Silicon Valley has repeatedly been jolted by scandal, from allegations of hostile workplace cultures and corporate misconduct to claims involving the private relationships of some of the technology industry’s most powerful figures.
The latest controversy focuses on Nvidia chief Jensen Huang and reported relationships involving Alice Huang, a businesswoman alleged to have links to Chinese intelligence, and Kimberly Powell, 48, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare.
The claims reverberated across the technology sector, with Nvidia’s share price falling sharply after the allegations emerged.
Huang resigned as chief executive on Thursday after the company opened an internal investigation, raising questions about the future leadership of the multi-trillion-dollar chipmaker.
Nvidia and Huang were also named in a proposed class-action lawsuit filed on Monday. The complaint alleges that shareholders were misled because Huang’s alleged ties to Alice Huang were not disclosed.
The Nvidia controversy is the latest chapter in a much longer list of scandals surrounding prominent men at the top of the technology world.
Bill Gates
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has faced renewed scrutiny over extramarital relationships and his past association with Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted sex offender.
In a recent closed-door appearance before the House Oversight Committee, Gates acknowledged having several affairs during his marriage to Melinda Gates and identified three women with whom he said he had relationships.
Jensen Huang with his wife Lori. He resigned as chief executive on Thursday after an internal probe was launched into his affair with Alice Huang
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates arrives for a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee
Gates finalised his divorce from Melinda in 2021 after 27 years of marriage
He also said Epstein had tried to use his infidelity as leverage to blackmail him.
Gates divorced Melinda in 2021 after 27 years of marriage. He named bridge player Mila Antonova, nuclear scientist Karima Nigmatulina and physician Alice Jacobs Nesselrodt, whom he met at a conference, as women with whom he had been unfaithful.
Documents connected to Epstein have also included allegations that Gates had relationships with Russian women, contracted a sexually transmitted infection and attempted to keep the matter from his wife.
Gates has insisted that his affairs were separate from Epstein’s sexual exploitation and that none involved any of Epstein’s victims.
He has described his relationship with Epstein between 2011 and 2014 as a “huge mistake”, saying he had hoped the association might help secure funding for philanthropic projects.
However, questions about Gates’s conduct toward women in professional settings emerged years before the Epstein revelations again placed his personal life under the spotlight.
A 2021 New York Times investigation reported that Gates had pursued several women who worked at Microsoft, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the company overseeing his family’s wealth.
Microsoft’s board commissioned an investigation in 2019 after learning that Gates had tried to begin an intimate relationship with a female employee nearly two decades earlier.
In one reported episode from 2006, Gates, then the company’s chairman, attended a presentation by a female employee before leaving and emailing her almost immediately to ask her to dinner.
Several years later, he allegedly made a similar invitation to another woman employed by the Gates Foundation.
The New York Times said six employees of Microsoft, the foundation and the firm managing the Gates family’s finances believed such incidents and others had contributed to an uncomfortable workplace atmosphere.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos became the subject of intense attention after his relationship with media personality Lauren Sanchez was linked to allegations of blackmail and an international hacking dispute.
Bezos and Sanchez later married in Venice in 2025 in a lavish ceremony attended by celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey. Their wedding came two years after Bezos proposed with a ring reportedly worth $5 million.
Their romance initially attracted headlines for another reason. Bezos accused a major tabloid of attempting to extort him over intimate photographs he had allegedly sent to Sanchez, while investigators working for him pointed to possible Saudi involvement in the leak.
Bezos met his first wife, MacKenzie Scott, in 1992. They had four children and remained married for 27 years.
On January 9, 2019, the couple announced their divorce in a joint statement, describing it as the result of a period of “loving exploration and trial separation”.
The next day, the National Enquirer published a dramatic report claiming Bezos had been involved with Sanchez, who was then married to Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell.
Bezos found himself at the centre of scandal after his affair with glamorous media personality Lauren Sanchez
Bezos met his first wife, MacKenzie Scott, in 1992, and the pair went on to have four children together
The story featured private messages that Bezos had reportedly sent Sanchez as early as April 2018.
