This is the Worst Bond Movie Ever

November 12, 2026

Unpacking Nvidia’s highly gendered scandal ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

November 12, 2026

Salutations, Meteor readers,

I recently finished my first-ever sashiko project, and my fingertips are so swollen I’m writing this voice-to-text. But it’s worth it to have unlocked a new skill!

In today’s newsletter, Nona and her unswollen fingers are guiding us through who’s actually getting hurt by the Nvidia scandal and the deeply careless man at the heart of it. Plus, the official dawn of Blississippi.

Ouch 🪡,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

The sneeze heard round the world: As of today, Jensen Huang is no longer the CEO of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. The board has forced Huang to step down following weeks of reporting, primarily by The New York Times, on his extramarital paramour, Alice Huang, who turned out to be a Chinese spy, and then on a second affair he had with Kimberly Powell, a vice president at Nvidia and his direct report. The Times also reported that Donald Trump was briefed on intelligence showing that Huang was in a relationship with a Chinese spy, and chose to do nothing about it. (Trump, for the record, denies this.) Basically, we have now all been forced to confront the fact that Nvidia, a company that’s key to the United States’ global dominance in artificial intelligence, was essentially built on one very callous and/or gullible man.

The full consequences of Huang’s (or Trump’s) actions have yet to be determined—including whether the spy actually gleaned any secrets from her relationship with the CEO. (Huang’s recklessness is even more enraging considering the well-known ubiquity of Chinese attempts at corporate espionage, including what WIRED calls “sexpionage,” also known as the use of “honeytraps” or “honeypots.”) It also remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will deem Nvidia too big to fail and help out the company owned by a guy the president recently called a “high-quality person,” a red flag if there ever was one. But we do know that Huang’s colossal fuck-ups are already causing frightening ripple effects. Nvidia’s stock is down 10%, which is bad news not only for the 42,000 people Nvidia employs, but for the global economy. As economic commentator Kyla Scanlon said to Vox last year about Nvidia, “If they sneeze, everybody else catches a cold.”

JUST TWO RICH GUYS HANGING OUT. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Not to mention the individual women hurt by this misconduct. Huang’s wife of 40 years, Lori Huang, has been subjected to some truly hideous online misogyny. Pray for interim CEO Colette Kress, who now teeters on the glass cliff. And while the spy plot may be the shiny, James Bond-esque object holding everyone’s attention, we should all be keeping an eye on the fate of Kimberly Powell, too. After all, a higher-up having a romantic or sexual relationship with a subordinate—far more common than falling for a honeypot scheme—has increasingly come to be understood as an abuse of power, even if it’s consensual. Having an affair with a CEO can have devastating effects on the less powerful person…who is probably a woman, given that more than 90% of CEOs are men.

As economist and associate professor of finance at the University of Southern California Emily Nix has found in her research, women pay grave professional consequences for having affairs with their superiors. When that affair ends, the woman winds up suffering a “big financial loss,” Nix told The Meteor in April. “A year after the event, they’re over 12 percentage points less likely to be employed…which persists for at least four years afterward.”

Huang may have lost his job, but he’s still a gazillionaire. And although the Powell affair may have intensified the pressure to oust him, it’s not at all clear the board would have punished him so swiftly were it not for the Alice Huang scandal. Yes, the (male) CEOs of McDonald’s and Intel have been forced out in recent years for having affairs with employees. But given that one in three workers say they’ve had romances with their managers, according to a 2025 survey, it’s safe to say a lot of questionable behavior is flying under the radar.

There are so many tough and complex elements of running an extremely successful and consequential tech company. It seems like refraining from sleeping with your employees and business associates would, in comparison, be easy. Is it too much to ask for CEOs to take other humans into consideration before violating their own codes of conduct?

—Nona Willis Aronowitz

AND:

Scott Colom has done the impossible, becoming Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction. A win that may have seemed to come out of nowhere was actually years in the making, and owes a lot to Stacey Abrams’ organization Fair Fight, which has long been focused on mobilizing Black voters in the South. Way back in 2020, Abrams, who has deep roots in Mississippi, called it a “battleground state” and saw it as winnable. “If we can win the Senate in Mississippi, we change the narrative of what is possible,” she said then. “We start to push back on the heart of voter suppression, a state where too much work has to be done to cast a ballot.”

BETTER THAN PICKING ANOTHER PROTEIN! (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Rescue workers are still searching through the rubble of an apartment building in Brooklyn that collapsed on Wednesday night. So far, the death toll is at eight, with more injured; two children are among the dead. The cause of the collapse is under investigation, but prior to the disaster, the building had 98 open housing code violations. As Councilmember Farah Louis told reporters, “We’ve seen infants, toddlers being pulled out of the rubble on stretchers into ambulances to be rushed to the hospital. We’ve seen a husband who was desperately waiting to see if his wife would be pulled out of the rubble, who was also six months pregnant. They did find her, and she is in critical condition.”
Cornell University is once again in the spotlight: A new report by New York Focus has found that two women sued the school in 2023, alleging that its Title IX office did not take them seriously when they filed complaints against a fellow student for sexual assault. The complaint alleges that “at least five-ten others are known to have been sexually abused” by this same student. This case, which will be heading to trial next year, was filed under the Adult Survivors Act, which also allowed E. Jean Carroll, Cassie, and more than 3,000 other survivors to file civil suits.
Now that Democrats are ascendant in Texas, there is hope that the state’s maternal mortality committee will have the support it needs to gather more data on how Texas’ abortion ban is impacting maternal health. (As a reminder, the state has been grossly negligent with reporting this data since Dobbs.)
Sports journalist Diana Russini, who was fired from The Athletic in April after reports surfaced that she had had an affair with NFL head coach Mike Vrabel, is making her return to sports coverage after months of silence. You may recall that Vrabel was never penalized for his side of the affair and missed only one day of work during the preseason. I guess the bright side here at least is that neither of them owned a massive tech company. But still!
Yolanda Thomas made history this week as the first Black woman to be hired as a permanent head coach for an NWSL team. Thomas will be leading the Orlando Pride where she has served as both a coaching assistant and interim head coach.