Billions lost and markets roiled by one man’s indiscretion. Isn’t it now clear that these tech bros are too powerful? | Aditya Chakrabortty

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair must be the costliest fling in human history – and a preview of what awaits when the tech bubble burstsOne thing we all know about the tech…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair must be the costliest fling in human history – and a preview of what awaits when the tech bubble bursts

One thing we all know about the tech billionaires is they are super-smart. We know this largely because they never stop telling us. The “cognitive elite”, to use their favoured phrase, are entitled to shape our future without our say-so. When Elon Musk goes hiring, he wants “super-high-IQ small-government revolutionaries”. Long before they got private jets, what fuelled these boys was faith in their own brainpower. As a teenager, Jensen Huang wooed his future wife, Lori, thus: “If you do homework with me every Sunday, I promise you you’ll get straight As.”

Which raises the question: if you’re that clever, why act so dumb? At last week’s midterms, it was Musk who backed Team Trump to the tune of $446m. With unhedged bets like that, why wouldn’t you want him gambling with your livelihood? This week, it is 63-year-old Huang and his affair with a much younger woman, who the US government strongly suspects is a Chinese spy. That scandal wiped more than $400bn off the value of his company in just two days, making it the costliest fling in human history. But who knows? Perhaps she loved the centibillionaire for his mind.

Forget Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: no one is more central to the future of technology than Huang. He runs Nvidia, which makes the chips powering AI. Previous generations of chips have been compared to kitchen knives: however sharp, they only chop one vegetable at a time. But the graphics-processing units made by Huang’s business are more like food blenders – they can blitz an entire veg patch. That’s what makes Nvidia the foundational infrastructure company of AI and one of the most valuable businesses in the world. And it uses its power: in some of the biggest funny-money deals over the past year in AI, Nvidia has been the money printer.

Not only is Huang one of Trump’s favourite businessmen, he’s warmly welcomed by…

Huang…

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