Quick Thought: Some People in Big Tech Really Are This Stupid
Yes, this post is about Jensen Huang.
But it’s about more than him.
There are a lot of people right now asking how someone in his position could have fallen for a honeypot- the cliché foreign woman who was allegedly a Chinese spy. It’s such an obvious attack vector; I’m almost tempted to think it couldn’t be true. Who would think this would work? And yet, I’m reminded of something else I’ve learned from reading about the tech billionaires.
They are dumb. As brilliant as they may be at getting where they are, they’re also not very bright in some big ways. Jensen’s story reminded me a lot of reading Careless People about the people running Facebook.
It also comes at a time when I’ve started reading The Nerd Reich, Gil Duran’s examination of how Silicon Valley’s political turn toward authoritarianism started. The book starts out with the strange tale of Peter Thiel’s belief in corporate-run states, and his belief that only the wealthiest, most successful businessmen should have a say in how society is run, not to mention his utter disregard for other people.
As I read, I keep coming back to the same thing I kept coming back to in Careless People. The lack of self-awareness. The inability to see beyond their own small ideas and consider that they might be wrong about something, anything, and, in the case of Thiel, the inability to distinguish a scam artist trying to sell books from the kinds of ideas we would easily identify as clickbait if they were online.
With that background, it’s easy to see why a man worth billions, running a company as large, successful, and vulnerable to infiltration as Nvidia, would get involved in multiple extra-marital affairs. He lacks the self-awareness to recognize the risks. I’d be willing to bet it never occurred to him that getting involved with a woman who reported to him, let alone a foreign businesswoman with ties to China, could be something that wrecked his professional and personal life.
All due respect to what he built at Nvidia, but this week’s headlines don’t make Jensen look like a brilliant tech billionaire; they make him look the opposite. He comes off more like an easily manipulated, horny old man without a lick of sense. In Silicon Valley, that might not be rare at all.
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