The company’s shares have plummeted in response to the exec’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
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The unfolding drama around NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a woman now accused of being a spy for the Chinese government may be getting its first courtroom chapter. A shareholder in the computing giant has sued accusing NVIDIA and Huang of misleading investors about the nature of the CEO’s relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at the Taiwanese company Megaspeed who is now suspected of being an espionage asset for China. Huang is a common surname; The pair are not related.
Mark Kistenmacher filed the complaint and is seeking class action status for anyone who purchased NVIDIA shares between October 9 and November 8. The first date is when The New York Times published a story on NVIDIA and Megaspeed detailing a connection between the pair, which was rebuffed by NVIDIA as a routine business relationship; the second date is when the NVIDIA founder admitted to an affair and the company publicly disclosed that it was launching its own investigation into whether its top exec had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation.
In the interim, The New York Times published an in-depth feature on October 29 claiming that the NVIDIA CEO had become the subject of a suspected Chinese intelligence action. The piece cites NVIDIA representative John Rizzo, who said, “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.” This statement, the lawsuit alleges, was not true.
The company’s shares have dropped in the fallout of the allegations, with NVIDIA on track to lose more than $470 billion in market value over the past two days. “As a result of Defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company’s securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages,” the complaint states.