When MacKenzie Scott Bezos, the founder of Amazon, divorced her husband, the result was $25+ billion in donations to progressive nonprofits and political causes. People are speculating about whether Lori Huang, the founder of Nvidia, might cash out soon in family court and have around $80 billion to spend. Here’s the latest gossip from the New York Times, which previously left tawdry sex stories to the tabloids… “Jensen Huang Said to Have Had Relationship With Nvidia Executive Who Reports to Him”:
Jensen Huang … had an extramarital relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company. The relationship, which has not been previously reported, was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, said the people, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.
Mr. Huang, 63, and Ms. Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March, according to two of the people who worked at the company. The New York Times has not seen the video.
Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people.
The newspaper tells us that Climate Change is an existential crisis for humanity and that Donald Trump has ended our beloved democracy. It also tells us to pay attention to who at Nvidia had sex with whom.
If Lori Huang does cash out, it would be interesting to know how she might choose to direct the money that she earned from building Nvidia (see below). What can one learn about her sentiments from Wokipedia? Not much:
“Jensen Huang’s Affair Puts His Wife in the Spotlight” (New York Times, November 11, 2026), reminds us of her pivotal role in building Nvidia, but doesn’t enlighten us as to how progressive she might be:
Mr. Huang apologized to his wife, as well as his two children, who both work at Nvidia, thrusting them into the limelight. … Ms. Huang, 64 … is president of the Jen-Hsun Lori Huang Foundation, which had $9 billion in assets as of 2024, including $6 billion in fresh funding that year. … She is also the sole controller of a trust that owns around $5 billion worth of Nvidia shares. … She has not promoted her philanthropic work in interviews or on the conference circuit. … Both were known as gifted engineers. Ms. Huang worked at Silicon Graphics, a hardware and software maker, where her salary was higher than Mr. Huang’s at LSI Logic, a semiconductor company, he said in a 2023 profile in The New Yorker.
But the couple struggled to find the right child care, according to “The Thinking Machine,” a biography of Mr. Huang. Just before he co-founded Nvidia in 1993, Ms. Huang gave up her career to raise their children, Spencer and Madison.
(Imagine if schools offered after-school care until 6 pm so that both parents could work if they chose to! Or if it were legal to hire a nanny to pick up kids from school at 3:30 pm and take care of them until 6 pm.)
Related, WIRED reminded us in 2019 that Amazon wouldn’t exist if not for the divorce plaintiff who later turned progressive philanthropist:
MacKenzie met Jeff after she graduated from Princeton in 1992 and took a job at the relatively new hedge fund D. E. Shaw, where Bezos already worked. In 1993 they married, and by 1994 they were driving to Washington, with MacKenzie reportedly at the wheel of the car.
Left out: Bezos was a VP at D.E. Shaw and MacKenzie was a secretary. Reminder: back in 1994 there weren’t any cross-country moving or car transportation services and, therefore, MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s role as driver was critical.
The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side
The “wealthy existence” was enabled by MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s salary as a secretary?
“They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says [Brad] Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”
MacKenzie helped get the company off the ground. While researching his book, Stone interviewed early employees who he says recalled how MacKenzie wrote checks and assisted in keeping track of the books.
(Today, however, thanks to the hard work that Lori Huang did to create the AI revolution, it is possible to hire a bookkeeper for $24.36/hour (BLS). In other words, a company founder wouldn’t have to get married and give up half of his/her/zir/their shares in order to have checks written and some “assistance” in keeping track of the books.)