The Human Behind the Leather Jacket

Jensen Huang. AI-generated illustration based on a photograph.

When I first saw the news about Jensen Huang, I almost scrolled past it. Another achievement for Nvidia, I thought. Another statement about AI. His name has become so closely associated with both that I expected little else.

When my wife asked whether I had seen the reports, I dismissed them. “You know, everything is fake news these days. Don’t believe everything you read.”

It was an easy response. Perhaps too easy. Was I questioning the reports, or was I reluctant to believe something troubling about someone I admired?

Then, over the weekend, came his letter to Nvidia employees, acknowledging that he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologizing to his family and colleagues. That was difficult to read. His resignation followed a few days later.

I have followed Nvidia since the late nineties, when desktop computers and graphics cards were finding their way into our homes. Watching the company grow, and then rise so dramatically over the last decade, made Jensen a familiar figure. I did not know him. Still, the news felt personal.

That feeling is worth examining. Familiarity can begin to feel like knowledge. We listen to someone speak, follow their work and admire what they build. Somewhere along the way, we begin to believe we understand the person too.

But what do we actually know?

Building an extraordinary company tells us something about a person’s abilities. It cannot tell us everything about their judgment, their relationships or the choices they make when nobody is watching. Yet we allow admiration to fill those gaps.

Extraordinary achievement does not remove ordinary human vulnerability, and wrongdoing does not erase someone’s humanity.

We do this with sports icons. Musicians. People whose work has meant something to us. We place them on a pedestal and then struggle when their conduct no longer fits the image.

None of this makes the conduct less serious. There are people who live with the consequences long after the rest of us have moved on to another headline. Their pain cannot become a footnote to our disappointment in a public figure.

There are also questions that admiration cannot answer. What happened? Who was harmed? What responsibilities were breached? What consequences should follow? Those questions deserve scrutiny, regardless of what someone has achieved.

But accountability does not require us to reduce a person to their wrongdoing. Nor does recognizing their humanity require us to excuse it.

Perhaps part of the shock comes from discovering how much we had assumed. We knew someone could be exceptional at building a company. We somehow took that to mean they would be exceptional in every other part of life.

We say we know that everyone is human. Then someone we admire fails, and we discover that we had quietly made an exception.

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