The billion-dollar breakup: Inside the high-stakes world of tech titan divorces | Gravitas

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is at the centre of a huge controversy, with the FBI now looking into his affair with Alice Huang, who is suspected of being a Chinese spy. Amid this, his admission of an extramarital affair in an email to Nvidia employees has triggered speculation about a divorce. While his wife, Lori Huang, is yet to make a public comment on this controversy, she could possibly be entitled to roughly half of the Nvidia CEO's fortune if she opts for divorce. With Forbes estimating his net worth at 155.2 billion US dollars, she could reportedly receive 77.5 billion US dollars.

However, the actual settlement will depend on the couple's ownership arrangements, the classification of Nvidia shares, family trusts, and any prenuptial agreement. According to reports, she is a co-trustee of family trusts holding more than 528 million Nvidia shares. They also reportedly run a foundation together. Thus, in a hypothetical scenario, this is likely to be the most expensive settlement in the history of tech titan divorces.

According to reports, the 2021 divorce of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates tops the list. While the divorce terms were never made public, the settlement is estimated at 76 billion US dollars. The second biggest divorce settlement is believed to be that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. As part of the divorce settlement in 2019, his wife MacKenzie Scott retained a 4 per cent stake in Amazon and reportedly received shares worth 38.3 billion US dollars. Since then, Scott has become one of the world's leading philanthropists.

The divorce of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki in 2015 also garnered significant attention. While the quantum of the settlement wasn't disclosed, Brin had an estimated net worth of 30 billion US dollars at the time. Turning to China, in 2023, Zhou Hongyi, one of the country's wealthiest tech moguls, gave his wife a 6.25% stake in his company as part of their divorce settlement, amounting to a staggering 1.3 billion US dollars.

In July this year, a South Korean court ordered tech tycoon Chey Tae-won to pay a divorce settlement of 644 million US dollars to his wife, who is the daughter of a former president. His SK Group owns memory chipmaker SK Hynix, a pillar of South Korea's tech-led economy.

Meanwhile, the Nvidia scandal continues to unravel. A new report claims that alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang facilitated the shipment of Nvidia chips worth at least 7.5 billion US dollars to Chinese firms. According to this report, Alice, along with her husband and sister, built a network of companies across China and Singapore for this purpose. To evade US export restrictions, she allegedly used her ties to Nvidia to help move about 240,000 chips into China.

Amid this, Jensen Huang's net worth fell by 7.4 billion US dollars during the first half hour of trading on Monday, causing him to slip from 10th to 8th in the Forbes billionaire rankings. Nvidia shares also took a hit, falling by about 4% by the close of trade on Monday. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump reposed his faith in the Nvidia CEO yet again.