Welcome to the Pirate Street Journal, the category news the business press misses.
Each week, we pick three headlines and break down the category underneath. Live every Thursday. See the news through a different lens. Keep reading in the Deep Dive Reports.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Well, pirates, we try to be timely with everything Pirate Street Journal.
This episode is 24 hours old, and it’s already out of date.
We recorded it Wednesday morning on November 11.
That was before the news broke about Jensen Huang’s second scandal, and before he stepped down as CEO of Nvidia. The news moved faster than we could drink our morning coffee (or whisky arrr!)
We decided to release it anyway. You’ll hear how we were thinking about the scandal when it first broke, and how we thought the category might move.
Next week, we’ll record a deeper dive on Nvidia without Jensen.
Walk into any meeting this week, and you’ll hear the affair and the spy parroted as insight. Then someone will ask who runs Nvidia now, and the room will go quiet.
If the people who used to ask for your opinion have started deciding without you, you’re not imagining it. It’s called the Irrelevance Epidemic, and it starts with being category blind. Pirate Street Journal is 30 minutes a week of seeing the category under the headline, so you’re the one the room turns to.
Watch or listen now:
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Here’s what we covered in this week’s Pirate Street Journal:
On Sunday, Jensen Huang told Nvidia employees he had been unfaithful to his wife.
The Financial Times named the woman as Alice Huang, a former executive at a company called Megaspeed. She is not related to him. Megaspeed buys chips from Nvidia. U.S. officials believe she was working for Chinese intelligence. President Trump said Jensen told him he had no idea.
Nvidia stock lost 4% on Monday and another 5.47% on Tuesday. On Tuesday, the board’s independent directors brought in the law firm Wachtell Lipton to run the investigation.
Now, here’s what the headlines skipped:
He was the whole org chart. Jensen had 60 direct reports and held no one-on-one meetings. Nvidia had no chairman, no succession plan, and no obvious number two.
The results made him hard to question. About 2.5% of Nvidia employees leave each year. The chip industry average is about 17.7%.
He could be removed. Jensen owns about 3.5% of Nvidia. He has no special voting shares, like the kind that protect Mark Zuckerberg at Meta.
Nvidia is in your retirement account. It sits in almost every index fund and 401(k). When Nvidia falls, most portfolios fall with it.
Reading this as a story about an affair is what being category blind looks like.
The category move: ask what category of scandal this is. There are four to choose from. A marital scandal is between Jensen and his family. A governance scandal is about a board that let one person carry a $4 trillion company. A criminal scandal needs charges, and there were none when we recorded. A geopolitical scandal is about what a suspected spy learned.
Each category comes with a different ending. A marital scandal ends with an apology or a divorce. A governance or spy scandal ends a career. Prior to the news this morning, the whole fight in the news this week was over which name would stick.
By Wednesday night, new reports said Jensen also had a relationship with an Nvidia executive who reported to him. That moved the story out of the marital category and into the governance one, and the ending changed with it. And by Thursday, he stepped down as CEO.
The episode is still worth your 30 minutes for three things the news has not caught up to:
Why this came out right after the midterm elections.
Who wins if Americans turn against data centers.
The one bet we would make if we ran Nvidia this week.
Here’s the one thing to understand before your next meeting:
The fight this week was over which category the scandal belonged in. Once it became a governance scandal, a company with 60 direct reports and no number two was out of good options.
Now see your own category:
Every week, PSJ trains your eye on other people’s categories. The harder part is seeing your own.
Becoming a Founding member gives you all the resources to get out of the Irrelevance Epidemic and design a category of your own. You can jam 24/7 with The Pirate Eddie Bot and The Pirate Christopher Bot, read all 7 of our big books, join the founding community, and join our live monthly jam sessions where you can ask any category design question.
Come aboard the pirate ship and stop being category blind here.
Before you go, we’d love to ask a quick favor.
Most pirates don’t know PSJ is on YouTube yet. If this helped you show up sharper this week, subscribe to the channel, like the video, and send it to one person who wants to be the smartest person in the room every Friday.
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Arrrr! 🏴☠️
Recorded Wednesday, November 11, 2026.
Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates 🏴☠️