The CEO of one of the world’s most powerful tech companies, taken down by a suspected Chinese honey trap. The first thought of any self-respecting Hollywood producer upon reading the news about Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who resigned from the multi-trillion-dollar semiconductor company in the wake of revelations of his extramarital affairs with both the aforementioned Chinese spy and an executive who reported to him, was surely: This is a movie.
It would certainly be on trend. This awards season has seen a slew of films about rapacious tech titans flying dangerously close to the sun, including Artificial, Musk, The Social Reckoning and You Can See Everything. Their release coincides with a culture-wide backlash against not only the tech industry but also the Trump administration’s laissez-faire enabling of it, a resentment that likely helped fuel Democrats’ resounding triumph in last week’s midterms.
Of all the tech barons who attended (and funded) Trump’s 2025 inauguration, few (with the exception of on-again off-again toady Elon Musk) have cozied up to the president more than Jensen, who sat next to him at the recent White House AI summit and has been among the most forceful voices urging him to ignore increasingly loud warnings about the technology’s dangers. A Huang movie would benefit from widespread schadenfreude and readymade intrigue in the form of a cookie-cutter espionage plot.
The honey trap is such a Hollywood cliché you have to wonder how Huang didn’t see it coming. Has he not watched The Americans? You would imagine that, as an avowed fan of leather jackets, he’s at least seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. If Harrison Ford, Cary Grant (North by Northwest), Michael Douglas (Disclosure) and even James Bond (every Bond movie) fell for it, some might argue Huang never stood a chance.
The cinematic potential is so obvious that an AI trailer for a yet-to-be-made film about Huang’s downfall, titled Honeypot, has already been posted — likely made using Nvidia’s own GPU microchips, which power the lion’s share of the generative artificial intelligence market.
But for now, at least, viable movies still require actual humans to make creative choices. The first such choice facing any exec contemplating a Huang movie will be what source material to acquire. Yes, Huang is a public figure and the scandal has been widely covered, so there’s technically no need to option anything, but Hollywood has grown so risk-averse that it prefers to plant a stake into any shred of existing IP, if only to change it completely later. In this case, however, it’s hard to know what that property would be. The most notable book on Huang and Nvidia, Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine, was written in 2025, well before the latest scandal. And the recent news has been reported piecemeal by publications including The New York Times and the Financial Times, as well as an obscure short-selling firm. So in this case Hollywood may have to face its fears and commission — gasp — an original script.
The exec’s second choice will be whether to play it as comedy or drama.
Judging from the number of late-night punchlines the scandal has generated, comedy would seem the easier choice. Huang, with his obliviousness to what seems to the non-centibillionaires among us to have been an obvious ploy, appears to have had more in common with Austin Powers than James Bond. Picture steamy, nerdy sex scenes in which his seductress Alice Huang fakes an orgasm while Jensen Huang passionately shares industrial secrets. Imagine her complimenting his leather jackets in the same purring tone that Jasmine complimented Jafar’s twisty beard in Aladdin, and Jensen falling for it. The farcical possibilities are endless.
But given the global stakes of the world’s then-most valuable company, pivotal to humanity’s future, being compromised because its leader couldn’t keep his pants on, perhaps drama is more appropriate. That the man who called for American companies to race full speed ahead to beat China to AI domination was bested not just by a Chinese spy but by his own all-too-human impulses is an irony worthy of a Greek tragedy. Ultimately, this is a tale of hubris, of a geeky engineer who grew so powerful that he felt invincible. Why else would he so frequently have allowed himself to be photographed sharing romantic glasses of wine with his paramour?
The real problem for a dramatist, I imagine, would be to make the seduction look more difficult than it actually was. Or to explain why it was so easy. A screenwriter would have to concoct some kind of origin story for Huang. Perhaps we’d find young Jensen recovering from a swirlie or a wedgie, and sniffling to himself, “One day I’ll make a billion dollars and wear leather jackets all the time. That’ll show ‘em!”
