As a parent, I have two main concerns for my children.
The first is economic stability. Will they be able to earn a livable wage in a world where AI keeps eating entry-level jobs? I question the time and money we spend educating our kids all the time. So I’ve been aggressively saving and investing for their future, just in case.
The second concern is bigger. Will my children find love?
A net worth target gets more achievable the more you save and the more time goes by. Compounding is boring, but it’s reliable. If the direction is correct, sooner or later you will get there.
Finding a partner is far more amorphous. Our kids can work on their communication skills, fitness, charm, education, hygiene, empathy, and finances. But all of that merely improves their odds. There are no guarantees.
Which brings me to the strangest business story of 2026.
What Was Reported About Jensen Huang And Alice Huang
In late October, The New York Times reported that U.S. officials concluded a Chinese citizen named Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was a Chinese intelligence asset. She is a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company and Nvidia cloud partner that rents computing power to Chinese firms.
Surveillance of her reportedly revealed a close relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. And no, they are not related. Huang is a common surname.
The Financial Times then reported that a U.S. government memo described the relationship as romantic. Her alleged goal was to gather information on Jensen and advanced AI chips, and to nudge him to lobby for looser chip exports to China.
Some important caveats. The allegations come from anonymous officials and haven’t been tested publicly. Officials reportedly don’t believe Jensen knew about any intelligence activity. Nvidia says his interactions with her were routine customer meetings. China denies the whole thing. House Republican committee chairs want a closed-door briefing on November 18.
So nobody outside the room knows the full story. But the story is out there, and the lessons about love and money are worth discussing regardless of how the facts shake out.
The Richest Man In AI Still Wanted To Be Wanted
Jensen Huang is worth over $120 billion (once $170 billion). He runs a company worth about $4 trillion after the sell-off. He is the closest thing we have to a modern-day emperor, the face of the AI revolution, mobbed like a rock star everywhere he goes in Taiwan.
And yet, if the reporting is accurate, it still wasn’t enough.
There’s a line from Gemma Teller Morrow in the TV show, Sons of Anarchy: “Only men need to be loved, sweetheart. Women need to be wanted.”
It’s not entirely true. Everybody wants to be loved and desired to some degree. But the line points to something uncomfortable. No amount of money, applause, or leather jackets fills the need to feel admired by one specific person who seems to see you.
We all just want to be loved and accepted for who we are.
If True, It May Not Have Been Love At All
Here’s the twist that makes this story sadder.
If U.S. officials are right, what may have felt like admiration was tradecraft. Attentiveness, respect, and flattery are exactly what an intelligence service would deploy against the most important man in AI. Intelligence services have used romance as an opening for as long as there have been secrets worth stealing.
Which exposes the hidden problem of extreme wealth and power. The richer you get, the harder it becomes to know whether anyone loves you for you. Every new person in your life has a reason to be nice to you. Normal people get to skip that existential headache.
Money doesn’t make finding love easier. Past a certain point, it makes find true love harder.
Powerful Men Who Risked It All For Love
Jensen is far from the first emperor to create a commotion over love for a woman.
Paris and Helen of Troy. The Greeks’ foundational story is about a prince who ran off with another man’s wife and got his entire city burned to the ground. Myth, sure. But the Greeks clearly understood the risk.
Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Antony controlled half the Roman world. He chose Cleopatra over Rome, lost at Actium in 31 BC, and both were dead within a year. Octavian got the empire.
King Edward VIII. In 1936, he abdicated the British throne after less than a year to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American. He traded a kingdom for love, and spent the rest of his life in comfortable, irrelevant exile.
John Profumo. The closest parallel to the Jensen story. In 1963, Britain’s Secretary of State for War was revealed to have had an affair with Christine Keeler, who was also involved with a Soviet naval attaché. Profumo lied to Parliament, resigned in disgrace, and the scandal helped bring down the government.
Brian Krzanich. Intel’s CEO resigned in 2018 after a past consensual relationship with an employee came to light. Running a chip giant doesn’t come with an exemption.
Jeff Bezos. His 2019 divorce after 25 years of marriage sent roughly 4% of Amazon, worth about $38 billion at the time, to MacKenzie Scott. Bezos kept his job, married Lauren Sánchez, and is still one of the richest men alive. But it was the most expensive breakup in history.
The pattern is clear. Kingdoms, careers, and fortunes are rebuildable. However, once you find the one, you will do anything to get them.
What Indecent Proposal Got Right
Remember Indecent Proposal from 1993? Robert Redford’s billionaire character offers a struggling couple, played by Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, $1 million for one night with the wife. They take the deal. Their marriage nearly implodes.
The couple discovered they had a price, and it wasn’t that high. But they badly underestimated what they were selling.
Meanwhile, the billionaire could buy the night. He couldn’t buy her heart. He had everything except the one thing he actually wanted.
Swap Redford for any modern tech billionaire and the lesson holds. Money can buy almost anything. Except the feeling of being genuinely loved.
Money Is Easy Compared To Love
The lack of money is a solvable problem.
