Sex scandals of the tech giants: As Nvidia chief is brought down by ‘Chinese spy’, the other powerful men who cheated

Silicon Valley has long been shaken by scandal, with the playground of tech billionaires repeatedly rocked by claims of toxic workplace cultures, corruption and inappropriate relationships.

The latest controversy to emerge centres on Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and his affairs with Alice Huang, a bussinesswoman with alleged links to Chinese intelligence, and Kimberly Powell, 48, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare.

The claims sent shockwaves through the tech world, with Nvidia’s share price plunging following the revelations. 

The disgraced tech mogul resigned as chief executive on Thursday, after an internal probe was launched, threatening to shake up the future of the multi-trillion-dollar company.

Nvidia and Huang were also sued on Monday in a proposed class action, alleging that they defrauded shareholders by concealing the former boss’s ties to Alice Huang.

But the controversy surrounding Huang is only the latest in a string of scandals that have engulfed the powerful men who dominate the tech industry.

Bill Gates 

Perhaps the most prominent example is Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has faced renewed scrutiny over his extramarital relationships and his association with the late paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein.

During a recent closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Gates acknowledged several affairs during his marriage to Melinda Gates, naming three women with whom he had relationships. 

He also alleged that Epstein had attempted to blackmail him after discovering his infidelity.

Gates, who finalised his divorce from Melinda in 2021 after 27 years of marriage, named bridge player Mila Antonova, nuclear scientist Karima Nigmatulina and doctor Alice Jacobs Nesselrodt, whom he met at a conference, as the women he had been unfaithful with. 

Documents released in connection with Epstein also contained allegations that Gates had relationships with Russian women, contracted a sexually transmitted infection and attempted to conceal it from his wife.

Gates has maintained that his affairs were entirely separate from Epstein’s sexual exploitation and did not involve any of the financier’s victims. 

He has also described his association with Epstein between 2011 and 2014 as a ‘huge mistake’, saying it was motivated by misguided hopes of securing philanthropic funding.

But long before the Epstein scandal brought renewed attention to Gates’ private life, questions had been raised about his conduct towards women in the workplace.

According to a 2021 investigation by The New York Times, Gates had pursued several women working for him at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2019, Microsoft’s board of directors launched an investigation into his attempt to initiate an intimate relationship with a female employee nearly two decades earlier.

In one alleged incident in 2006, Gates, then Microsoft’s chairman, attended a presentation by a female employee before leaving the meeting and immediately emailing her to ask her out to dinner.

A few years later, he allegedly approached another woman working at the Gates Foundation and similarly invited her to dinner.

The NYT reported that six employees of Microsoft, the foundation and the firm managing the Gates family’s fortune, said these incidents, alongside others, had created an uncomfortable working environment.

Jeff Bezos 

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has also found himself at the centre of scandal, after his affair with glamorous media personality Lauren Sanchez became embroiled in allegations of blackmail and an international spying controversy.

The couple eventually married in a lavish ceremony in Venice in 2025, attended by a star-studded guest list including Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey, two years after Bezos proposed with a $5million ring.

But their relationship first made headlines for very different reasons, when Bezos accused a major tabloid of extortion over intimate photographs he had sent to Sanchez, as his investigators accused the Saudi Arabian government of being behind the leak.

Bezos met his first wife, MacKenzie Scott, in 1992, and the pair went on to have four children together during their 27-year marriage.

On January 9, 2019, the couple announced their divorce in a joint statement, describing the decision as the culmination of a period of ‘loving exploration and trial separation’.

The following day, the American tabloid National Enquirer published an explosive expose revealing that Bezos had been having an affair with Sanchez, who was at the time married to Hollywood talent agent Patrick Whitesell.

The report included intimate text messages Bezos had purportedly sent Sanchez as far back as April 2018.

‘I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon,’ one message read.

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 claimed to possess intimate photographs Bezos had sent to Sanchez.

The scandal took an even more extraordinary turn the following month, when Bezos published a blog post accusing the tabloid’s owner, David Pecker, of ‘extortion and blackmail’.

Bezos claimed that the company had threatened to publish intimate photographs of him and Sanchez unless he stopped investigating how his private messages and pictures had been obtained.

In his post, Bezos included internal emails from National Enquirer executives describing the images they allegedly possessed.

One was described as a ‘below the belt selfie,’ while another reportedly showed ‘a shirtless Mr. Bezos holding his phone in his left hand while wearing his wedding ring. 

‘He’s wearing either tight black cargo pants or shorts and his semi-erect manhood is penetrating the zipper of said garment,’ the email continued.

And in March 2019, Gavin de Becker, the security consultant hired by Bezos to investigate the leak, said he believed the Saudi government had hacked the billionaire’s iPhone.

He suggested the alleged operation could have been retaliation for critical reporting on Saudi Arabia by the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, specifically its coverage of the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents.

In 2020, United Nations officials said they were ‘reasonably certain’ that Saudi Arabia had been involved in the hacking of Bezos’s phone.

American Media Inc, The National Enquirer’s parent company, however, maintained that its source for the story was Lauren Sanchez’s brother Michael, with reports claiming he had been paid $200,000 for providing the material.

Although he denied he provided the naked photos, Lauren Sanchez backed the reports, telling 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 boss Elon Musk became embroiled in controversy after reports emerged that his friendship with Google founder Sergey Brin had collapsed over an alleged affair with Brin’s then-wife, Nicole Shanahan.

A 2022 report by The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, claimed Musk had a brief affair with Shanahan in 2021.

The relationship was said to have prompted Brin to file for divorce and brought an end to the friendship between the two tech billionaires.