One message read: “I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon.”
In another, he wrote: “I want to smell you, I want to breathe you in. I want to hold you tight.… I want to kiss your lips…. I love you. I am in love with you.”
The National Enquirer also said it had obtained intimate photographs allegedly sent by Bezos to Sanchez.
The dispute escalated the following month when Bezos published a blog post accusing the tabloid’s owner, David Pecker, of “extortion and blackmail”.
Bezos claimed the company had threatened to release private photographs of him and Sanchez unless he abandoned his efforts to determine how the messages and images had been obtained.
He included emails from National Enquirer executives that described the photographs they allegedly held.
One image was referred to as a “below the belt selfie”, while another was described as showing “a shirtless Mr. Bezos holding his phone in his left hand while wearing his wedding ring.
The email continued: “He’s wearing either tight black cargo pants or shorts and his semi-erect manhood is penetrating the zipper of said garment.”
In March 2019, Gavin de Becker, the security adviser hired by Bezos, said his investigation led him to believe that Saudi Arabia had hacked the billionaire’s iPhone.
De Becker suggested the alleged hacking may have been retaliation for critical Washington Post coverage of Saudi Arabia. Bezos owns the newspaper, which had reported extensively on the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents.
United Nations officials said in 2020 that they were “reasonably certain” Saudi Arabia had played a role in the alleged phone hack.
American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, rejected that account and said its source was Michael Sanchez, Lauren Sanchez’s brother. Reports claimed he had received $200,000 for supplying the material.
Michael Sanchez denied providing nude photographs. Lauren Sanchez, however, supported the account and told TMZ: “Michael is my older brother. He secretly provided my most personal information to the National Enquirer – a deep and unforgivable betrayal.”
Elon Musk
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk faced controversy after reports said his friendship with Google co-founder Sergey Brin had broken down over an alleged relationship with Brin’s then-wife, Nicole Shanahan.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2022, citing people familiar with the matter, that Musk and Shanahan had a brief affair in 2021.
The report said the alleged relationship contributed to Brin’s decision to seek a divorce and ended the close association between the two billionaires.
Musk strongly rejected the allegation, writing on X: “I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic.”
The Wall Street Journal responded at the time: “We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting.”
The claims returned to public attention in 2024 after The New York Times published an investigation alleging that Musk and Shanahan had taken ketamine together at a private Miami party in December 2021.
The newspaper, citing eight sources and documents reviewed by its reporters, said the pair had “disappeared together for several hours” during the event.
Three people familiar with the matter told the paper that Shanahan later informed Brin she had had sex with Musk, prompting Brin to file for divorce the following month.
Shanahan has also denied having an affair with Musk, telling People magazine that the speculation had been “utterly debilitating”.
Musk vehemently denied that he had a romantic relationship with Nicole Shanahan
Nicole Shanahan and Sergey Brin in 2019 at an awards ceremony
Sergey Brin
Before reports about Musk and Shanahan emerged, Google co-founder Sergey Brin had already faced a high-profile scandal involving an alleged relationship with one of his employees.
Reports in 2013 said Brin had become involved with Amanda Rosenberg, a marketing manager working on the Google Glass project.
Brin was then married to Anne Wojcicki, the founder of biotechnology company 23andMe. They had been married for six years and had two young children.
Rosenberg worked closely with Brin to promote Google Glass, a project he had championed at Google’s secretive research division, Google X.
During that period, Rosenberg also developed a friendship with Wojcicki, who later reportedly found explicit messages exchanged between her husband and the younger employee.
Vanity Fair reported that Wojcicki was blindsided by the relationship.
The situation was further complicated because Rosenberg was also dating Hugo Barra, a senior executive on Google’s Android team.
By April 2013, Brin had left the couple’s large Los Altos home and moved into another nearby property they owned.
Although their marriage ended, Brin and Wojcicki were reportedly able to maintain a cordial co-parenting relationship.
The affair nevertheless caused turmoil inside Google. Fellow co-founder Larry Page was said to have been particularly angry about the situation.