Save 20% or more of your income, subscribe to Financial Samurai, invest consistently in risk assets, avoid lifestyle inflation, and give it 20 years.
Plenty of regular people have become millionaires this way. The formula is public.
There is no formula for love. You can do everything right and still never meet the one. And even if you do, roughly 40% of first marriages in America end in divorce. Finding love involves tremendous luck. Keeping it is work.
You can always make another dollar. You can’t always make another soulmate.
The Loneliness Epidemic And Why FIRE Works Best Together
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic. About half of American adults report feeling lonely, and the health impact of social disconnection was compared to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
The FIRE crowd isn’t immune. Early retirement can be isolating. Your friends are at work. Your identity is gone. And if you’re married, there’s a specific trap I want to warn you about.
FIRE is better when both partners retire and experience freedom together. Not when one spouse is slaving away while the other is kicking back.
Yes, I get it. Some men’s egos still need protecting when their wives are bringing home the sashimi. But men need to get over themselves. Women now make up the majority of college students, and plenty of them will out-earn their husbands.
It’s OK to be provided for. Just don’t let your spouse provide forever while you play pickleball at 10 am on a Tuesday.
I left banking in 2012. My wife kept working until 2015 when she negotiated her own severance. For almost three years, I was the guy at home while she commuted.
If you’re planning FIRE, plan a joint exit. Or at least make sure the working spouse genuinely wants to work.
A rich, lonely couple living separate lives is not financial independence. It’s a well-funded failure.
Other Lessons About Love And Money
1) A high-value spouse may need more respect just to break even. If your partner is successful, attractive, or powerful, the world is constantly praising them. Next to all that adoration, treating them normally at home can inadvertently feel like a lack of respect, or even disrespect. So you may have to deliberately show more appreciation than feels natural just to run in place. Be careful marrying someone super successful.
2) Everything gets taken for granted. Eat Kobe beef every day and you’ll get sick of it. In FIRE land, wake up without an alarm clock every day and you’ll take that for granted too. You’ll even get annoyed at a dentist appointment during your nap hour. The antidote is voluntary discomfort. Scrub your own toilets after a big investment win. Take a part-time consulting gig a 40-minute bus ride away that makes you take orders from a micromanager. Doing hard things on purpose helps you appreciate the people you already have.
3) Privacy is priceless. When you’re private, you can fix your mistakes without the whole world watching. Being known in your small circle for something good is great. Being famous means millions of strangers have opinions about who you are. Respond to all of them and you’ll never have peace of mind. Embrace being a rich nobody.
4) Be careful who admires you. If you have money or power, flattery is a strategy, not a compliment. The people worth keeping are the ones who liked you before you were worth liking.
A Sad Situation All Around, With A Silver Lining
Whatever the full truth turns out to be, this whole situation is sad. Sad for Lori and their adult children. Sad for Jensen and his legacy. Disappointing for Nvidia’s tens of thousands of employees and shareholders. And a blow for America, given we’re in a global AI race.
Relationships are hard. They require constant work and attentiveness. Forty years of marriage doesn’t buy you immunity. If anything, it makes it easier to stop paying attention.
As a shareholder, I can obsess about key-man risk and succession planning. But as a father and husband, I just feel bad for the family.
If there’s one silver lining, it’s that this story may help bring the left and the right together on maintaining our lead in AI. AI spending has been one of the biggest drivers of U.S. economic growth. If post-midterm infighting causes us to lose the race, we could sink the economy along with it.
What I Want For My Children
If someone with that much money and goodwill was allegedly willing to risk throwing it away, you can’t really blame people for their emotions and their desire to be wanted. We’re all human.
I would love for my son and daughter to have a basic amount of financial security. I’m working hard to make sure they do.
But far more importantly, I hope they find someone who will support, love, and cherish them. I would rather my children find that person than be rich.
Then I hope they never take that person for granted. Because the odds say they will, just like most of us take for granted the water we drink and the air we breathe.
Readers, do you agree that making money is easier than finding love? Would you take the $1 million in Indecent Proposal, or $2.2 million in today’s dollars? If you’ve achieved FIRE, did you and your spouse exit together, or did one of you keep working, and how did that affect your relationship? And if you had $140+ billion, how would you ever know if someone loved you for you?
If you’re a worried parent, I’m diligently working on my new book out in Fall 2027, Your Kids Will Be OK: Smart Money Decisions For Parents In An Uncertain World, published by Portfolio Penguin. It’s about raising capable, resilient kids and making solid money decisions so they have a real shot at independence, and at a good life.
Protect The People You Love
You can’t buy love, but you can protect it. If your family depends on your income, term life insurance is one of the most loving financial moves you can make.
My wife and I each got matching 20-year term policies through Policygenius after shopping around for months. It took far less time than I expected, and we sleep better knowing our kids would be OK if the unthinkable happened. Check out Policygenius to compare quotes from top insurers for free.
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Money is the easier problem to solve, and I’ve been helping readers solve it since 2009. Join 60,000+ others and get my free weekly newsletter here. I share what I’m seeing and doing with my own money, plus the lessons on family, freedom, and life that don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
