How much having an affair will really cost you financially

Detailed summary

It could be the biggest financial loss triggered by an affair in history – $430bn. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, disclosed last week that he had an extra-marital…

It could be the biggest financial loss triggered by an affair in history – $430bn. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, disclosed last week that he had an extra-marital affair with Alice Huang (no relation), who is a suspected Chinese spy.

In recent trading, the market value of Nvidia has fallen from more than $5trn to just over $4trn. While not all of that decline is the result of this disclosure – high-tech shares have been weakening anyway – the share price took a sudden lurch downwards when the news came out.

We don’t need to feel too sorry for Jensen Huang. He remains extremely wealthy by any standard, currently ranking 13th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with $141bn. But Nvidia is the world leader in the chips used in artificial intelligence computing and is very much his creation. Given that Alice Huang worked for a Singapore company that is under US scrutiny as to whether it helped China obtain export-restricted US chips, it is possible that he may have to resign. That concern appears to have been the main driver of the hit to the share price.

Since Nvidia was until recently the most valuable company in the world – it is still number two behind Apple – the fall hits investors everywhere, including anyone with a company or personal pension here in the UK. Pensions are invested in mixtures of financial products which track the performance of the markets, and will follow Nvidia’s fall. We are all that little bit poorer as a result. It is the extreme case of an affair costing a lot of money.

So what does it tell us about the financial consequences of this sort of personal behaviour?

It’s a tough one, because it’s difficult to separate the personal and social impact from the economic issues. As the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence states, people are endowed with unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

But we do know that if an affair leads to a family break-up, that is very expensive.

London is often ranked as the…

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