Everything is not about everything else.
One of the more alienating aspects of American society is the way everything has to be about everything else.
You can’t “just” do anything. Everything has to be tracked into a bunch of redundant trackers and systems and it all feeds up into huge bureaucracies that are designed to count the money and tilt the playing field toward whatever political objectives are favored at any given moment, basically. People have started to revolt against this with things like Flock cameras, but it’s the normative expression of American culture in so many ways that it is really difficult to change on any broad level. Everything is designed this way!
Where NVIDIA failed was in not playing this game very well. Jensen Huang was effectively a naive player in the game of American politics. He assumed a naive view of the world where building a relationship with the most important singular person in American politics, Donald Trump, would insulate him from the dysfunction. Sadly, what he underestimated is that everything has to be about everything else.
NVIDIA was originally a gaming company. So like, cartoon anime guys with swords and female characters with 3D beach ball boobs. Later when tech really boomed, cryptocurrency companies started buying GPU’s, and that turned NVIDIA into a wealthy and powerful enough company that people started to pay attention.
With AI and data centers, that attention and investment in all things NVIDIA and computer hardware reached a whole new level. All these important people that were effectively raised within the system started to look at the company like it needed to play by their rules and be about the “everything else”. Instead of focusing on building the best gaming hardware, NVIDIA needed to be about national security and trade policy. The derpy guy with a bunch of leather jackets that came up in an industry about rendering alien worlds and sexy demons was made responsible for all of U.S.-China policy without ever being told. When Jensen Huang fumbled that job according to their rules, they punished him in the ways that are the most relevant in that universe. Media leaks, claiming some kind of unsubstantiated ties to a foreign government, dumping vulnerable personal information, and just generally smearing Jensen Huang individually like he failed them on a deep and personal level.
Many immigrant-founded businesses are successful precisely because they come from people that are not aware of this worldview from day 1, that everything needs to be about everything else and you can’t really do anything because if you do anything you have to do everything. Jensen Huang did not found NVIDIA to be in the business of sorting out trade disputes with China or managing international espionage. He did it to design hardware for the gaming industry and he did that better than anyone else currently alive on planet Earth.
