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This is The Manthropologist, a column by Charlie Sosnick about the Internet and the male mind.
Breaking news: A man cheated on his wife.
That’s usually none of my business. But the married man in question is Jensen Huang, one of the richest people on Earth and co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, which was the largest company in the world as recently as this year. And the other woman is Alice Huang (no relation), an accused Chinese spy who may be skirting national security laws for semiconductors. And another other woman is his employee. And now he has resigned from the company he started, deleting nearly a trillion dollars in market capitalization along the way. Suddenly, a private situation becomes a public concern.
As the internet digested this information, some men took the opportunity to confess a belief they seem to think is obvious: When you’re a powerful centibillionaire, cheating is just one of the perks. One tier ranking of “CEO Straightness” that went viral on X put Huang in the “Certified Playboy” tier alongside Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos—all of whom have been divorced.
In a past column, I argued that the concept of hypergamy in modern dating has become a widely-held belief for men. In sociology, hypergamy means marrying up for money or social status. Incels used it to describe the unfairness of modern romance to men at the bottom of the sexual totem pole. The theory posits that an elite strata of males—such as centibillionaire AI overlords—hold a near-monopoly on sex. A widely-shared chart, first posted on Reddit in 2018, showing 10 women pointing at four men and leaving the other six guys out in the cold, has been shockingly effective at spreading this theory around the internet.
In essence, hypergamy offers a cleaner answer to the thorny questions of infidelity. Why would Huang cheat on his wife of more than 40 years, who married him as a young, broke nerd? How could someone do something like that? The answer, according to hypergamy truthers, is simple economics. Huang is unfathomably wealthy and powerful—and therefore, he’s in demand. In their eyes, not only would it be challenging, but also irrational, and maybe impossible, for him to resist. In the true hypergamist’s view, the tweets pitting his wife’s looks against his mistress’s are not cruel jokes or victim-blaming, but proof of a rational decision on Huang’s part. If hypergamy is the underlying logic of the sexual marketplace, then rich, powerful men committing infidelity is simply the inevitable result of market forces.
To some degree, Huang may have internalized these ideas himself. As Huang’s net worth soared to $200 billion over the past couple years, he seemed to lean into the Tony Stark of it all. He bought fried chicken for everybody at a restaurant in South Korea. He drank a lot in public. He upgraded his trademark leather jacket to a studded YSL one. He autographed a woman’s boobs. When you add these events up, it does paint a picture of a guy letting the money change him in some way.
About a month ago, in the same tech-bro part of X that produced most of the pro-Jensen takes, a video went viral of a bride altering her wedding vows to say, “For richer or for richer,” on the altar. She unsurprisingly got a lot of hate. Maybe she could have avoided some of that scorn if she said “for poorer or for poorer” instead, but many online seem to agree that the rules change if a couple gets rich.
I am 29 and newly engaged, as are many of my friends. Among my cohort, pre-nups are seen as a universal necessity. Divorce has slowly gotten rarer, but pre-nups are booming. Young couples discuss asset protection as openly as whether to hire a band or a DJ for the wedding. For men today, particularly young, upwardly mobile, non-religious males, marriage seems to come with a tacit financial opt-out. Even broke grooms are planning how they would protect an imaginary fortune from their future ex-wife. Within this financialized view of marriage, it follows that the most common question online is not “How could Jensen Huang cheat on his wife?,” but “How could Jensen Huang cheat on his wife without a pre-nup?”
The men who forgive Jensen Huang’s infidelity, or at least write it off as a natural byproduct of wealth, are taking a profoundly unpopular stance. Because Americans do not tolerate adultery. In a 2013 Pew study, more Americans viewed cheating as “unacceptable” than in any other Western country. In a 2025 Gallup poll about “immoral behaviors,” 89 percent of people viewed adultery as morally wrong, the most universal opinion on the list. Only human cloning came close at 87 percent. Adultery also had among the lowest variances between Democrats and Republicans, and Boomer and Zoomers.
One of the few things Americans truly agree on is our hatred for cheaters. Still, some men would give the richest and most powerful men in the world a pass. And why not? They already break every other rule in our society. Why should they follow that one?
