Jensen Huang and the Storied Lineage of the Honey Trap

Detailed summary

Novelists have long grasped the possibilities of the honey trap. Ian Fleming served up such enticements in his James Bond novels nearly as often as Bond was served a Martini.

In the winter of 1956-57, Philip Roth was living in Chicago and, as he recounted, following the local saga of “the missing Grimes girls, Pattie and Babs,” who had gone off to see an Elvis Presley movie and never returned home again. Every day, the papers featured a new turn in the case, a new character. An entire American city was taken up with a running narrative. Chicago could speak of little else.

“And what is the moral of the story?” Roth asked, in a lecture at Stanford University, in 1960.

Roth would no doubt have hungered for every detail of the tale of Jensen Huang, the Taiwanese American chip gazillionaire, who has resigned as the C.E.O. of Nvidia amid reports of affairs with three women (at last count), including two employees and, most damningly, Alice Huang, a Chinese technology executive who was allegedly acting not as an earnest paramour but as an asset of the People’s Republic of China and its Ministry of State Security. (Officials in Beijing have called reports of her intelligence ties a “pure fabrication out of thin air.”)

The global and financial stakes are immense. Launched from a Denny’s in San Jose, Nvidia became the first company to reach a market capitalization of five trillion dollars. Its chips are crucial to the revolution in artificial intelligence and to America’s technological competition with China. The reported means of gaining influence over Nvidia’s leader, however, are rather less cutting-edge than its products.

All involved in l’affaire Huang may take some comfort in the lineage of mobilizing erotic attraction as a weapon of espionage—or, to use the term popularized by John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1974), the “honey trap.” In the Hebrew Bible, Delilah, a “woman in the Valley of Sorek,” is bribed by the Philistines to extract from Samson the source of his superhuman strength.

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