Thanks to American oligarchy, Jensen Huang’s midlife crisis is a problem for all of us | Moira Donegan

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At a time when individual men wield massive power, the ramifications of the Nvidia CEO’s affair could be enormousOne of the reasons you want to distribute power and responsibility…

At a time when individual men wield massive power, the ramifications of the Nvidia CEO’s affair could be enormous

One of the reasons you want to distribute power and responsibility in powerful organizations and high-stakes enterprises is so that the narcissism or myopia of one man do not come to carry outsized consequences.

When power is spread out across multiple people, it matters less if one of those people is prone to flattery, or in the midst of a midlife crisis, or perhaps just a bit stupid; the limits on his power become limits on the fallout of his character flaws.

A broad distribution of authority also has the virtue of making any one man disposable, replaceable: if he turns out to have poor judgement or counterproductive preoccupations, he can be dispensed with, and his role can be filled anew with someone better suited to its responsibilities.

But if one man becomes synonymous with a company – or a country – then untold numbers of other people live and die by that man’s decisions. And when his decisions are bad – petty, selfish, shortsighted, small-minded or dumb – then it is other people who will pay the price. And the price is often quite steep.

Because we live in an era of massive inequality, tightly consolidated corporate leadership, and rule by a billionaire class with large egos and deficient dignity, the US economy is now experiencing one of the latter scenarios, in the form of Jensen Huang, a Silicon Valley billionaire who this week confessed to having an extramarital affair.

This would be tacky and embarrassing for Huang on its own. But because Huang is the CEO of Nvidia, one of the country’s largest companies and the manufacturer of advanced chip technology that is powering the US’s AI boom, his petty midlife crisis – the kind of small-minded narcissism that can usually be dispensed with in the form of a red sportscar, or indeed with one of the cheesy leather jackets that Huang is prone to wearing – is now a problem for the US economy, and…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from The Guardian Business. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.