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LL Liz Lopatto Senior reporter at The Verge covering money, the internet and business culture, with recent coverage of the Musk v.

“None of us are that hot. Okay? If you meet a really good looking woman and she thinks you're really fascinating, you might want to think about for a minute why this person is interested in me. Is this person asking me a lot of questions about certain kinds of relationships that I have, and do I want to answer those questions? Because the answer is probably no.”

The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“None of us are that hot. Okay? If you meet a really good looking woman and she thinks you're really fascinating, you might want to think about for a minute why this person is interested in me. Is this person asking me a lot of questions about certain kinds of relationships that I have, and do I want to answer those questions? Because the answer is probably no.” — Liz Lopatto, The Vergecast

Context

Talking about Silicon Valley executives mixing business and romance after the Jensen Huang honeytrap story, Liz Lopatto addresses founders directly with her advice on honeypot risk.

Transcript

The Vergecast Around 07:44 into the episode
Speaker 4

I listen. Personally, I think one should not have sexual relationships with people who are your business partners. But like life happens. So if you do that, I think to be fair,

David Pierce

a lot of Silicon Valley would disagree with that assessment.

Speaker 4

It's one of the many reasons. It's like one of the many reasons that I am not employed there. But, you know, like, I just, I really think that like in terms of like maintaining comfortable business relationships, like not sleeping with people that you do business with seems like, seems like good practice. But if you must, like, life happens, we're human. It does also seem like good practice to maybe disclose that and recuse yourself from the relationship. And obviously, that did not happen. Instead, we have all of these like couple photos and like the business deals simultaneously, which like again, Silicon Valley, for those of you who are paying attention, anybody who might be listening who lives there, like, I don't know how to put this. So I'm just going to be blunt about it. None of us are that hot. Okay. Like if you meet a really good looking woman and she thinks you're really fascinating, I think maybe you should like just like, look, I know it's exciting. Like it's exciting when you meet someone hot who's into you.

David Pierce

Absolutely.

Speaker 4

But you might just want to think about for a minute, you know, why is this person interested in me? Because like, you know, maybe in the case of like Jensen Huang, he was like, oh, it's my money. It's my power. Right. Like, I don't think people are like dating Eric Schmidt because he's like…

David Pierce

make you hot, Liz. Like, this is just a fact of the world. Money does make you hot.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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