Musk vehemently denied the claims, writing on X: ‘I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic.’

At the time, the WSJ released a statement saying: ‘We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting.’

The allegations resurfaced in 2024, when The New York Times published an investigation claiming that Musk and Shanahan had taken ketamine together at a private party in Miami in December 2021.

The newspaper, citing eight sources and documents seen by its journalists, reported that the pair had ‘disappeared together for several hours’ during the gathering.

According to three insiders, Shanahan later told Brin that she had had sex with Musk, prompting the Google co-founder to file for divorce the following month.

Shanahan has also denied having an affair with Musk, telling People magazine that the speculation was ‘utterly debilitating’.

Sergey Brin

Years before Elon Musk’s alleged affair with his wife, Nicole Shanahan, made headlines, Google co-founder Sergey Brin found himself at the centre of a scandal of his own after an affair with one of his employees.

In 2013, reports emerged that Brin had been involved with Amanda Rosenberg, a marketing manager working on the Google Glass project.

At the time, Brin had been married to Anne Wojcicki, founder of biotechnology company 23andMe, for six years, and the couple had two young children together.

Rosenberg was working closely with Brin on the marketing of Google Glass, a project he had spearheaded at the company’s secretive research laboratory, Google X.

During this period, Rosenberg had struck up a friendship with Wojcicki, who later discovered explicit messages between her husband and his younger employee.

According to an expose by Vanity Fair, Wojcicki was blindsided by the affair.

The scandal was further complicated by the fact that Rosenberg was herself in a relationship at the time with Hugo Barra, a senior executive on Google’s Android team.

By April 2013, Brin had moved out of the couple’s massive estate in Los Altos and into another property they owned nearby.

Despite the breakdown of their marriage, he and Wojcicki reportedly maintained a cordial relationship to co-parent their children.

But the affair sent shockwaves through Google, with Brin’s fellow co-founder Larry Page said to be particularly furious 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.’

Despite the internal backlash, Google had no formal policy prohibiting workplace relationships and neither Brin nor Rosenberg was removed from the company.

Rosenberg, meanwhile, faced intense media scrutiny and online harassment following the affair. 

She later spoke openly about struggling with severe clinical depression during and after the scandal, eventually stepping away from Google and pursuing a career as a writer.

Eric Schmidt

Meanwhile, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has been linked to at least five women during his marriage to Wendy Boyle, whom he wed in 1980.

Their relationship has been described as an ‘open marriage’ and, despite the various scandals, the pair have remained legally married, although they reportedly separated in 2011.

One of Schmidt’s earliest high-profile relationships was with Marcy Simon, a prominent New York public relations executive, whom he was first linked to in the early 2000s.

Schmidt appeared remarkably unconcerned about keeping the relationship under wraps, with their romance becoming public knowledge and Simon openly referring to him as her ‘boyfriend’.

Simon was still married to another man when their relationship began, but she subsequently divorced her husband and continued seeing Schmidt. The pair remained romantically linked until around 2014.

During a brief hiatus in their relationship, Schmidt became involved with CNBC journalist Kate Bohner, with the pair reportedly dating between 2006 and 2009.

Bohner had first met Schmidt in the 1990s while researching a Forbes profile on the tech executive. They reconnected years later, when Schmidt invited her to produce videos for Google’s newly acquired YouTube platform.  

The pair soon fell in love, with Bohner believing that Schmidt would eventually divorce Boyle and that she could become his second wife.

She was introduced to his daughters, had keys to his home and regularly travelled with him on his private jet.

But after several years, Bohner grew increasingly weary of the media attention, which branded her Schmidt’s ‘mistress’. 

She eventually came to the realisation that he had no intention of leaving his wife, and the relationship came to an end.

According to Vanity Fair, Schmidt was briefly linked to Lisa Shields, the vice president for media relations at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Wendi Deng, the former wife of Rupert Murdoch.

In one note written by Deng obtained by the publication after the pair ended their relationship, she said: ‘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, when Eric Schmidt was in his mid-60s, he began dating Michelle Ritter, an entrepreneur in her twenties.

Ritter was studying law at Columbia University when she was introduced to the billionaire through one of her professors.

At the time, she was looking for financial backing to get her startup, an online sports-fan platform called StarX, off the ground.

Their relationship quickly developed into both a romantic and business partnership. In 2021, the pair established an investment firm called Steel Perlot, with Schmidt committing at least $100million to the project.

Ritter increasingly began to appear alongside the Google boss at high-profile events, and was introduced to some of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures, including OpenAI chief Sam Altman and tech entrepreneur Alexandr Wang.

But the relationship began to deteriorate, after Ritter became frustrated that Schmidt, who had promised to divorce his wife Wendy, had not followed through. Their business was also struggling, and by 2024, the couple had split.

Their tumulous breakup took a far more serious turn the following year, when Ritter made a series of explosive allegations against the billionaire.

In November 2025, Ritter accused Schmidt of sexual assault and surveillance.

She alleged that Schmidt had ‘forcibly raped’ her aboard a yacht off the coast of Mexico in 2021, and claimed he had sex with her without her consent during the 2023 Burning Man festival.

Ritter also alleged that Schmidt had built a ‘backdoor’ into Google’s servers, allowing him to access and spy on her and other people with Google accounts.

Schmidt vehemently denied the allegations, and in March 2026, a Los Angeles judge ruled that Ritter’s claims had to be dealt with through private arbitration.

In April, an arbitrator ruled in Schmidt’s favour, finding that Ritter had defamed him through her sexual assault allegations. She was ordered to pay him $10.7million in damages.