Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is caught in the center of one of the biggest corporate, geopolitical, and personal scandals in Silicon Valley history.
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Jensen Huang was allegedly involved with a Chinese spy, potentially leaking crucial information and inciting a national security crisis. Stephen Witt, the author of Jensen Huang's biography The Thinking Machine, joins me on this week's Power User to explain what really happened and what it could mean for the future of NVIDIA and the AI industry.
Jensen Huang spent decades building NVIDIA into one of the most powerful companies in the world. He also cultivated an image as a devoted husband, father, and disciplined tech executive. But after admitting to cheating on his wife of roughly 40 years, Huang is facing scrutiny over his alleged relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly suspect of working for China.
NVIDIA's board has launched an independent investigation, Congress is demanding answers, and major questions remain about whether Chinese intelligence targeted one of the most influential figures in artificial intelligence.
In this episode of Power User, I speak with Stephen Witt, New Yorker writer and author of The Thinking Machine, who spent years reporting on Jensen Huang's life, interviewing him, and investigating NVIDIA's rise to power.
We discuss:
Jensen Huang's extraordinary rise from immigrant childhood to AI billionaire

How he met his wife Lori and built NVIDIA with her support

The alleged affair with Alice Huang and the Chinese espionage allegations

Megaspeed's relationship with NVIDIA and concerns over AI chip exports to China

What NVIDIA executives and board members may have known

The role of Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and U.S. intelligence officials

Whether Jensen Huang could be forced out as NVIDIA CEO

How the scandal could reshape the global AI race

What Stephen Witt learned about Huang's personality, leadership, and private life while writing his biography

The Government Just Found a New Way to Censor You
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Meta was ordered to pay a staggering $25 billion in a New Mexico lawsuit. But nothing about this landmark case is about protecting consumers. Instead, it's about the government gaining censorship powers over online speech. 
In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with Trace Mitchell, lead counsel for technology and free expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), to unpack the $25 billion Meta verdict and its potentially devastating implications for online free speech.
The New Mexico case has largely been portrayed as a privacy and consumer protection victory. But that's completely false.
Trace explains how state attorneys general are increasingly using consumer protection laws to censor what people can say online, why these legal tactics encourage social media companies to censor more speech, and how politicians across the political spectrum are using government power to pressure tech platforms to censor content that they don't like. 
We also discuss government jawboning, First Amendment protections, Facebook censorship, the role of automated content moderation, the future of Section 230, and why the consequences of this lawsuit extend far beyond Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.
In this episode
Why New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion

How the verdict could have reached $219 billion

Why this lawsuit raises serious First Amendment questions

How consumer protection laws can be used to pressure social media companies

Why government lawsuits could lead to more censorship on Facebook and Instagram

How both Democrats and Republicans pressure tech platforms

What ordinary internet users stand to lose

Whether Congress and the courts can stop government jawboning

The internet just experienced one of its worst weeks for cybersecurity in recent history. 
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Dubbed "Black October" or the "Vulnerability Apocalypse," researchers uncovered critical zero-day flaws in the foundational software that powers over 70% of the web, including PHP, Node.js, and major certificate authorities, right as a wave of hacks hit popular cloud hosting platforms and developer tools.
In this episode of Power User, I sit down with Cooper Quintin, Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), to break down what actually happened during Black October, how frontier AI models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are supercharging both bug discovery and cyberattacks, and why the internet is going to become a much more chaotic place before it gets safer.
We also dive into why banning open-weight and open-source AI models would be a disaster for digital defense, the hidden dangers of giving new AI agents access to your browser and bank accounts, the crisis of underfunded open-source maintainers holding up the entire web, and the cybersecurity risks of the "vibe coding" boom.
Read the EFF's Cybersecurity Guide: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/computer-security-about-get-lot-worse-heres-what-you-can-do 
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Why is online age verification so dangerous? 
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Online age verification laws and mandatory digital ID bills are sweeping across the US, UK, Europe, and Australia under the guise of protecting children online. On this episode of Free Speech Friday, I'm joined by two of my favorite tech policy experts, Jennifer Huddleston and David Inserra from the Cato Institute to break down the massive hidden costs of online age verification, mass surveillance, and the death of internet anonymity.
For most of the internet's history, you could browse websites, watch videos, and join online communities without linking your government ID or biometric face scan to everything you read and post. Today, legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act, Australia's under-16 social media ban, and state-level age verification mandates are changing the free internet forever.
We dive deep into why these youth online safety laws don't just affect kids, they harm adults, cause massive data breaches like the 60,000 leaked Discord IDs and the Tea app breach), crush small independent forums, entrench Big Tech monopolies like Meta, and pave the way for mass censorship. 
Read the full piece from Cato here: https://www.cato.org/briefing-paper/online-age-verification-has-guaranteed-costs-uncertain-benefits

Is "enshittification" real, or are we just refusing to take accountability for our own screen time? 
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In this episode of Power User, I sat down with NYC-based cyber ethnographer, designer, and NYU professor Ruby Thelot to debate his viral and controversial Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) essay, "Enshittification Isn't Real".
While Cory Doctorow's famous theory of enshittification argues that tech platforms inevitably decay as they extract value from users and businesses, Ruby argues that when it comes to social media, the data tells a completely different story. We dive deep into American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) polling, the myth of platform "lock-in," and why he thinks blaming Big Tech algorithms disempowers everyday internet users.
Plus, we get into a heated debate over the rise of "paratechnology" (buying hardware like the Brick or apps like Opal to restrict your own phone use), why people are returning to single-purpose devices like the iPod, why you should stop using Instagram to text your friends, and how the bipartisan push for "Kids Online Safety" laws and age verification is a Trojan horse that helps Meta harvest more data while destroying anonymous free speech online.
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