Mark Zuckerberg Maintains Status as Tech’s One True Wife Guy

CarlaVanWagoner / Shutterstock / Futurism Another giant stone face has been chiseled off the Mount Rushmore of billionaire tech wife guys. Jensen Huang, the man who built the global chip juggernaut Nvidia, resigned this morning amid revelations that he had not one but two extramarital affairs, according to bombshell reporting by The New York Times. Jensen’s status as the chipmaker’s CEO was already in question after it was revealed that he’d had an intimate relationship with a businesswoman at a Chinese AI infrastructure company called Megaspeed that was facilitating sales of Nvidia chips to Chinese companies — and an alleged spy working on behalf of the Chinese government. Then the second affair emerged, this one with a Nvidia executive who reported to him directly. In sum, this is a chief executive of an American company at the heart of the global AI boom who slept with a customer and a direct report. And that’s before you get to fact that the customer in question is an alleged spy for America’s main international rival who may or may not have been smuggling chips around US sanctions. After Huang was ousted today from the company he founded in 1993, Nvidia’s stock took a sharp downturn. Even by the standards of the AI industry, Huang’s vibe was unusual. He wasn’t your average jeans-and-hoodie tech guy, nor was he often seen in a suit. He instead wore expensive leather jackets, often from the luxury brand Tom Ford, and had a rock star persona within the extremely-not-rock-star world of tech. At the same time, he presented himself as a family man: both of his adult kids work at Nvidia, and his wife of more than 40 years, Lori Mills Huang, presides over the Nvidia Foundation. “It’s good to have someone in your life who unconditionally believes in you, who believes you’re doing your best,” Jensen said of his wife back in 2014. “You need people like that, and Lori’s always been that person for me — ever since I was 18, she was there believing in me and knowing I could do it. Even when I had self-doubts, she didn’t.” Jensen’s family man — nay, wife guy — persona has now exploded in truly spectacular fashion, along with his status as one of the world’s most powerful CEOs. But he does have company: he now joins a sordid line of tech billionaires to face public reckonings over infidelity. Among those ranks are figures like Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder whose strange sexts to his then-mistress and now-wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos, were leaked in 2019. (Who amongst us can forget the infamous line “I love you, alive girl?”) Then there’s Bill Gates, who had multiple affairs and chummed around with Jeffrey Epstein while married to Melinda French Gates, his wife of 27 years and philanthropic partner. Google cofounder Sergey Brin got divorced from his first wife, 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki, after striking up a relationship with a Google employee. (Brin and his second wife, Nicole Shanahan, also divorced after Shanahan reportedly had a sexual tryst with Brin’s former pal Elon Musk.) Speaking of Musk: he isn’t exactly a wife guy, but he has been married several times, has fathered a small army of children, and is reported to have impregnated one of his business lieutenants without telling his then-partner Claire “Grimes” Boucher. Not all wife guys have fallen, though. And if there’s one tech industry wife guy to rule them all, it has to be Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder and his wife, Priscilla Chan, met as students at Harvard University. In 2024, to celebrate his love for his wife, Zuckerberg recorded a cover of T-Pain’s “Get Low,” which was apparently playing when they first met. Zuckerberg also built a 7-foot-tall statue of Chan, and implored others to join him in bringing back the “Roman tradition of making statues for your wife.” Chan, meanwhile, has stuck by Zuck through Congressional hearings, lawsuits, local jiu jitsu tournaments, and his blinged out fashion rebrand. They share two children and recently went as “burger night” for Halloween, which we have to admit was fun. Meta and its CEO might be a magnet for business scandal, but on the personal front, the Zuckerberg-Chan union might just be the strongest of Silicon Valley’s most elite. We better not see you in Tom Ford leather, Zuck! More on Jensen Huang’s fall from power: It’s a Really, Really Bad Day for Nvidia