✏️ Legal Pad
Tinker, Tailor, Chipmaker, Spy
On Sunday, Jensen Huang, the leather-jacketed co-founder of Nvidia and the face of the entire AI boom, told his employees he'd been unfaithful to his wife. By Thursday he was out, after 33 years, at a company that has never had another CEO. The affair itself isn't what did it. (Affairs, plural. A second one, with one of his own executives, has also been reported.) What did it is who the first one was with: Alice Huang, no relation, an executive tied to a Singapore company called Megaspeed, and a woman U.S. intelligence officials believe is working for China's Ministry of State Security.
I want you to read that paragraph again, slowly, because it's one of the wildest things I've ever typed.
If you pitched this to a publisher, they'd tell you John le Carré already wrote it. Le Carré is credited with giving us the term "honey trap," and his Cold War novels run on one premise: you don't break into the vault, you make friends with the man holding the key. Here, the vault holds the most valuable computer chips on earth, the ones the United States bars from being shipped to China. Megaspeed reportedly bought about $4.8 billion of Nvidia equipment in three years. Investigators say 240,000 restricted chips made their way to China through a string of shell companies. When reporters went looking for Megaspeed's offices, they found a nearly empty headquarters, a dilapidated storefront, and a space in a Malaysian shopping mall. George Smiley would've had this figured out by chapter three.
The old Moscow Rules of spycraft start from a simple place: assume everyone is potentially under opposition control. Apparently that one never made it to Silicon Valley. In fairness, Huang says he had no idea, Megaspeed denies any wrongdoing, and nobody has been charged with anything (yet). But the Justice Department, the FBI, and Congress are all now asking questions, and Nvidia's stock is down roughly 30 percent in a month. On Monday alone, $192 billion in value disappeared.
Which brings me to the only question a plaintiff's lawyer was ever going to ask: who do we sue?
A shareholder already sued Nvidia and Huang in California on Monday, claiming the company misled investors when a spokesman called the relationship "not unusual or unexpected." That's a garden-variety securities fraud case. The more interesting defendant is the People's Republic of China.
Short answer: you can sue anybody. Winning is harder. Under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a foreign government is immune from suit in American courts unless an exception applies. 28 U.S.C. § 1604. The "commercial activity" exception, § 1605(a)(2), doesn't fit, because spying isn't commerce. It's about the most governmental thing a government does. The Ninth Circuit said so when a political fundraiser sued Qatar for hacking his emails. Broidy Capital Mgmt., LLC v. State of Qatar. The tort exception, § 1605(a)(5), carves out discretionary acts and any claim arising from "misrepresentation" or "deceit," which is a honey trap's entire job description. And the whole tort has to happen on U.S. soil. Doe v. Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
Even if you thread that needle, you've got to prove the spy caused the drop (the stock was already sliding on AI bubble fears before any of this broke), and then you've got to collect. Ask Missouri. It sued China over COVID, China never showed up, and a federal judge entered a default judgment for about $24 billion in March 2025. Missouri ex rel. Bailey v. People's Republic of China, Missouri hasn't collected a dime. China's response was to sue Missouri in a Chinese court for $50.5 billion.
So the shareholders will sue who shareholders always sue: the company, the board, and the man. In a le Carré novel the spy never pays the bill. The poor fool who trusted her does.
💡 Sidebar
Lawyer Trick No. 322: "What If It Happened to Your Wife?"
A few months ago I had a case where the defendant, in a fit of road rage, brake checked my client and caused a wreck. It was all on video. At his deposition we played it, and I asked him whether that's an acceptable way for people to drive in a polite society.
He said yes.
I didn't plan the next question. It just showed up. "What if someone did that to your wife?"
"I'd kill them."
It was almost cartoonish, and you better believe I've used it ever since. Anytime a witness is being flat-out silly trying to defend bad behavior, out it comes.
Here's why it works. Every one of us keeps two rulebooks. The first is for what we do, and it's full of excuses: I was late, he started it, nobody got hurt that bad. The second is for what gets done to the people we love, and it has no excuses in it at all. Psychologists have fancier names for this, but your grandmother called it the Golden Rule, and it's the oldest test of right and wrong we've got. A man can defend his own conduct in the abstract all day long. Put his wife in the other car and he stops being a defendant and becomes the protector. The answer comes from the gut before the lawyer in his head can stop it.
The law asks what a "reasonable person" would've done. My question cuts through that. If he says he'd be fine with it, the jury knows he's lying. If he tells the truth, he's just told them what his own driving was worth. Either way, I'm reading it back at trial.
⚖️ Closing Arguments
The Short List
Last week I flew to D.C. to see my oldest friend in the world. The occasion wasn't what you'd call celebratory, but that didn't matter.
The trip up was an unmitigated disaster. The plan was a 1:00 p.m. touchdown and dinner at Le Diplomate. What I got was a canceled flight, a connection through Charlotte, late-night wheels down, and the most absurdly large order of sushi I've ever seen in my life. No steak frites. No regrets.
There are certain people you do that for. If you're lucky, the list is short, and it's short on purpose.
Life at this stage has an almost comical way of getting in the way. Jobs. Wives. Kids. Clients. There's always a trial, a deadline, a sick kid, or a three-year-old with strong opinions about who reads the bedtime story. Very few things are important enough to drop all of it, and even fewer people. So when one of those people hits one of life's speed bumps, you book the flight. You don't check the calendar first. You just go, and you figure out the rest from the gate.
It's a blessing and a privilege to have people like that in your life, and to get to grow up with them and still be as close. In a world where so many of our interactions are increasingly digital at a distance, those moments elbow to elbow at the bar become even more valuable. I thought about that a lot last week.
Which is good, because I had plenty of time to think about it during the twelve hours I spent in the airport for what should've been an hour-long flight.
Court is in recess- see you next Friday.
