“I think also Jensen created a reality bubble around himself. Inside the company, it was almost like a cult leader when he got up and talked. He was like a prophet. But the thing was, everything he said actually came true. And then when something he said came true, everybody in the room made a billion dollars. So you couldn't even disagree with Jensen inside the company, and he wouldn't let you anyway.”

Hard Fork (NYT) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

Context

The panel asked how someone so powerful could show such poor judgment. Witt, who wrote a biography of Huang, describes the company around him and argues that nobody near him could say no.

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Transcript

Hard Fork (NYT) Around 13:27 into the episode

Ana Swanson

…of the, one of his sort of strengths, but also his weaknesses that, you know, if I, if I were to kind of analyze the man that, you know, he sees the world in the way that he would like it to be. And, you know, that has largely been a success for him. But in this episode, maybe it was his downfall.

Ryan Mac

…signed someone's chest, a woman, a female fan's chest at an event. He was pictured with the CEO of Megaspeed openly. And part of me thinks like, you know, if that's happening in front of us, like what's going on that we aren't seeing? And now we're starting to see some of that reported out now.

Stephen Witt

You know, I think also Jensen created a reality bubble around himself. He had inside the company, he was like, it was almost like a cult leader when he got up and talked. He was like a prophet. But the thing was, everything he said actually came true. And then when something he said came true, everybody in the room made a billion dollars. And so this created this, I think, this thing that you couldn't even disagree with Jensen inside the company and he wouldn't let you anyway. He just started screaming at you if you didn't agree with his point of view. You know, I disagree with Jensen once and it was like lighting a fuse on a stick of dynamite. And when it went off, he just started screaming at me. I'm a journalist. I don't work for the company. Like there's nothing to be gained from with that. But that indicated to me, like, oh, this guy has no breaks. Like this guy, there's no one telling this guy you're acting out of turn here. You know, even his PR people, they were there and they just let him yell at me for 20 minutes. You know, there's no one around him saying Jensen really back in. He had no one like that in his life.

Ana Swanson

I will say also, just a little more than a week ago, Jensen did give an interview to Bloomberg in which he said that his interactions with the woman Alice Wong were, you know, just very normal and just usual operations. Right. And then in a week, we saw. That narrative changed just so dramatically.

Max Read

Yeah.

Ryan Mac

I would say, reading. Keep going, Ryan. Yeah, reading the TVs.

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

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