One source told Vanity Fair: “Larry is so ethically strict…. I heard Larry was insanely upset by this whole situation and wasn’t talking to Sergey… At Google, some people were furious internally, especially women, that Sergey and Amanda were not [professionally] separated.”
Google had no formal ban on workplace relationships at the time, and neither Brin nor Rosenberg was removed from the company.
Rosenberg was subjected to heavy media attention and online abuse after the relationship became public.
She later discussed her struggle with severe clinical depression during and after the scandal. She eventually left Google and pursued writing.
Eric Schmidt
Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has been linked to at least five women during his marriage to Wendy Boyle, whom he married in 1980.
Their relationship has been described as an open marriage. Despite the controversies surrounding Schmidt’s personal life, the couple remain legally married, although reports say they separated in 2011.
One of Schmidt’s earliest widely reported relationships was with Marcy Simon, a prominent New York public relations executive. The pair were first linked in the early 2000s.
The relationship was hardly kept secret. Simon referred to Schmidt publicly as her boyfriend, while reports about their romance circulated widely.
Simon was married to another man when the relationship began, but later divorced and continued seeing Schmidt. They were reportedly together until around 2014.
During a break in that relationship, Schmidt was linked to CNBC journalist Kate Bohner, with reports placing their relationship between 2006 and 2009.
Bohner first met Schmidt in the 1990s while researching a Forbes profile about him. They reconnected later, when Schmidt invited her to create videos for YouTube after Google acquired the platform.
Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy Schmidt in November 2026 at a gala
Eric Schmidt leaving his private jet with former girlfriend, Michelle Ritter
The professional relationship developed into a romance, and Bohner reportedly believed Schmidt would eventually divorce Boyle and marry her.
She met his daughters, had keys to his home and frequently travelled with him on his private aircraft.
Over time, however, Bohner became increasingly uncomfortable with media coverage that described her as Schmidt’s mistress.
She ultimately concluded that Schmidt did not intend to leave his wife, and the relationship ended.
Vanity Fair also reported that Schmidt had brief relationships with Lisa Shields, the Council on Foreign Relations’ vice president for media relations, and Wendi Deng, the former wife of Rupert Murdoch.
In a note obtained by the publication after her relationship with Schmidt ended, Deng wrote: “I achieved my purpose of Eric saw me looking so gorgeous and so fantastic and so young, so cool, so chic, so stylish, so funny and he cannot have me.
“I’m not ever feel sad … about losing Eric … Plus he is really really ugly. Unattractive … and fat. Not stylish at all try to wear hip clothes…. I’m so so soo soooo happy I’m not with him.”
In 2020, Schmidt, then in his mid-60s, began a relationship with Michelle Ritter, an entrepreneur in her twenties.
Ritter was studying law at Columbia University when one of her professors introduced her to the billionaire.
She was seeking investment for StarX, an online platform aimed at sports fans, and Schmidt became involved in backing the venture.
Their connection soon became both romantic and professional. In 2021, they launched an investment firm, Steel Perlot, with Schmidt reportedly committing at least $100 million.
Ritter increasingly appeared with Schmidt at prominent events and was introduced to influential technology figures, including OpenAI chief Sam Altman and entrepreneur Alexandr Wang.
The relationship later deteriorated. Ritter reportedly became frustrated that Schmidt had not divorced Wendy, despite allegedly promising to do so. Their business was also struggling, and the couple had separated by 2024.
The breakup took a more serious turn the following year, when Ritter made a series of allegations against Schmidt.
In November 2025, she accused him of sexual assault and surveillance.
Ritter alleged that Schmidt had “forcibly raped” her aboard a yacht off Mexico in 2021 and had sex with her without consent during the 2023 Burning Man festival.
She also claimed Schmidt had created a “backdoor” into Google’s servers, enabling him to monitor her and others with Google accounts.
Schmidt strongly denied the allegations. In March 2026, a Los Angeles judge ruled that the claims had to be handled through private arbitration.
An arbitrator ruled in Schmidt’s favour in April, finding that Ritter had defamed him through her sexual-assault allegations and ordering her to pay $10.7 million in damages.