges a further thematic link between “Primetime” and “You Can See Everything”: Both feature protagonists wearing masks of attractive ambition over their monstrous tendencies. Still, it’s sparse camouflage.—A.B.