Why do Nvidia investors care who Jensen Huang sleeps with?

Detailed summary

The answer lies in the vibe economy

Kean Birch is the Ontario research chair in science policy at York University.

Jensen Huang stepped down as chief executive officer of Nvidia on Thursday morning, after his admission of an extramarital affair with a suspected spy and reports of another affair with an employee. Shortly after, the company’s stock was down as much as 20 per cent from the previous Friday’s close. While it had already started to fall, the resignation likely exacerbated the downward trend.

But why do we and, more importantly, investors care who Mr. Huang sleeps with?

It relates directly to the increasingly vibe-dependent nature of our economies, especially when it comes to the promises, claims and stories that the elites in corporate, government and other sectors tell about the future of technological innovation. The current vibes are all about artificial intelligence solving all of our problems, and Nvidia is centrally implicated in this becoming reality.

To understand the vibe economy and its potentially pernicious effects, we have to understand where vibes come from.

To do this requires a diversion into how to understand the difference between science and technology. Paul Nightingale, a professor of strategy at Sussex University in the United Kingdom, argues that the production of scientific knowledge entails a form of cognition in which people try to understand the world by extrapolating patterns.

Cognition is highly contextual, in that context defines what patterns to look for, how to look for them and which instruments we have available to do these tasks. This is why people talk about science as standing on the shoulders of others; we don’t do it alone. Science is inherently uncertain because, by definition, we don’t know what the end point is. Getting to that end point is the whole purpose (i.e. learning what we don’t know).

The cognition of engineers and technology developers is different from that of scientists.

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Opening of the article, excerpted from The Globe and Mail (Report on Business). To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.